Ron's words echoed through the empty carriage, and Ilya, standing beside him, immediately fell into deep thought.
His words put her straight into a contemplative state as she weighed whether Prince Ron's proposal was truly feasible.
A few dozen seconds later, Ilya concluded that, in theory, this was indeed an excellent approach.
At the very least, it was far more reliable than her previous idea of "letting every household have access to an Elemental Car."
Excluding the price of the Elemental Potato, the production cost of an Elemental Car itself was roughly one to two hundred gold coins.
In other words, just the eight Elemental Carriages sent to Tansang City had cost around a thousand gold coins in total.
Eight hundred Elemental Carriages would mean one hundred thousand gold coins.
And that might not even be enough for the residents of a single city.
A hundred thousand gold coins was no longer an especially heavy burden for Ron, but he could not simply throw it all away as a public welfare project.
Even if Elemental Carriages were sold at cost, no ordinary household could afford one.
In the end, they would only become new toys for the nobles.
That would go against Ilya's original intentions.
Yet Prince Ron's solution seemed to resolve those problems quite neatly.
"Prince Ron, will this... bus charge a fare?" Ilya asked.
Since buses were meant for shared use, there was no question of selling them.
That meant recovering the costs would still be an issue.
"Of course it will charge a fare. We aren't actually running a charity." Ron shrugged and reached out to pat the coin box he had installed by the front entrance. "One copper coin per ride—something the vast majority of commoners can afford."
"If they only ride it to and from