Assume every tax rate except for the “personal allowance” was increased by 1% to fund free train travel.
Would you be in favour of this?
I’ve not done the math for this (though did look up some stats for a Scotland specific post, and it seems to be feasible: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44818305). So for the UK it may require a lower or higher increase (and to be fair my Scotland “calculations” were very rough and likely entirely wrong). This is more just a question about whether people would be in favour of something like this in general.
im not from uk so peanut gallery here. On the one side I would love something like this in my city. Paying to ingress is a significant delay in both ingress and egress to the station and if it was free such that you could just have open access it would be really handy. The other side to me is when things are free like this you have the problem of bad behavior. Its kinda good to have a capacity to get your privileges suspended for bad behavior. If you do that though you will still need the pass and gate type of thing which eliminates that ingess/egress thing I started with. I also have to say that where I am from the public transit is subsidized such that its a good value and the real value is in free transfers so once you pay at the start you don’t pay more as you go bus to train to bus and that is really powerful. We have both exterior and interior bike racks at stations and the interior ones are nice in that someone who wants to steal your bike has to pay to get on and more importantly its hard to run off because of the ingress/egress limitations. So anyway I appreciate anyone who listened to this peanut.