Why not make public transportation free as part of the government's investment in combatting climate change (and lots of other benefits)
On the con side:
- When people get something for free, they often don't value it as much and treat it worse. E.g. more pollution.
- public transportation being free also means that it will be used even in cases where it is both economically and ecologically a suboptimal solution. This is a problem because more usage means higher costs. E.g. someone now might take a bus instead of cycling.
- Less competition. This point is tricky, but essentially, other solutions such as private long-distance busses (which have a comparibly good ecological footprint) might go out of business. In general, market might develop suboptimal.
There are a lot of good points too, which makes it a difficult decision. But since you asked, those can be named as reasons I suppose.
That’s really reaching. Presumably people would do the thing that bear fits their circumstances after weighing the costs and benefits.
For instance in Estonia, the majority of "switchers" were cyclists and pedestrians.
This is definitely the case in North America, but still likely the case in Germany despite Germany having a much more robust transit system.
The €9 ticket got you around without playing stupid games. The same freedom is either unavailable otherwise, or comes at absolutely unjustifiable prices.
I've only been here for a month and see why the 9 euro is so popular.
I've already experienced everything you mentioned in my short stay here
Some routes that take me 30 minutes with the car, go up for 1h 30m or even 2h if I am unlucky, due to the amount of times I have to change public transport and waiting between connections.
Travelling on the DB is not easy for several reasons, and even with this 9 eur ticket, it's not likely to shift very time sensitive travellers.
That said, most people would be willing to forgo that inconvenience for a price, and this ticket did that.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-public-transit-be-fr...
Electric bikes make public transit much better.
An important thing to understand, is that public transit cannot be faster or as fast as cars. People need to change home.
That's why sobriety is important to talk about. You can't fight climate change without some sacrifices. It often seems like most consumers can't accept it, but it's a reality.
In cities of significant density metro very much is faster. Even some trams are faster in rush hours.
It also only benefits city-dwellers (see political impact of this by looking at, for instance, the yellow vest protests in France).
Of course, this assumes that public transportation is only available in cities, but that's not true at all. Many European countries have extremely effective rural public transportation.
The 'one time cost' is something you're signing up to do every year at ever increasing cost until you go bankrupt or give up and build transit.