Barcelona gives free annual public transport tickets to former car owners | Hacker News Reader

Barcelona gives free annual public transport tickets to former car owners

eltis.org

52 pointsDoreenMichele23 comments

Any reason to not simply make all public transit free. I'd assume once you factor in reduction in traffic, car accidents, etc. It would more than pay for itself .

> not simply make all public transit free

Not sure if Barcelona has this problem, but in New York, that would turn the subway system into a moving homeless camp.

How much of the overall transit demand in NYC is serviced by public transit? Isn’t it already super high? The homelessness issue is one problem, yes, but I also wonder about how much more traffic the subways could actually support.

Like homeless people can't jump the turnstiles.

In most cities I've lived homeless people don't pay fares regardless. Considering fare enforcement is very expensive, I imagine making it completely free would be be cheaper. The Utopian in me imagines a struggling working class person saving a significant amount of money. To us, 200 or 400$ a month for public transportation isn't a big deal, but if your only making 2k a month that's a ton of money.

I already pay sky high taxes, I figure the city can pay for public transportation out of that.

What cities are you talking about, I'm guessing not in America?

Fare enforcement is one of the few pro arguments for the broken window theory. I've never been on any subway system in the US that didn't have attendants near the gates and they have no qualms stopping trains while the transit police come. Homeless people get on the train and ride all day but they put in their couple dollars at the beginning of the trip.

I'm in America.

Cops generally don't care if a homeless person jumps a turnstile.

In my ideal world of course you'd still have tons of cameras and attendants for security. Expensive public transit is horribly regressive.

Which city are you talking about because this just generally isn't true in any of the major city subway lines like NYC and Chicago

In LA the cops generally don't care.

Even if they do, they'll just give the homeless guy a citation which he'll never pay. Don't get me wrong, the cops should definitely still handle crimes on the trains, as well as anyone who's trying to live there.

The primary argument is that the funds used to make transit free would be better put to use to provide better, more reliable, more frequent service.[0]

[0] https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-gre...

Because it's not an unlimited, infinite resource. They are physical systems with unsolvable bottlenecks, and as soon as you release pressure in one place, another crops up. By making it absolutely free, the cost to a rider for an inconsequentially short trip is zero, but the rider using it for that short of a trip makes the system as a whole less usable for other riders because the system is full at a chokepoint. This happened in Boston on the Green line. Riding the T was free for students, but the number of young healthy students using that perk to ride 1 station overwhelmed the system, causing it to be harder for everyone else that had to use the system for commuting. I support better access to public transportation, but free has issues is its own.

I can make the same argument about freeways. I can make the same argument about parking. If you have a society where almost everyone has a car you're just pushing that cost somewhere else.

As with the metro in Barcelona, you also pay to use the highway in Spain and most parking is paid inside the cities, most likely because someone have made those very same arguments.

The highway tolls in Catalonia were just abandoned this month :)

Oh good, I noticed that they were shut down when I went to the beach sometime last month but I didn't realized they had been completed abandoned. Source for others who missed the news: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2021-09-01/tolls-scrapped-o...

It's really nice to see Barcelona at the forefront of innovative city planning. They also introduced "superblocks" a few years ago https://www.archdaily.com/796252/how-barcelonas-superblocks-...

They did, but it never really took off except for a few experiment blocks, unfortunately.

1.6 million people with 540,000 new cars registered each year, and 12000 cars retired. This looks very much like people retiring cars anyway (getting too old to drive, etc) and getting a free transit pass as a bonus. It’s nice but with no measurable impact on car ownership. If Barcelona is truly worried about congestion, then there are options like congestion taxes that London has used in its most touristy areas in order to try to decrease vehicle traffic there. But if you want people to give up car ownership entirely, a lot more than some free tickets for public transport in a select number of zones will be needed, as people already have the option of using public transport, and it is not so expensive relative to the cost of car ownership that reducing the costs a bit will change the equation for a lot of people.

I wonder if this will lead to the cobra effect as it applies to former car owners only:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

This feels a bit like being in school and seeing the naughty kids being offered sweets or privileges, meanwhile the good kids get nothing because they're already well-behaved.

I am getting more and more disapointed by all these incentives to take public transportation that can only think about making them cheaper or try to make them faster to compete with cars.

It is time that we consider other ideas.

I would like to recommend one of the best Ted talks https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_.... It is not specifically about public transportation, but about the larger question of what is value - and has a great example of how to apply it to public transportation.

Excellent TED talk!

In dense cities public transport often already is faster than a car. For example, average car speed in London is 8 to 12mph. It's not hard to beat that, even with an e-bike. https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2019/19767

Another aspect is that moving people to public transport itself is the way to make it faster. Cars are an incredibly inefficient way of using road space, so fewer cars on the road leave more space for more efficient transport modes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow#/media/File:Road_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow#/media/File:Passe...

It's not really spelled out in this article, but as cities introduce Low Emission Zones, everyone that lives in or commutes into the area needs to have a car that meets the new regulations if they don't want to be heavily fined or banned.

Some people were going to buy a new car anyway, and can afford whatever kind is needed they just need to be aware of the incentives to do so.

Some people might be able to afford the TCO of an EV, but not have the up front cash to pay for one, especially if they take a loss on selling their recent purchase. Zero interest loans for EVs are a common policy choice for this group.

This then is a complementary policy aimed at the people who have just enough money to fill the tank on their old car, but not enough to buy a new one. The "lump sum" of 3 years of free public transport in that area helps to ease the transition for them, potentially letting them save up, or wait for cheaper second hand vehicles, or just use the bus and spend the money on other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com