Odd hill to die on, but if you wish to argue that Iowa City is a serious transit city, but Brisbane and Lanzhou are not, feel free to state your definition of serious transit city. These cities are bigger than Iowa City and their public transport share of journeys to work is higher than any similarly-sized U.S. metro area.

Beware: if there are no true Scotsmen left, and your definition of serious transit city excludes everything apart from ~10 European cities, the conclusions that one can draw from the policies of serious transit cities will be so limited that they will in fact be useless.

I was just pointing that out from the post you replied to, I don't agree with the author.

However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translink_(Queensland)#Fares

Thanks.

> However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference

A reasonable point. That very well might be the case, and if everybody thinks symbolic-fare is better than no-fare, I won't be the one to oppose it.

It's an order of magnitude larger than Iowa City, though.