Carolina Journal’s Michael Lowery analyzes Durham’s plan to make bus service free:

“While I know it’s tough economic times, I think it needs to be on the table,” the Durham Herald-Sun quoted Mayor Bill Bell as saying during a recent city council budget retreat. “We keep talking about the whole issue of poverty in this community, and the whole issue of jobs. I dare say a fare-free system will facilitate the ability of people without transportation to get to jobs.”

…..Bell’s suggestion also shows confusion about the purpose of transit. Not everyone who currently rides the bus in Durham is poor. There’s a real danger that the philosophy motivating Bell’s remarks risks creating — enhancing, really — a public perception that bus systems exist merely to move poor people around.

Local government types want to use transit to get people out of their cars and rely on buses to get to work. Transit also is a key element of the Smart Growth agenda, which aims to remake cities.

In Durham, that means attracting so-called “choice riders,” those who can afford to drive, to ride buses. That’s not going to happen, though, if people who can afford to drive believe, as the British art-rock group Fatima Mansions put it some years back, that “Only
Losers Take The Bus.”

Funny, PART director Brent McKinney says ridership is down because —-during the tough economic times that Bell says necessitates free fare ——- fewer people are riding the bus because fewer people have jobs.

Just like government always finds the money for such-and-such pet project, the public always finds gas money. Driving might soon be one of the few freedoms we have left, although —- in case you’ve been paying attention — government’s working on it.