I think the difference between nominal cost, even 10 cents and free is huge in terms of behavior.
When electric cars were fairly new, free chargers were fairly common and people would horrendously abuse them. They would leave their cars plugged in past the time the charge was complete. So the people who wanted to charge their batteries every minute their car was idle spoiled it for the rest, even people who desperately needed to charge.
So I think of the same thing wrt public transportation. I believe NYC had enough subsidies that they could make their subways free, but the behavior of outliers like people who would live on the trains spoiled it for the rest.
People spend more than 49€ a month to sleep on the train now. Making the train free is a marginal difference. If you don't want people to sleep on the train, hire people to make sure people aren't sleeping on the train.
> but because governments like to keep track off movements.
You can buy any ticket in cash at the automatic ticket machines. I don't think it's that, the government has enough cameras to track you in general, they don't really need ticket records.
As TillE wrote, we don't even have gates in Germany. Passenger volume is measured by manual counting - for real. It's a typical job for students and for the retired. They count how many people are getting on and off the trains at every station. During the ride they ask volunteers about their point of departure, destination and type of ticket.
Yeah, this would be about the most inefficient way to do it. You barely ever have to show your ticket. There are no gates that track where you are. You just walk into the train and go with it.
Especially considering that tracking the general population by phone is much easier and efficient.
Would free trains not need conductors? At least here in Belgium, conductors also check whether it's safe for the train to depart. Metros don't have this, but they have cameras throughout the vehicle and on each platform of each station.
> governments like to keep track off movements.
This doesn't make sense, train subscriptions don't make this possible. I have a train subscription but am only checked 1 times out of 10. The other 9 times no one knows where and when I got on or off the train. (Except if they examine the cameras in the stations.) A single ticket also only has a date, no time. And until a few years ago, conductors still 'cut' those, with an 'analog' tool; it's only recently they started scanning them.
It is possible that is the long-term goal. Getting there may be incremental, and providing a 49EUR ticket could be one step in that direction. Convincing people to do "all free" may only be possible by first agreeing to a lower-cost ticket.
What it has convinced me of is that politics still only wants to spend relatively limited amounts of money on public transport (a lot of cities and counties don't have the tax base to spend seriously more money on all sorts of things, anyway; states possibly could, but aren't necessarily that willing, anyway [1]; and the federal government – that one definitively has the financing power, but you can see how hard it was to get even the current agreement of increased money beyond the originally allotted amount.
Given that situation, I definitively would have mostly preferred better rather than cheaper public transport, but apparently everyone has succumbed to a frenzy of "free, free, free, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie!"…
[1] E.g. Hessen is right now still cutting its public transport budget in order to balance debts caused by Covid, Baden-Württemberg has cancelled a stated goal of increased service quality (a goal of providing public transport at least every half hour even in rural areas and every 15 mins in urban areas) before it ever really got started because it now has to finance its share of the 49 €-ticket and doesn't want to spend even more [2], etc. etc.
[2] I don't want to be too ultra-harsh on the latter – compared to a low point in terms of financing in the mid-/late-2000s, things have definitively improved and the state government is definitively spending more on public transport again, but clearly not limitless amounts more.
I think the author is just frustrated with her height. Why else would she write such a long article.