Transport Progress, Farefree Transit, Blankfaces, and Fraudsters

Off-Ramps for 2 January 2025

Happy New Year, and welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your commute, or save them for the weekend; or read them right now, if you’re still on holiday.

1. Progress in Transport

It’s traditional around now to look up from our immediate surroundings and take a longer view. (Though Oliver Burkeman, whom Changing Lanes reveres as an Enlightened Master, is skeptical of this approach.) But whether or not it is wise personally, I think it is important intellectually. The changing of the year is a good time to think about our long-term projects and where we should be spending our time and energy, though “our” in this case might be our society or nation. As I wrote recently, failing to get excited about making good changes is a road to stasis and stagnation.

That means it’s a good time to re-read

Eli Dourado

’s 2019 essay on progress.

How do we move the needle on progress?

Naturally, I am most interested in the final section on transportation. Dourado helpfully reminds us of why progress in transport is good on its merits:

Starting from a central point, the number of places that you can economically travel to is an inverse square function of the transportation cost. We can consider the cost to include both time and money costs. If you could travel in half the time and for half the money, the number of places you can access given your time and money budgets goes up by a factor of four… the social gains to lower travel costs (or higher speeds), therefore, are doubly quadratic… A halving of transportation costs, therefore, raises the value of the transportation network 16-fold.

From there, Dourado reviews all the ways that we could make progress on transport: permitting reform! robotaxis! drone delivery! air taxis! high-speed rail! This remains a good agenda, and one that little progress has been made on to date.¹ Let’s see what we can do with it in 2025! I’ll do my part by addressing each of these topics in the year to come, so reading Dourado now will prepare the way for what you’ll be seeing in this space.

2. Farefree Transit Is Still Bad

The second issue of this newsletter argued that public transit should not be free. It not only starves operators of revenue, but also makes the experience of using transit worse. The idea remains popular, however; as of this week, Belgrade became the latest city to stop charging transit fares.

So long as politicians push this idea (it’s always politicians, never operators themselves), there will continue to be new evidence that it is bad policy.

Take, for instance, this research paper (h/t to

Lauren Gilbert

) that explores Germany’s introduction in 2022 of nearly fare-free service: a 9-euro monthly ticket that offered unlimited local and regional transit use. What were the results?

…increased public transport usage, reduced car traffic, and rail network congestion. …we find limited substitution between transportation modes, a strong increase in leisure train journeys, and notable adverse effects on rail infrastructure quality. These effects dissipate after the ticket’s expiration.

“Limited mode substitution” means people didn’t stop using their cars, they just took transit trips they wouldn’t have taken otherwise. “Leisure train journeys” means people riding without a destination, just killing time by hanging out on buses. “Notable adverse effects on rail infrastructure quality” does not mean vandalism (though one can’t rule it out); it means the influx of new riders boarding and alighting wrecked the schedules, making chronic train delays even worse. One is forced to conclude that if the public purse could afford to forego this much fare revenue, it would have been better off investing it in improving existing service.

Or take this boast from Washington State DOT (h/t to my co-author John Niles) that fare-free transit programs for youth have boosted ridership by 16.5 million trips. At the same time, Seattle Transit has largely stopped collecting fares on buses altogether, meaning that crime and harrassment on Seattle buses is way up, particularly against drivers: just two weeks ago a driver asked a passenger not to close a window, which led to altercation where the driver was pepper-sprayed, kicked, and then stabbed to death.

3. Blankfaces

What is blankface? It’s who you don’t want to be.

More precisely, it’s Scott Aaronson’s term for a certain kind of employee:

A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

We love to hate our fictional blankfaces: Aaronson cites Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter novels, though the Vogons from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also qualify. (If you’re more high-minded, think of Kafka’s The Trial or Dickens’ Little Dorrit, both of which feature blankfaces who hide their sadism behind a facade of neutral procedure.)

I recognized the distinction before I ever heard the term, drawing it by distinguishing good ‘civil servants’ from bad ‘bureaucrats’. I’m a former civil servant myself, and I know well that there are good people in the system trying to make it work. As one colleague told me one evening at the pub, when beer had loosened his tongue: no one hates a bureaucrat more than a civil servant, because it’s the bureaucrats who make the civil servants look bad.

And blankfaces certainly do make the civil service look bad. Aaronson gives several examples from the Covid pandemic where blankfaces ended up costing us thousands of lives. Much of the current fascination with Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE initiative springs from righteous anger at this sort of behaviour.

But blankfaces exist any large structure, so the private sector is rife with them as well. Pro tip: in a customer-service context, if you encounter any employee who refers to the firm they represent not as we, but as they, they’re a blankface. As in, “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s their policy not to issue refunds in cases like this”. Blankfaces can’t be reasoned with, and so the best response to them is to escalate or make a lateral move when you encounter one, rather than to waste your time trying to elicit different behaviour; further engagement is futile.

4. Fraud Psychology

It’s natural, when we’re young, to imagine that the world is made up of good people and bad people. As we mature, we often dismiss that view as too simplistic. We set aside black-and-white thinking for shades-of-grey thinking: bad behaviour stems from poor impulse control, bad executive functioning, or simply being misguided. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and if they do bad things, it’s because they are confused about what the good is.

This is true in many cases, and perhaps most. But not all. Some people are, indeed, Bad: that is to say, they enjoy hurting others, and look for opportunities to do so.

In that vein, I recommend

Ozy Brennan

’s review of The Phantom Capitalists.

The Psychology of Long-Firm Fraudsters

Why do people commit long-firm fraud? Not because it’s easy; it’s more difficult than actually running a successful business. And not because it’s lucrative; the nature of the enterprise requires working with mobsters and gangsters, who absorb most of the profit and torture you if you object. Why then? As Ozy explains, “Because they like it! They enjoy tricking people. It makes them feel powerful. The intensity and anxiety and constant improvisation of a long firm is fun. They see themselves as adventurers, charming rogues who make fools of boring creditors.”

Ozy’s conclusion is that one should not do fraud, and I agree. But I will add that one should also remember that malevolent actors exist, and to be on guard against them. As Samuel Johnson put it: “If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.”

1. Even Dourado’s unfortunate enthusiasm for Hyperloop, which was more plausible in 2019 than it is today but only slightly, illustrates a larger point, and one of the theses of Changing Lanes: we need to be excited about progress; we need to rule ideas in, and not out; but paying too much tribute to Big Exciting Change can distract us from Small Changes That Are Worth Making… which is why we spend as much time here talking about public-transit reform as we do robotaxis.