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by hjanssen
1419 days ago
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> free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes Source for this claim? I would be surprised if it holds true. > Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides This is a problem with the infrastructure, not free rides. Of course capacity planning has to be adapted to keep up with increased usage, but thats literally what we want. We want more people to use public transportation, limiting or capping usage is the wrong approach IMHO. |
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> Residents of the Estonian capital of Talinn have been able to ride public transportation for free since 2013. Last year Estonia’s national auditor issued its assessment of that policy: It had induced many additional transit rides, but it failed to reduce car journeys. Dunkirk, France, and Frydek-Mistek, Czech Republic, have adopted free transit as well.
> “There’s no evidence at all that cities introducing fare-free public transport have seen their car traffic reduced,” said Mohamed Mezghani, the secretary general of the International Association of Public Transport, which has published a policy brief on the topic. “Most of the [new] people taking public transport used to walk.”
> The story was similar in Santiago, Chile, where researchers randomly assigned free two-week transit passes to residents. Those receiving the free passes took 12% more trips overall, but they did not drive less.
> If free public transportation failed to attract drivers in relatively transit-rich Europe and Santiago, there’s little reason to think it would fare better (pun intended) in the U.S., where scant transit service acts as a deterrent. An extensive 2012 study by the National Academies of Sciences noted that fare-free experiments undertaken in Denver (1978-9) and Austin (1989-90) failed to reduce driving; most new trips were taken by those lacking access to a car.
> Three MBTA bus routes went fare-free last August, and data showed that ridership on the 28 line rose 38%. (Other Boston bus routes, where fares were still collected, also saw increases, but smaller ones.) A survey of riders indicated that 15% of riders were new — but the fare-free rides replaced more biking and walking trips (8%) than driving (5%).
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Limiting or capping usage is the reality in most major cities because we cannot build our way out of the induced demand. Guangzhou is no slouch to public transport construction, in 25 years they have gone from zero to 621km of metro (the third largest system in the world) and yet even they cannot handle the capacity crunch. If there is no hope at Chinese levels of metro investment it’ll be impossible for anyone to actually build enough.