When you consider your passengers as dependents or wards, it's easy to get fed up with them--you're thinking of them as children who you have to provide for, except they never get older and move out! Of course you're frustrated...
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...but when they are CUSTOMERS who could take their business elsewhere, who you rely on to pay your own bills, the dynamic is flipped upside down. Even stores which cater to the poor are trying to cater to them, instead of trying to drive them to other stores!
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How can you get this dynamic, though, when the riders are just a trivial part of your overall revenue? If the cost of providing a service is mostly paid by people who don't intend to use that service, then who will you, the operator, be trying to satisfy when you operate it?
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I maintain it's important to divorce the "charity" aspect of transit from the actual BUSINESS of it--providing service which the highest number of people want to use. You can have soup kitchens and you can have restaurants but you don't usually expect one establishment to do both
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Moreover, within the realm of restaurants you have high-end places and cheap places, and countless gradients in between--but at no point do you have restaurants that are obliged to serve customers for nominal (or nil) prices, bc once you do, it's not a restaurant anymore!
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