If you’re looking for a source of odd public-policy ideas, go no further than Durham. The latest from the city and county that brought us the Duke lacrosse case, attempted to impose an obviously illegal impact fee for school construction, and let its yard-waste dump burn for a month, is a proposal to make rides on its bus system free.

One would think that even considering an increase in local government spending during a severe economic downturn that’s causing large budget deficits would be a nonstarter. But this is, well, Durham, so there’s a chance it will happen.

“While I know it’s tough economic times, I think it needs to be on the table,” the Durham Herald-Sun quoted Mayor Bill Bell as saying during a recent city council budget retreat. “We keep talking about the whole issue of poverty in this community, and the whole issue of jobs. I dare say a fare-free system will facilitate the ability of people without transportation to get to jobs.”

The Durham Area Transit Authority takes in about $2.8 million a year in fare revenue.

Some obvious problems: The model that Durham is looking at is Chapel Hill, which made its bus service free a few years back. The two communities are not equivalent.

Chapel Hill is a college town, with a permanent population of about 55,000 that grows by nearly 30,000 college students during the school year. Durham is the state’s fifth-largest city, with a year-round population four times that of Chapel Hill, and a prestigious university with half of UNC-Chapel Hill’s enrollment.

And it’s not as if Durham’s bus service isn’t heavily subsidized. In 2008, fares covered only 16 percent of Durham Area Transit Authority’s operating expenses. DATA already offers free rides to those under 12 and over 65; such passengers account for 15 to 20 percent of ridership.

Bell’s suggestion also shows confusion about the purpose of transit. Not everyone who currently rides the bus in Durham is poor. There’s a real danger that the philosophy motivating Bell’s remarks risks creating — enhancing, really — a public perception that bus systems exist merely to move poor people around.

Local government types want to use transit to get people out of their cars and rely on buses to get to work. Transit also is a key element of the Smart Growth agenda, which aims to remake cities.

In Durham, that means attracting so-called “choice riders,” those who can afford to drive, to ride buses. That’s not going to happen, though, if people who can afford to drive believe, as the British art-rock group Fatima Mansions put it some years back, that “Only Losers Take The Bus.”

Unfortunately, that’s what Bell essentially is saying, and in a manner that’s only slightly more subtle than Fatima Mansions put it.

To put it another way, if DATA truly is offering a valuable service, why would it give it away to everyone, even to those who easily could afford to pay the current $1 fare?

Bell talks about living in tough times, and the lack of jobs, while not recognizing that in the Great Recession, the now unemployed include many people with considerable skills, people who have a mortgage, a car, and are now just trying to hold on.

A free bus ride to work doesn’t help if you don’t have a job. In fact, it makes things worse, as your taxes and fees would rise to support a free bus system.

Only in Durham, the land of bizarre government.

Michael Lowrey is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.