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Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

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.

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So the real story is free transit led to massive economic growth which in turn led to increased car ownership.

The lesson for planners and government here is clear: combine free transit with measures to make it massively more incovenient and expensive to own a private automobile.

What's clear is that you don't like cars, and you're willing to make people's lives worse to reduce the number of them.

For less dogmatic people, it may be useful to reflect on what else needs to be done to make public transit useful to more people, beyond the price.

Well yeah, obviously if your public transit is garbage and you make it free it doesn't magically become good. Broadly reaching public transit that comes every 5 minutes with timed transfers is what makes public transit good (though it should also be paid for by taxes).

>So the real story is free transit led to massive economic growth which in turn led to increased car ownership.

How did you make a jump to that conclusion? Correlation doesn’t mean that it’s a sole reason (or even one of the reasons)

I think OP is saying that on some lighter note. On another lighter note, maybe people were finally able to reach their workplaces and productivity increased.

You make an interesting point that making transit free could have triggered economic growth.

This could be because making transit free reduces the underutilization of large mass transit systems.

> The lesson for planners and government here is

... the market will regulate everything. /s

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