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• Speech Writing /

Speech on Make Public Transport Free: 2 Minutes Speech

• Updated on  
• Dec 16, 2023

People love exploring new places. Those who possess their private vehicle can easily reach out to their favourite destinations without travelling hassles. Still, those who handle monetary factors economically feel this exploration is heavy on their budget. 

But what if this heavy budget could be made free of cost with the help of human rights and duties? However, there will undoubtedly be duties to follow, but how do you see making public transportation free of cost?

Also Read: Essay on Air Pollution for Students

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10 Lines on Make Public Transport Free

1. Getting free transportation is the fundamental right of every citizen.

2. Free transportation leads to flexibility without any economic boundaries. 

3. Less private transit leads to the promotion of environmental sustainability.

4. Public transportation with no cost boosts exposure to local businesses and city areas.

5. Travelling in identical public vehicles creates a balance of society without economic discrimination. 

6. Discovering new stations and public stoppages will encourage physical wellness with a low mortality rate and more productive work.

7. Free public transportation is a pocket-friendly treasure for heavy expenses on personal transportation.

8. Public transportation is a superb mode of encouraging social behaviour if done without any cost, and it will undoubtedly lead to healthy communications and interactions. 

9. Implementing no cost on public transportation will enhance the reduction of private traffic congestion. 

10. More public transportation will help the domestic government grow with more revenues and further economic investment.

Also Read: How to Prepare for UPSC in 6 Months?

2-Minute Speech On Make Public Transport Free

‘Hello and welcome to everyone present here. Today, I stand before you to present my speech on ‘Make public transport free.’ Have you ever wondered, if all the public transport costs nothing and is free to explore globally?’

‘This no-cost will benefit local business development through easy reach in departmental stores and various local setups, boosting economic growth and community competitiveness.’

‘Secondly, free public transport will strengthen environmental considerations. Instead of using private conveyance, the vast crowd will consume free transportation, lessening the number of self-owned vehicles and causing dense pollution.’

‘Apart from no-cost and environmentally friendly advantages, maintenance of these vast numbers of public transport will need a considerable workforce for care and handling.’ 

‘In a report by APTA (American Public Transportation Association) regarding Economic-Impact-Public-Transit-2020, an average of 20,000 jobs are supported for a year per 1 billion dollars of annual spending on public transportation operations.’

‘Let me quote the words of Susan Heller ,  ‘When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.’

‘Travelling is just a hobby or an activity. It needs a lot of stuff to carry on. It is an unspoken feeling that leads the traveller to travel with many thoughts. Unluckily, these feelings cannot have words, yet collecting necessary stuff such as clothing and many more is part of travelling. And yes, it can also be frustrating for the traveller.’

‘During this time-travelling time when everything is full of chaos, how will the traveller feel if the entire public transportation journey is made accessible? Sounding great? This free stuff is more than a wish that surely will come true with numerous adventures.’

Also Read: 7 Best Fitness Tips for Staying Healthy with a Busy Schedule

If public transportation costs nil, then it will surely be more accessible to the public. 

Apart from free costs, public transportation can be made available in good numbers so that the public can avoid any shortage at the time of requirement. 

Public transportation should be used more often to enhance good environmental conditions and improve health and social interactions. 

Increasing public safety and comfort will boost public transportation. 

Buses, trains, and aeroplanes are all means of transportation facilities used by the public are called public transportation. 

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Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with educational and informative content expertise. She has hands-on experience in Education, Study Abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and analysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particularly in the education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs related to her field to expand her expertise further. In her personal life, she loves creative writing and aspires to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Pros & cons: Making public transportation free

Experts present their pros and cons lists for making public transit free for communities.

Public transit is an important part of many people’s daily lives. Image: epSos.de / CC BY

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0

December 13, 2019. Now that Kansas City has become the first major U.S. city to make all public transportation free , the debate over whether or not this is a viable option for most cities is back in the spotlight. The viewpoints of the following experts are still very much relevant to today’s discussion.

The following question was recently posted on Quora : “What are the arguments against and for making public transportation free?”

Read the diverse opinions from experts below.

Don Johnson, Urban Planner and Economist

There are a couple of economic arguments for making public transportation free (or at least cheaper than it costs to provide:)

• Cars impose a lot of costs on society that drivers don’t pay for
• Everyone benefits when people can travel around freely.

The technical term for the first one is “negative externality,” and there are two big ones associated with cars: pollution and congestion. Every time you start your car and get on the road, you put mono-nitrogen oxides, VOCs, ozone, and carbon dioxide in the air, and you make the road more crowded and thus slower. These are real costs, measurable in environmental damage, health care costs, and wasted time, that other people have to pay for .

Economists like efficiency, and efficient economic systems are ones in which people pay for costs directly, because then they can make choices rationally. (I’ll wait for everyone to stop laughing before I continue.) That’s why economists and planners have been fantasizing about congestion pricing for so long - in a well-designed congestion pricing scheme, drivers actually pay more when they choose a congested road. And if there were an additional tax on gas dedicated to relieving air pollution and improving respiratory health (the existing gas tax in the US only pays for roads) that would make drivers pay the cost of pollution and also be economically efficient. But in the absence of those, subsidizing public transit (which gets people to drive less than they otherwise would) is kind of a second best solution.

The technical term for the second argument is “public good.” It’s good for everyone if transportation costs are reduced - workers can get to more jobs, companies can choose from more workers and more suppliers, people can take more spur-of-the moment road trips to outlet malls, etc. Robert J. Kolker will say that making the price zero don’t make it free -- somebody somewhere is paying -- and he’s right, but under some conditions you can probably show that making everyone pay to make transit free for some people actually makes everyone collectively better off. Again Robert will say that’s not fair, but this is not a fairness argument but a collective benefit argument. But in any case our society is not run by economist philosopher kings.

Because economists famously don’t agree on anything I have to point out that there are also economic arguments against making transit free:

• Free transit is a poor substitute for making drivers pay actual costs of driving
• Free anything makes people use it too much - in theory, anyway, transit that’s too cheap is just as bad as driving that’s too cheap. Somebody will end up paying for lots of trips that didn’t really need to be made.
• As noted above, people may feel that it’s not fair that they have to pay for other people’s bus tickets, even if it does make everyone better off. I’m personally not very sympathetic - pretty much every decision society makes is unfair to somebody. Is it fair to me that we spent $62 billion to develop the F-22 fighter plane, when I don’t feel any safer because of it? But I digress.

In summary there is a lot of reasonable thought behind subsidizing public transit (even if not making it absolutely free) and indeed that’s what most cities end up doing.

Andrew Levy

• We would need more public transport. Buses, planes, trains etc. all harm the environment, just as cars do. If everyone used public transport, more buses would pollute cities. It should also be mentioned that the manufacturing and creation of a public transport system is very energy intensive, drawing largely on coal and fossil fuels for energy. This releases significant carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
• With the financial crisis, we can’t afford to spend more money on something like this. It would cost too much for the government to pay for running public transport services. With the economic crisis, it needs to spend the money on other more important things.
• Car sales would drop significantly. If it were free for everyone to get to work, families wouldn’t need two or three cars; just one or even none, depending on their availability to public transport of course. Most families have several cars, and one is used just for someone to get to work each day. This wouldn’t be necessary. It would hurt the car industry and car makers would most likely lose their jobs, and car companies may collapse, which is very bad news.
• There are many people who would also lose their jobs. People like conductors, parking cops and plenty of other people wouldn’t have their jobs any more, because their services would be no longer required.
• Some public transport cities are already terrible; this would just increase the strain. Some public transport networks are already crowded and/or unreliable. With increased customers and pressure, these networks wouldn’t manage.
• If it was free, companies would not be expected to provide top service, because they are not paying customers. Generally when you pay a little bit more, you are paying for a good service. But if you aren’t paying anything, and heaps of people are using the service, you can’t expect top-notch customer service. Generally people look after paying customers more. If it was free, companies could lower their service under the excuse that its customers aren’t paying anything so they should just “get what their given”.
• Many people dislike public transport and still would not use it. Many people will stick to their cars, and some would even stop using public transport, because with it being free, so many people will use it, it would become a mess and be way too crowded.
• “Why Free Public Transport is a bad idea?!?”, World Streets Blog
• Baum, Herbert J. (1973), “Free Public Transport”, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, January 1973
• “Myth: Making public transport free will encourage use”, Public Transport Users Association, Australia
• “Free public transport is not our ticket to ride”, Australia
• Free public transport would reduce the number of cars on the road. Global warming is a serious issue and if public transport was free, more people would use it, taking cars off the road. 1 train could take 2000 cars off the road. A public transport system with 20 trains could take 40,000 cars off the road. Some people would simply choose to not own cars, further reducing the number of cars on the road. Across dozens of cities in a nation and thousands world-wide, the result of free public transport would be dramatic in cutting vehicle emissions and combating global warming.
• The government’s job is to provide services. This would be a great service that could be used by everyone. Taxes already pay for health care, schools and roads etc. so why not let taxpayers see the benefits for themselves, in a useful service everyone can use.
• The environment would greatly benefit. As well as providing services, the government should look out for the environment. No amount of money is too much to protect the environment.
• We would need more public transport workers. With increased and better public transport, we would need more bus and train drivers, creating jobs. This is great with the global financial crisis. And it work make it easier for people to get to their job - they could just get on a bus.
• The government would be forced to improve public transport. With more users, bad public transport networks would be improved by the government, to make it worthwhile using. Bad networks would be greatly improved, and the benefits can be used by everyone. Its definitely a worthwhile incentive.
• A lot of public transport companies are reliable and need more customers. Most public transport organisations offer friendly and reliable service and could do with some more “customers”. They would be happy to take them and it would get cars off the road.
• Single or zero fare maximizes the efficiency, convenience and attractiveness of public transport systems for both users and operators in inner cities. “The option of a single and potentially free public transport fare zone in the Sydney CBD should be examined as a way of immediately simplifying fare structures, eliminating CBD interchange fare penalties, eliminating other CBD fare anomalies and maximising the efficiency, convenience and attractiveness of CBD public transport systems for both users and operators.” Independent Public Inquiry - Sydney’s Long Term Public Transport Plan, May 2010
• Heaps of people would be tempted by free transport. If free public transport was offered to everyone, of course they would use it. Yes, some people may stick to their cars, but the majority would think it was a great idea. If you had the choice of paying thousands each year to run a car, or to get on a train every morning for free, what would you choose?
• A lot of people would already be using it if it didn’t cost so much. For a lot of people, the only reason they don’t catch public transport is because it costs too much. If it was free, they’d definitely start using it.
• Free Public Transit Blog
• Møller, Berit and Thoegersen, John (2008), “Breaking Car Use Habits: The Effectiveness of a Free One-Month Travelcard”, Transportation, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 329-345, 2008
• Thoegersen, John (2009), “Promoting Public Transport as a Subscription Service: Effects of a Free Month Travel Card”, Transport Policy, Vol. 16, 2009
• “Perspectives on implementation of free public transport - assessments and recommendations from a working group under the Danish Board of Technology”, Summary, English version, November 2006
• Scottish Socialist Party’s campaign for free public transport, UK
• Campaign for Free Public Transport, UK
• Free Public Transport, Finland
• Transport Vsem, Russia
• Saltada Popular, Spain
• Planka.nu, Sweden
• “At Any Cost? The hidden costs of charging for public transport”, Alex Berthelsen, Planka.nu, Sweden
• freepublictransports.com, USA
• Zero-Fare, Canada
• “Free ride: the future of public transport”, The Age, March 5, 2006, Australia
• “The case for free public transport”, Green Left, Australia
• Fare Free, New Zealand
• “A Case for Free Comfortable Public Transport?”, Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities Center

Prashant Prasad

In my opinion, encouraging public transport is a very good way to reduce pollution and other traffic related problems in any city. But in most of the cases, creating a free public transportation system is not a feasible solution.

The following are what I see as the pros and cons of making public transportation systems free of cost:

• More users will get attracted to the public transportation system as their mode choice which will reduce number of small and private vehicles on street resulting lesser congestion and lesser emission (good for the environment).
• Time taken to purchase the travel ticket will be saved.
• It will be accessible to the economically weaker section of the society also.
• Will reduce the societal gap between poor and rich in the society as people from all economic status will be able to travel together.
• This will provide job opportunities to more people as more public transportation vehicles will be required to ply in the Country.
• Initially managing the crowd in the public transport will be a major challenge in populated countries like India.
• It will become a burden on the government to maintain the quality and finally to sustain the public transportation system.
• Many people will not use the public transport as it will be too crowded.
• Human psychology is that free things are not valued much, so the system may get abused by the public.

However there are countries like Germany where public transportation is free for students and the money for the same is collected as a semester fee. In countries like India the challenge is quite unique. In India we have a huge range of users ranging from a homeless person to a millionaire.

There are two types of users, according to the literature: Choice riders and Captive riders.

• Choice riders : users who can afford to travel by other private modes of transport
• Captive riders: users who cannot afford anything other than public transport.

We need to find a balance between their requirements and affordability, keeping in mind that anything we do will need money and money cannot be grown on trees. In order to attract both types of riders towards public transport, we need to keep the fare within an affordable range of the user groups and need to uplift the quality of the service to match the choice riders’ needs.

This can be done by creating segments in the public transportation system:

• A higher service quality for which the fare will also be a little lighter as the choice riders’ affordability range is higher and
• A comparatively lower service quality which will sustain itself with a lower fare and also will fit within captive riders’ pocket.

Ways to get funds to improve the service-quality of entire transportation system:

• The revenue of the higher service quality can support the lower quality to improve and come to the same level.
• The revenue from the goods transportation system can also contribute in improving the public transportation service-quality.
• In order to maintain the interest of the choice riders we will need to think of providing some advantages against the higher fare they will pay. Like less crowed in the higher class and little more pleasant condition.

The entire process to improve the quality of public transport and reducing various problems due to vehicles needs to be worked out in detail. This will take a longer time but this should work better than making it completely free for all.

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Funded And Affordable: Should Public Transit Be Free?

The New York City subway system at rush hour. Andrew Burton/Andrew Burton / Getty Images hide caption

The New York City subway system at rush hour.

What would happen if you could get to work each morning on the bus for free? Or if you could take your kids to the movies and get there for free? Would you drive less? Would it help you afford the other things you need?

Public transportation is supposed to be the low-cost alternative. For millions of Americans, it's a lifeline if they can't afford a car, or if they live in a city where there are no other alternatives but public transportation.

New York City is the mecca of mass transit. More than 5.5 mill ion people ride the subway every day, and recently, the city began a crackdo wn on people who break the rules and ride for free. But which communities suffered most under this enforcement?

What does it take to give residents a free ride? Can any city do it? And once you do it, can you sustain it?

Joining us to talk about these questions are Laura Wagner , senior staff writer at Vice ; David Jones , MTA board member; Angie Schmitt , transportation writer; and Daniel Rivera , mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Like what you hear? Find more of our programs online .

Public Transport Should Be Free

Cities need good public transit or they grind to a halt. Growing cities in the developing world often have traffic jams that choke up whole expressways for days. The reliance on the car also leads to large amounts of pollution, both smog and CO2 emissions. The solutions for these problems is more and better public transit. In cities the public transport network can be dense enough that users do not need to walk far to reach their nearest stop. Should public transit not be seen as a public service and be free in order to encourage people out of their cars?

All the Yes points:

How to get to work, money saved, will encourage people not to drive, will open opportunities for new businesses, some people are very poor, all the no points:, private companies, not enough capacity, bus driver’s salary, and crowded transport., it already is almost free., more pollution , we need to combat heart disease, we need to improve the transport system, this costs, people are misguided as to cost allocation, people can walk for free, yes because….

There are so many people without a car. They don’t have enough money to use public transportation. How are they supposed to get to work?

No because…

no importance of making it free for people who don’t have money and can’t get to work because of it. why? 1. People who apply for job should know where their job place is, and how they can get there. if they know that they don’t have money, they should’ve find another nearer place that they can get only by walking, etc. it is ridiculous that you apply for job without knowing where your job place is, and even if you know you’re still being stubborn and take the position. 2. even if those people are being stubborn, and they still take the position, there’s nothing government can do with that. look, when these people want this position, they should know the consequences of having a very far job place or things. and when the consequence is they have to pay some amountt of money because of applying for a far job place. since these people will get money by the job, so that’s why this consequence belong to them.

Although the idea of riding the bus every day to work is not very appealing, saving money every week on gas is. At an average of 3.10 a gallon, filling an average sized SUV can cost anywhere from 50-65 dollars. The cost of gas has become so high that some workers are unable to pay for their commute without significantly reducing their take home pay. Free public transportation is the answer for hard working people to have more money in their pockets, clean air in their lungs and a better future for their children. Some governments have considered paying for public transport out of taxpayers’ money, making it free. This would take cars, along with congestion, off our roads, and help the environment, so many people think it’s a great idea and everyone would be able to see its advantage. However, like nearly all policies, it does have its cons. In Belgium the government made public transport free, and it was a huge success. Lots of money was saved by all parties; the transport companies, the government and particularly the customers. They saved on everything, even printing tickets. It is still free.

By making public transport free, the Government would be encouraging people to use public transport instead of driving to and from work. Whilst there may be the initial lack of revenue from the ticket prices, the Government would benefit the environment. This would mean that they would have to pay less for pollution schemes and pay less for cleaning the streets. They would also have to pay less for the upkeep of roads, this upkeep of roads currently costs 15million GBP. [[http://www.freightonrail.org.uk/PDF/Research-Maintenance.pdf]] By encouraging less people to drive, the Government could cut these costs and this would help fund the free transport.

The introduction of the Oyster card was supposed to have a similar effect. It reduced the costs of tickets and made the service more efficient, but it has done relatively little to the number of people who drive. If people have a car, they are inclined to use it rather than walking and getting transport. Public transport is always going to be cheaper than running a car, yet people still drive. It is not cost that is a motivating factor for drivers to take public transport. It is convenience.

If people were able to travel easily to areas slightly out of urban areas then businesses could take advantage of cheaper ground rents out of the city and yet easy access to employees. With more businesses able to start up, the Government would be able to take advantage of more tax. This would mean less benefits paid for unemployment benefit as jobs are created out of the city, and more tax via income tax, and then more tax revenue via corporation tax on the business. This additional revenue could offset the loss of income from public transport. In our dying economy, this is what is needed.

Once something is completely free people tend not to value it all that much. However it should be priced much cheaper than it is, so that for most urban journeys it becomes the obvious choice. One problem at the moment is that regular users can usually buy a pass which is reasonable value, but the casual bus user tends to get ripped off. This means that once somebody has a car, they are likely to use it, even if a bus exists. Another problem is that many bus routes do not connect well, especially in off peak periods. One idea that would be worth trying would be to allow people to buy a year long, all routes bus pass in exchange for a single fee, payable at the same time that they pay their Local Government taxes. If urban public transport is going to succeed, it is also necessary to provide better public transport between urban centres, and from the countryside to urban centres. Many people who visit the urban centres do not live within that conurbation. Public transport to and from the countryside or even the near-town suburbs is verging on non-existant, at least in Britain. I fully identify with the point that journeys such as getting from home to a small industrial estate across town are often difficullt or even impossible. The fact that some people are very poor is largely an argument for greater fairness and equality in income distribution, rather than a public transport argument.

In my opinion I think that public transit should be free because there a lot of people in the world that don’t have the money to pay for there gas. Some people even have to bike to work. Some people don’t even have a car or a bike. It is even eco friendly because there would be less people on cars which means that there would be less car polling. The world will have more gas and will save money each time you take public transit because there are more people on the transit which will help the environment.

Nothing is free,it just means taking more from the tax payer to fund it. Don’t you think the taxpayer is paying enough ?. It would not and does not take the people from their cars onto the bus,it is inconvenient, and more enjoyable in the car.It will NEVER save the planet or anything else. Have you seen the free bus services and free park and ride ?. I have and the buses are EMPTY and they use 4 times more fuel than a car,and are left running at the bus stations for up to half hour at the rural bus stations. They are(as the trains are) already paid for by the tax payer anyway so it is not right to have to make up for the bit of revenue the transport takes from the passenger. A bus costs approximately £80 per hour to run, with purchase of the bus, tax and 2 insurances, fuel, wages, administration, maintenance and repairs,etc etc.No its more like £100 perhour EACH bus. The only thing the bus services are doing in rural towns and villages is keeping themselves in jobs,they are empty, and the taxpayer is paying for that.Bus fares are cheap enough in the cities. Free to some is expense to others.

Private companies can not afford to provide free transportation on its own without the support of government and if government provide this facility then the huge part of budget will go in this sector and then the government how can manage the other basic needs of public like health, education and other necessary public services. There are two types of public transport: run by the government and by the private companies. While the later seems impossible to provide free-of-charge transport, the former has the possibility of providing what the private companies can’t. In one hand this policy would make lessen people’s expenses in transport but in the other hand it’s killing the income of the private companies since people would choose the free-of-charge transport.

Private companies could provide free public transport if the government paid them to do so. An example of this happening on a limited scale is the free bus passes that are given to pensioners in Britain.

Being free will make something much more popular, in the case of public transport this is something that would be a good thing. However across the world transport networks are already at capacity. Could the London underground cope if it was free and suddenly numbers using it jumped dramatically? Probably not. Unfortunately transport infrastructure takes a long time to build so it would be a long time before there could be an increase to match ridership. This would also be costly – a cost that could obviously not be paid off by selling tickets.

It may be possible to make public transport free during quiet periods, late at night or during the middle of the day while charging a lot in peak periods so as to encourage more people to use public transport when it is not already at peak capacity.

Alot of people only make money from driving bus’s around and if they do it for free how do the company’s make money? This could lower the salary for the driver,s which means less money for the drivers. Also People who don’t own cars will always use puplic transport making it much more crowded and less comforatble for the passengers. Do you want to walk into a bus filled with so many people you have to stand? Not to mention alot of people walk to places using less gas, and if everyone uses bus’s that will make the weight of the bus heavier resulting in using more gas. Not to mention if its free the idea of puplic transport will be more popular so the companies will have to make much more (Bus’s, Subways,e.t.c). Making much more Bus’s will cost alot of many. These are reasons why public transport should not be free.

The actual cost is not really an issue. Presumably the tab would simply be picked up by government. The transport being free would not make bus drivers into volunteers. However the technology is increasingly moving towards being able to have driver-less cars, so why not driver-less buses? Driver-less trains are already possible. The environmental argument you put forward is however wrong. yes a more crowded bus will use more fuel than one that is not crowded. However it uses much less per person. This actually means that overall there is a fuel saving to having buses (and other public transport as full as possible). This is exactly the same as the idea behind car sharing. Similarly the cost (environmental and monetary) of building new buses is much less than building the cars to transport an equivalent number of people – even if we make the assumption that some of them will be changing from walking. Being on a crowded bus is still far less stressful than driving. You can use your phone or fall asleep without being in danger of your life, you aren’t susceptible to road rage, you don’t have to worry about running out of petrol or damaging your car or getting lost. The overall cost is so much less than running a car, monetary stress will be less.

The fares collected hardly pay for the bus company,s overheads. They are subsidised by the tax payer. People should realise that the cost of the bus plus enormous amounts of insurances and wages wear and tear maintenance runnung costs admin and admin offices garages etc etc. To a point it should not be any freer.

Most busses here advertise that the bus replaces 5 cars.The car does 40mpg ?, the bus does 15mpg but is left running non stop at the bus stations spewing out thick diesel fumes,and is paid for by the tax payer as they are always empty both ways every half hour where I live. Most of the routes at most times of the day could be covered by a taxi at a tremendously lower rate than the busses. The transport systems in the uk are subsidised too much by the taxpayer without making the underpriced tickets free.

In 2007, cardiovascular disease (CVD) caused 34% of deaths in the UK, and killed just over 193,000 people. [[http://www.heartstats.org/topic.asp?id=17]] This is a startling statistic and it an easily circumvented disease. The prevention is in exercise. If we gave people free urban transport, people would begin cutting down on the little exercise they do!! Instead of walking for 5 minutes people would take the free transport. This is not something we should encourage.

At least they will walk to the bus stop instead of getting in their car yards from the front door! If people are inclined to walk they are unlikely to be stopped by free buses, quite the opposite, they are more likely to walk a distance for the shopping, rather than take the car, because they know that they can hop on the bus to carry it back if they acquire heavy items, or it comes on rain or the return walk is otherwise made uncongenial.

In order for transport to remain environmentally friendly and efficient, it needs to be continually maintained. The Liberal democrats understood this as they argued for spending more on public transport not less[[http://www.libdems.org.uk/siteFiles/resources/PDF/Election%20Policy/Liberal%20Democrat%20Environment%20Manifesto.pdf]]. Old buses and old trains pollute more than new systems. There are various technological developments that have helped this. However, in order for the research into technology to be conducted, in order for that research to be implemented, money is needed. Money in the public purse is in low supply. Therefore, it is not viable for the public transport system to be both environmentally friendly and free.

There are many ways in which such a system will in fact save the Government money. The costs on the environment clean up policy has already been mentioned, but then we have the benefit of fewer health care costs. As the air cleans in city centers as people use less cars, rate of asthma will decrease and therefore so will the NHS bill.

People seem to be under the impression that the maintenance of roads is free and therefore think that public transport should also be free [[http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/transit_should.php]]. However, people pay road tax to cover the costs for roads. There is also the high level of tax paid on petrol, making the Government 23.6 billion GBP a year. [[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/F/pbr_csr07_endofyear321.pdf]] This is how the money is obtained to pay for the roads, they are not free. If public transport were made free, we would be made to pay for the service via a tax. There is little point in doing this, all it is doing is transferring costs from direct payment to indirect taxation.

This is not a misapprehension at all, quite simply the use of the roads would be rather more efficient if everyone was on buses rather than cars, if 50 people get on a single bus thats 20-30 fewer cars; it should be fairly obvious what that does to wear and tear on the road, thus reducing the maintenance cost!

“More than half of the world’s population lives near an urban center.” With this being so, why should public transport be free? If we take the urban cities where the jobs are, where the activities are, everything is so close together that walking is a perfectly viable option. With this being so, why should the Government offer public transport for free? At the moment people have the option to either walk or get public transport. If people choose not to walk, then they should pay.

This rather hinges on ‘near’ near does not mean much, you can live within the M25 and still be many miles from the Center of London, as the M25 is between 12 to 20 miles away from the center all the way round, by almost anyones definition people within the M25 are in London yet they are not within walking distance by any stretch of the imagination!

Public transport should’ve absolutely been free for the elderly as of the reasons listed above.

Public transport a should be free for the elderly. IT doesn’t help those of which have mental issues. Also, paying for public transport costs a certain amount of money whichever some people cannot afford like poor people and those of which are saving money but aren’t wealthy. Public transport should be free for the elderly.

Many people say to ride bike instead of cars….. Than shouldn’t the government make the public transportation free? In addition, there are many people who don’t own their driving license. And poor people can’t afford a car… Even small cars worth 2 thousand won…

I drive a minibus about 10hrs a day. I’d say if you can legit get idiots to stop thinking that just because they “can” get a liscense, that they “know” how to drive, and instead get on a bus, do it. The issue isn’t that bus fare is too costly, it’s that (here in California) bus fare is like $1.75 and 96% of voters support raising funds for public transport, yet only 6% of the people actually ride the damn things. California’s current population is about 49m, and each one of them want to sit in traffic for 2+ hours driving 50+ miles to work, rather than taking the train that goes the same way. The issue isn’t about making public transport more affordable, it’s educating idiots driving personal transport vehicals that there are other ways of getting around, and helping pace the traffic flow. The other issue is car loans, houses fine, but cars? I personally think car loans should be outlawed; you want to drive yourself around and hog up traffic, that’ll be $44k. Can’t afford that? Well, at least public transport is free, and you wont lose your home attempti g to pay for both.

Could you make that a bit more appropriate?

How do you get to school or work every day. There are so many people with out a car. They don’t have enough money to use public transportation. How are they supposed to get to work? And for students that go into town every day it ends up costing lots of money and some people don’t have that money so it can be a real problem for them. Although the idea of riding the bus every day to work is not very appealing, saving money every week on gas is. The cost of gas has become extremely high, For a small car it can cost around about $50-$350, So that means that some workers are unable to pay for their petrol.

We would love to hear what you think – please leave a comment!

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Episode 513

Should public transit be free.

It boosts economic opportunity and social mobility. It’s good for the environment. So why do we charge people to use it? The short answer: it’s complicated.

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Episode Transcript

Marcus FINBOM: My name is Marcus Finbom , and I work as a traffic planner in Stockholm, Sweden. Stephen DUBNER: I understand that in a previous life and maybe still, in your current life, that you were a pretty devout — I don’t know what’s the best word for what you were: a transit protester? A transit anarchist? FINBOM: A public-transit advocate . Bringing more access to public transit for people. DUBNER: Can you just pronounce the name of the organization? Is it Planka? FINBOM: Planka . So it means, “Fare dodge now.” DUBNER: Talk about how you dodge a fare. If it’s a train, are there turnstiles that you have to jump, things like that?  FINBOM: In the metro and the commuter trains, there were back then turnstiles. The turnstiles had a sensor. So if you just stretch your leg in, you would reach the sensor, and it would open up, and you would slide through.

Marcus Finbom didn’t just dodge fares himself, and encourage others in Stockholm to do the same; he and his comrades at Planka also had a scheme to mitigate the risk of fare-dodging.

FINBOM: We mainly did this by organizing a solidarity fund. So if you got caught and you got a quite hefty fine — at the moment, I think it’s somewhere in the vicinity of $150 — the solidarity fund would pay this. DUBNER: So this is a group you join, where you’re not going to pay for the transit that you ride, but then you contribute to — it’s kind of like an insurance fund, right? You contribute a little bit, and if you get caught and get fined, the fund will pay it for you. Is that the way it works? FINBOM: You can say that. Yeah, for sure.   DUBNER: Were you ever caught? FINBOM: For sure, yeah.  DUBNER: How did it happen?   FINBOM: The ticket controllers — they found it quite easy when someone were a member of Planka, because we never got aggressive or tried to get away because like, “Okay, I got caught. Here’s my I.D. La, la, la.” And they were like, “Oh, you are a member of Planka. Okay, cool. Here’s a ticket.” 

It’s a clever idea, this fare-dodging insurance plan. But that wasn’t Planka’s only goal, or at least its primary one. They wanted to challenge the idea that anyone should pay for public transit. For Finbom, this gets at some bigger questions about the relationship between transit and society.

FINBOM: What kind of city do you want? Do you want one open and accessible for everyone? Or do you want one with barriers and borders that hinder some and makes life just more miserable for some? 

Marcus Finbom is not alone in asking such questions. There is a flourishing argument that public transit is good for the environment, good for economic opportunity and social mobility — basically good for everybody. Assuming that is all true, here’s another question: should public transit everywhere be free?

Brian TAYLOR: I cannot answer that without context. 

Today on Freakonomics Radio : one large serving of public-transit context.

*      *      *

DUBNER: If I were to ask you, let’s say, 10 years ago, which would you say was less likely: that the mayor of Boston would be Michelle Wu or that all public transit in Boston in, let’s say, 2030 would be free?   Michelle WU: I’m not sure. Both would be completely impossible. DUBNER: So the first one we now know is not at all impossible. In your heart of hearts, what do you think about the second one? WU: I think we can get to a free bus system. That would be transformational for our city’s economy, climate, and opportunity.

That is Michelle Wu and she is the mayor of Boston. She grew up in Chicago, came to Harvard for undergrad and law school, then served on Boston’s City Council for eight years before winning the mayoral election. As mayor, she wants to be aggressive.

WU: It’s very easy to be just reactive in these roles, and we have to exercise every bit of planning and capacity and organizational muscle to be proactive. I keep a countdown clock, a little widget on my phone, that shows me exactly how many days are left in the term, because every single day should count, and we have to move at a pace that is closer to the urgency in the communities, as opposed to the usual pace of government. 

It’s not just the pace of government Wu dislikes; it’s how little risk they usually take on.

WU: If you maximize the chance that nothing will go wrong, then we won’t get close to the scale of change and transformation that’s needed. DUBNER: So in a 2019 Boston Globe op-ed —  you were a City Council member then — you wrote a piece titled, “ Forget Fare Hikes, Make the T Free ,” the T being the Boston public-transit system; it’s the T in M.B.T.A., which is the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. “Free public transportation,” you argued, “is the single biggest step we could take toward economic mobility, racial equity, and climate justice.” I read that now — even now, even knowing what you’ve been doing, and I say, “Wait, what? The single biggest step?” And I think before transportation, I — and look, I’m no mayor, I’m no city council person — but I would have thought the single biggest step might have been about early education, or childcare, or healthcare, or affordable housing. So why start there? Why start with free public transit?  WU: We know that the foundation for equitable access to opportunities, is connectedness, the ability to get around. A 2015 longitudinal study of several hundred people that Harvard conducted showed that the factor most closely linked to a family’s ability to rise out of poverty, in fact, wasn’t the test scores of schools in the area, it wasn’t the public-safety statistics. In fact, it was the average commute time to work. So there’s a relationship between transportation, and particularly transportation-infrastructure decisions, and which communities have access to economic opportunity. DUBNER: When I’m thinking it through, I’m thinking, “Well, even for low-income workers, transit fares just can’t make up a very large share of income, especially compared to housing, childcare, healthcare, and so on.” So how much of the argument for free public transit is about actually helping people afford transportation — versus all those other incentives, including lessening carbon emissions, lessening traffic, increasing mobility generally?   WU: Even if it feels like, compared to your rent or the cost of food, that the fare for the bus is smaller than that, it does add up. M.I.T. helped lead a study here a number of years ago, where a number of low-income families were given a 50 percent discounted fare card to the M.B.T.A. And what we saw was that families saw a significant increase in their M.B.T.A. usage. Thirty percent more trips. And it turns out that people were using the transportation for basic life necessities — to get to their medical appointments, to get to the grocery store, all things that they had previously been rationing because it was just one more cost that you had to undertake. DUBNER: New York City has means-tested transit discount —  50 percent off for people below a certain income. But Boston doesn’t have that. So why not start there? Why go from zero all the way up to free transit for everybody?  WU: We are proud as a city to be home to the innovations that have shaped our society in many ways. We were the first to drop the prices for access to education, for example, or libraries, or parks. And we’re still home to the first public school in the country, the first public library , the first public park at Boston Common — all ways in which we recognize that by investing in our shared destinies, our common wealth, that we are all better off. And so in line with that vision, public transportation is just as fundamental. To get there, it’s not going to happen overnight. And there are different starting points. So I have been very forcefully supportive of a means-tested discount program as one step in the right direction. Free buses are the ideal place where we would capture so much of this value. It’s a place where we see the widest inequities across our transit system in Boston —  64 hours more per year that Black bus riders spend on city buses compared to white riders because those routes tend to be longer, stuck in traffic more. This is also a place where the act of paying slows down the service because people are lining up, digging out their wallets, uncrinkling the bills. So that’s the ideal place to start. 

If Boston were to eliminate transit fares, it would become the biggest American city to do so. Michelle Wu would therefore steal those bragging rights from this man.

Robbie MAKINEN: Robbie Makinen. I’m president and C.E.O. of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.

Actually, Makinen is now the former president and C.E.O. He left his job not long after we spoke with him. But on his watch, Kansas City, Missouri, became the first major city in the U.S. to make the move to free public transit.  

MAKINEN: We didn’t just flip a switch and say, “Hey, everything’s free.” We did a methodical, strategic process. We first made transit zero-fare for our veterans. All you had to do was show your veteran’s card and come on board. Next we went to the school districts, and we said, if a child wanted to stay after school for a chess club or football or whatever, and they missed that one yellow bus at 5:30 to get home, well, then what was going to happen? Mom would have to come get them, or they’d have to walk, so just giving them access to public transit was a big deal, and they enjoyed that. The third step was, we went to our safety-net providers — mental-health agencies, domestic-violence shelters. So by the time we got to where we were going to flip the switch to make zero-fare throughout the region, we were already 60 percent there .

Now, you may be asking yourself: when a transit agency stops charging its passengers, where does the money come from to run the system — to buy and maintain buses and trains, to pay drivers and other employees?

MAKINEN: We have a $100 million budget. Less than 10 percent of that we were getting from the fare box.

Among transit people, this is called the fare-box recovery ratio . And it varies a lot from place to place. Here’s Brian Taylor , a transportation scholar at U.C.L.A.

TAYLOR: People often may not have an idea of how much the fare they pay goes for the cost of transit. Nationwide, fares cover about a third of the operating costs of a system, but they don’t cover any of the capital costs. So the buses, the trains, the equipment, the stations are all paid for with federal grants. And the cost of operating the service — the operators, the drivers and the mechanics, fuel, tires, wear and tear, things like that — about a third of that is covered out of fares and about two-thirds by government subsidies. 

But as we said, the fare-box recovery ratio can vary from place to place. Consider the numbers for two big California transit systems: Los Angeles Metro and BART, or Bay Area Rapid Transit.

TAYLOR: L.A. Metro is down in the teens, where BART is closer to 50 percent.  

And remember what Robbie Makinen told us about the $100 million transit budget in Kansas City.

MAKINEN: Less than 10 percent of that we were getting from the fare box. 

Meaning the vast majority of the operating costs were coming from federal, state, and local funding.

MAKINEN: And if you’re down that low from a fare-box recovery standpoint, you cannot tell me that I couldn’t walk in there and find that 10 percent. You can’t tell me there’s not a way to help the folks that need it the most.  

Who need it the most financially, he means. The demographic makeup of public-transit ridership also varies from place to place, depending on the geography, the economics, even the history of a given city. In places like San Francisco and Boston and New York, traveling by car is time-consuming and expensive; therefore, more middle- and high-income people in those places use public transit. In Kansas City, meanwhile, where driving is easier and cheaper, there is a much larger share of low-income transit passengers.

MAKINEN: And to me, charging a fare is a regressive tax on the people who need it the most. When we started down this road, everybody wants to go back to some study that was done in, 19- whatever the hell — excuse my language. Everybody said, “Oh my gosh, you can’t do it. Society’s going to break down.” You know, “crime everywhere. Cats living with dogs. Mass hysteria. That’s what’s going to happen.” Well, let me tell you, exactly the opposite happened here in Kansas City. And I’m going to tell you why. Over 75 percent of any incident we ever had on a vehicle was over a fare-box dispute. Think about that. And since we took the fare away, we’ve had less than 20 incidents out of 10 to 13 million rides. That’s fantastic. And then the other part was they said, “Yeah, but now the houseless folks are just going to get on and stay on and live on your vehicles.” Well, you know what? First of all, there but by the grace of God go I and you, right? These folks are people, and they’re just people that need help. So what we’ve done is invent a pilot program where some of the homeless providers are putting case-management teams on our vehicles — based upon heat maps of where we need the most help —  and they can help them get to the shelters and the services that they can actually use, rather than just putting more police with guns on a vehicle. 

Once Kansas City went fare-free, Makinen and his transit agency did have to make up a $9 million budget shortfall. They’re getting $5 million from the municipal government and using federal COVID-relief funds to cover the rest. But that money will run out soon, and with Makinen — the program’s main champion — out of his job, the future of free transit in Kansas City is uncertain. The agency says it is pursuing other sources of revenue. But advocates of free transit like to point out that eliminating fares can actually save money — by saving time. Here again is Boston mayor Michelle Wu.

WU: We’ve already seen significant operational savings from the cost efficiencies of making our routes run faster.

Earlier this year, Wu helped start a pilot program that eliminated fares on three bus lines that serve lower-income areas: Routes 23, 28, and 29.

WU: And you save some of the costs of fare collection.  DUBNER: So when you do a net accounting on the enforcement and fare-collection costs versus free fares on those three lines, where do you come out?  WU: In some ways, there’s an elasticity question: How much are more people riding because the price has changed? The estimate across the entire bus system previously was that it would be about a $30 million cost for revenue replacement just for bus fares. And the M.B.T.A. system has separately estimated that it would be a $29 million cost savings in the fuel and all the efficiencies from speeding along bus service with all-door boarding. DUBNER: But is that at a steady state? Because theoretically, if you’re inducing demand by making it free, right? So now you need more buses, more drivers, more depots for those buses and so on, yes? WU: Yes, and that’s part of what we’re trying to measure with this pilot. The pilot so far has been just a number of months. But what we did see was that relative to other bus lines that did not have free fares, the ridership of the 28 bus was at 92 percent of ridership pre-pandemic. That is compared to most bus lines at 50 percent, 30 percent.  

This is all starting to sound pretty convincing in favor of fare-free transit. You’ve got easier and cheaper access for passengers, especially low-income passengers; you’ve got fewer private cars, theoretically at least, and the congestion and pollution they create; even the price tag sounds manageable. There’s also the fact that even in places that don’t have free transit — like New York City — a lot of passengers aren’t paying anyway. A nonprofit news organization called The City recently reported that nearly a third of all New York bus passengers fail to pay the fare, with that number rising above 50 percent in the Bronx. These free riders either board through the back doors or just walk past the driver without paying. The drivers’ union says that drivers risk being assaulted if they try to collect the fare. The head of New York’s transit agency acknowledges that passengers who do pay feel like “suckers.” So, coming up, does all this mean that transit should just be free, in New York and maybe everywhere?

TAYLOR: Just saying generally “make it fare-free for everything, for all types of trips,” I would not agree with it.

TAYLOR: The thing about transportation is that everybody does it, and so everyone thinks they’re an expert at it. 

That, again, is Brian Taylor.

TAYLOR: I go to a party and people come up and say, “You know what they ought to do? They ought to put a monorail down the middle of the freeway.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And they said, “Well, I’m a cardiologist.” I said, “You know what you ought to do? You ought to do more angioplasties and less coronary-artery bypasses.” “Well, why do you say that?” I said, “Well, I have as much expertise in cardiology as you do in transportation. I have a heart.”  

So what are Taylor’s transportation credentials?

TAYLOR: I’m a professor of urban planning and public policy, and I direct the Institute of Transportation Studies at U.C.L.A. DUBNER: Let me ask you to just brag for a minute, Brian. The U.C.L.A. Institute of Transportation Studies is to transportation studies as blank is to blank. The Yankees to baseball, maybe? TAYLOR: It’s one of four branches in the U.C. system, so there’s a branch at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Davis, U.C. Irvine, and the one at U.C.L.A. The four branches together are pretty unambiguously the premier transportation research institution in the world.  DUBNER: What are you actually trying to accomplish with this research?  TAYLOR: I try to make it difficult for public officials to make bad decisions. So there are a lot of things about transportation that are counterintuitive. And, because of that, it’s a challenge to explain to members of the media, to elected officials who have to make decisions, to members of the lay public, because so many things seem obvious which aren’t — like widening a road will get rid of congestion, for example. DUBNER: There’s a name for that, right? Braess’s Paradox or something?  TAYLOR: Yeah, it’s basically the idea of latent demand. There’s a demand for the use of the roadway, and the congestion increases the time-cost of travel. So it raises the price of travel. When you add capacity, in the short term that congestion goes down, the time-cost of travel goes down, and so it becomes cheaper to travel on that roadway from the user’s perspective — and they fill it up until the price brings it back into equilibrium. It fits very consistently with economic theory. But the idea that demand is somehow fixed is something that people assume. They can’t imagine that people’s demand changes. DUBNER: If this paradox exists with new lanes of a highway, does it exist with public transport as well? TAYLOR: There’s this idea of elasticity — when there’s a change in price, how do users respond? If it’s very elastic, a change in price causes a big change in behavior. If it’s inelastic, a change in price elicits a small change in behavior. In this case, we can think about price elasticity, which is: if the fare goes down to zero or goes up. And we can also think about service elasticity, so if the service becomes more frequent, people don’t have to wait as long. And it turns out that people are at least as service-elastic as they are price-elastic.   

Okay. Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you run a big-city transit agency and you get a financial windfall — maybe a couple hundred million dollars from a federal Covid-relief fund. Considering what Brian Taylor just told us — that “people are at least as service-elastic as they are price-elastic,” how do you want to spend that windfall?

TAYLOR: One thing we could spend it on is making the service free to everyone, and that might encourage more people to ride. Another thing we could do is to have more frequent service. And we know that people hate to wait and that more frequent service would also encourage people to ride. DUBNER: What do you know about the pilot program in Boston for free buses, and Mayor Wu’s desire to expand that over time?   TAYLOR: They’ve found that there was an increase in ridership as a result of the fare-free in comparison to other services that were similar in their operating characteristics. One of the things I want you to notice about that evaluation is what the riders commented on. The most frequent positive comment was that it sped boarding and alighting and increased service reliability. Okay, remember, I was talking about how people are very service-elastic? They really like reliable service. We know that people weight wait time — they w-e-i-g-h-t w-a-i-t time at about 1.5 to 4.5 times in-vehicle time. So let’s just call it three times. That means if you wait 10 minutes for a bus, in your perception of the burden of that trip, you weighted it like it was a half hour. So what I would say is that experiment tells us both that people responded to the free fare, they also responded to the fact that the boarding and alighting times are faster. If you have systems where people are fumbling in their pocket and uncrumpling dollar bills and sliding them in, that takes time. And that brings us to a thing about the way we charge for fares. 

Ah, the way we charge for fares. This is one of Brian Taylor’s pet peeves about public transit. A few years ago, he took his daughter to Boston to look at colleges.

TAYLOR: We did not wonder how we would pay for the hotel we stayed in. When we walked in at a restaurant, we didn’t say, “Do you take cash or credit cards or what? How will we pay for this?” There was no uncertainty. 

But when it came to the public transit in Boston:

TAYLOR: We walked out to get on the T — and I’m someone who works in this field — we had no idea what to do. Absolutely no idea what to do. There was eight-point type laying out all of the fare policies. And I needed to go to a convenience store and buy a card. Could I pay cash? I didn’t know, there was confusion. Why public transit should it be so complicated and difficult to figure out? I have cards from Sydney, Australia, from Brisbane, from London, from Tokyo, from Shanghai — all of which are different, all of which have different rules.

To be fair, some of these places are much easier than others, and some use technology better — including, and this may surprise you, New York City.

TAYLOR: In New York, recently, I was visiting my daughters. I used Google Pay to use the train. What a breakthrough that was. 

So why don’t all transit systems let you just use an app on your phone to pay?

TAYLOR: The problem is, because public transit is publicly owned and operated, and we see as our goal to give mobility to everyone. Not everyone has access to a smartphone or to a credit card, so in our efforts to try and be as inclusive as possible, we end up making paying to use transit as confusing as possible. And that’s a serious problem. DUBNER: In one sentence, is free — or as people like you call it, fare-free public transit — a good idea or bad idea, on balance? TAYLOR: I cannot answer that without context. First of all, I’m an academic, so don’t ask an academic. What I can tell you — I’ll just give you a very clear example. BART in the San Francisco Bay Area, going into downtown San Francisco, those peak-hour, peak-direction commuters — that is going downtown in the morning — have higher incomes than the average driver. DUBNER: So you’re saying making public transit free for those commuters doesn’t make a lot of sense? TAYLOR: First of all, they’re not that price-sensitive. And secondly, it’s just transferring a benefit to very high-income commuters. On the other hand, local bus service in Lubbock, Texas — the users are almost uniformly low-income. There, are-free transit is essentially a transfer to lower-income, disadvantaged populations. Just saying generally, “Make it fare-free for everything, for all types of trips,” I would not agree with that. DUBNER: Okay, so that context is noted and appreciated, but it sounds as though one simple adjustment might be, “Hey, let’s just make it means-tested.” We do means testing for a lot of things in society. Is that a sensible way to think about public transit? Fare-free public transit for, let’s say, students and seniors, which a lot of places already have, and everybody under $X annual income?  TAYLOR: Yeah, there’s a movement around trying to do that. The criticism is, “Well, you have lots of undocumented residents, you have other people who aren’t able to document their income, you create bureaucratic barriers that the most disadvantaged travelers can’t overcome. And you may end up excluding people that you ought to help.” On the other hand, the question is, do we need to give something valuable away to rich people for free on the argument that we want to help low-income people? DUBNER: The more you talk, the more complicated fare-free public transit — TAYLOR: Isn’t it great?  

Coming up: as we consider free public transit, we also need to ask: where do cars fit into all this?

TAYLOR: I want to make driving great, but rarer. 

And: if you want to hear some earlier Freakonomics Radio shows about transportation, I would suggest Episode 454 , “Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished?,” Episode 165 , “The Perfect Crime,” which is about how easy it is as a driver to hit a pedestrian and get away with it, and Episode 118 , “Parking Is Hell.” If none of those appeal to you, check out the other shows in the Freakonomics Radio Network: there’s People I (Mostly) Admire , hosted by my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt; Freakonomics, M.D., hosted by Bapu Jena; and No Stupid Questions , hosted by Angela Duckworth and me, Stephen Dubner. You can get all our podcasts on any app for free.

WU: I think we often talk about economics and policy and decision-making through data and graphs — and that’s all really important.

That, again, is Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston.

WU: But it’s really hard to actually conceptualize what this means for people unless you experience it directly. Unless you are a daily commuter or need to get to work with a big, double stroller with two little children under the age of three in it on our public-transportation system. 

Wu wants to make public transit in Boston free.

WU: Fare-free transportation is funding public transportation as a public good and recognizing the right to mobility for every person to belong in every space and to be able to benefit from all that our city has to offer.

So that’s Wu’s argument for Boston. But again, different places have different transportation needs, and styles.

TAYLOR: The thing to understand about public transit is that public transit is very context-specific.

And that, again, is Brian Taylor, a transportation researcher at U.C.L.A.

TAYLOR: We operate public transit in places like Bakersfield, California, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its relative utility compared to private vehicles is a fraction of driving, because the environment in those places is around rewarding having an automobile and punishing its absence. So when we talk about public transit, abstracting it from the environment within which it operates is almost meaningless. Overall, the use of public transit is highly asymmetric — that is, it’s not everybody rides a little bit. A very small share of the population rides a lot, another chunk of the population rides occasionally, and most people don’t ride at all. The thing you have to understand about public transit is there’s New York and everything else. And in fact, I just reviewed an academic paper where they simply held New York out of the equation because New York accounts for about four out of 10 transit trips in the entire United States.  DUBNER: Wow.  TAYLOR: There was a period where New York was gaining riders during a boom time, a decade or so ago, and much of the country was losing riders. But it appeared, if you looked at the top-line figures, that public transit was doing very well. New York was so big it could, by itself, move the needle. 

Not long ago, Taylor and his colleagues were approached by the Southern California Association of Governments to figure out another drop in transit ridership.

TAYLOR: Los Angeles, Southern California, in fact, the state —  was on a pretty good run of increasing investment in public transit, and rolled out a lot of new rail lines, improved bus service. And yet ridership was eroding at an accelerating rate. 

What’d they figure out?

TAYLOR: There were many factors associated with the eroding ridership, but the most important one was that households with no access to motor vehicles were gaining access to motor vehicles . You had lots of low-income households, immigrant households that were quite low-income, that over time the economy had been doing reasonably well and people were accumulating assets. And among those assets were motor vehicles. And even in middle- and higher-income households, you were going from one vehicle and two adults to two vehicles and two adults.   DUBNER: Were there other factors that drove the decrease in California public-transit use?  TAYLOR: There’s evidence that the rise of of Uber and Lyft had some effect, but it was relatively modest . DUBNER: If one reason to have really great public transit is to increase mobility, generally — and I don’t know of a single economist or other social scientist, any scientist who doesn’t think that increasing access to mobility at least is a really good thing — rather than building these monstrously expensive public-transit systems, would it just make more sense to buy cars for low-income people? TAYLOR: I have another colleague who has gotten herself in a lot of trouble over the years doing research showing that when low-income households get access to automobiles, all sorts of good things happen. 

The colleague he’s referring to is in fact his wife, Evelyn Blumenberg — another transit scholar at U.C.L.A.

TAYLOR: Better access to food, better access to healthcare, to education, which many concerned about the problems of dependence on automobiles chafe against that and say, “Well, that’s a problem.” Her response is that we shouldn’t balance our environmental policy on keeping poor people out of cars. “You all have spent the last century building cities around automobile travel. Why should it surprise you that when low-income people get access to cars, they’re better off?” We can say that low-income travelers drive too little and most of us drive too much.  DUBNER: Is there within you, as a human and researcher, someone who says, “Hey, we need to do much less subsidizing and encouraging of car travel and more subsidizing and encouraging of public transit”? TAYLOR: Well, the question is, do we need to subsidize travel? To use economist parlance, if we properly priced automobile use, the need to subsidize transit would go down a lot because the demand for transit would go up a lot.  DUBNER: Imagine for a minute that Pete Buttigieg decided the Transportation Department is just too boring. He wants something saucier, and he steps down. And you, Brian Taylor, are immediately installed as secretary of transportation. Give me your top, let’s say, five priorities. TAYLOR: Well, first, my opinion of President Biden would probably slip a little if he made that choice. We have to think about climate change, we have to think about access by people who are disadvantaged — those would be two really important things. I think the third thing would be related to our ability to cope with shocks — wildfires in the West, pandemics, sea-level rise, things like that. And I would certainly try to manage private-vehicle travel. I want to make driving great — but rarer. DUBNER: So Secretary Taylor, I did not hear you name public transit at all and especially fare-free public transit. What number on your list might that come in? TAYLOR: To me, right now, the problem with public transit is the problem we have with cars. In fact, in the United States, we’re investing more in public transit. And that’s all for the good, except that it’s undermined by policies that keep trying to make it easier and cheaper to drive. And now we say, “Okay, well, we’re not going to make drivers responsible for the cost they impose on society, let’s see if we can make it even cheaper to go on public transit.”  

When Taylor says that we don’t make drivers responsible for the cost they impose on society — he’s really talking about two things. The first is that car travel produces a lot of what economists call negative externalities — things like pollution and congestion and accident risk that are not priced into the cost of travel. But there’s also the fact that most of our roads are essentially free; they aren’t priced according to supply or demand.

Shashi VERMA: The argument forever has been that you can’t price for roads because it’s a public good, and that’s fundamentally not true.

That is Shashi Verma , a longtime senior executive at Transport for London, which oversees pretty much the entire transportation network in London, including the roadways . And some of those roadways now cost a lot of money to use.

VERMA: The congestion charge came in 2003 to discourage people from driving into central London.

The congestion charge today means it will cost you 15 pounds to drive into central London during the day. It’s estimated this has helped reduce roadside emissions there by up to 44 percent .

VERMA: If you could get cars out of the way and get more buses on the road, that is an overall benefit for society. It’s also a benefit for all the other things for which roads need to be used, which nobody would ever argue against. You wouldn’t want to be in an ambulance caught up in traffic.

So did congestion pricing in London increase public-transit use? That question is not so easy to answer.

VERMA: It’s very difficult to distinguish between the effect of the congestion charge versus other improvements we were making on buses.

That’s because at the same time congestion pricing came online for private vehicles…

VERMA: We were improving the quality of the bus network to give people an alternative anyway.

That made it hard for researchers to isolate the effect of congestion pricing. Still if you look at things in the aggregate:

VERMA: The aggregate impact of all of those things was that bus ridership increased by 60 percent , 6-0 percent, in a six-year period, from 2000 to 2006.

Does this mean the key to increasing public transit everywhere is just to make driving painfully expensive?

VERMA: The negative incentive is very much on driving, but the answer cannot be, “Well, we’ve started charging you, and go to the public transport system that already exists, which is now going to become worse because there are more people using it.” That cannot be the answer. So the two things — the incentive and the disincentive — have to go hand in hand. If you tell people you can’t use your cars, you also have to give them an alternative. FINBOM: People won’t start using public transit unless they have actual access to it.

And that, again, is Marcus Finbom, the Swedish traffic planner who used to be a fare dodger.

FINBOM: By decreasing the cost of public transit and at the same time increasing the cost of car, you will definitely switch riders. One really good example is when they introduced the congestion fees in the Stockholm region here. At the same time, they built a lot of park-and-ride systems. So if you lived in the outer parts of the region, you would take your car and park it and then take one of the new express buses directly into the city. And at the same time, they also introduced a one-zone system. With just $2 you could jump on the bus from anywhere. And this really increased the attractiveness of the public transit. And if you compare this with when they introduced the congestion fees in Gothenburg, it was quite contested.

Gothenburg is Sweden’s second-biggest city, after Stockholm.

FINBOM: And it’s the main port city of Sweden as well.  And they did not put as much resources into getting new access to public transit. So it just made car ridership more expensive. And this got people really, really angry and actually shifted the whole political situation in the local parliament in Gothenburg. The ruling party lost power — it had a big effect .

Brian Taylor, from U.C.L.A., has also looked at the relationship between congestion pricing and public transit in Sweden.

TAYLOR: If you’ve ever been in Stockholm, it’s shocking. Public transit gets around very quickly and easily. People do drive there, but the streets aren’t packed with traffic. You can choose to drive in and out of central Stockholm, but you have to pay for it. And because of that, when you can take public transit or bike or walk or travel by some other means, people do it. So it’s not that it’s an unpleasant place to drive. It’s that it’s an expensive place to drive. It’s the same thing as flying over Thanksgiving or Christmas or staying at a hotel during peak holiday periods; the price goes up and down to bring supply and demand in line. Otherwise, we’d just have people queuing up, and that’s what we do now.  DUBNER: What do you know about what you call “mode change” when transit systems are either improved or made free? If there are new riders, where are they coming from? Are they people who were walking and biking? Are they drivers? Because that’s kind of the environmental dream, right? That you take all these people, clogging up the roads in cars, making pollution in cars, and convert them to public transit. Does that actually happen?  TAYLOR: So that’s a great question. And it gets to what is the goal of public transit.  I talked about those two markets for transit — people who because of age, income, or disability don’t have the ability to drive and people traveling to places where parking is difficult or expensive. The latter group is more affluent; the former group is poorer. That first group is transit’s dirty little secret — the idea that it was providing an absolutely critical social service, a redistributive social service, is not something that you advertised to voters because that kind of a role didn’t get as much support as saying, “Hey, we’re going to provide an alternative to driving that’s going to help to deal with congestion. It’s going to deal with environmental pollution. It’s going to help slow climate change.” That has broader appeal. So those are two different goals. They’re sometimes congruent, but sometimes they’re at odds. I think that’s an important thing that your listeners think about is this opportunity cost of spending money to eliminate fares. Could we do things with that money that riders might value even more than a free ride? I would think that anyone before embarking on a fare-free program ought to ask that question. And the answer could be no, but it could be yes. The equity arguments are strong, but we have to remember that what the characteristics of the ridership in the system are tell us a lot about who’s going to benefit most from fare-free. DUBNER: It sounds to me like the median person, given a choice between taking a subway, commuter train, or bus, would much rather drive their car. Is that a true statement?   TAYLOR: Well, again, it depends on context. The Onion , the humor magazine, a while ago had an article that said, “Voters favor increased funding to public transit so that others will use it and get off the road so they can drive better.” So a colleague of mine, Michael Manville, essentially studied that question , and he empirically supported The Onion headline. And that is, in fact, why people vote for it, thinking that, “I’m not going to change my behavior, but other people might and it will make driving easier for me.” So the question again comes back to, we are not managing automobile use and we’re trying to change pricing. And so what that means is that we may get benefit from fare-free transit and that benefit is going to be more in terms of social-equity benefits and environmental benefits — well, that’s a good thing on its own — but if the argument is that this is going to reduce automobile dependence, that is likely to have modest effects at best.

What do you think about this wrestling match between public transit and private automobiles? Your answer probably depends on where you live, maybe how old you are — and how much you like your car, if you have one. Thank you so much to Brian Taylor, Marcus Finbom, Michelle Wu, Robbie Makinen, and Shashi Verma for helping us wrestle with this topic.

Freakonomics Radio  is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Ryan Kelley . Our staff also includes  Neal Carruth ,  Gabriel Roth,  Greg Rippin , Zack Lapinski, Rebecca Lee Douglas ,  Morgan Levey , Julie Kanfer, Jasmin Klinger ,  Eleanor Osborne, Jeremy Johnston, Emma Tyrrell,  Lyric Bowditch ,  Jacob Clemente , and  Alina Kulman.  Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed by  Luis Guerra . You can follow  Freakonomics Radio  on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify ,  Stitcher , or wherever you get your podcasts.

• Marcus Finbom , traffic planner in Stockholm, Sweden.
• Robbie Makinen , president and C.E.O. of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
• Brian Taylor , professor of urban planning and public policy and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• Shashi Verma , director of strategy and C.T.O. at Transport for London.
• Michelle Wu , mayor of Boston.
• “ Route-28 Fare-Free Pilot Evaluation: Summary Findings ,” by the City of Boston Transportation (2022).
• “ Vehicle Access and Falling Transit Ridership: Evidence From Southern California ,” by Michael Manville, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, and Andrew Schouten ( Transportation,  2022).
• “ Forget Fare Hikes — Make the T Free ,” by Michelle Wu ( The Boston Globe,  2019).
• Traffic Power Structure ,  by Planka.nu (2016).
• Planka.Nu .
• “ Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished? ” by  Freakonomics Radio  (2021).
• “ The Perfect Crime ,” by  Freakonomics Radio  (2014).
• “ Parking Is Hell ,” by  Freakonomics Radio  (2013).

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Should public transit be free? Experts weigh in on policy options

With outdated funding models and questions about whether riders care more about fares or service, opinions are divided on the future of public transportation.

With companies addressing how their employees will return to the office as the pandemic recedes, public transportation is a key part of the policy dialogue. Would free ridership keep autos off the road, a huge benefit for climate change? For the many essential workers who continued to commute during the pandemic, public transportation failed in many ways with interrupted and unreliable service.  How will free fares address this inequity? Is it even what commuters want?

As part of the Greater Boston Debate Series, sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston based at Harvard Kennedy School, panelists debated the merits of free ridership, a movement gaining momentum in American cities from Los Angeles to Kansas City to Worcester. In the upcoming mayoral race in Boston, nearly every candidate has expressed support of some form of fare elimination. But is the idea fiscally sustainable? Does it weaken transportation options, especially for low-wage earners who depend on it the most? The debate, featuring proponents and opponents of free ridership making their cases, was moderated by Monica Tibbits-Nutt, executive director of 128 Business Council, an organization that runs shuttle services in Massachusetts, and an advisory board member of the Rappaport Institute. 

David Bragdon, executive director of TransitCenter, a foundation in New York that focuses on improving public transportation in U.S. cities, began by reframing the issue. “I’m going to pose a bigger question,” he said. “What can and should society do to help low-income people for whom the price of a transit ticket is an obstacle?” He suggested that local governments should provide targeted discounts to help alleviate poverty. “It’s similar to what we do with other public utilities in our society, whether it’s electric bills, water bills, or for that matter food—a human right where we have a SNAP program—or housing, where we have vouchers.”

He also pointed to rider surveys his foundation has conducted showing that transit patrons at every income level rank service, quality, and quantity over the fare price. And fare revenue provides the income to improve those services. In New York, 50 percent of fare revenue goes to infrastructure. In Chicago, it is 40 percent and in San Francisco, 62 percent. “If you tell a transit agency you’re going to take that revenue away, I can guarantee there is one thing that they can do: cut service,” Bragdon said. “That is just the math of it. But if riders are being helped by getting a free ticket to a really substandard product, I’d want to know that.”

“If riders are being helped by getting a free ticket to a really substandard product, I’d want to know that.”

David bragdon.

Stacy Thompson, executive director of LivableStreets Alliance, an organization that advocates for equitable and safe public transportation in the Boston area, agreed with the need to expand and improve service, but questioned whether it will bring more people to public transportation. “Kansas City and Worcester, communities offering free ridership throughout the pandemic, demonstrated much more resilient ridership than their peer transit systems of similar size and demographics,” she noted.

Thompson pointed out fare collection can actually cost transit operations money and increase public safety incidents on transit vehicles. “We know that fare disputes are the leading cause of safety incidents for our operators and systems across the country,” she said. “A 12-month study statewide of free buses, such as a pilot in Massachusetts, can provide the data points needed to move this decision,” she added. “And we’re in a moment where we have federal funds for this kind of thing. We need to ask what kind of riders ride? I actually don’t think that free transit is going to move car drivers necessarily, but if it brings on more people who had an actual cost burden, that’s important. We need to ask how much money was saved in the agency by not collecting fares? We need to ask about the transit driver experience. Was it easier to do their job?”

Tibbits-Nutt summed up this important discussion by noting that while there is disagreement on the idea of free transit, the speakers agree that communities need to begin thinking about more progressive ways to fund our transit systems: “I think transit is always going to be vital to the health of our communities.”

You can listen to the complete debate here .  The Greater Boston Debate Series will resume in the fall.

— Banner image: Riders board a "T" trolley car in Boston on the day when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority let people ride for free as a goodwill gesture following a winter of disastrous breakdowns. Photo by Bill Sikes

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Story of change

Free public transport: the new global initiative clearing the air, roads and helping keep climate targets on track.

All around the world, cities, towns and even whole countries are waking up to the many benefits that come from making public transport completely free. In what appears almost unimaginable to old economic systems, to date, over 100 cities have already made public transport free, with more and more taking the leap every month. Cities as diverse as Taichung in Taiwan , Miami in the USA and Velenje in Slovenia are all providing free public mobility services to their citizens in some form, with people, local economies and the planet reaping the rewards.

The growth of truly free mobility comes at an important junction for transport and cities. Amidst a global pandemic, where the use of public transport was actively discouraged by governments and scientists, despite the limited evidence of mass transit increasing transmission rates , the dominance of the car in cities and towns reached new heights. And after this, at the height of lockdowns , people enjoyed the rare experience of almost empty streets and cleaner air. A 2020 YouGov survey found that 23% of British people expected to be using their cars more after the pandemic . In even more car-dominant societies, such as the USA and Australia, YouGov found that around 40% of respondents believed they would be increasing the use of their cars post-pandemic, despite many expressing concerns around air quality and the climate crisis.

At the same time, much of the active travel infrastructure introduced during the global pandemic, such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) as a means of getting people walking and cycling, have been consistently challenged by vocal minorities. Some of the criticism levied at these schemes relates to the public consultation processes, which some felt inadequate. However, the majority of complaints come from some angry car drivers, complaining about their loss of convenience and privileged treatment on roads. Much of the evidence, however, shows that the active travel infrastructures introduced during the pandemic halved road traffic injuries relative to areas without such schemes . 

Free mobility, it seems, is the perfect antidote to rising car militancy in our cities and towns around the world – especially as countries reopen and rebuild after the pandemic. The logic is sound, too. Once the cost of mass public transit becomes lower than the fixed costs of owning a car, and the operational costs of running one,  people have a clear incentive to ditch their cars and jump on a bus, tram or train. And when public transport is free, there’s no way the car can compete. It is a potential rapid game changer.

In terms of rapid transition, free mobility has it all. For cities, it’s a win-win. Air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels – with transport and private cars a major contributor –  is an issue that plagues cities around the world – from Addis Ababa to London – responsible for  approximately 8.7 million deaths each year . In the UK alone, 40 cities and towns exceed the WHO pollution limits, with more than one in 19 deaths in these cities and towns related to long-term exposure to PM2.5 – one of the dominant emissions from cars’ exhausts. 

Without radical and targeted action from governments and citizens, the issue of air pollution is only going to get worse. Getting rid of cars is therefore paramount. Incentivising citizens to jump on high capacity, frequent service, electrified public transport is one of the most effective ways of riding cities of cars and clearing the air. 

Fewer cars also means less energy. And less energy means fewer emissions. Within the European Union, transport contributes 27% to overall carbon dioxide emissions, almost half of that comes from private car use . In the USA, famed for its gas guzzling cars and endless highways, the emissions from transportation accounted for around 29% of the total cumulative amount , with the number of vehicle miles driven by cars and light-duty trucks, such as SUVs, increasing by 48% from 1990 to 2019 . Globally, road transport is responsible for 11.9% of greenhouse gas emissions every year . Worryingly, t he emissions from road transport are going in the wrong direction when we need to be seeing deep reductions in order to keep the 1.5℃ degree target alive.

Of course, the meteoric rise of electric vehicles (EVs) in countries like Norway present a route to decarbonising road transport, but that will only get us so far. Forecasts for the mitigation potential of EVs vary, but the best estimate of their emissions reduction potential up to 2050 is a 70% reduction compared to a business-as-usual scenario . Even under this best case scenario for EVs, which doesn’t include factors such as the resource scarcity of lithium and cobalt or these metals’ susceptibility to price rises, or problems due to land-take or their micro-plastic pollution, the remaining 30% of emissions reductions must come from people ditching the car altogether. 

Here, free mobility could make serious headway. In the city of Tallinn in Estonia, the decision to make public transport free increased public transport usage by 14% in the first year and greatly benefitted lower income households in and around the city . While 14% doesn’t seem like a lot, consider that in Tallinn public transport usage is already extremely high due to a great provision of service and low fares, with 8% of this increase made up of car users switching to mass mobility . After the policy was introduced, public transport use increased by 29% . The main reason given by 90% of the nearly half a million Tallinners was  the free mobility policy, showing a level of popularity that could counter car populism. In Luxembourg, around 40% of households are set to benefit from their policy of country-wide free mobility. However, to maximise its impact, this needs to be part of a broad policy mix that both disincentivises car use, while giving incentives for public transport use by making it more accessible, attractive and responsive to citizens’ needs.

Context and background

While the win-win of cleaner air and fewer emissions that free mobility brings to the table is well documented around the world, the wider context of the global pandemic is vital for galvanising a rapid transition away from fossil fuel-dependent mobility. 

COVID-19 undermined confidence in public transport. Use collapsed during the first wave of the pandemic, as stay-at-home orders from governments came into force. In the USA, just over half of all Americans used public transport less frequently or not at all , with only 34% of US citizens using public transport the same as before. In other nations, the drop off in public transport usage was even more dramatic: Northern Ireland, for instance, saw a drop off of more that 90% during the height of the pandemic. In the city of New York, rail and bus ridership dropped by 74% even before Governor Cuomo decided to shut down the city-wide transit system . 

Alongside the orders from governments to stay-at-home and work-from-home, there were also growing concerns amongst the public that mass mobility options were riskier due to increased transmission of the virus. However, it seems that the fear of using mass mobility got ahead of the evidence. A scientific study in Paris recently found that of the 150 identified COVID-19 clusters originally identified in May 2020, none originated from the Parisian public transport system . Even in Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places on earth, where its transit system carries approximately 12.9 million people per day , only 1,100 COVID-19 cases were recorded overall, despite public transport usage not falling as much as in other megacities.  

The combination of pandemic policy and misplaced fear around transmission has pushed public transport out of fashion and hardened attachments to the car. Research from the automotive services firm RAC found that the reluctance to use public transport in the UK was at its highest for 18 years . The pandemic, the RAC argues, has set back attitudes to public transport by two decades. At the same time, however, other vehicle lobbies point to the growth of home working during the pandemic as having permanently suppressed commuting by car. 

But free and integrated mobility may be just the antidote for this post-pandemic bounce to car use. By making transport free – or almost free – commuters can be lured away from relying on their car, reducing emissions and congestion. In the Austrian city of Vienna, for instance, a yearly fee of €365, which amounts to €1 a day, gives you unlimited access to public transport. Half of Vienna’s population, which is around one million people, has paid for one of these transport cards, and 38% of all journeys are made by public transport with walking now more popular than the car, which accounts for just 27% of trips . What’s more, pursuing free mobility could be a route to generating employment and boosting productivity as the labour market readjusts to post-pandemic realities, while also ramping up efforts to achieve climate and environmental targets.

However, there is the question of funding free public transport. And in the wake of the pandemic, which left huge holes in transport providers’ budgets, raising the requisite funds to make mobility free is a challenge. Usually public transport is funded through three channels: fares, taxpayer and government subsidies, and third-party funding . The importance of each of these channels to the functioning of the mobility network varies from context to context, as no two networks are the same. But in removing fares from the equation, the other two channels need to pick up the slack, either through a small increase in business taxation, like in France , or exploring different commercial revenue streams, such as renting out retail space in Network Rail stations. Also it is important to remember the multiple wider, health and economic benefits to society and the economy – typically unmeasured and unrecognised – that mass transit systems provide.

Free mobility must be improved mobility 

While price is obviously an important factor in peoples’ decisions over transport options, it’s not the only factor. The quality, frequency and safety of public transport provided is also fundamental to a rapid transition away from the passenger car. The case of the Belgium city of Hasselt is illustrative of this, where public transport was made free with no network or system improvement. It wasn’t until the quality of the transport network and the service improved that citizens started to take advantage of it. From there, the free mobility service saw a ninefold increase in ridership , with 37% of the additional trips coming from completely new users, 16% of which had switched from cars , 12% from bicycles and 9% from walking. 

Without the provision of mobility being upgraded to deal with both the increased demand that comes with making it free and the varied needs of commuters, free mobility will not be enough to substantially drive down car use and clear the air. The defining attribute is that of convenience , where the provision of free mobility not only saves citizens money, but time too. To do this though, each city, town or country must take a contextual and targeted approach to free mobility, ensuring the provision of service meets the actual needs and demands of its citizens. 

Help the poorest to maximise the co-benefits of free mobility

Helping the poorest and most marginalised must be the foundation for any free mobility policy. In the American state of Washington, 28% of residents live in poverty and these households are 6.8 times more likely not to have a car . As rising housing costs in urban centres have pushed poorer households into suburbs with fewer transport links, families are finding themselves isolated from wider society. 

The social and economic impact of this cannot be understated, as poor transport links and unaffordable costs both systematically create and perpetuate inequality. In fact, an ongoing study on social mobility at Harvard found that commuting times have ‘emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty’ . Another study, based in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, found that people living in lower income areas of the city have significantly fewer opportunities than those people living in wealthier areas due to poor mobility . In the small European nation of Luxembourg, which has made public transport free country-wide, 40% of households are expected to directly benefit, saving an estimated €100 each year .

Free mobility is not only an environmental policy, it is a social justice policy too that helps lift people out of poverty and fosters a sense of social cohesiveness through greater equality of opportunity and accessibility. In the words of Luxembourg’s mobility minister, François Bausch, the free mobility policy ‘objective is to stop the deeping gap between rich and poor. For people on low wages, transport expenses matter. Therefore, it is easier to make it free for everyone.’

Free mobility pays society-wide dividends

Free mobility can kick-start a profusion of society-wide benefits: increased social inclusion, increased mobility of lower income citizens, better health, more disposable income for all citizens, but especially those among the most disadvantaged groups (although this may entail rebounds), lower employment costs for businesses thereby boosting employment opportunities, increasing public transports’ overall share of mobility, and reduced environmental impacts through fewer emissions and cleaner air. 

In purely economic terms, estimates from the World Bank suggest that with a total investment of $4 trillion today into public buses, trains and rail networks would yield annual benefits of $1 trillion all the way up to 2030, totalling a net value of $19.6 trillion . By 2050, scaling up mass transit options would create nearly 12 million decent green jobs . There are also ongoing costs that would be avoided through a mass modal shift, enabled through free mobility, as air pollution, congestion, road traffic accidents and noise pollution costs the city of Beijing between 7.5 to 15% of its GDP . 

Pursuing a policy of free mobility also presents the opportunity to engage multiple societal stakeholders, bringing them on for the (free) journey and ensuring their needs are represented. In Luxembourg, the free mobility policy that sought to increase public transport use by 50% by 2025 and reduce private car use by 15% involved engaging employers, passengers, schools and colleges, amongst others, to ensure no section of society was left out . This process of stakeholder engagement resulted in the creation of the Mobiliteit.lu app that simplifies door-to-door travel planning across all modal options – be it bike or tram – where citizens can choose their preferred route and mode, with the app providing live data on travel times and potential disruptions.  

With a growing pile of evidence to support it, free public transport is going from something that old economic thinking could barely imagine, to being a practical and highly effective way rapidly to change behaviour bringing climate, health, communal and economic benefits. It’s a single initiative that is solving multiple problems.

Scope and evidence

• To date, over 100 cities have already made public transport free, with more and more taking the leap every month. 
• Within the European Union, transport contributes 27% to overall carbon dioxide emissions, almost half of that comes from private car use .
• In the USA, famed for its muscle cars and endless highways, the emissions from transportation accounted for around 29% of total cumulative emissions , with the number of vehicle miles driven by cars and light-duty trucks, such as SUVs, increasing by 48% from 1990 to 2019 . 
• In the small European nation of Luxembourg, which has made public transport free country-wide, 40% of households are expected to directly benefit, saving an estimated €100 each year. 
• In the Belgian city of Hasselt, the free mobility service saw a ninefold increase in ridership , with 37% of the additional trips coming from completely new users, 16% of which had switched from cars , 12% from bicycles and 9% from walking.
• Air pollution is an issue that plagues cities around the world, from Addis Ababa to London, and is responsible for approximately 4.2 million deaths each year . 
• In the UK alone, 40 cities and towns exceed the WHO pollution limits, with more than one in 19 deaths in these cities and towns related to long-term exposure to PM2.5 – one of the dominant emissions from cars’ exhausts.
• The World Bank suggests that through a total investment of $4 trillion today into public buses, trains and rail networks would yield annual benefits of $1 trillion all the way up to 2030, totalling a net value of $19.6 trillion .

Lessons for rapid transition

• Free mobility can create a raft of environmental, economic and social benefits , including cleaner air, reduced emissions and improved social inclusion amongst society’s most disadvantaged.
• By making transport affordable and reducing living costs, free mobility can provide a chance to bring everyone on board for rapid transition. Not only does this create policies that actually meet societal needs, but it engages disparate groups in society on matters of sustainable behaviour change.
• Each free mobility policy has to be tailored to the specific geography of the town, city or country, as well as what the citizens actually need from their public transport service. Just like other areas of rapid transition, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. But free mobility shows that local initiatives can have large cumulative impacts.
• Brand, R. (2008). Co-evolution of Technical and Social Change in Action: Hasselt’s Approach to Urban Mobility. Built Environment, 34(2), 182-199. https://doi.org/10.2148/benv.34.2.182
• Cats, O., Susilo, Y., & Reimal, T. (2016). The prospects of fare-free public transport: evidence from Tallinn. Transportation, 44(5), 1083-1104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-016-9695-5  
• Chetty, R., & Hendren, N. (2018). The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects*. The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, 133(3), 1107-1162. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy007
• Creutzig, F., & He, D. (2009). Climate change mitigation and co-benefits of feasible transport demand policies in Beijing. Transportation Research Part D: Transport And Environment, 14(2), 120-131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2008.11.007
• Dai, J., Liu, Z., & Li, R. (2021). Improving the subway attraction for the post-COVID-19 era: The role of fare-free public transport policy. Transport Policy, 103, 21-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2021.01.007
• Hernandez, D. (2018). Uneven mobilities, uneven opportunities: Social distribution of public transport accessibility to jobs and education in Montevideo. Journal Of Transport Geography, 67, 119-125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2017.08.017
• Laverty, A., Aldred, R., & Goodman, A. (2021). The Impact of Introducing Low Traffic Neighbourhoods on Road Traffic Injuries. Findings. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.18330
• Scott, N. (2020). Where can cycling lift the common good? Regional political culture and fossil capitalism play a role. Journal Of Transport Geography, 86, 102745. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102745  

2020s , 2030s , 2040s , 2050s

Areas of change

Clean energy , Efficient travel

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Should All Public Transit Be Free?

More than half of the world’s population lives near an urban center. But as our cities grow increasing traffic has clogged roads and highways.  In much of the U.S., a car—there are 246 million registered, as of 2009—is a near-necessity. Meanwhile, longer commutes have been linked with severe health problems, according to a recent report by Gallup.

Public transportation systems hold the promise of more efficient movement—and a healthier population—but in many U.S. cities there are few incentives to promote widespread use of buses, subways, trolleys and trains.

A way to realign these incentives and increase public transit use is to make all public transportation free to passengers, Erik Olin Wright, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Big Think. According to Wright, the benefits of free public transit are broader than are apparent with strict financial bookkeeping. The full value comes in a range of ancillary economic, health and ecological benefits, including:

• “Reduced air pollution, including especially reduced greenhouse gases, which would help mitigate global warming.”
• “More efficient labor markets since it is easier for poor people to get to jobs. This is a benefit to employers for it makes it easier to hire people and it is a benefit to the people without cars who now find it easier to get jobs. But it is also a benefit to the society at large because it contributes to a long-term reduction in poverty.”
• “Health benefits: reduced asthma and other illnesses linked to automobile generated pollution.” 
• “Less congestion on the highways for those who do need to drive.”

These “positive externalities” need to be highlighted to gain public support for free transit, says Wright.

College towns have been a testing ground for free-ride transit—for students and non-students alike. Programs currently operate in cities such as Clemson , South Carolina, and Chapel Hill , North Carolina.  As well, popular tourist towns from Park City , Utah, to Hawaii’s Big Island have created free systems. Baltimore, too, recently started the Charm City Circulator , a fleet of twenty-one buses traveling three free routes in the city. Other transit systems have free-fare programs for children, students and the elderly.

The key is to scale an already-subsidized industry with select free-fare groups into a system-wide program free to all.  This would create a tipping point toward more people using public transportation. “Of course public transportation has to be paid for,” writes Wright, “but it should not be paid for through the purchase of tickets by individual riders—it should be paid for by society as a whole through the one mechanism we have available for this, taxation.”

“This should not be thought of as a ‘subsidy’ in the sense of a transfer of resources to an inefficient service in order for it to survive,” he says, “but rather as the optimal allocation of our resources to create the transportation environment in which people can make sensible individual choices between public and private means of transformation that reflect the true costs of these alternatives.”

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Should Public Transit Be Free? Freakonomics Asks the Experts

2:22 PM PDT on August 26, 2022

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A bus stop in Downtown Oakland. Photo: Jenna Fortunati

The topic of fare-free transit is hot. Public transit is a public good and it's also good for the environment, economic opportunity, social mobility, traffic congestion.

Various places around the country are piloting the idea: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has pushed for a free bus system, and Kansas City eliminated bus fares. In California, several bills in the legislature would create free transit for youth , and some local agencies aren't waiting for them to pass. Temporary fare-free programs at agencies around the state have been supported by cap-and-trade grants, with the expectation that more people riding means less people driving, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Some have argued that free transit can't work, citing a variety of reasons. As Stephen Dubner points out on his recent podcast for Freakonomics Radio , "it's complicated."

In the podcast, he speaks with Boston Mayor Wu, Robbie Makinen from the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, UCLA transportation researcher Brian Taylor, London transportation executive Shashi Verma, and a traffic planner in Stockholm who believes so thoroughly in free fares that he shows people how to dodge them, going so far as to create an "insurance plan" to pay their citations if they got caught.

The arguments for free transit are many. Dr. Destiny Thomas recently articulated an equity perspective on the issue in a conversation with Kea Wilson on Streetsblog USA . People can't afford transit fares, she said, and because we live in a society where basic needs are monetized, they are stuck. Arguing that transit subsidies are "unfair" puts the burden of solving issues like climate change, once again, on the people who are suffering and struggling the most.

In the Freakonomics podcast, Wu articulates this clearly. She has argued that free public transportation is the single biggest step society could take to move towards greater economic mobility, racial equity, and climate justice because it creates equitable access to opportunities. She quotes a Harvard study that "showed that the factor most closely linked to a family's ability to rise out of poverty... wasn't the test scores of schools in the area, it wasn't the public-safety statistics. It was the average commute time to work."

And people "ration out" other necessary tips, like going to the grocery store or getting to medical appointments, because transit fares are expensive, and they add up, she said. It's a matter of basic quality of life.

Other arguments for free transit discussed in the course of the podcast are that paying fares slows down passenger loading, which contributes to the long travel times of bus riders vs. car drivers. In the case of many bus agencies in particular, fares pay for a vanishingly small portion of the costs of running transit anyway - about a third, nationwide, and as low as ten percent.

One of the reasons Kansas City decided to make its buses fare-free was because their "farebox recovery" was only ten percent, and they chose, at least for the moment, to make that up from other sources.

The discussions continue, and there's more to learn from the experts on the podcast .

Streetsblog California editor Melanie Curry has been thinking about transportation, and how to improve conditions for bicyclists, ever since commuting to school by bike long before bike lanes were a thing. She was Managing Editor at the East Bay Express, editor of Access Magazine for the University of California Transportation Center, and earned her Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley.

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Should Public Transit Be Free?

Several cities in Massachusetts are experimenting with free public transit. Do you think that getting to and from work and school on public transportation should be a right?

By Nicole Daniels

Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

How do people get around in your community? Are there different forms of public transit, such as trains and buses? Is it more common for people to drive or cycle to and from work and school? Does your community have shared forms of transit like ride-share services, taxis or shared bikes?

Do you think your community should make public transit free for everyone?

In “ Should Public Transit Be Free? More Cities Say, Why Not? ,” Ellen Barry writes about cities in Massachusetts that are experimenting with offering free public transit:

Mayor Daniel Rivera of Lawrence, intrigued after hearing his friend Ms. Wu speak about fare-free transit, asked his regional transit authority how much was collected on three of the city’s most-used bus lines. The answer was such a small amount — $225,000 — that he could offset it from the city’s surplus cash reserves. “What I like is the doability of this, the simplicity of it,” Mr. Rivera said. “We are already subsidizing this mode of transportation, so the final mile is very short. It isn’t a service people need to pay for; it’s a public good.” Around 100 cities in the world offer free public transit, the vast majority of them in Europe, especially France and Poland. A handful of experiments in the United States in recent decades, including the cities of Denver and Austin, were viewed as unsuccessful, because there was little evidence that they removed cars from the road; new riders tended to be poor people who did not own cars, according to a 2012 review by the National Academies Press. But in another sense, they were successful: They increased ridership right away, with rises between 20 and 60 percent in the first few months. That statistic accounts for its revival among a new wave of urban progressives, who see transit as a key factor in social and racial inequality.

Some cities are drawn to the idea because they have seen a decline in ridership:

The idea also appeals to moderates in places like Worcester, the state’s second-largest city, which is struggling to persuade residents to use its buses. Ridership has dropped by 23 percent since 2016, and the buses now run half-empty, according to a report released last May by the Worcester Research Bureau, a nonpartisan policy group. At a City Council meeting last week, a parade of citizens lined up to express support for a proposal to make Worcester’s buses free for three years, as a pilot program. Revenue from bus fares is so low, and the cost of collecting them so high, that it could be replaced by an infusion of $2 million to $3 million a year.

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Why Can't Public Transit Be Free?

The main goal of transportation that costs riders nothing—getting people out of their cars—can't be achieved by eliminating fares.

About 500 subway riders in Stockholm have an ingenious scheme to avoid paying fares. The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: "dodge the fare now"), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here's how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur . As an informal insurance group, Planka.nu has proven both successful and financially solvent. “We could build a Berlin Wall in the metro stations,” a spokesperson for Stockholm’s public-transit system told The New York Times . “They would still try to find ways to dodge.”

These Swedes’ strategy might seem like classic corner-cutting, but there’s a dreamy political tint to their actions. Like similar groups before them—Paris’s Métro-cheating “fraudster mutuals,” for example—they argue that public transportation should be free, just like education, parks, and libraries (and health care, in some parts of Europe). Planka.nu in particular laments the superiority of the car in what it calls “the current traffic hierarchy.” “The pure act of putting oneself behind the wheel seems, for almost everyone, to lead to egotistic behavior,” the group writes in one online manifesto . “We are confident that one is not born a motorist, but rather becomes one.”

These fare-dodging collectives' egalitarian dream happens to align with some hopes of U.S. policy makers. There’s an intuitive, consequentialist argument that making public transit free would get drivers off the road and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In the U.S., where government subsidies cover between 57 and 89 percent of operating costs for buses and 29 to 89 percent of those for rail , many public-transit systems are quite affordable, costing in most cases less than $2, on average . If it might make transit more accessible to the masses and in the process reduce traffic and greenhouse-gas emissions, why not go all the way and make transportation free?

The earliest urban experiment in free public transit took place in Rome in the early 1970s. The city, plagued by unbearable traffic congestion, tried making its public buses free. At first, many passengers were confused: “There must be a trick,” a 62-year-old Roman carpenter told The New York Times as he boarded one bus . Then riders grew irritable. One “woman commuter” predicted that “swarms of kids and mixed-up people will ride around all day just because it doesn’t cost anything.” Romans couldn't be bothered to ditch their cars—the buses were only half-full during the mid-day rush hour, “when hundreds of thousands battle their way home for a plate of spaghetti.” Six months after the failed, costly experiment, a cash-strapped Rome reinstated its fare system .

Three similar experiments in the U.S.—in Denver, Colorado, and Trenton, New Jersey, in the late 70s, and in Austin, Texas, around 1990—also proved unfruitful and shaped the way American policy makers viewed the question of free public transit. All three were attempts to coax commuters out of their cars and onto subway platforms and buses. While they succeeded in increasing ridership, the new riders they brought in were people who were already walking or biking to work. For that reason, they were seen as failures.

A 2002 report released by the National Center for Transportation Research indicated that the lack of fares attracted hordes of young people, who brought with them a culture of vandalism, graffiti, and bad behavior—which all necessitated costly maintenance. The lure of "free," the report implied, attracted the "wrong" crowd—the "right" crowd, of course, being wealthier people with cars, who aren't very sensitive to price changes. The NCTR report concluded that eliminating fares “might be successful for small transit systems in fairly homogenous communities, it is nearly certain that fare-free implementation would not be appropriate for larger transit systems.”

Another report followed up 10 years later, revisiting the idea of a fare-free world. The report reviewed the roughly 40 American cities and towns with free transit systems. Most of the three dozen communities had been greatly successful in increasing ridership—the number of riders shot up 20 to 60 percent “in a matter of months.” But these successes were only to be found in communities with transit needs different from those of the biggest cities; almost all of the areas studied were either small cities with few riders, resort communities with populations that “swell inordinately during tourist seasons,” and college towns. In other words, slashing fares to zero is something that likely wouldn’t work in big cities.

Despite that, one big city has tried. In January 2013, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, announced that it was making public transit free to all of its citizens . A study released a year later revealed that the move only increased demand by 1.2 percent—though it did inspire Estonians that year to register as Tallinnian citizens at three times the normal rate . The authors of the Tallinn study reached the same conclusion as the NCTR: Free subway rides entice people who would otherwise walk, not people who would otherwise drive.

What makes more sense than implementing free transit on a grand scale is deploying it as a specialized tool. By the summer of 2013, officials in Singapore, for example, noticed that the city’s subways were getting unsustainably crowded during peak hours, between 8:15 and 9:15 in the morning. In response, the city comped rides for anyone who got off the train in a city center before 7:45 . The shift made a significant difference. Before the rule change, peak-hours riders outnumbered off-peak riders about three to one; after, that ratio was closer to two to one.

Getting people less frustrated with the concept of paying for public transportation, though, might just be a matter of telling them about its operating costs. Public transit is wildly expensive, but also, as noted above, heavily subsidized. A 2014 study in Transportation Research found that simply telling people just how heavily subsidized their subways and buses were made them willing to pay more money to ride. (Perhaps the recent price hike in New York's public-transit system would have gone over more smoothly had the system's subsidies also been publicized.)

Perhaps the cost of public transportation shouldn't be looked at from an angle of reducing traffic and emissions. Sure, that’s a noble question, but those turnstile-hopping Swedes might have a point. Maybe free public transit should be thought of not as a behavioral instrument, but as a right; poorer citizens have just as much of a privilege to get around conveniently as wealthier ones. If the debate shifted from means-to-an-end thinking to pure egalitarianism, the hope of free public transit might actually be realized. Until then, there’s always Planka.nu.

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Should Cities Make Public Transport Free?

• Written by Niall Patrick Walsh
• Published on January 20, 2020

Around the world, cities are the “ground zero” of inequality and unsustainability. The two largest cities in the United States, New York City and Los Angeles, are also the two most unequal cities , and one-third of the United Kingdom’s poorest 10% of families live in London. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the world’s energy and 70% of global carbon emissions are attributed to cities . This leads to the question of how the evolution of public policy, and urban design, can strategically combat these two growing issues. Around the world, cities are looking to mobility as part of the solution, and in particular, asking a simple question: what if public transport was free?

Today, approximately 100 cities around the world offer free public transport, with a heavy concentration in Europe. The future of transit, both from an operational and architectural standpoint, has generated a growing interest among architects and urbanists as of late, with ArchDaily last year noting a 206% increase in views of articles related to public transport versus 2018, along with a 143% increase in readership of articles related to mobility.

There are numerous reasons why access to public transport should be encouraged. For every $1 invested in public transport, around $4 of economic returns is generated, while a $10 million investment in public transport generates $30 million in increased business sales. People are also safer traveling on public transport, with accident risk reduced by 90% versus private transport. From an environmental perspective, public transport already saves the US 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline each year, and 37 million metric tons of carbon. As buses emit 20% less carbon monoxide and 25% fewer nitrogen oxides per passenger mile versus single-occupancy cars, public transport is also better for public health.

The advantages of increased public transport use are obvious, but the effects of making entire public systems free at the point of use are more contested. While studies, scenarios, and simulation models can provide limited indicators, the effects of free public transport are best seen in real-world actions by cities that have taken the brave step.

Europe is leading the way in free public transport. From March 1st of this year , Luxembourg will become the first country to make its system free for all citizens. Taking aim at long commutes and the country’s carbon footprint, the new move hopes to alleviate some of the worst traffic congestion in the world, with Luxembourg currently containing the largest number of cars per population in Europe. The move to make public transport free has been a phased process, with previous initiatives making the system free for people under 20, and subsidized for others. The government believes that making the system free will allow for savings on fare collection, policing, and administration.

France has also become a center for free public transport initiatives. As the country has pledged to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040, and ban their presence in Paris by the same year, access to public transport has taken on an added significance. Today, 23 French towns offer free public transport . The largest is Dunkirk, whose 257,000 residents benefit from a free bus system that has increased usage of the network by 60% on weekdays, and 100% on weekends. 48% of users say they leave their cars at home, while 5% have sold their cars entirely.

Paris is also in the process of lowering the financial burden of public transport. September 2019 saw new concessions rolled out across the Greater Paris region including free metro and bus travel for people under 11, including non-nationals, and free travel for people with disabilities under the age of 20. In addition, high school students between 14 and 18 will receive a 50% concession, as well as a free bike share account on the city’s Vélib scheme.

At the time of the announcement, Free University Brussels transport expert Wojciech Keblowshi noted that “Use among vulnerable groups – the unemployed, the elderly and youths who do not have a middle-class income – increased dramatically when fares are abolished. The city becomes much more available to them. They can look for jobs and take advantage of cultural activities and institutions. That argument is especially present in the French context.”

While Europe has become a role model for free public transport, cities in the US are also beginning to adopt similar measures. Last year, Kansas City announced that it would make its bus system free, setting aside $8 million to support a move aimed at tackling inequality concerns and grounding the city's efforts to fight the climate crisis. Olympia, Washington has also recently announced that they are following suit.

In the liberal state of Massachusetts, a number of towns and cities are examining and enacting free systems. As detailed by The New York Times , the state’s second-largest city of Worcester is considering waiving bus fares in a move expected to cost between $2 million and $3 million per year. Meanwhile, Lawrence MA, a city of approximately 80,000, began a two-year pilot program in September 2019 to abolish bus fares, leading to a 24% increase in the use of their system.

Boston is also examining the feasibility of such a system. President of the City Council, Kim Janey, sees the move as a key factor in addressing social and racial inequality, saying “ think about who is using our buses: It’s black people, folks who live in communities where there are deep, deep concentrations of poverty.” Janey has proposed abolishing fares on key routes through low-income neighborhoods of the city.

However, the idea has not won unanimous backing in Boston. Mayor Marty Walsh has exhibited caution over the financial feasibility of the scheme, while MBTA Advisor Board deputy director Brian Kane, who oversees the system’s expenditures, was quoted by The New York Times as saying “there’s no such thing as free. Someone has to pay. Boston has the highest-paid bus drivers in the country. They’re not going to work for free. The fuelers, the mechanics — they’re not going to work for free.” He has argued that a free system would mean losing the $109 million generated by fares in 2019. Supporters of a free system dispute this, saying the system would cost $36 million and be paid for by a 2-cent rise in the city’s fuel tax. This month, the idea was endorsed by the editorial board of The Boston Globe .

As architects, urbanists, and designers, our focus on public transport is often founded on aesthetics and new concepts, such as the Hyperloop or Uber Skyports . However, the ways in which existing systems are administrated and funded by government should also be at the forefront of the debate. Changing how people access and use existing public transport can prove far more cost-effective and environmentally responsible than proposing radical transport alternatives that require the expenditure of new energy, materials, and finance. Those involved in the shaping of urban transport systems, be they architects, urbanists, or policymakers, must be prepared to be as bold and visionary with financial and economic infrastructures as they are with physical ones. The groundwork is already there.

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Would you ditch your car if public transport was free? Here’s what researchers have found

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Luxembourg recently became the first country in the world to make all public transport free. As of March 1 2020 , all buses, trains and trams throughout the country can be boarded without paying a fare – the largest area to institute free public transport for both residents and tourists so far.

Free public transport, however, isn’t a new idea. Cities and towns have been experimenting with it since 1960 – Luxembourg merely clinches the title of the first country to roll it out nationwide. Today, at least 98 cities and towns around the world have some form of free public transport. In some areas, only residents can use it, or certain groups, such as senior citizens.

It’s often introduced to encourage people to use their cars less – reducing congestion in cities and lowering air pollution and carbon emissions.

But does it work?

No ticket to ride

Economists tend to argue that free public transport is irrational and uneconomical because it generates “useless mobility”. This means that people will choose to move more simply because it’s free, increasing the costs of transport operators and subsidies for local authorities , while ultimately increasing emissions from public transport.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that introducing free public transport increases the number of people using it. Strong passenger growth has been reported everywhere free public transport has been introduced, and the effects are more evident after several years.

Research has also found that when fares are removed, only a small number of people who previously travelled by car make the switch. New passengers attracted by it tend to be pedestrians and cyclists rather than car drivers. The picture from most cities where free public transport has been introduced is that the increased passenger numbers overwhelmingly come from people who might have walked, cycled or not travelled otherwise.

Three years after fares were abolished in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, the number of bus passengers increased from 55% to 63%, while car journeys decreased only slightly (from 31% to 28%), together with walking (from 12% to 7%). Cycling (1%) and others (1%) remained the same.

Experts from the Cosmopolis Centre in Brussels agree that the effects of free public transport on car traffic levels are marginal , arguing that by itself free public transport cannot significantly reduce car use and traffic, or improve air quality.

So what can? Well, the researchers found that the behaviour of motorists and the transport mode they choose depends very little on public transport fares. Rather than relying on free public transport to engineer the shift, a more effective way to reduce the number of people choosing to drive could be regulating car use.

Read more: Free public transport is great news for the environment but it's no silver bullet

Increasing the cost of parking, congestion charging, or increasing fuel taxes could all be combined with free fares to lower car demand.

How successful fare abolition is at tempting people to use buses and trams depends on the quality of the service. Cleaner and more reliable public transport must be a prerequisite for these schemes if buses and trams are to compete with the car, and making it part of a wider investment plan could have a big impact on the sustainability of transport.

Fare abolition can help to make public transport visible as a valid alternative to the car in cities where many residents might have forgotten about it over time, due to chronic underinvestment.

Free public transport may not be effective for making transport sustainable on its own, but it can have plenty of other benefits that make it worthwhile . It can be a progressive social policy, guaranteeing and improving access to public transport for diverse groups that might otherwise struggle to get around.

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Essay on Make Public Transport Free

Students are often asked to write an essay on Make Public Transport Free in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Make Public Transport Free

Introduction.

Public transport is a vital part of our communities. Making it free can have many benefits, such as reducing traffic and pollution.

Benefits of Free Public Transport

Free public transport encourages more people to use buses and trains. This can reduce the number of cars on the road, decreasing traffic and air pollution.

Supporting Low-Income Families

Free public transport can help low-income families. It can save them money and make it easier for them to travel to work or school.

Making public transport free can benefit our communities in many ways. It’s an idea worth considering.

250 Words Essay on Make Public Transport Free

The rationale for free public transport, economic implications.

While the economic burden of providing free public transport might seem daunting, it is essential to consider the long-term benefits. Free public transit could potentially lead to a reduction in traffic congestion, saving billions spent annually on road maintenance and traffic management.

Social Impact

Free public transport could also have profound social implications. It would make commuting more accessible for low-income groups, thereby promoting social inclusion and equality. Furthermore, it could stimulate local economies by making it easier for individuals to travel for work, shopping, or leisure.

Challenges and Solutions

Implementing free public transport is not without challenges. It may lead to overcrowding and could strain existing infrastructure. However, these issues can be mitigated through careful planning and investment in upgrading public transport systems.

To conclude, while free public transport comes with its set of challenges, the potential benefits in terms of environmental conservation, economic savings, and social inclusion make it a compelling proposition. By fostering a culture of shared mobility, we can create more sustainable and inclusive cities for the future.

500 Words Essay on Make Public Transport Free

Public transportation is a critical facet of modern urban living, facilitating mobility and accessibility for all citizens. The idea of making public transport free has been a topic of great debate, with proponents arguing that it would improve social equity, environmental sustainability, and urban livability.

Economic Implications of Free Public Transport

Social equity and inclusion.

Free public transport can also promote social equity and inclusion. Transportation costs can be a significant burden for low-income households. By eliminating these costs, we can improve access to essential services such as healthcare and education, and job opportunities. This can help reduce social inequalities and promote social mobility.

Environmental Impact

Environmentally, free public transport can contribute significantly to reducing carbon emissions. By encouraging more people to use public transport instead of private vehicles, we can potentially decrease traffic congestion and air pollution. This would align with global efforts to combat climate change and promote sustainable urban development.

Challenges and Considerations

In conclusion, making public transport free is a complex issue with potential benefits and challenges. It requires careful consideration of various factors, including economic implications, social equity, environmental impact, and practical feasibility. While it might not be the ultimate solution to all urban transportation challenges, it represents a radical shift in how we perceive and value public transportation. As such, it is a concept worth exploring further, particularly in the context of creating more sustainable, inclusive, and livable cities.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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Should Public Transportation Be Free?

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Low-Cost, High-Quality Public Transportation Will Serve The Public Better Than Free Rides

Op-ed: history shows what works best to rebuild public transit networks, and free transit isn’t high on the list. .

Nicholas Dagen Bloom | The Conversation   May 25, 2023

(Photo by bradlee9119 / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )

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This story was originally published by The Conversation.

Public transit systems face daunting challenges across the U.S., from pandemic ridership losses to traffic congestion, fare evasion and pressure to keep rides affordable. In some cities, including Boston , Kansas City and Washington , many elected officials and advocates see fare-free public transit as the solution.

Federal COVID-19 relief funds , which have subsidized transit operations across the nation at an unprecedented level since 2020, offered a natural experiment in free-fare transit. Advocates applauded these changes and are now pushing to make fare-free bus lines permanent .

But although these experiments aided low-income families and modestly boosted ridership , they also created new political and economic challenges for beleaguered transit agencies. With ridership still dramatically below pre-pandemic levels and temporary federal support expiring, transportation agencies face an economic and managerial “doom spiral .”

Free public transit that doesn’t bankrupt agencies would require a revolution in transit funding. In most regions, U.S. voters – 85% of whom commute by automobile – have resisted deep subsidies and expect fare collection to cover a portion of operating budgets. Studies also show that transit riders are likely to prefer better, low-cost service to free rides on the substandard options that exist in much of the U.S.

Why isn’t transit free?

As I recount in my new book, “ The Great American Transit Disaster ,” mass transit in the U.S. was an unsubsidized, privately operated service for decades prior to the 1960s and 1970s. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, prosperous city dwellers used public transit to escape from overcrowded urban neighborhoods to more spacious “ streetcar suburbs .” Commuting symbolized success for families with the income to pay the daily fare.

These systems were self-financing: Transit company investors made their money in suburban real estate when rail lines opened up. They charged low fares to entice riders looking to buy land and homes. The most famous example was the Pacific Electric “red car” transit system in Los Angeles that Henry Huntingdon built to transform his vast landholdings into profitable subdivisions.

However, once streetcar suburbs were built out, these companies had no further incentive to provide excellent transit. Unhappy voters felt suckered into crummy commutes. In response, city officials retaliated against the powerful transit interests by taxing them heavily and charging them for street repairs.

Meanwhile, the introduction of mass-produced personal cars created new competition for public transit. As autos gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, frustrated commuters swapped out riding for driving, and private transit companies like Pacific Electric began failing.

Grudging public takeovers

In most cities, politicians refused to prop up the often-hated private transit companies that now were begging for tax concessions, fare increases or public buyouts. In 1959, for instance, politicians still forced Baltimore’s fading private transit company, the BTC, to divert US$2.6 million in revenues annually to taxes. The companies retaliated by slashing maintenance, routes and service.

Local and state governments finally stepped in to save the ruins of the hardest-strapped companies in the 1960s and 1970s. Public buyouts took place only after decades of devastating losses, including most streetcar networks, in cities such as Baltimore (1970), Atlanta (1971) and Houston (1974).

These poorly subsidized public systems continued to lose riders. Transit’s share of daily commuters fell from 8.5% in 1970 to 4.9% in 2018. And while low-income people disproportionately ride transit , a 2008 study showed that roughly 80% of the working poor commuted by vehicle instead , despite the high cost of car ownership.

There were exceptions. Notably, San Francisco and Boston began subsidizing transit in 1904 and 1918, respectively, by sharing tax revenues with newly created public operators. Even in the face of significant ridership losses from 1945 to 1970, these cities’ transit systems kept fares low, maintained legacy rail and bus lines and modestly renovated their systems.

Converging pressures

Today, public transit is under enormous pressure nationwide. Inflation and driver shortages are driving up operating costs. Managers are spending more money on public safety in response to rising transit crime rates and unhoused people using buses and trains for shelter .

Many systems are also contending with decrepit infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. public transit systems a grade of D-minus and estimates their national backlog of unmet capital needs at $176 billion . Deferred repairs and upgrades reduce service quality, leading to events like a 30-day emergency shutdown of an entire subway line in Boston in 2022.

Despite flashing warning signs, political support for public transit remains weak , especially among conservatives . So it’s not clear that relying on government to make up for free fares is sustainable or a priority.

For example, in Washington, conflict is brewing within the city government over how to fund a free bus initiative. Kansas City, the largest U.S. system to adopt fare-free transit, faces a new challenge: finding funding to expand its small network, which just 3% of its residents use .

A better model

Other cities are using more targeted strategies to make public transit accessible to everyone. For example, “Fair fare” programs in San Francisco, New York and Boston offer discounts based on income, while still collecting full fares from those who can afford to pay. Income-based discounts like these reduce the political liability of giving free rides to everyone, including affluent transit users.

Some providers have initiated or are considering fare integration policies. In this approach, transfers between different types of transit and systems are free; riders pay one time. For example, in Chicago, rapid transit or bus riders can transfer at no charge to a suburban bus to finish their trips, and vice versa.

Fare integration is less costly than fare-free systems, and lower-income riders stand to benefit. Enabling riders to pay for all types of trips with a single smart card further streamlines their journeys.

As ridership grows under Fair Fares and fare integration, I expect that additional revenue will help build better service, attracting more riders. Increasing ridership while supporting agency budgets will help make the political case for deeper public investments in service and equipment. A virtuous circle could develop.

History shows what works best to rebuild public transit networks, and free transit isn’t high on the list. Cities like Boston, San Francisco and New York have more transit because voters and politicians have supplemented fare collection with a combination of property taxes, bridge tolls, sales taxes and more. Taking fares out of the formula spreads the red ink even faster.

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Nicholas Dagen Bloom is a Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. His research analyzes long-term planning outcomes in essential urban systems such as subsidized housing and mass transportation. He is the author of Suburban Alchemy (OSU, 2001), Merchant of Illusion (OSU, 2004), Public Housing That Worked (Penn, 2008), The Metropolitan Airport (Penn, 2015), and How States Shaped Postwar America (Chicago, 2019). He is co-editor of four edited collections, including the prize-winning Public Housing Myths (Cornell, 2015) and Affordable Housing in New York (Princeton, 2015)

Tags: public transportation ,  fare free transit

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A Playbook for Persuading People to Use Public Transportation

June 4, 2015

Narrative storytelling is one of many crucial tactics that public transportation advocates need to use often.

The art of persuasion was on display in two sessions at the end of the Center for Transportation Excellence conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan this week.

When attempting to convince someone to try something new – such as transportation alternatives to driving – arguing facts simply won’t work and usually makes the situation worse, according to keynote speaker Christopher Graves, the global chair of Ogilvy Public Relations .

Other keys to influencing decision-making, according to Graves, include:

• Using myths is a bad idea. It often backfires, inadvertently popularizing the myth for people who had never heard it in the first place and repeating it for people who naturally tend to believe things the more they hear them. He showed a video of a conflicted father dealing with his daughter’s same-sex marriage, suggesting that this would be much more effective in potentially changing opinions than a website detailing myths versus facts.
• Affirmation works really well, but we don’t use it enough. Try to relate to your opponents (for instance, saying things like “I know you love your family” and “I know you hate traffic” before jumping in with what you know will be combative). Graves added, “Affirm them as a human first, and you have a little bit of an edge. Nobody confirms anymore, everyone is already an idiot.”

• Use concrete rather than abstract concepts. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently was charged with getting people to understand the unhealthiness of movie popcorn . It held a press conference at a theater and showed what the massive amount of fat found in a bucket of popcorn would equal in terms of a person’s daily diet. It roughly equals bacon and eggs, cheeseburgers, steaks, deserts. It’s the equivalent of a disgusting amount of greasy, unhealthy junk. And it was never more clear how bad moviegoers had been treating their bodies all those years.

He finished by noting that consumers are smart. “They’ll get it” if it’s explained well to them. To create a true movement, Graves said:

• an issue has to be real and immediate
• has to be something people can relate to, and
• has to have a foreseeable outcome or result.

“The most important thing is to get on message and stay on message. If you have too many messages, you really have no messages at all,” said Mike Zuhl, R&R Partners’ government and public-affairs director, in a separate session at the conference.

His group has worked on several transit campaigns, including one that began with the Utah Transit Authority and has been effective in other places as well, with an overall message of “even if you don’t ride it, you use it.”

Kyle Parks of B2 Communications responded, “There may not be a better message than anywhere in the country. You can create messaging in a communications plan by coming up with about 50 different ways to use that one message.”

Other tactical recommendations made by Zuhl and Parks included:

• Get others in the community to step up with your messages. The spokespeople should not be political or transportation officials, but rather respected leaders in the community.
• Use social and non-traditional media. R&R wrapped up a store to look like a train, which was a “wonderful way to promote transit” and also ran a campaign to have local bands in Phoenix write songs about transportation.
• Start small when it comes to infrastructure projects, like in Charlotte and Orlando. When a handful of people start riding a system, it becomes real and has a better chance at long-term success.
• Create a neighborhood plan with grass-roots outreach. Have people ride around in a “Scooby Doo-like van” educating people about what’s in it for them, and include yard signs and t-shirts in the plan.
• Know your opponents and be ready for them. While you shouldn’t get into back-and-forth arguments, you also shouldn’t be so shy and nice. Parks said, “Staying above the fray won’t work. If something is true most of the time, we can run with it. It’s all about sound bites and people’s short-attention spans. The other side goes with stuff all the time that has zero basis in fact. If something is true 80 percent of the time, it’s worth using.” Also watch the Merchants of Doubt documentary. Repeat to the news media that this is how your opponents operate and that the 10 things they’re saying are not true. This also helps you avoid calling them names.

For more ideas of how to tell better stories that persuade people about the immense value of public transportation, we like the American Public Transportation Association’s Voices for Public Transit reference site. And, of course, our own archive of marketing and communications resources isn’t half-bad either.

Photo by Insomnia Cured Here .

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Why should Public transport be made free?

Some cities turn to free public busing to counteract inequity

William Brangham William Brangham

Casey Kuhn Casey Kuhn

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/some-cities-turn-to-free-public-busing-to-counteract-inequity

The drive for free public busing is speeding up. Several cities are moving towards offering 100% free service on public buses as a way to counteract inequity. Digital video producer Casey Kuhn takes a look at Washington, where it's expected to start later this year, and William Brangham discusses the issue with Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett:

The drive for free public busing is speeding up, at least in some places.

William Brangham has more.

William Brangham:

There are a number of cities that seem to be moving towards offering 100 percent free service on public buses. In fact, that's expected to start here in Washington, D.C., later this year.

Casey Kuhn, who is one of our digital video producers, has been looking into that and filed this report for our Web site.

Casey Kuhn:

Taking the bus in Washington, D.C., is about to get a lot more affordable.

Dozens of cities in America offer free bus rides in some capacity. But a new move by Washington, D.C., could make it the largest city in America to offer free bus rides, affecting hundreds of thousands of riders who wait at these stops every day.

Riders like Wayan.

Wayan, D.C. Resident:

I think it's a great thing, especially for graduate students like me.

He's a physicist Ph.D. candidate who studies biomass at Georgetown University. And he says taking public transit is a must.

We don't have a lot of money. And so transportation is always a big problem. So, this is a small burden that is lifted, in a way.

The D.C. City Council voted unanimously in early December to offer free bus rides for anyone getting on a bus in the District, resident or otherwise, and to extend a dozen popular bus routes to include overnight service.

A majority of D.C. residents who ride the bus make less than $50,000 a year, according to the City Council. For riders like Emmanuel, who commutes to work via bus, it's more than a convenience. It's a help financially.

Emmanuel, D.C. Resident:

It's going to be like 200 bucks that everyone is going to save around every month. So, it's good.

The change will cost the city an expected $42 million the first year. And the move comes as part of a growing push to make public transportation free across the country. Other cities like Alexandria, Virginia, and Kansas City, Missouri, have already made their bus rides free.

The goal is to create a more equitable public transportation that will benefit the people who don't have any other option.

Isabel, who takes the bus on occasion, agrees.

Isabel, D.C. Resident:

I heard when they were in talks about that it was proposed, but I thought there was no way it was going to go through. And then, when a day or two later, I saw that it was passed, I was very excited.

I think it's going to make it more accessible to everyone. And, especially, it'll benefit those who need it most.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has also fought for free transit. The state of Massachusetts tried out free regional bus fares across the board during the holiday season only. And the city has made fares free on several widely used Boston city routes, pushing back against critics who say the lost revenue does not make up for the gain in ridership.

The D.C. proposal cleared its last council vote and is now sitting on the D.C. mayor's desk. If it moves forward, free bus fares would begin in July.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Casey Kuhn.

So, as Casey reported, there are still a number of questions for cities who are considering doing something similar.

So, to get a wider view of what's happening, we're joined by Yonah Freemark, who studies this field for the Urban Institute.

Yonah, thank you so much for being here.

As we heard in Casey's report, Washington, D.C., is making this move. Can you give us a little sense, why is it that cities do want to do this? What's the rationale for this?

Yonah Freemark, Urban Institute:

There are a few key reasons.

Number one, during the pandemic, we saw a lot of cities want to improve service for their customers in a way that reduced the contact with drivers. So they said, fine, board at the back of the bus. Don't pay a fare.

And, with that, I think a lot of cities got the idea and got the knowledge that it was possible to make buses free without too much of an inconvenience. At the same time, a lot of cities around the country are trying to increase the equity of service and trying to make sure that public transportation is something that's useful for everyone.

As we heard in this report, a lot of D.C. riders on the buses are people who don't make a lot of money. And so this could be a real savings for them.

But she also reported that this is going to cost D.C. something like $42 million. Are there other benefits that the city could get for that cost?

Yonah Freemark:

Well, the biggest benefit is going to go directly into the pocketbooks and the wallets of people who are riding the bus. And that's mostly going to be people who live in the city of Washington, but also some people from the suburbs.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the city's going to benefit in terms of increased revenues, but it could benefit in terms of higher quality of life for the residents who live here.

So are there examples of cities that have tried this where those goals have actually been met, meaning, does this actually work?

So, most of the research tells us that, when cities make public transportation free, ridership does go up. And we have actually seen that to be the case in Richmond, Virginia, where ridership on their transit system has increased substantially since the buses were made free.

That said, there's not much evidence that making buses free is going to get people out of their cars. Those people are likely to remain in their cars even if buses are free.

So, if ridership goes up, is it your sense that public transit systems around the country that might be considering this can handle that increased ridership? Does their infrastructure have the capacity to take more bodies?

Well, because of the pandemic, and because of changes in the way people are working, we have seen a reduction overall in the amount of ridership on transit systems around the country.

And, as a result, actually, transit systems have a lot of space for more riders. They will be able to absorb the increase in passengers for making buses and potentially trains free. But if the numbers went up dramatically, then, yes, we would absolutely need more investment in improving public transportation services.

I mean, as you're hinting at here, one of the criticisms is that public transit has been underfunded for a very long time, and now you're taking another revenue stream out of public transit.

Does that make these systems more sustainable in the long run, though?

From a financial perspective, we have a problem in the United States that we have not provided sustainable funding for public transportation, perhaps ever in the history of this country.

If you look at countries in Europe and Asia, you see a lot more commitment to making sure that everyone has access to good bus and rail service pretty much anywhere they live. And that's just not the case in the United States, because we haven't spent the money at the federal, state or local levels.

If we get rid of fare revenue, it's true that we might actually have an even bigger financial problem. But most of the cities that have talked about making buses or trains free have backed it up with some other new revenue source.

So, for the meantime, I don't think we are going to expect a significant drop in the revenues for transit systems.

All right, Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

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William Brangham is an award-winning correspondent, producer, and substitute anchor for the PBS News Hour.

Casey is a producer for NewsHour's digital video team. She has won several awards for her work in broadcast journalism, including a national Edward R. Murrow award.

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Should public transit be free experts weigh in on policy options.

Riders board a “T” trolley car in Boston on the day when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority let people ride for free as a goodwill gesture following a winter of disastrous breakdowns. Photo by Bill Sikes

With outdated funding models and questions about whether riders care more about fares or service, opinions are divided on the future of public transportation.

With companies addressing how their employees will return to the office as the pandemic recedes, public transportation is a key part of the policy dialogue. Would free ridership keep autos off the road, a huge benefit for climate change? For the many essential workers who continued to commute during the pandemic, public transportation failed in many ways with interrupted and unreliable service.  How will free fares address this inequity? Is it even what commuters want?

As part of the Greater Boston Debate Series, sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston based at Harvard Kennedy School, panelists debated the merits of free ridership, a movement gaining momentum in American cities from Los Angeles to Kansas City to Worcester. In the upcoming mayoral race in Boston, nearly every candidate has expressed support of some form of fare elimination. But is the idea fiscally sustainable? Does it weaken transportation options, especially for low-wage earners who depend on it the most? The debate, featuring proponents and opponents of free ridership making their cases, was moderated by Monica Tibbits-Nutt, executive director of 128 Business Council, an organization that runs shuttle services in Massachusetts, and an advisory board member of the Rappaport Institute.

David Bragdon, executive director of TransitCenter, a foundation in New York that focuses on improving public transportation in U.S. cities, began by reframing the issue. “I’m going to pose a bigger question,” he said. “What can and should society do to help low-income people for whom the price of a transit ticket is an obstacle?” He suggested that local governments should provide targeted discounts to help alleviate poverty. “It’s similar to what we do with other public utilities in our society, whether it’s electric bills, water bills, or for that matter food—a human right where we have a SNAP program—or housing, where we have vouchers.”

Stacy Thompson, executive director of LivableStreets Alliance, an organization that advocates for equitable and safe public transportation in the Boston area, agreed with the need to expand and improve service, but questioned whether it will bring more people to public transportation. “Kansas City and Worcester, communities offering free ridership throughout the pandemic, demonstrated much more resilient ridership than their peer transit systems of similar size and demographics,” she noted.

Tibbits-Nutt summed up this important discussion by noting that while there is disagreement on the idea of free transit, the speakers agree that communities need to begin thinking about more progressive ways to fund our transit systems: “I think transit is always going to be vital to the health of our communities.”

You can listen to the complete debate here .  The Greater Boston Debate Series will resume in the fall.

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The Case for Making Public Transit Free Everywhere

Used to spending hundreds of dollars on public transit every month? Soon, depending on where you live, all those bus, train, and tram journeys could be totally free. Sure, transit operators would earn less revenue. But some are willing to risk the cash to find out whether free fare policies can help reduce car journeys and make cities run more smoothly.

Does it work? So far, the evidence is mixed—but ditching tickets has other benefits, from ensuring equitable access to transport to keeping buses running on time, with costs offset by savings on ticketing systems or fare enforcement.

If it feels strange not to pay, experts draw parallels with public health, libraries, and schools—services that some use more than others, but everyone pays into. “When you remove fares that says to people that you’ve got a right to get around regardless of your means, it’s a public good,” says Jenny Mcarthur, urban infrastructure researcher at University College London. The need for new thinking is acute: Road transport makes up a tenth of global carbon dioxide emissions, with soaring fuel prices also putting a squeeze on already stretched household budgets.

This is why cities and countries around the world have been edging toward free fares. Spain is the latest to join the list, offering free train travel on a selection of routes for a few months to relieve pressure on commuters as the cost-of-living crisis bites. Officials in Germany introduced a 9-euro-a-month travel pass, Ireland slashed fares for the first time in 75 years, and Italy doled out a 60-euro, one-off public transport voucher for lower-income workers. Luxembourg and Estonia ditched fares to get commuters out of cars years ago, which is the same motivation for Austria’s 3-euro-a-day Klimaticket for countrywide transport, launched last year.

Free fares boost ridership, but not necessarily from drivers. In Estonia , free transport was more likely to be used by those who were walking or cycling, a trend repeated elsewhere . That’s a problem, as pedestrians and cyclists create fewer emissions than public transport.

Short trials make it difficult to discern impact. Car use in Copenhagen initially dropped after a one-month trial of a free transport ticket, but people eventually returned to their old habits. But that’s not always true: Initial analysis of German traffic in June, just a few weeks into the 9-euro-a-month tickets, showed fewer cars on the road and faster driving times in most of the cities studied.

In 2020, Luxembourg became the first country to offer free public transport, but its tickets were already cheap, and it’s a small country—with a population of about 630,000, plenty of cities are larger—that’s famously wealthy . Two years later, traffic remains about the same or worse than before the free fare policy, at least partially because a large number of people who can’t afford to live in Luxembourg commute from across the border.

So while free fares can and do boost public transport use, such policies don’t necessarily get cars off the road. But free transport has benefits beyond the environment. In Spain, free tickets have been introduced to ease the burden of inflation and rising fuel prices rather than to directly target emissions.

Free train tickets might entice drivers to ditch the car when fuel prices are high, traffic is snarled, or when traveling for a holiday. But for low-income people who are unable to afford a car, free transport keeps cash in their pockets—and means some who can’t afford a ticket can catch a ride rather than walk. “It’s common for people to rationalize their trips when public transport is very expensive,” says Mcarthur. “They make one trip to the shops each week and can’t go whenever they please because it adds up too much.”

Local context matters. In Australia, the Tasmanian government made buses free for five weeks to offset cost of living increases. While that project was deemed a success, researchers argue that expanding the policy elsewhere in the country would benefit richer residents, as public transport in Australia is more heavily used by residents of inner cities or central suburbs traveling to central business districts—in other words, people living in expensive neighborhoods commuting to well-paying jobs. The farther away people live from central areas, the more likely they are to rely on cars to travel to dispersed workplaces, the researchers say, and that means free fares benefit wealthier people rather than those on low incomes.

In Spain, the free tickets will overwhelmingly benefit people living in urban areas that can access regional trains, known as Media Distancia, and suburban railways called Cercanías. “85 percent of Cercanías trips are done daily in Madrid and Barcelona,” says Pablo Muñoz Nieto, a campaigner at environmental activist group Confederación de Ecologistas en Acción, adding that regional trains have suffered from lack of investment and many areas don’t have services. “What do you want a free train ticket for if you don’t have a train?”

In the US, the divide between the haves and have-nots often falls along racial lines, meaning free fares could support racial equity. But while that’s true on financial grounds, there’s more to the story. As community organizer Destiny Thomas notes , US transit systems “rely on the criminalization of poverty as a primary source of revenue,” with operators issuing significant fines to those who lack the funds to buy a ticket. In 2019, the city council in Washington, DC, voted to slash fines and remove the risk of jail for fare evaders following evidence that nine in ten court summons for failing to have a ticket were given to African Americans . By removing fares entirely , transit operators avoid the risk of discriminatory enforcement.

Free fares also remove the financial cost of creating ticketing systems and enforcing them. In Boston, an extension of a free fare trial was in part inspired by a $1 billion new ticketing system , Mcarthur says—a serious investment when bus fares bring in only $60 million annually. A single-route bus trial in the city revealed an unexpected benefit: faster boarding time. “That means faster and more reliable journey times, and improved overall service,” Mcarthur says. “If you’re a public transport agency, a lot of money is spent trying to get dwell time down.”

But the rush for free or heavily-discounted tickets can have the opposite effect. In Germany, the first long weekend of the 9-euro-a-month tickets led to overcrowding, service disruptions, and thousands of hours of overtime for staff. In Spain, Muñoz Nieto warns that if train frequencies aren’t increased, services will become overcrowded; plus, making one mode free and not others could pull passengers away from buses or metro services.

Boosting services when cutting fares costs money—which has to come from somewhere. In Spain, the free tickets will be paid for out of a windfall tax on energy companies and banks that the government believes will be worth 7 billion euros over two years. “Subsidizing trains is phenomenally expensive, but it needs to be done if you want to get lots of people in and out of cities for work,” says Paul Chatterton, professor of urban futures at the University of Leeds.

And mass transit systems across the world are already subsidized to some extent by public funds. In France, fares make up as little as 10 percent of public transport budgets. Luxembourg could easily make trains free because a two-hour ticket costs only 2 euros, with fares pulling in just 30 million euros in revenue out of a 1 billion euro budget. But two-thirds of Transport for London’s budget is from fares, meaning the central government would have a bigger gap to make up if it wanted to make all public transit in the capital free.

Transit systems that rely heavily on fares for funding were put under enormous strain during the pandemic, with many networks still struggling as commuters switch to hybrid working. An empty office on a Monday, for example, also means a lot of empty commuter trains. “All the funding models have been predicated on this huge demand for commuter travel, which has been stable for 50 years,” Mcarthur says. “But then the pandemic came along and that model fell apart.”

One alternative to free fares for all is targeted discounts, offering free or cheap passes to students, young people, seniors, and those on benefits, already a common practice. Rather than subsidize transport costs for those who can afford it, free passes could be given to those on lower incomes or in regions where public transport is available but unpopular. Another intermediate step is charging a cheap flat rate, as Germany has done this summer. “People would still value the service, but you also generate some revenue,” Chatterton says.

Free fares might not get everyone out of cars, but will convert some journeys, which benefits everyone in terms of carbon reduction and improving local air quality—and even helps drivers by calming traffic. Free fares won’t pull low-income people out of poverty, but will keep money in their pockets and ensure everyone can travel when they need to. Ditching fares comes at a cost, but there are savings to be had by not investing in expensive ticketing systems and wider logistical and societal benefits.

But setting aside figures about costs and statistics about ridership, there’s another way to look at it: Public transport should be considered a human right , alongside access to health and education. It’s necessary to life in a city, says Mcarthur. “Public transport is an extremely efficient way to get people around,” she says. “Buses and trains are not only efficient for people who use them, but also people who don’t.”

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By Sina Zhen, Sustainable Mobility Officer, ICLEI World Secretariat

ICLEI Korea and Hwaseong City, in partnership with the EU-Korea Climate Action Project, hosted the EU-Korea Urban Mobility Forum in Hwaseong on April 6, 2021. The theme of the forum was “Transition Towards Net Zero,” with presenters from Korea and the EU sharing innovative policies and programs for sustainable and low-carbon urban transport systems. One of the key topics of multiple speakers’ presentations was the recurring theme of implementing free public transport in cities and why it is essential as a mean of social equity and improving the quality of life for city residents. The forum focused on innovation in public transport and free public transport and how these improve urban life.

Public transport is not a service people should pay for as it is a public good

One of the most important questions raised during the Forum was a question framed by Konrad Otto-Zimmermann, Creative Director of the Urban Idea, where he asked, “Why should we have free public transportation?” “Why?” is an important term any mayor, planners, or city officials have to consider when implementing new measures in urban mobility. Does the city want to reduce its environmental impact by encouraging more people to use public transportation by eliminating fees? Is the city concerned for the social welfare of its residents who may be limited in career opportunities due to access? As Sangchul Kim, Chairman of Policy Committee at Public Transportation Network, pointed out, why don’t we pay for elevators as it is essentially playing the same role as public transit? It is not a service people should pay for as it is a public good. Common themes that were presented at the forum were the need to combat climate change and to increase the wellbeing of cities’ residents, with ambitious policies such as free public transport being considered. Korea and the EU have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050. The Korean and EU plans both aim to leverage green and digital transitions to increase the uptake of zero-emission vehicles, and solutions that will improve connectivity, access, and quality of life in cities. Eliminating fares in public transport is a step toward that vision.  

Examples of free and subsidized transport from Korea and the EU

Many examples of cities implementing free or subsidized public transportation were presented in Korean and EU cities. Below are some of the few cities mentioned:

Korea Context

Hwaseoung City: The city plans to implement free transportation and to convert its fleet to eco-friendly modes such as electric and hydrogen. Currently, children and youth under 18 years old are entitled to ride without fares and the city is considering expanding the scope of support to young adults under 23 and elderly over 65 years old in 2021. Furthermore, the mayor of Hwaseoung City, Cheol-mo Seo, shared the city’s ambition in transitioning its bus fleet to eco-friendly and autonomous by 2030. He also encouraged innovation emphasizing on-demand based, electric, and autonomy as solutions to achieve net zero in its transport fleet. 

Dangjin City: Dangjin City’s free public transportation policy started in 2019 to address several issues such as the low number of available buses per capita in the city, low public transport mode share, and air pollution. The transport policy was split into three phases to gradually expand free public transport to the city’s most vulnerable residents. Dangjin City’s free transport policy has now entered its third phase of expanding the coverage to the youth population (between 6 and 18 years of age), from the previous coverage that targeted elderly above 75 years old, veterans, and the disabled. So far, the policy increased the public transport usage by the target audience by 30% on an annual basis while reducing the average economic burden of target households by 93,000 KRW (69 EUR) per month or 1,120,000 KRW (832 EUR) annually. 

Talinn: Estonia’s capital was the first to provide fare-free service on buses, trams, and trolleys to its residents in 2013 and has since expanded this service all over Estonia with a public transport mode share of 25%. The free fares allowed the elderly to benefit from social outings and access to healthcare. The city also claimed an increase in income due to increased population size and economic activity. 

Luxembourg: With a population of just over 600,000, the country suffers from major congestion. In an effort to alleviate this, Luxembourg introduced free public transport among trains, trams, and buses in early 2020. While the outcome is still being evaluated, it has so far been perceived as successful.

Other cities across Europe are heavily subsidizing public transport including Freiburg, Edinburgh, and  Dunkirk . Heidelberg and Coventry  have programs where public transport is free or credits for public transport are offered to residents willing to give up their cars.

Other barriers in preventing people from using free public transport

In theory, free public transport sounds like an enticing way to tackle environment issues caused by personal vehicles. A survey conducted in Korea asked respondents whether they would use public transport if it is free. 57.9% of respondents responded positively while 51% said no, citing transfer and location inconvenience. Additionally, the cost of owning a personal vehicle is not as high in this country. Reggie Tricker, Sustainable Mobility Senior Officer at ICLEI European Secretariat, also shared a similar survey result from the United Kingdom where only 25% of respondents stating they were willing to give up their car in exchange for free public transport. However, the percentage is higher among people under 24 years old, with 50% of these respondents indicating their willingness to give up their car for free public transport. This raises the question of figuring out who the existing users are and what the target group is that cities want to attract in using public transportation.

These two survey results highlight another flaw in public transportation. People may not use public transport because of economic reasons, but there are other barriers in preventing potential users, which brings us back to the question of “Why?” Why do people not use public transport even when it’s free? Otto-Zimmerman provided some insights into the barriers preventing public transport use including:

• Too many transfers
• Long trip durations
• Unpleasant environment (e.g. crowded buses)
• Negative image (e.g. perception that public transport is only used by the poor)

So now what? 

Eliminating fares alone will not automatically encourage people to swap their automobiles for public transport. Transport authorities will need to improve public transport systems as a whole. A combination of carrot and sticks measures with a systems approach needs to be considered. Eliminating fares, route and destination optimization, and increasing comfort within public transport pulls in users but infrastructural changes such as replacing car lanes with exclusive bus lanes, and eliminating parking and implementing congestion fees, pushes for private vehicle owners to use public transit. At the same time, cities also need to consider that people who would have walked or biked might transition to public transport as well. The goal is to reduce vehicle trips and not to compete with active modes, hence a systems approach with free public transport complementing bicycling and walking as the desirable outcome.

One thing that cities will need to consider in implementing such policies is the financial burden that might be imposed without fare revenue. How will cities finance the transport system while maintaining a living wage and good working conditions for their transport workers? Innovative financial models and partnerships may need to be considered to ensure the longevity of a free public transport system.

Access to free public transportation is not a luxury but a basic need as it gives residents the opportunity to better access jobs and social activities, which then increases a city’s economic activity. Moreover, against the background of air pollution and other negative externalities caused by personal automobiles, free, convenient, and accessible public transport is a powerful tool in combating climate change.

About the EU-Korea Urban Mobility Forum in Hwaseong

For more information and references, please visit the forum webpage

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