Public transport should be free for everyone, and that is something I'm willing to pay higher taxes for. If it's free more people will use it, which will justify more investment.
If I choose to bike or walk or take a cab because the train is being terrible, that is felt directly in decreased revenue. I think that’s important for keeping things a little more honest.
If someone can do a private shuttle bus more cheaply than the public transit, and it also offers better service, that should be made obvious. If the public service is entirely paid for by taxes, it would be really difficult to see what’s going on.
It's not that public transport is a bad idea, it's that assholes will be assholes, and the public purse is annoyingly easy to spend on obvious bullshit and political bacon. I wonder if there's a way to structure these things so they're more resistant to these shenanigans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
"[...] the problems plaguing the subway did not suddenly sweep over the city like a tornado or a flood. They were years in the making, and they might have been avoided if decision makers had put the interests of train riders and daily operations ahead of flashy projects and financial gimmicks.
An examination by The New York Times reveals in stark terms how the needs of the aging, overburdened system have grown while city and state politicians have consistently steered money away from addressing them."
"Century-old tunnels and track routes are crumbling, but The Times found that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget for subway maintenance has barely changed, when adjusted for inflation, from what it was 25 years ago.
Signal problems and car equipment failures occur twice as frequently as a decade ago, but hundreds of mechanic positions have been cut because there is not enough money to pay them — even though the average total compensation for subway managers has grown to well over $200,000 a year."
"None of this happened on its own. It was the result of a series of decisions by both Republican and Democratic politicians — governors from George E. Pataki to Mr. Cuomo and mayors from Rudolph W. Giuliani to Bill de Blasio. Each of them cut the subway’s budget or co-opted it for their own priorities.
They stripped a combined $1.5 billion from the M.T.A. by repeatedly diverting tax revenues earmarked for the subways and also by demanding large payments for financial advice, I.T. help and other services that transit leaders say the authority could have done without.
They pressured the M.T.A. to spend billions of dollars on opulent station makeovers and other projects that did nothing to boost service or reliability, while leaving the actual movement of trains to rely on a 1930s-era signal system with fraying, cloth-covered cables.
They saddled the M.T.A. with debt and engineered a deal with creditors that brought in quick cash but locked the authority into paying $5 billion in interest that it otherwise never would have had to pay."
Public transport is already heavily subsidised in most European cities.
One of the aim is to cut car use, not to specifically balance the books of just public transports. The issue is thus to avoid using taxpayers' money to finance lines that run mostly empty.
This can improve passenger flow (I live in Paris, and turnstyles are a major pain during rush hour) and passenger convenience.
In the case of Paris, traffic is positively horrible, and parking is even worse of a joke. Yet there are people who still prefer driving and who don't even come from the suburbs (where public transit may be somewhat lacking). The reason is clearly one of convenience which means that this should be taken into account by the authorities if they really want people to drive less (which is the official policy here).
My concern is that free transit would lead to an insatiable amount of travel demand, which we already see with free roads that magically fill up the moment expansions open. A free train is useless if you can't board it. And even with Paris's ambitious plans to expand transit there probably wouldn't be enough capacity, and even that new capacity is only scheduled to come online in a few years' time, since you can't increase buses and trains available instantly.
In the case of Paris, public transit is already insufficient during peak times. I'm sure most people who don't already take it have reasons other than the price, meaning that if it were free there wouldn't be a significant rise in traffic.
However, I think that all the money spent on the ticketing system could help improve the general reliability which in turn would help provide more capacity. This would probable incite more people to take public transport which could help the transport authority obtain more funding from the region government.
As in Paris the transport authority is already heavily subsidized, I think it would be interesting to have to some numbers on how much tickets bring in vs how much the whole ticketing infrastructure costs.
This is coming from Germany though, so ymmv
I agree with the main thrust of what you're saying. But money does serve an important purpose, rationing scarce goods.
Transportation should never be a scarce good. If induced demand highlights cracks in our transportation infrastructure, our job is not limit that use but to fix it through increased capacity.
For example it might cause a company that was going to open an office in a neighboring city to open the office in Paris instead.
If they can't afford it they end up with overcrowded buses and then people who don't want to wait a long time for a bus that isn't full have to buy cars instead, and traffic gets worse for everyone.
It makes society better because it means less congestions on the street and less pollution, it makes it fairer for those that don't have a choice (because they're too far from work to bike or walk, because their city does not have have the right bike lanes, etc ...), it's the definition of what taxes should be for in a developped society, imho.
I'm happy to pay higher taxes for it, despite not needing it since I work remotely and have most place I go to within walking distance by living in city center.
Not that the article here is for kids (and in particular for Paris) so my comparisons is not that great I admit but still, living in a rural area I've spent my entire teenage decade dependant on public transport to go to the school my parent wanted for me, to go to "the city" see my friends/visit places/go to the mediatheque where they had computers (!!!), and along with the food cost at school it was a major expense for my parents, that they would have had to cut on if one of them was unlucky and lost his or her job.
So it still rings very true to me. But again, given it's about Paris, my exemple is not that great. You probably realized I would probably be ok for it country wide though.
Also, there must be plenty of less obvious effects. E.g. Uber Eats or other kinds of delivery services can get cheaper, if couriers can travel across the city all day for free.
And Uber Eats wont use public transport, it is very slow compared to an e-bike or scooter.
I travel often to NYC and it doesn't seem much different to those of many major European cities, at least in terms of reach.
This is location dependent, public transport is not a build-it-and-they-will-use-it expenditure. Where I live, it is not something I'm willing to pay higher taxes for and every time it's done, it goes empty and costs lots. It is the equivalent of just setting a bunch of money on fire.