What people do today is not necessarily going to be the same once they have a financial incentive to act differently.
I imagine that it'll lead to a lot of non-optimal mode shifting, where you've got people loading up other bus routes to avoid making the subway transfers the system was intended to make.
Ex: Chelsea. The 111 (to Haymarket) is straining at the seams even with some of the densest service on the entire system.
The 116/117 are also very high ridership and go to Maverick for a Blue Line transfer to get downtown.
What happens when taking the 111 becomes a free way to get downtown and taking the 116/117 costs you $90/month? I'll bet you see lots of people switching to the 111 even if the 116/117 -> Maverick would be a more optimal commute in terms of time and system utilization to get to their destination.
You can probably find plenty of other example trips on the system that are potentially going to see similar issues. Kiss those attempts at building ridership on the Fairmount Line goodbye, for example. Not many people are going to ride it when the bus is free, even though rail is exactly what we want them to be using for that trip.
Good post. That said, this doesn't mean that making buses free is a bad idea, it just means that the existing bus system would need to be tweaked
(and paired with rapid transit expansion) in order for the scheme to work. Ideally, under a "free bus, but pay for rail" regime, downtown bus routes would either need to be shifted elsewhere or all be pay-for-service. The 39 is another example of a free bus that would cannibalize rapid transit.
Taking your Chelsea example, that's an example of a city that's aching from a lack of real transit access. Give it to them. Whether it's the (relatively easy) GLX from Lechmere to Chelsea Bridge using the Eastern Route or a (much crazier) GLX from North Station along the Charlestown waterfront over/under the Mystic... this neighborhood desperately needs better transit. Anyway, that's crazy talk, but my point is that the Chelsea bus system is broken now and it would be broken under a different fare regime. What makes it broken is the paucity of appropriate transit in the neighborhood.
Same goes for Roxbury/Dorchester. The buses would need to be recalibrated and paired with improvements on Fairmount to
feed the line, rather than cannibalize it.
So your point is well taken, that "free buses, yay!" couldn't be done willy-nilly, it would need to be in a thoughtful and deliberate way to avoid negative side-effects and be paired with less simple solutions, such as transit expansion.
