Things in the article I would like to comment on:

• In Germany, most public transport from local metro to long distance international trains do not have anything that stops people from entering the vehicles & platform. no ticket check, no turnstiles. so its pretty easy and inconspicuous to enter without a ticket.
• "Every day, hundreds of people do the same thing in the encrypted chat." - the public Telegram chat is not really encrypted, the article is just misleading here. of course Telegram uses standard encryption from user to server, but its not E2E like you would expect from the way its phrased.
• there are similar groups Telegram groups in other german cities, but many are not as active. Berlin is the only city with a dedicated app though, as far as i know.
• link to the webapp: app.freifahren.org

Why is everyone so afraid of just funding public transit with public money and making it free? We need to incentivize people to use it and all the fare collection and enforcement personnel cost money.

Because that costs money and benefits many people.
When in reality it is eaiser to lower taxes on high income people to have the same impact on the budget.

freifahren = free transit, yes?

Yes. Its used because fare evasion is commonly referred to as "schwarzfahren", which translates to "black transit" and thats not cool. So people are trying to establish a better name that cant be used in a racist way and also has a positive connotation.

Ah, right, we cannot be doing that.

Elmo needs a new company to ruin.

Ah, one of the unfortunate ways such an efficient, logical language finds challenges in morphological growth. 😅