Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.
Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...
Ass soon as you see a human it costs a fortune.
Also around here i've never heard railway unions ask for better compensation, because as you have pointed out they already have a good pension and some transport-related privileges [0]. However, they have been relentlessly asking for better working conditions in order to provide a better service, and that the government stop to try and privatize railways.
Of course the managers, directors and private contractors earn a lot more and that's how our corrupt overlords get away with siphoning much public money into private pockets. But these people, we could well do without, and unions would certainly support a move like that.
[0] Personally, i would strongly approve better compensation for those people we now call "essential workers". It appears in a capitalist system, those who work the most and provide the most services (railway/construction/food/cleaning/health workers) are those paid the less and with the most grueling working conditions. That's a shame.
That is, without mentioning that controllers have to be paid without providing any service. If you additionally take into consideration the social cost of the criminalization of something as banal as using public transports when you don't have money, the benefits of doing away with these systems of control arguably are even more evident.
I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern.
Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.
So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive.
They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.
The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.
I would hate to live in a society formed by that ethos...
I think both of those factors push most people in Berlin to buy a ticket. With a fine of 60 EUR the staff already pays for itself if they pick up ~2 people/hour, which sounds very realistic. If they then on top also have the effect of increasing the percentage of paying riders by a tiny amount, the whole program is quickly turning a profit.
Edit to add some context:
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/haft-nach-schwarzfahren-u...
Consider this article from Berlin where a sizeable number of people in jail are there for riding without a ticket. The cost of that needs to be taken into account here.
With the way the MAX stops are designed, it's still very possible to just hop on without paying.
You get your money for nothing and your travel for free
Just increase that bed tax by 2-3 eur daily and use those 2-3 eur towards the public transport budget. Then let anyone use public transport for free, locals or not.
You will miss some people who will seek out couchsurfing opportunities at their friend's home, but you will still earn a lot from all the hotels, pensions and legal AirBnBs.
(Still, however, not a UBI fan in general).
I like it but the more you think about the more disturbingly it sounds like communism :|
The appeal of free public transportation, to me, is that it allows more people to take advantage of public spaces and works and, marginally, allows people to bring home more money for the same amount of time worked.
Free public transportation fare incentivizes participation not tuning out like I feel many UBI proposals do. No one is going to look at, effectively, a free metro card then think "Sweet! I don't need to work!"
In theory population size 12x of the population of Luxemburg would make it easier to distribute the cost of free transport. But this glosses over the fact that London is huge and only zone 1 and maybe 2 are a pain to drive. Not everyone in London works in zone 1 / 2.
I wonder if there’s anyone here able to give an answer if free transport in London would be financially realistic.
This also means the bus driver doesn't have to worry about checking tickets. There aren't guards to check if people are jumping over turnstiles, etc. Moving to 'totally free' eliminates all kinds of overhead.
There is no reason it couldn't scale.
And the question of scaling hides an interesting assumption: what is the purpose of charging fares?
If it is to reduce usage (to thus ensure that the system isn't used past capacity), then why do you want to limit the usage of public transport? If people don't take public, they will take private transport (cars, etc) which have much higher social cost (you can move many more people by bus than by car).
If it is to 'raise revenue to pay for the system', does the same argument apply to use of roads? What is a fair road tax, given that this method of transport has such high social costs?
This ignores two elements:
- congestion differs by time of day, and
- capacity is constrained differently by mode
In London:
- it's cheaper to take a bus than to take an underground train, and
- there are ticket types that are only valid after the morning rush hour
Both of these decrease peak congestion on the transport system.
The differential pricing would not push people to private transport, but might push them to buses (whose capacity can more easily be increased) or to postpone their journey to later in the day.
You know what might push people to private transport? Severe congestion on the underground. If you are not fit and aggressive, then trying to get on a Central Line train in the morning might mean waiting for 2-3 full trains to pass before you can get on one.
Increasing bus capacity might not be easy either. That requires more busses, more staff, more service, more whatever the source of power is for the busses. It all costs ££££.
Mayor vetoed it, on the grounds that "it would be too popular and overtax muni's capacity". I'm not sure I buy that, my guess is that the local tour bus/tourist bike rental industry disapproved, but that's just speculation on my part. I would personally use Muni about 50% more but I have a chicken-and-egg problem; I don't use it enough to justify a monthly pass, and since I don't have a monthly pass, most times I'd rather just walk than catch a bus.
But it might have exacerbated the problem.
Honestly they rarely bother even to ask for fares. The problem with SF Muni is that the buses are dirty, smelly, and travel along at an average speed of about 8 miles per hour. This, combined with the fact that the buses always appear at random times and can never be ontime creates a very unpleasant experience that is only marginally better than walking.
Which honestly is probably the best outcome any way, at least from an environmental and personal health perspective.
For poorer households, the yearly ticket will still be subsidized, but the public transport companies (fully owned by the state) will still have direct income to maintain a corporate-like structure.
Earlier this year, there were rumors of a cheaper "Homeoffice-Ticket" which would only be valid on certain days, and in the end nothing came out of it either.
Commuters were angry as anything that they couldn't get on the buses any more that were picked with children.
Societies are very different around the world and I'm not sure how much this is factored into ideas that could work really well in some places and not so much in others.
Instead NYC spent $250 million to crack down on fare evasion [1] and installed huge ticket machines at a bunch of bus stops that probably cost >300K each to install.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-o...
If people still need to use their cars, it doesn't really work.
Which is why part of the "funding" for such systems comes from the reduction in the cost caused by private vehicles (on the roads, on the atmosphere, on the neighborhood and more).
Our economic system ensures that we keep the gas pedal to the floor both figuratively and literally.
I think you mean being subsidized by the fuel cost of the cars?
At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of transportation.
Maybe allow reduced taxes for electric vehicles at the same time.
In the end, it wouldn't be much different than the subsidized meat production with artificially lowered meat prices in the US, nor would anyone care much about small increases like that on a year by year basis.
Private individuals are becoming less and less able to afford cars in the first place (not even talking about real estate). If legislation around predatory lending schemes would be tightened, the demand for cars would decrease.
If at the same time you'd invest aggressively in actually making sure that there is enough public transportation in place (as is the case in many European countries already but not the US), then it'd help with displacing them in the background as well.
Couple that with a remote working culture, a few decades of employee pushback and quitting their jobs if they're asked to return to the office in careers where that's not necessary, better postal services and ride sharing apps, food delivery apps or a push for cooking meals at home and you'd see even more significant changes. Even more so if the road networks and infrastructure cannot support rush hour traffic with most of society living in a single shift mode, rather than morning and afternoon shifts.
In contrast, if any initiative comes out today that calls for immediate and drastic change, it will get shot down. Real change takes a lot of patience and dozens if not hundreds of compounding factors over decades.
Either that or going out into the streets with guns in hand, but that has historically worked out horribly time and time again and humanity should be past that savagery. Protests could happen, of course, since that's a bit different.
Regardless, with more initiatives to limit heavy industry, global shipping of goods that could be locally manufactured and an overall push for less consumerist lifestyles, humanity might even have a few hundred years left to kick around on this rock before the long term environmental consequences actually start becoming visible!
Edit: phrasing
I agree with the other commentir: let's stop talking let's start doing.