My opponent makes the classic mistake that almost everyone makes when they first hear "free public transit" — they hear the word free and immediately think someone is being naive about money. But let me explain exactly why their entire financial argument is built on a false foundation. They say someone has to pay for it through taxes and that is a cost shift from riders to taxpayers. But here is what they completely ignored — we already do this for roads. Every single highway, every street, every motorway you drive on is paid for through taxes by every citizen, including people who do not own cars. Nobody calls roads a radical socialist experiment. Nobody says highways are financially irresponsible because non-drivers are funding them. We collectively decided that roads are infrastructure that benefits society as a whole, so society pays for them together. The only question is why we apply that exact same logic to roads but suddenly panic when someone suggests applying it to buses and trains. And actually the financial case for free transit gets stronger the more you think it through. Right now cities spend enormous amounts of money building and maintaining fare collection systems. The machines, the staff, the maintenance, the fraud prevention, the ticketing technology — all of that costs serious money. Transport for London estimated that fare collection alone costs them hundreds of millions annually. When you remove fares, you remove that entire cost. You also get faster boarding because nobody is fumbling for a card or cash, which means buses run more efficiently and you need fewer of them to move the same number of people. Their library comparison actually proves my point rather than theirs. Libraries are free. And yes, their budgets get squeezed. But the solution to that is not to start charging people to borrow books. The solution is to properly fund them as the essential public service they are. The same logic applies here. If transit funding is unstable, the answer is to make it a protected budget priority, the same way we protect funding for schools and hospitals, not to keep a fare system that still leaves the system underfunded while also creating a barrier for the poorest people who need it most. Now here is the real argument they cannot answer. Every car that stays on the road because someone cannot afford the bus fare costs society far more than the fare ever collected. One car on the road contributes to congestion, which costs cities billions in lost productivity every year. It contributes to air pollution, which costs healthcare systems billions more. It contributes to road wear, accidents, and carbon emissions. A 2019 study from the International Transport Forum found that congestion alone costs urban economies between one and three percent of their entire GDP annually. Free transit that gets even a fraction of those cars off the road pays for itself through savings the opponent is not even counting. Luxembourg made all public transit free in 2020 and did not descend into chaos. Tallinn in Estonia has had free transit since 2013 and saw a 14 percent increase in ridership in the first year alone. These are not theoretical experiments — they are working, real-world proof that the model functions. Their targeted assistance idea sounds reasonable on the surface but it actually keeps the most broken part of the current system intact. Every means-tested program requires bureaucracy to administer, applications to fill out, and people falling through the cracks because they do not know they qualify or are too proud to apply. Universal free transit has none of that friction. Everyone gets on the bus. Everyone benefits. And the people who benefit most are always the ones at the bottom because they are the ones currently being priced out. The goal is not a free system that falls apart. The goal is a properly funded, universally accessible system that we treat with the same seriousness we treat roads, because transit is not a privilege you earn by being able to afford a ticket. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure belongs to everyone.