Quote:
Originally Posted by Spork
Which is good, but perhaps we need to extend this? All I hear is complaints when fares are increased (heck, I complain myself), but in the grand scheme of things, it is a very inexpensive way to travel. If we have lower pricing for students, wouldn't it make sense to have a similar relative advantage for other lower income people?
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In-kind transfers are significantly less efficient than cash transfers; I recommend searching for those terms if you want to read the econ literature on why that's the case.
These people's problem is that they don't have enough money; with that in mind, giving them discounted bus passes instead of cash is very ineffective welfare policy. It's also quite wasteful at an administrative level; maintaining a discounted transit pass system costs money and time, whereas increasing their income supplements through existing systems has a very low marginal cost.
Long story short, welfare policy isn't Translink's job and it shouldn't be. If you're (probably legitimately) concerned about poverty then there are many parts of government better placed to address poverty than Translink.
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