Estonia's capital made mass transit free a decade ago. Car traffic went up

The car dependency in Tallinn is definitely not helped by public transport being much inferior to just taking your car everywhere. I've tried to reduce my dependency on cars in Tallinn, and yet I often discover that an hour-long trip via public transportation in Tallinn can be done in 15 minutes or less via car, often due to infrequent departures or due to the unreliability of the schedule. There's also one road that I frequent that has 4 lanes, and yet buses get stuck in traffic jams because of cars clogging the road up, and there are no bus lanes in that part of town.

Bicycle infrastructure is also very inconsistent. You can end up riding on a nice, physically separated path, then find yourself driving on painted gutters that are bumpier than the surface cars ride on. Connections between bicycle paths are also awful. One time I just found that the bicycle path just stops with a dead-end, and the only option was to continue driving on the road alongside cars.

Car usage rising has a lot to do with city leadership not taking steps that actually discourage car dependency. Making mass transit free or very affordable is good, but it has to be accompanied with steps that actually make public transportation a better option compared to cars. The most convenient option wins, always.

A big confounding factor here is that Estonia became massively richer over the past decade. From 2012 to 2022, their per capita GDP went up 62% from $17k to $28k.

It is much, much easier for Estonians to afford cars than it was a decade ago. Without making transit free, car traffic easily could have gone up even more.

Once again proven that mass transit does not have a problem of price, but a problem of reach and reliableness, or in other words water is wet... (Except Switzerland, transport there is pretty expensive, but imo it's bc car lobby in the gov trying to underfund trains and overfund highways)

If you want ppl to use mass transit, provide fast & frequent transport in all the country. This means more units, dedicated lanes, priority on semaphores, easy methods to pay, more trains.

When mass transit is so frequent and easy to use you don't need to plan ahead when to leave your house- that's the moment more ppl will use it. One nice addition will be dedicated buses for children going to school to demotivate parents buying a car just bc of kids

Article implies that free public transport lead to increases in car traffic. But we have to wonder, would it have been even worse without free public transport?

There are so many variables that factor into the success of public transport that direct comparisons between different countries are of minimal use. Its going to depend a lot on how safe the public transport is, how well it connects commuters to places they need to travel between, how inconvenient the roads and accommodation are for owning cars, etc. etc.

The sane thing to do is to experiment with a pilot program and adapt for the local context. Even then there are many problems to weed out with experimental biases and sampling issues, etc. - but it is less terrible.

It is difficult to tell from the article what impact free public transport had, but it's clear that, when Estonians had the option to take no-cost public transport or spend a ton of money on a personal vehicle (and incur the maintenance associated with it). They chose the substantially more expensive option. This is driven home by the fact that ridership fell "transit’s share of Tallinn commutes has fallen from over 40% in 2013, the year fares were eliminated for residents, to under 30% last year."

Whatever services public transit was offering failed to meet the needs of many Estonians. It doesn't matter how inexpensive your product is if it doesn't deliver what people want.

The answer is right at the end of the article: “Transit’s price is not a barrier for most people. It’s service quality and speed of the trip.”