Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes).
Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users?
If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.
Tickets may be cheap and somewhat eco-friendly if made from whatever recycled paper and a drilling machine like in the old days. But i doubt that's the case, so you have to account for the financial and ecological costs of all the electronics and magnetic tapes, and all the replacement parts you need to keep that system of control operating. Also, if your tickets are sufficiently unsophisticated to be eco-friendly, then they may well be very easy to forge.
That is, without mentioning that controllers have to be paid without providing any service. If you additionally take into consideration the social cost of the criminalization of something as banal as using public transports when you don't have money, the benefits of doing away with these systems of control arguably are even more evident.
"a fortune" is very relative. Railway workers are not exactly known to earn a fortune. From what i could see in France (quick search), they earn between 1500 (close to minimum wage) and 2500€ per month, before taxes.
Also around here i've never heard railway unions ask for better compensation, because as you have pointed out they already have a good pension and some transport-related privileges [0]. However, they have been relentlessly asking for better working conditions in order to provide a better service, and that the government stop to try and privatize railways.
Of course the managers, directors and private contractors earn a lot more and that's how our corrupt overlords get away with siphoning much public money into private pockets. But these people, we could well do without, and unions would certainly support a move like that.
[0] Personally, i would strongly approve better compensation for those people we now call "essential workers". It appears in a capitalist system, those who work the most and provide the most services (railway/construction/food/cleaning/health workers) are those paid the less and with the most grueling working conditions. That's a shame.
The easy way is to make it legally free for residents and charge tourists but don’t actually enforce it. Just put up ads in the airport and all over the tourist hotspots, run a few fake stories in the media of tourists being fined etc.
You get your money for nothing and your travel for free
It seems you'd still need tickets, ticket machines, ticket scanners, ticket sellers, people to put more tickets in the machines, fix the ticket machines and scanners, people to pick up the discarded tickets, etc.
Having laws or rules you intentionally don't enforce at all can't be good for society. Why would people conditioned to steal from the state in one way not be expected to eventually steal from them in others as well?
In Europe, a tourist bed tax is collected from commercial establishments that cater to tourists.
Just increase that bed tax by 2-3 eur daily and use those 2-3 eur towards the public transport budget. Then let anyone use public transport for free, locals or not.
You will miss some people who will seek out couchsurfing opportunities at their friend's home, but you will still earn a lot from all the hotels, pensions and legal AirBnBs.
I like this idea better than most local government UBI proposals. E.g., instead of suggesting UBI in NYC just make the trains free. It's not straight currency but it's unlimited transportation on high capacity, environmentally nice(r) systems. Then people can argue over who can make the experience nicer vs who is going to raise the fares. Ridership-wise, many heavy users already have unlimited cards.
We have something like those already. Primary and secondary education are free (and compulsory) and one cannot refuse treatment to individuals in the emergency room.
The appeal of free public transportation, to me, is that it allows more people to take advantage of public spaces and works and, marginally, allows people to bring home more money for the same amount of time worked.
Free public transportation fare incentivizes participation not tuning out like I feel many UBI proposals do. No one is going to look at, effectively, a free metro card then think "Sweet! I don't need to work!"
When I visited Germany, they had cleverly ditched most "gateline staff" like you say but then had a reasonable number of ticket inspectors who would check you had a ticket and it was stamped for the current day. Best of both worlds?
Italy does this and I've always wondered how much they must lose over it. Even as a tourist, every time I saw a ticket agent get on the bus/tram, a good number of people would instantly get off.
I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern.
Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.
I've lived in a place with a system like this. The people who jump off were mostly students and people for whom tickets represented a significant expense.
The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.
That sounds like the worst possible outcome - you're literally teaching that poor people either don't have to be honest or are expected to be dishonest.
I would hate to live in a society formed by that ethos...
As far as I remember, in the bigger cities in Germany farebox recovery ratios are usually somewhere in the 30 to 80 % range, in some cases even higher. (According to https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35, the average might actually be around 75 %, it seems.)
So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive.
They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.
In Berlin, they usually enter the train in groups of 3-4, so they are able to check every person in one wagon in between two stops. You also see them pretty often at a station collecting the details of someone who didn't have a ticket.
I think both of those factors push most people in Berlin to buy a ticket. With a fine of 60 EUR the staff already pays for itself if they pick up ~2 people/hour, which sounds very realistic. If they then on top also have the effect of increasing the percentage of paying riders by a tiny amount, the whole program is quickly turning a profit.
Consider this article from Berlin where a sizeable number of people in jail are there for riding without a ticket.
The cost of that needs to be taken into account here.
It's extremely rare that that happens. It's typically considered a criminal offence if you are caught twice in two years, but rarely anyone is following up on that. Only really frequent repeaters are really prosecuted.
The downside is that visitors who are unfamiliar with the system--especially if they don't speak the local language--can end up riding illegally by mistake.
I’m convinced that many transit/rail systems give
Minimal thought to the use of the systems by occasional users some of whom may not speak the
language natively.
If you really want to charge tourists for the use of public transport, you could perhaps find ways of charging that at the border of the country. A daily tariff, either on entry, or on exit.
This is already done today. A lot of touristy cities already charge a daily fee per night you stay there. Hotels bill you for it so compliance is complete too. Between that and taxes for residents there's really no point to charging separately for public transport.
Tom Scott did a great video on Luxembourg's switch to free public transport. They were already covering 90% of the cost, so upping that to 100% was easy. London's network, on the other hand, gets roughly 50% of its funding from fares.
The area of Luxemburg is 2500km2 and the estimated population is 633k. For comparison: the area of London is ~1500km2 with population of 8m+. Do you think that Luxemburg’s system can be scaled up?
Luxembourg resident here. Free public transport is a game-changer. You don't have to think about it, you just step on the bus, or tram.
This also means the bus driver doesn't have to worry about checking tickets. There aren't guards to check if people are jumping over turnstiles, etc. Moving to 'totally free' eliminates all kinds of overhead.
There is no reason it couldn't scale.
And the question of scaling hides an interesting assumption: what is the purpose of charging fares?
If it is to reduce usage (to thus ensure that the system isn't used past capacity), then why do you want to limit the usage of public transport? If people don't take public, they will take private transport (cars, etc) which have much higher social cost (you can move many more people by bus than by car).
If it is to 'raise revenue to pay for the system', does the same argument apply to use of roads? What is a fair road tax, given that this method of transport has such high social costs?
> why do you want to limit the usage of public transport?
> If people don't take public, they will take
> private transport (cars, etc)
This ignores two elements:
- congestion differs by time of day, and
- capacity is constrained differently by mode
In London:
- it's cheaper to take a bus than to take an underground train, and
- there are ticket types that are only valid after the morning rush hour
Both of these decrease peak congestion on the transport system.
The differential pricing would not push people to private transport, but might push them to buses (whose capacity can more easily be increased) or to postpone their journey to later in the day.
You know what might push people to private transport? Severe congestion on the underground. If you are not fit and aggressive, then trying to get on a Central Line train in the morning might mean waiting for 2-3 full trains to pass before you can get on one.
Yes, there are also weekend tickets, zone 1, 2, up to 6 tickets. It’s pretty complex.
Increasing bus capacity might not be easy either. That requires more busses, more staff, more service, more whatever the source of power is for the busses. It all costs ££££.
I was considering this but higher density also means more transportation is required, more people have to employed and so on. It gets very expensive very fast.
In theory population size 12x of the population of Luxemburg would make it easier to distribute the cost of free transport. But this glosses over the fact that London is huge and only zone 1 and maybe 2 are a pain to drive. Not everyone in London works in zone 1 / 2.
I wonder if there’s anyone here able to give an answer if free transport in London would be financially realistic.
San Francisco city council voted in favor of making public transit free, even Muni was on board. Total cost was something like $20 million a year (city budget is measured in the Billions) to get rid of fares completely, forever. That happened about two months ago.
Mayor vetoed it, on the grounds that "it would be too popular and overtax muni's capacity". I'm not sure I buy that, my guess is that the local tour bus/tourist bike rental industry disapproved, but that's just speculation on my part. I would personally use Muni about 50% more but I have a chicken-and-egg problem; I don't use it enough to justify a monthly pass, and since I don't have a monthly pass, most times I'd rather just walk than catch a bus.
God, that's so infuriating, particularly given that for many people I know, the concern with Muni/BART is that it's oftentimes too empty, which can be a little freaky particularly as a woman.
This would not cover BART, which is not an SF run system. It would not cover SAMTRANS. This is just SF muni (busses and a handful of trolley lines) -- I think trolleys also were excluded as these are for raising money from tourists.
Honestly they rarely bother even to ask for fares. The problem with SF Muni is that the buses are dirty, smelly, and travel along at an average speed of about 8 miles per hour. This, combined with the fact that the buses always appear at random times and can never be ontime creates a very unpleasant experience that is only marginally better than walking.
This is already a problem as the homeless just don't pay and no one forces them to pay. Actually you can hop on the muni today and no one will force you to pay either.
Here in Berlin the idea floating around is to make yearly tickets very cheap (365€), while keeping prices for single travel (2.80€) or daily tickets (9.50€) more expensive. That's probably the easiest, least bureaucratic route to go.
For poorer households, the yearly ticket will still be subsidized, but the public transport companies (fully owned by the state) will still have direct income to maintain a corporate-like structure.
It would be much easier and less bureaucratic to just make it free and adjust taxes for residents and overnight fees for turists accordingly. Just the savings on all the ticketing and compliance systems and staff should be significant.
Considering that single travel tickets cost 3€ at the moment, and yearly ones 730€, that would be a godsend. One can also hope that one day they'll allow traveling on a single ticket for the full two hours, not just for one journey. However, it's unlikely the BVG will ever budge on pricing.
Earlier this year, there were rumors of a cheaper "Homeoffice-Ticket" which would only be valid on certain days, and in the end nothing came out of it either.
Just remembered another consideration. When Ken Livingstone introduced free transport for school age children in order to remove cars from the school run, it simply meant a load more children who would have traditionally walked or cycled didn't need to because the bus was free.
Commuters were angry as anything that they couldn't get on the buses any more that were picked with children.
Societies are very different around the world and I'm not sure how much this is factored into ideas that could work really well in some places and not so much in others.
I lived in London when Livingstone did that, and I do not recall that being the reaction of commuters. The afternoon school "rush" doesn't really overlap with commute hours either. Lots and lots of kids in London had travel passes at that time anyway, because the UK has never had a separate school bus system.
From what I've read about similar experiments in various cities, in fact it's not an unmitigated good thing. Most augmentation in public transport usage comes not people switching from driving, but people that used to walk or bike.
making intercity public transit free or cheaper - as per here 100% will augment public transit as very few people walk or cycle more than 10 miles each way.
I've been saying this for a while. I used to live in queens and would take a practically empty bus down a traffic packed metropolitan ave to a coworking space in bushwick. There was no way the bus was breaking even with the 5-10 people that would get on during my trips.
Instead NYC spent $250 million to crack down on fare evasion [1] and installed huge ticket machines at a bunch of bus stops that probably cost >300K each to install.
In the UK, most people who are employed do not file taxes, they are handled by the employer. Other people whose only income is benefits also do not file taxes.
I think it's safe to assume that GPs suggestion includes people who are paying taxes via the employer or receiving benefits. Also, in lots of countries employers already subsidize public transportation costs.
It's also possible the suggestion is based on the concept of a country where 'filing taxes' is some optional or culturally odd thing so people need to be incentivised to do it at all. Or perhaps it's more thinking along the lines of 'someone who is a citizen' and measuring that by using tax filing as proof.
I read it as a "reward" and incentive for filing taxes in places like the US where everyone has to do it so it wouldn't translate to somewhere that taxes are paid via the employer or people on benefits because then there is no reward.
Because it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of car journeys but costs a load. It might be fine for e.g. London but where I live, there is no public transport between my house and work (well, perhaps over about 3 hours compared to 30 minute drive) but even though my wife lives on a bus route, the times are less than hourly so she can't get to work for the right time, would get there an hour early or an hour and a half later!
If people still need to use their cars, it doesn't really work.
The simplest way is to do what my city (Missoula) did years ago and make the public transportation zero fare for everyone. No more tickets, no more swiping cards, no more concern over who "doesn't deserve" to ride a public resource. This succeeded so well they've even upgraded a number of their buses to be zero-emission as well.
Did it come with a tax increase? Was everyone happy about that? If it didn't come with a tax increase then what funding was cut for this public transport? It's easy to look at a success when you're only looking at the beneficial side, but don't look at the cost.
> It's easy to look at a success when you're only looking at the beneficial side, but don't look at the cost.
Which is why part of the "funding" for such systems comes from the reduction in the cost caused by private vehicles (on the roads, on the atmosphere, on the neighborhood and more).
Good luck with that as long as our society is based around subsidizing the fuel cost of those polluting cars (not to mention the externalized cost of pollution), and any politicians that tries to change that will lose their next election..
Our economic system ensures that we keep the gas pedal to the floor both figuratively and literally.
Maybe introduce a gradual shift instead over 50 years or so: with each next year taking the originally expected profits of public transport and gradually add those as taxes for cars while at the same time also reducing the current public transport ticket prices?
At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of transportation.
Maybe allow reduced taxes for electric vehicles at the same time.
In the end, it wouldn't be much different than the subsidized meat production with artificially lowered meat prices in the US, nor would anyone care much about small increases like that on a year by year basis.
Private individuals are becoming less and less able to afford cars in the first place (not even talking about real estate). If legislation around predatory lending schemes would be tightened, the demand for cars would decrease.
If at the same time you'd invest aggressively in actually making sure that there is enough public transportation in place (as is the case in many European countries already but not the US), then it'd help with displacing them in the background as well.
Couple that with a remote working culture, a few decades of employee pushback and quitting their jobs if they're asked to return to the office in careers where that's not necessary, better postal services and ride sharing apps, food delivery apps or a push for cooking meals at home and you'd see even more significant changes. Even more so if the road networks and infrastructure cannot support rush hour traffic with most of society living in a single shift mode, rather than morning and afternoon shifts.
In contrast, if any initiative comes out today that calls for immediate and drastic change, it will get shot down. Real change takes a lot of patience and dozens if not hundreds of compounding factors over decades.
Either that or going out into the streets with guns in hand, but that has historically worked out horribly time and time again and humanity should be past that savagery. Protests could happen, of course, since that's a bit different.
Regardless, with more initiatives to limit heavy industry, global shipping of goods that could be locally manufactured and an overall push for less consumerist lifestyles, humanity might even have a few hundred years left to kick around on this rock before the long term environmental consequences actually start becoming visible!
Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.