welcome everyone it's great to see so many people here tonight so my name is katie wilson and i am a co founder of the seattle transit writers union and i'm going to be your m c this evening and i'd like to say thank you to the university bookstore for generously hosting this event also thank you to read made seattle three fifty seattle for co sponsoring this event along with the transit riders again so how many of you out there rode public transit to get here tonight it's ok and how many of you would choose public transit more often if it were free so we are here tonight to explore the vision of free public transit we're going to hear about some real life examples of transit systems that have gone fair free and we'll talk through some of the advantages and also some of the challenges to achieving that vision we'll also hear about some of the progress that we've made right here in seattle and king county as well as some possible next steps and finally we'll talk about a campaign going on right here now in the your district that we need your help to win after the speaker program which should probably take us till around seven pm what have probably about half an hour for some questions and back and forth discussion and then they'll be half an hour after that till the bookstore closes for informal conversation and purchasing the  book which is not yet here so without further ado i am honored to introduce our featured speaker for this evening rosalie ray who is an author of the new book free public transit and why we don't pay to ride elevators rosalie ray is a ph d student in urban planning at columbia university a research fellow at transit center and a member of the bargaining committee for the graduate workers of columbia u a w local two one one zero i know there's a lot of union folks in the room so that's appreciated her dissertation which is just beginning focuses on how planners politicians and activists fought in london paris new york and seattle the court before coming to colombia she worked as an eco at the u s department of transportation and got a master's in planning from u c l a so please join me in welcoming rosalie ra which thank you so much katie and thank you everyone for coming and thanks to the transit writers union to the university bookstore for hosting and also thanks to everybody on the panel rather than read from the book which isn't here  and also i only wrote a chapter and that chapter is on the u s so figured i'd try to sort of highlight some of the key finding some of the coolest examples and just provide a little overview to set the frame for the discussion so the premise of the book is that transit should be conceived of as a necessary object to connect places like an elevator and not as a commodity a luxury or a service and implicit in this reframing of transit as a necessity are three arguments sort of economic efficiency environmental sustainability and the coolest argument the equity and rights based argument right like we should have a right to public transit and a right to public transit means it cannot be limited based on the ability to pay it's sort of across the dozen or so countries included in this book which comprises two hundred cities that have implemented or explored some form of free public transit and i should first of all say that free public transit is the first defined pretty broadly in the book the ideal version right is no enforcement no barriers no payment whatsoever funded through some sort of tax revenue well that am to try and convince people to travel then or what is most common in the u s free for certain groups of people but not for everyone so all of those are included but so for this i'm going to talk about sort of the three main justifications and then the challenges that cities face and how they try to overcome them the economics argument which is the most common one in the u s focuses on ways that it can be cheaper to operate a free system or places where other beneficiaries of transit are willing to cover the gap from last fares and so the model that most often occurs in vending transit in the us is a three legged stool right so you get user fares you get beneficiaries  businesses usually will contribute something and then overall tax revenue often from property tax so what free transit does is it takes away the user fares so one of the things to keep in mind is the size of the gap the size th even when they put in the system they saw it was more expensive to enforce it than it was to gather the revenues this also applies to a lot of the small european cities that do that the beneficiary pays model is probably the most exciting one in the u s and it's the basis of something like the university pass campaign it is actually cheaper for you in the long run to fund transit than it is to build parking time after time  it's cheaper as long as the system is usable by the people who are driving in right so i wrote my my college dissertation my college master's thesis or whatever on the fact that smith actually could not do that because smith college in massachusetts did not have a bus system that served more than ten percent of its employees you guys don't have that problem and so obviously it makes sense to have a university pass the other good examples of this are something like the downtown fair zones where they were put in place by businesses who saw their retail leaving to the suburbs and they said it would be so much better if you guys would come down here and we'll make it free and easy so these kinds of beneficiary pays are where we've seen a lot of it in the us other economic justification that ha ppened outside our towns in greece that actually used free public transit as a way to promote the city or chengdu example where they used it to try and spread the peak which didn't work for them but doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't  otherwise the second justification is environmental which is a big one reason that paris is thinking about it i don't know if you guys saw the news or the post in the facebook page but paris is seriously exploring free public transit in the city so the difficulty when thinking about mode shift is we don't actually see vast shifts of ridership just based on fares alone this depends first of all  on how expensive the system was to begin this but also how many people are already getting a discount rate so it will loan you they did get a fifty percent increase they were one of the first people to try it but they also at the same time center removed two lanes from their inner ring road and built sort of giant parking red lots outside the city and then funnel people in so reshaping your city to run on transit is a really good idea it will increase rider ship it's not necessarily thoroughly linked to the free ridership question on the other hand there are really good ways in which the shift can actually provide sort of the same economic savings where your budgets allow you to sort of transfer back and forth right so bin poland saved three hundred thousand dollars from not penalizing fare dodgers anymore  which is a fifth of what it cost to run for transit free transit they were lucky enough that they had a system where they could transfer those costs the savings from one arm into another in half so they actually ended up no longer providing free transit in part because all  savings they were getting from the way the city was running better couldn't go to sort of cover the transportation so that's one thing to sort of think about and the other thing to keep in mind is that even though they did all of those many things eighty percent of the town is still using using a car so when we think about the environmental benefits there are ways to do it in there ways to do it right but it definitely depends on what else you're doing to improve your transit system i think for me the best argument the most exciting argument and the one that really matters is the question of rights based arguments that the public transit is a right axis should not be determined by ability to pay and this argument has multiple facets which are incredibly important i think for me the most important is it entangles with the racist enforcement practices attack in tangles with the way in which transit fares are complicit in the system of racialized capitalism that occurs and the ways in which by having a system where that is policed we end up with a system that is unjust and does not allow everyone to use that system with equal dignity so i'm sure there are seattle statistics but the ones that i know best are l a and new york in new york it's the single biggest source of arrests currently fighting for free transit and a fifty percent reduction in the m t a police budget based on those statistics the other sort of part that it opens up is the idea of transit as a public space which of course is related to the enforcement  it also sort of increases the use of transit as a public sphere and the conception of public transport as sort of a municipal responsibility in some way is people who use the efficiency argument like ching do use peer spreading and they also have free community buses this is actually something where the city itself doesn't recognise that it's having a little bit of a transformative  reformist reform if you will but the fact is that because those buses have no enforcement at all they're the only public service in the city that can be used by people who are not legal residents which then provides them actually better access in those communities and is a sort of model for how to do it for other services which they didn't mean to do that they ended up doing so in the us one sees the rights based arguments less on sort of transit as a whole and more for particular social groups so it is standard practice in  transit systems to do at least reduced fares for the elderly disabled and often youth in some cities particularly san francisco they've gone full free some places also have free transit for veterans uniform military exciter the issue here is sort of deciding whether people are worthy of it or not which can be pretty problematic one just side note i interviewed new york city so i put forward campaign as part of this chapter and they were very vehement in the idea that they are not a campaign for a fair free public transit in fact they're a companion for black liberation to provide a space for black people to move through the city with dignity which i think they're right that they're they're saying they're not a movement that's fine but i also think that the more that we understand free public transit as a way to create space for people to move through the city with dignity sort of the better off we are know sort of having said that shifting to the challenges a bit the more we open up transportation as a public space particularly in the u s the more it becomes responsible for other failures of the public sector note that i'm using responsible here in the way that iris marion young who you should all read she's a great political political philosopher she says responsibility is the ability to take action not the source of blame right so we're not at fault but it does mean that one of the things that comes up when people talk about fair free transit is that public transit becomes a space for and he related folks folks who don't have a place to go and rebellious youth and this was and so what we need in terms of when we think about this particular in the us context is innovative solutions to sort of address those issues particularly ones that come at it from the focus on the rights of the homeless and those who are using that space rather than a managing the problem kind of solution it's also true that in cities where they did see ridership increases the problem was less of a big deal it's sort of the more eyes on the street jacobs issue me me solve it on its own and then the other one that lots of people come up with is how do you pay for it and i think that much like there's no one justification that is most salient in every city there's also  one way to pay in the us we like to force our taxes to have some relationship to what is being attached to what is being provided but in fact in many countries that is not a requirement at all and it's easiest to think of funding as a manifestation of political will if enough people are willing to fight for thing it will get funded and it's also worth noting that we don't mandate that road maintenance like charge every time we do a new thing that said there are sort of three interesting funding streams that  exist in cities that have tried it and that have made it easier to do it the first and most interesting is that in france there's a payroll tax that is available to any city over one hundred thousand people by default and you can also opt into it  between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand it's roughly one percent of the payroll of all employers with more eleven employees ya'll are dealing with this already but the taxes on the total income of  employees right now in paris it's forty percent of the transportation agency's budget compared to fares which are twenty eight percent which is something that they're thinking about is how could we bump it up to cover that extra thirty percent  it was all it was already being used to pay for a tram and they just sort of added a little bit more to cover that the second is an annual transit pass which doesn't really didn't feel like fare free transit but what it enables is the ability to use the transit system as though it were free and also to one model this proposed in germany and has been proposed in academia is having you buy it as part of your income tax or impose part of your tax system in general and just saying  it's a share of your income rather than a particular fixed price which again if you had an income tax that would be helpful and the other version which is practically fair free is  like a city id card that may come with a small fee that then enables you to use transit as well as other public services and this is the model that's used in the german town of templin that may become the model if germany follows through  on its nasht nationwide sort of consideration of fair free transit because one of the cool things to keep in mind is we're actually seeing a pretty big wave of places considering this as their sort of looking for climate based and just space solutions to city problems and the last one is that sort of everyone really wants but no one has done in practice is a land tax differentiated by accessibility to them more accessibility provided by your transit system the more you pay in property tax which essentially just sort of replicates the way land taxes should be working anyway because it should be in the value of the land it's related to sort of attack and commit financing it's been crudely applied in london to all the place that told the business is that should be positively impacted by crossrail but it's not sort of fancy they just were like this pearl got it and this pearl got it so you guys should have a tax so this is sort of the methods of financing that are most useful but again it really makes sense what contacts are legal and what is available in here in your legal system so to sort of sum it up the full free fair public transit is most clearly a signaling device right it's a demonstrated commitment to public transit emphasis on the public an emphasis on transit the ability to get to where you're going to be successful in achieving the environmental goals it has to be coupled with efforts to prioritize public transportation which is stuff that's already happening in seattle it's you know you're going to get the ridership shifts if you improve the system you're going to get they're going to matter more if your system is then also free but also to be equitable it really needs to be carried out with as little enforcement as possible it's the ability to take the farebox off the bus to take the ferry and forcemeat team off the bus that really makes it possible and as for efficiency what we know is that the economics of a policy seem to work out when you're covered your fares are already less than sort of forty percent of the total cost of the system and the cool thing about that is it means that the more incremental fights between when the more people we get covered the more places we get covered the more routes we get covered the more little bits we find to cover those gaps the easier the eventual fate to make public transit free becomes which means that every single when you guys are winning matters to this fight in a pretty cool gotten those handouts if you didn't matthew over there hopefully can help you get get those handouts ok so now i'm sure that you'll have lots of questions and comments rosalie's presentation if you can hold your thoughts maybe jot them down we're going to hear from the rest of our panelists and then we'll open it up to questions and discussion so now we're going to hear we're going to sort of zoom into seattle in king county to the nosedive in sales tax revenues that occurred during those years so affordable transit really quickly became our core issue in fact our first big campaign was a protest against the elimination of the ride free area zone in downtown seattle where transit was free starting in the early one nine hundred seventy s until it was eliminated in two thousand and twelve so the handout that you should have had on your seat shows some of the progress that we've made here in seattle in king county towards the goal of free public transit and one thing that you'll see if you read the text on this handout is that our power really comes from solidarity and from grassroots community organizing when we've won it's because we've worked together with allies and we've built powerful coalitions that get things done so on that no i would like to introduce three years ago when israel was a student high school she was a leader in the campaign to win free transit passed as for low income students her energy and initiative and her leadership among her fellow students were instrumental in the success of that campaign and if there is now i believe a pre med student here at the university of washington paying three dollars for transportation to school that's a double that amount for lunch right so it just didn't make sense mathematically or anything especially because you have schools who don't we have these problems right like some schools are fighting for parking lots parts of this so many because of the access to transportation and you know so there's a color that black black and brown youth have the lowest access of transportation and then a lot of times our students will go on the bus the chains with that paying fares and then they will risk again resident of shares tent city three so ever since our ride for your campaign the transit riders union has worked in close collaboration with share wheel and nickel to bill many campaigns including winning better transit access for homeless and very low income riders through king county's human services bus ticket program so i'm going to turn it over to alex to tell us a little bit about that running outdoor encampment we move around greater seattle every couple of months and almost always we take the bus except right now when we are taking the real light rail all the way to where we are located just three blocks from the station our bus tickets are part of the package was staying at ten thirty three which we self manage ourselves with next to no staff why you might ask to our bus tickets only cost share ten cents on the dollar our community share realized a long time ago that public transportation was essential for us to have communities of homeless people living throughout seattle and that's why one of our first bites was to get bus tickets at a reduced it started our share started paying twenty five percent of cost and then it went down to twenty percent and now it's at ten cents on the dollar the fact is that last reduction took place with the formation of our city call a coalition with the transit riders union we think it's another example of why the definition of union is something people can do together that they can't do by themselves i hope i have the chance to read the book that this gathering is about the more public transportation is free or low cost more opportunities will have to work together and achieve victories in other areas so speaking of victories i'd like to conclude by thanking everyone here who fought for the employee hours tax of the city council just passed and the mayors just signed last monday together will keep on winning would be able to join us this evening but they both had urgent other things that they had to do so in their place i would like to welcome michael maddox who is a legislative aide to transit access and mobility as something that ties into a lot of the work that we are doing on our committee and we're trying to lead within our city with respect to access to transit access to mobility as a means of public health and as part of the overall strategy that we look at and we're talking about housing access and affordable housing in the city of seattle as many of you just alluded to we recently just passed the employee hours tax at city council was signed by the mayor to help fund some of the affordable housing needs that we have within the city of seattle but apart none of that really matters if people can't have housing that is close to where they need to be or have transit that connects people to where they need to be and this is one of the ongoing theme to we hear time and again back in january comes from a skate on the days of city council made a comment that she believes that we need to be moving forward as a city to ensuring that all people in our city have access to transit to public transit regardless of their ability to pay and that means driving fares always down to zero that's the thing that we should do we sent out a tweet to that effect and i believe that that has been the most seem like and repeated thing we've ever done it still comes back to haunt me to this day and i mean a good way and people are still saying here's new ways that we can do that here's some ideas and and we hear that not just from writers not just from us as a fifteen year old son who gets around by bus everywhere that he goes on turning sixteen in december and not even talking about getting a driver's license because he's got an orca card right now and i think that's the way we want to try to get folks to go try to get kids to go if we're going to be living up to our environmental credentials as a city trying to reduce our carbon footprints in the world and be a leader on that but we also hear from transit drivers my mom she's a metro driver a team member working out of north base and they what i hear is allude to policing the bus drivers don't want to be the ones policing the bus and by trying to make a fair unfortunate part of their job they are forced to police the bus and it creates oftentimes what we hear in our office it creates situations that are left uncomfortable and can lead to more assaults more people spitting on drivers and more situations that are uncomfortable slow down transit and no smith dollars that they recover don't actually go back into the system and from what i can tell they don't actually pay for fare in forstmann either and so then we get to the question of what is the point is the point to actually enforce fares to make sure we're bringing more money in or is the point to dissuade people from using transit and then i think the idea then turns to well clearly to dissuade people from using transit we want people to use trains in the city of seattle so how do we fund that is an ongoing conversation that we have as was alluded to earlier there's a since i was a second jam and that gutted funding for transit and libraries throughout the state of washington as well fire departments and what that did was a critical thirty dollars car tabs and eliminated motor vehicle excise tax which was one of the more progressive ways we were able to fund transit in all parts of the state at the excise tax for the purposes of transit connectivity so for the current moment that's out and so we looked at other options and one thing that i heard was potentially looking at ways that we can extract more funds from transit rich properties and in fortun when we look at that we run into situations around the question of the uniform the clause of the state constitution with respect to property taxes this is wrong it's ugly head again with income taxes in the state of washington as income property i had one no that was that was a call and i'm terrible at those things and so we then look to see what are some new ways and this is one thing that i'm excited about that we're working on on the second floor at city hall you know the first is the expansion of the  for folks in our schools and high schools and i believe in middle schools as well as proposed by mayor durkin which is building off of the great work that was done by the folks down to rainier beach high school by the students at rainard beach high school so i think we they deserve another hand right now you tell you that our office remembers another councillor johnson's office remembers account number of brian's office remembers and we'll definitely be driving that home as that conversation continues and that's happening as a result of some extra funding that was that looks like it's going to be available in  transportation benefit district so that's one piece but then what about the rest that students who have one one group that we could potentially take care of so there's other ways that we're looking at in the city to potentially expand access to transit access to the city one would be an employer based pretax benefit for folks to get work a card through their employer but again that only cover some folks what about people who don't have an employer what about people who are on fixed income for senior citizens and so we're also looking additional models through like that t housing levy through affordable housing complexes to provide housing based options for folks to potentially have that for your car as we identify the funding sources necessary to get to that reducing it down to a free pass throughout the city of seattle which i think is very important for us to be trying to do again if we're going to try to keep ourselves as a getting to zero carbon city of course none of this matters of buses are stuck in traffic and so one thing i would encourage all of you to do throughout  is ensure that as we look at things like a quote reset and quote on the let's move seattle levee that we are prioritizing things like transit and pedestrian safety and bicycle safety and by city he's very important to get hit by a car which is one thing right here  biking home one day and so we need to ensure that all ages and all mobility is have opportunity to get around and get around safely throughout the city of seattle and one way to do that is through transit prioritization it's it's fantastic to hear cities doing three quarters of their downtown streets  dedicated transit right of way that improves reliability of transit and eliminates the reason for folks to have to to quote have to and quote drive into downtown if they can't take transit and rely upon it and then this all ties back into again public health and housing the comment was made about i keep on looking to so many great things but the question about policing folks on the bus and if we have people who have nowhere else to be and there's free transit and that's the only place that they feel safe or feel comfortable because there's nowhere else to be that's a problem and that's why we must continue to ensure we're having the adequate investment and the affordable housing component in the days center component and the activities for people to do during the day component because when we do that in conjunction with the investments in transit access and  connectivity throughout the city of seattle everybody when it's people who want to get to and from work want people who want to get to and from appointments when people want to be in a place and feel safe and comfortable friends and family when so it's all connected and that's all we that's one of the things that we definitely want to import from our position on the second floor is the connectivity of all these issues as we move forward thank you so thank you thank you all for welcoming us and thank you to all the excellent panel speakers it was great to hear everything you had to say and i'm excited to be here talking about public transit because i've used public transit from a very young age and i'm really excited that these stories from around the world are being collected in one spot i also mourns the loss of the right free zone downtown not because it limited my mobility financially but because it limited my incentive to use public transit if it was going to cost me more than five dollars to go into the city and back because i went shopping and then had to pay again or to the movies and then had to pay again to go to dinner i might as well drive last year for example i celebrated with husky women's basketball team on campus here as  a final four then headed downtown for a day in the city transit that day cost me ten dollars a bus to ask a stadium celebrate with the team we wanted to use the light the new open light rail downtown and then i bussed to connect to seattle center and then i bus home like i said i work at you know medical center and i work swing shift so i looked into a lot of commute options the transportation office ran my addresses and tried to give me a her poor bus and they came up with nothing because my evening shift is outside the regular transit hours and because i live in shoreline where i can afford a house to rent there is no line all the way to my house in one shot i would have to transfer many of my coworkers have to transfer the official buses the five twelve off the freeway and that is two miles from my house the less back and forth in the dark to me to my car especially in winter and you guys may know that this is also bike everywhere month which i have been doing and participating in so i bike the ten miles and then i home with the five which is very efficient  i'm still paying for my monthly parking pass here on campus because i don't want to lose my spot when bike everywhere month is over but using the five twelve it only takes me twenty more minutes to get home and this is where this has into the free transit if my past was free i wouldn't care about twenty minutes i would take twenty minutes and getting the exercise and not having to the gym that's twenty minutes i didn't go to the gym her a budget so a free bus for my employer would make this an attractive commute option to me even at midnight and the university of washington i've been here fifteen years i've been here in every role i really do think that they pride themselves on their high state and setting high standards and they put them out on their websites things like  medical center is your home for world class care and where in the puget sound the there are number four in public institutions by the times higher education and that their number five for a best value college by forbes magazine one of the places that they don't hold up is by offering him play benefits such as a simple transit pass we have a link already right to campus we have a second station coming to north campus in just a few years we are a major hub for seattle buses  there's fifty thousand people that come to campus every day that's more than a lot of cities so there's a lot of reason for you to be leaving with a free pass for simply fifty thousand people are region other hospitals such as children's are offering free transit they're offering bike incentives they're making sure that their employees are incentivized to come to work by transit if we offer if we look at other universities they're offering free or fair cards and we were looking at tech companies microsoft not only has financed bus routes but they've also got their own buses that their their access buses and they're putting out to the city their master ten year plan and they want to be a tech incubate or so if they want to come here to tech companies they want to be offering free bus passes and as a state employer other state staff in king county have a free bus pass so despite having to pay for your passes there are still many employers that are trying to make transit work for them earlier this month we were out in regions meeting and it was shared there's an employee that is spending the all this is his option commute option to work and he's making an effort to use it despite the obstacles as i shared his bike to work month and i can't connect with transit so this would be more like this would eliminate some of the transfers that i would need to do other union members are transferring two or three times and more more than an hour on the bus to connect to campus whether because of finances environmental conservancy or endorsement the purported value of having employees use and public transit these corporate are trying to make public transit work for them when surveyed fifty percent of employees said that a free pass would have them change their habits and start using public transit as their primary commute option this change in ridership would free up spaces for our donors to come to campus our campus visitors that want to see the cherry blossoms and also patients which will improve and patients families which would really improve some satisfaction and so the university can really show there's a world class employer and community member by providing free this free you pass six thousand people have signed petitions that are part of the campus life they're part of the recognize free trances an important player benefit verging on a right then they can start lobbing transit for a from a position of strength they can start addressing crazy things like sleeping overnight in locker rooms and sir question more services to the neighborhoods that their employees actually live in i was in the transportation actually this morning and it was brought up that instead of expanding service between cities the sound transit route five eighty six which connects downtown you know to downtown you know to downtown tacoma and actually cut service runs and this is a bus that i've actually personally utilized  to come up and there's no longer a may day bus south for this ins and the last bus leaves here at six twenty pm which means if you take the last bus to getting to campus which arrives at about nine ten you have to leave and you've only worked eight hours not eight and half that is a regular shift and nurses getting off from the center at seven thirty pm are left out entirely they would have to go downtown and make a connection and now you're on the bus for an hour  issuing for you passage shows the university values that they're in place will use the public transit and we can see more stories like yet another route i use the metro route three seventy three from shoreline this bus used to come on the campus at the earliest at seven thirteen am so i did not use it i used a different route because it was not early enough for me to make my medical staff shift which usually starts at seven or business school students their first class that they starts at seven so now there's a bus that comes at six thirty am and six forty five am making stops between lobbying for ourselves and having an institution that's helping back up our choice to use public transit with a free pass the transit companies are going to start looking at providing public transit property would be constitutional i don't know that but i do know that right now the democrats you know if you hold a functional one vote majority of the state senate and a functional to vote majority in the state house of representatives and not all democrats are the same seattle based off of my experience working in politics in the region and so i think that well that is an interesting idea and would be a little boy if we could see what that number it would look like it's a long term proposal to even gets implementation or even a hearing in the state legislature for in the interim we have over four thousand people sleeping outdoors today probably over five thousand in the city of seattle alone and the h t has passed is a functional  now payroll tax of zero point two to zero point eight percent of payrolls for employers that are the top three percent in the city of seattle that's compared to the city of portland which has a payroll tax of point seven three eight five percent and  really actually not that big of a of a tax or revenue source but it is a revenue diversification stream that's a five year timeline and at this point dedicated in theory towards producing affordable housing on the quickly on the other to fund the transit so we don't need the fairing foresman in the first place because it's not paying for itself and people are going to have to pass anyway i think is kind of the idea that our office looks at is that people shouldn't there shouldn't be on that front very unfortunate should it be a fair there should be a progressive tax just pay for transit as a public service which then gets to the question about the employee or based on whether it's a pretext or not is a labor right in the interim i do believe that the way to go for all employers in the city is is likely going to be a tough time right proposal which i'm not sure it's publicly a proposal yet so i can tell you that which is the tax benefit concept as we work towards finding that more permanent funding solution and you're right that that doesn't necessarily cover you've got and that's why it's so important to support the labor movement and folks like like like our health care employees in the state of washington as they try to get that equity in access t need to resist that more so than anything else and that the importance of getting a very person off the bus is really to say we're not really concerned about the wrong people using it we're concerned about as many people as possible using it  over twenty five percent of people who are being ticketed and in many in many cases like the tickets go to collections they get on their records they go to court system are people who are homeless or housing care definitely disproportionately people of color  cause which is sort of what we call for is like let's stop harming people now while we figure out a better system but as we try to figure out what that others want to play we do run up against that sort of just one justification that they give for a force that is that even though it doesn't pay for