10 ms·

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 tax

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
KronisLV 5y ago
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.
- erdo 5y ago
  Except we don't have anything like 50 years!
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Disagreed! 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! Edit: phrasing
- Lekoit 5y ago
  Longer you wait more generations are getting used to it slower. I agree with the other commentir: let's stop talking let's start doing.
- mellavora 5y ago
  I like this, but let's make it 50 days instead of 50 years. Or maybe weeks. I could see 52 weeks.
newsclues 5y ago
Free public transit for people who file taxes makes so much sense. The time and money costs of collecting fares is far to high.
- lbriner 5y ago
  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.
  - ratww 5y ago
    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.
    - lbriner 5y ago
      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.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      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.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Adjust it based on the country’s tax system, but in Canada it would work because the employed and those on benefits tend to file taxes.
sokoloff 5y ago
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.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  That would indeed cut quite a cost (monetary and environmental) due to barriers, tickets, validation machines, selling points, controllers...
  - whiterock 5y ago
    I don‘t think the cost is so high here, we have covert ticket inspectors, none of those fancy electric gates.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      And if you're prepared to spend that much money, I'd rather prioritise spending it on improved service first.
    - Fargren 5y ago
      Aren't inspectors more expensive than gates? You don't have to pay a salary to the gates.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        Well, gates need people to install/maintenance them. And they're also pretty pointless unless you have controllers, too. Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904eb85b-11fc-4ebb-b5b2-1f2b2fd8313f/640_000_arp3010764.jpg https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
bakuninsbart 5y ago
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.
- danr4 5y ago
  SaaS pricing infiltrates real life
- pedrocr 5y ago
  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.
- aloe_falsa 5y ago
  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.
ortusdux 5y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  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?
  - Scarblac 5y ago
    Shouldn't it be easier in London due to higher density?
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      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.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    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?
lbriner 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lbriner 5y ago
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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  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.
- smtm 5y ago
  The alternative: They get delivered by their parents in the fat SUV, congesting curbsides in front of schools.
wazoox 5y ago
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.
- scarby2 5y ago
  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.
m_ke 5y ago
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. [1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-on-new-cops-to-save-200m-on-fare-evasion/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-o...
msla 5y ago
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.
- Mirioron 5y ago
  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.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > 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).
cannabis_sam 5y ago
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.
- scarby2 5y ago
  > our society is based around subsidizing the fuel cost of those polluting cars I think you mean being subsidized by the fuel cost of the cars?
m463 5y ago
If I were a homeless person, that would be great -- just get a seat on a warm, heated train, and I have a bathroom to shower in any time I want!
- JFKKFJ 5y ago
  It's almost my situation. For 1039 Euro/y I can access all public transport in Lombardy, Italy. Train is my 'office': warm heated place, bathroom, wi-fi, 220V for my old PC :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

KronisLV 5y ago

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.

erdo 5y ago
Except we don't have anything like 50 years!
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Disagreed! 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! Edit: phrasing
Lekoit 5y ago
Longer you wait more generations are getting used to it slower. I agree with the other commentir: let's stop talking let's start doing.
mellavora 5y ago
I like this, but let's make it 50 days instead of 50 years. Or maybe weeks. I could see 52 weeks.

newsclues 5y ago

Free public transit for people who file taxes makes so much sense. The time and money costs of collecting fares is far to high.

lbriner 5y ago
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.
- ratww 5y ago
  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.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    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.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    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.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Adjust it based on the country’s tax system, but in Canada it would work because the employed and those on benefits tend to file taxes.

sokoloff 5y ago

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.

southerntofu 5y ago
That would indeed cut quite a cost (monetary and environmental) due to barriers, tickets, validation machines, selling points, controllers...
- whiterock 5y ago
  I don‘t think the cost is so high here, we have covert ticket inspectors, none of those fancy electric gates.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    And if you're prepared to spend that much money, I'd rather prioritise spending it on improved service first.
  - Fargren 5y ago
    Aren't inspectors more expensive than gates? You don't have to pay a salary to the gates.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Well, gates need people to install/maintenance them. And they're also pretty pointless unless you have controllers, too. Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904eb85b-11fc-4ebb-b5b2-1f2b2fd8313f/640_000_arp3010764.jpg https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...
  - 908B64B197 5y ago

bakuninsbart 5y ago

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.

danr4 5y ago
SaaS pricing infiltrates real life
pedrocr 5y ago
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.
aloe_falsa 5y ago
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.

ortusdux 5y ago

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
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?
- Scarblac 5y ago
  Shouldn't it be easier in London due to higher density?
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    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.
- mellavora 5y ago
  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?

lbriner 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lbriner 5y ago

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.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
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.
smtm 5y ago
The alternative: They get delivered by their parents in the fat SUV, congesting curbsides in front of schools.

wazoox 5y ago

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.

scarby2 5y ago
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.

m_ke 5y ago

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. [1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-on-new-cops-to-save-200m-on-fare-evasion/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-o...

msla 5y ago

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.

Mirioron 5y ago
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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > 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).

cannabis_sam 5y ago

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.

scarby2 5y ago
> our society is based around subsidizing the fuel cost of those polluting cars I think you mean being subsidized by the fuel cost of the cars?

m463 5y ago

If I were a homeless person, that would be great -- just get a seat on a warm, heated train, and I have a bathroom to shower in any time I want!

JFKKFJ 5y ago
It's almost my situation. For 1039 Euro/y I can access all public transport in Lombardy, Italy. Train is my 'office': warm heated place, bathroom, wi-fi, 220V for my old PC :)