Wyatt Gordon (Op-Ed) wrote:

Public good, private payment

The bus doesn’t care if you can’t afford a car, if your disability disallows driving, or if you’ve just had one too many drinks. As long as you’re waiting at a stop, the bus will pick you up and carry you home—no questions asked. The bus epitomizes a public good: it’s available to all, and society is better off the more people use it. The problem is that we treat the bus like a private company (and in Richmond it actually is). Unlike other public services such as libraries and schools, we expect the bus to pay for itself, largely on the backs of the working poor who take it.