From Deseret News archives:
Mass transit runs better if riders pay fare
User fees for the light-rail and bus "infrastructure," as the senator convincingly puts it, took a hike last week along the Wasatch Front. And along with that came an interesting question.
If people pay once for transit through sales taxes and then again when they pay to get on board, is that a form of double taxation?
Or, put another way, why isn't mass transit free for everyone?
That very question was posed last Monday by a handful of advocates for the poor who rallied against the fare increases in front of the Salt Lake City Library. They offered one compelling argument: For riders on fixed incomes, any fare increase at all is a major adjustment.
But the question is particularly intriguing because transit here receives about 70 percent of its support from sales taxes, and in Utah sales taxes apply to many things, including groceries, which means they hit the poor unusually hard. You can cut out a lot of nonessentials. Food isn't one of them.
Let's look at the questions from a few different angles.
Obviously, UTA itself can't be in the position of deciding who qualifies and who pays full price not unless officials there want to start examining the tax returns of their riders.
Second, the idea of a totally free transit system is not new, nor is it untested. About 30 years ago, voters along the Wasatch Front rejected the idea when they decided to set up UTA, but the idea keeps popping up every now and then like a whack-a-mole. In fact, 11 years ago Randy Horiuchi and Brent Overson, both Salt Lake County commissioners at the time, asked the Legislature to consider a tax increase that would have made the system free. Lawmakers promptly ignored them.
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