Tallinn has been recognized as an innovative city in China
By Toomas Raag, Pealinn (Estonian newspaper) 27 September 2019
The European-Chinese Green and Smart Cities Summit [took] place in Nanning, China from September 1 to September 5, where Tallinn [capital city of Estonia] was recognized as an innovative city in the category of free public transport and the launch of the Park and Travel system.
The award was received by Tiit Terik, (pictured below) Chairman of the Tallinn City Council, who also gave a presentation on "Free public transport in Tallinn and Estonia - either an experiment or an experience".
Former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is one of the keynote speakers at the event, who said that smart and green solutions in the European Union and China must serve the interests of the environment and people, and that they must work together.
In his presentation, Tiit Terik pointed out that free public transport is a good solution for reducing passenger cars and avoiding congestion in cities.
Christchurch mayoral candidate, John Minto says "Free Public Transport is an important part of fighting climate change - Minto for Mayor will get it going in Christchurch!"
Today Minto welcomed an important "breakthrough in the debate about free public transport":
"A lot can be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport," he said yesterday.
Transport had a crucial role to play, and he urged "more promotion of public transport, with introduction of "free city transport offered by local governments, paid by ratepayers, at least as a trial exercise".
Some fare-free public transport had been offered in Auckland and he would like to see this extended and offered elsewhere.
Sir Alan is a University of Otago botanist and chairman of the Wise Response Society, a group that promotes sustainable approaches and a "wise response" to climate change challenges.
There was "no substitute for reducing emissions", rather than simply trying to capture carbon through extensive exotic tree planting, he said yesterday.
Such emission cuts required promotion, policies and regulations by central and local governments.
And cuts were vital "in effectively addressing global warming and associated climate disruption", he added.
"Permanent forests, exotic or native, would be more effective in sequestering carbon, " he said.
- This story is part of the Otago Daily Times contribution to Covering Climate Now, an international campaign by more than 170 media organisations to draw attention to the issue of climate change ahead of a United Nations summit on September 23. To read more of our coverage, go to odt.co.nz/climate.
Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill
Submission by Fare-Free NZ editor Roger Fowler (July 2019):
I support the general thrust of the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill with the strongest possible targets and serious and concerted action planning to achieve those targets.
Recommendations
I submit the following proposal as a viable action towards achieving the short term and long term robust targets of the Bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
1. The Government should immediately declare a nation-wide 'climate emergency' to set the country on the equivalent of a 'war footing' to mobilise maximum support for concerted planned action to combat climate change. The government needs to lead a serious response to this climate emergency and discard empty slogans and ineffective piece-meal gestures. The action has to be big and bold to produce a national mind-set turn-around needed to be successful.
2. Recognising that the proliferation of cars and chronic daily traffic congestion in our cities is already causing record vehicle emission levels and hundreds of premature deaths, plus extensive heart and acute respiratory diseases, and that the impact on the environment is rising, the Government should make urgent steps to place public transport into the hands of appropriate elected governing bodies and plan to upgrade all public transports services and infrastructure to cater for a major increase in usage, and to allow for the introduction of fare-free, quality, no-emission public transport in all the main cities. These moves will have a huge 'big and bold' impact of attracting a large bulk of people out of cars and onto quality, modern, integrated public transport and ending chronic traffic congestion - a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
When you wake up each morning, what do you think of first?
You probably think about what you’re going to do that day. Off to school, then
back home, but do you ever pause to think about how you’ll get there? Probably
not, but take a second to consider it, because whether you step out into the
crisp morning air and into the driver’s seat or into the nearest subway car can
change a lot. It’s not just a matter of how you get to where you’re going, but
the means of getting there.
Building networks of public transit users – ones from across
the spectrum of people who live in Los Angeles – requires removing the biggest
barrier to use: the transit fare. It’s imperative that the change be made now.
Compared to public transportation, a single car throws
vastly more carbon into the atmosphere, fits fewer people, and isolates us from
our communities. Like any other essential program, say healthcare or college,
we need free public transportation. Until transit is free, every city without
it will be plagued by the dominance of cars – and car companies – which destroy
an environment already under siege.
Could Kansas City become the first major US city with totally Free Public Transit?
The Kansas City streetcar is already free to ride, thanks to a taxing
district whose revenues pay for its operation. City officials hope to
use a similar method to make all buses in the city free.
We don’t put coins in street lamps or pay by the minute in
public parks. Here’s why we can make subway and bus fares a thing of the past.
If we are to believe transport experts and practitioners,
abolishing fares for all passengers is the last thing public transport
operators should be doing. For Alan Flausch, an ex-CEO of the Brussels public
transport authority and current Secretary General of International Association
of Public Transport, “in terms of mobility, free public transport is absurd.”
According to Vincent Kauffmann, a professor at University of
Lausanne and one of key figures in sustainable mobility, “free public transport
does not make any sense.” Getting rid of tickets in mass transit is judged
“irrational,” “uneconomical” and “unsustainable.”
However, if we turn to commentators from outside the field
of transport, the perspective on fare abolition changes radically. Social
scientists, activists, journalists and public officials—often speaking from
cities where fare abolition has actually been put to the test—fervently defend
the measure.
For Judith Dellheim, a researcher at Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung
in Berlin, providing free access to public transport is the “first step towards
socio-ecological transformation.” For Michiel Van Hulten, one of the earliest
proponents of free public transport in Europe, “it is about returning to the
commons.” Finally, according to Naomi Klein, this is precisely what cities
around the world should be doing —“to really respond to the urgency of climate
change, public transport would have to become free.”
Free child fares on Auckland’s public transport at weekends
Our Auckland, 2 September 2019
[Photo: Metlink] From Saturday 7 September, children aged 5 to 15, using a registered AT HOP card, will be able to travel free on Auckland Transport’s bus, train and select ferry services during weekends and public holidays.
Children under the age of five already travel free with a paying adult at any time.
This change comes as part of the $1.1 million contribution from Auckland Council towards public transport initiatives announced earlier in the year.
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff says the free travel will encourage the next generation of public transport users.
“We’re spending more than ever before on building our public transport network across the region. Aucklanders are embracing transport choice, with more than 100 million journeys taken on public transport in the past year,” he says.
“Making public transport free for under 16s on weekends and public holidays will encourage more people to leave their cars at home and use existing capacity. Every person on public transport is one less car on the roads, helping to reduce carbon emissions and traffic congestion.”
Colin Homan, AT Group Manager of Integrated Networks says public transport will now be accessible for all young Aucklanders.
“We’re really excited about this, families will be able to enjoy some time together and explore the region without worrying about the traffic.”
Travel for free
There are a few things that you need to do before you head out on public transport.
You need to make sure that your kids have an AT HOP card and it is registered with a child concession.
Setting up a child discount concession is easy:
Buy an AT HOP card for each of your children aged 5 to 15
Create a MyAT account
Register your child’s AT HOP card
Start your adventure!
A child concession will be applied automatically when you register your child’s AT HOP card with the correct date of birth.
It may take 24 - 72 hours after registration for the concession to be applied, so make sure you register the card/s at least two days before you intend to travel.
People cross a square with a 100% free autobus parked in
background in Dunkirk, northern France on October 30, 2018.[Philippe
Huguen, AFP]
By
Colin Kinniburgh, France24. 28 August 2019
The city of Dunkirk in northern France launched a
revamped bus system last year with a twist – it’s completely free. A new
study shows that the programme is not only revitalising the city center
but also helping the environment.
Dunkirk, which sits on the “Opal Coast” at the northernmost tip of France,
is best known for the battle and evacuation of hundreds of thousands of
Allied soldiers to Britain during the Second World War. After the war,
the port city was rebuilt as an industrial hub, with oil refineries and a
major steel mill.
Now the city (population 90,000) seeks to become a beacon of a greener economy, by building infrastructure such as a large-scale wind farm
off the coast and transforming its city center to be more
pedestrian-friendly. Key to this effort is its free bus system,
inaugurated on 1 September, 2018. The network connects Dunkirk to a
cluster of neighbouring towns, with five express lines running every ten minutes throughout the day, and a dozen other lines serving less dense areas. Altogether, it serves some 200,000 residents.
For many, the effect has been nothing short of liberating, says Vanessa Delevoye, editor of Urbis,
a magazine of urban politics published by the local government. To get
around town, you no longer need to look at the schedules, buy tickets or
worry about parking, she says. You just hop on the bus.
“It’s
become a synonym of freedom,” she says, attracting those who might not
otherwise have used public transport. In this largely working-class
city, “people of limited means say they’ve rediscovered transport” – a
prerequisite to finding a job, maintaining friendships or participating
in local arts and culture. But it’s not only disadvantaged or
working-class people who take the bus. It is also attracting
white-collar workers, students and pensioners, according to Delevoye.
A postwar industrial hub, Dunkirk now seeks to become a beacon of a greener economy. [Etienne, Flickr Creative Commons]
Accessibility has been “one of the keys of Dunkirk’s
success” with free transport, says Maxime Huré, a political scientist at
the University of Perpignan and president of the think tank VIGS,
which specialises in urban development and transport issues. Over the
past year, Huré has led an in-depth study of Dunkirk’s free bus
experiment, commissioned by the city and carried out by an independent
team of social science researchers. The study will officially be
released on 11 September, but some of its initial findings
have already been published. They show that ridership has spiked over
the last year, more than doubling on weekends and increasing by around
60 percent during the week. Going car-free
More
revealing than the simple increase is the way that the free buses are
changing residents’ habits. In a town where a large majority of
residents (about two-thirds) have typically depended on their cars to
get around, half of the 2,000 passengers surveyed by researchers said
they take the bus more or much more than before. Of those new users, 48
percent say they regularly use it instead of their cars.
Some (approximately 5 percent of the total respondents) even said that
they sold their car or decided against buying a second one because of
the free buses.
Source: VIGS. Infographic by AGUR, courtesy of Urbis magazine. Adapted by France 24.“My car was getting old, it needed major repairs, so I
gave it up and I told myself, the new bus network is coming, I’ll see
how it goes,” one retiree, Philippe, told the VIGS researchers. “In the
end, I don’t need it – I do everything by bus and on foot.”
For
some young people, the reliable bus service means they may not need to
start driving at all. “My cousin started taking lessons to get her
driver’s license, she failed, and she dropped it because she found a job
and the bus takes her straight there from her house,” said Laure,
another passenger.
Despite the clear implications for reducing
pollution, fighting climate change was not the main goal of Dunkirk’s
free bus campaign, says Delevoye. If nothing else, though, it’s a
welcome side effect.
The free buses are a step in overhauling the
car-centered model that has shaped European and North American cities
since the Second World War. That model has shown itself not only to be
environmentally unsustainable, but “disastrous” for urban life, argues
Delevoye. Could the Dunkirk model catch on?
Styling itself as a “laboratory”
of free transport, Dunkirk has attracted an “incessant” stream of
visitors intrigued at whether it could work in their cities, says
Delevoye. Among them was Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who took a ride on Dunkirk’s buses last October. A few months later, she announced that Paris would extend free transit passes
to children under 11 and young people under the age of 20 with a
handicap, taking effect this Sunday, 1 September. That’s in addition to
senior citizens earning less than €2,000 a month, who already benefited
from free ‘Navigo’ passes.
Such measures remain a far cry from
Dunkirk’s model, whose appeal rests in part on there being no forms to
fill in or criteria to meet. Expanding free public transport to the
level of a major city like Paris poses a completely different set of
challenges, says Huré. Before the network was revamped in Dunkirk, buses
were often almost empty – a problem common to many small and
medium-sized cities. Major metropolises tend to face the opposite
problem: a public transport system that is saturated, especially at peak
hours.
Historically, the lack of travelers on Dunkirk’s buses
also meant that ticket sales contributed only a small amount – about 10
percent – of the system’s funding. The rest was publicly subsidised.
Dunkirk is known for its colourful annual
carnival. This year, the carnival period saw a spike in bus ridership. [Etienne,
Flickr Creative Commons]
For Dunkirk’s left-wing Mayor Patrice Vergriete, who took
office in 2014 after campaigning in large part on the free bus pledge,
the small share of ticket revenue was less a problem than an opportunity. It meant that the city could get rid of fares without a major impact on its budget.
In
short, finding the resources to make buses free came down to a
“political choice”, says Delevoye. Even in Paris, which is on the high
end of funding from customers at 28 percent, the transport system is paid for largely by taxation. In other words, the obstacles are less financial than political. A “figurehead” for post-industrial urban transition
Meanwhile,
several cities closer to Dunkirk’s size are testing out their own
versions. Among them is Calais, less than 50 kilometers down the coast.
Mayor Natacha Bouchart, of the right-wing Républicains party, presented
the measure as a response to the Yellow Vest movement’s
demands for greater purchasing power and better public services. It was
voted for unanimously by the local government and will take effect in
2020, affecting 100,000 residents. As well as Calais, Chateauroux (population 44,000) and Niort
(population 59,000) in central-western France have also made their
buses free in recent years, although without necessarily improving the
service.
Valenciennes, another city in France’s industrial north,
is taking a step in the same direction. Starting this Sunday, residents
under the age of 25 can sign up for a pass that will allow them to
travel around for free, after a €20 registration fee.
For Vincent Jarousseau, a photojournalist who spent two years documenting life in neighbouring Denain for his book Les racines de la colère
(The Roots of Anger), the interest of Valenciennes’s approach is mostly
“symbolic”. For one thing, students, who are among the main users of
public transit in the area, already benefit from steeply discounted
passes. And those who wish to take advantage of the new policy face an
initial bureaucratic hurdle – they can’t just step on the tram.
Still,
Jarousseau says the push toward free transport could help relieve the
pressure on some young residents, who risk confronting ticket
controllers when they can’t pay the fare. Denain, which is part of the
Valenciennois transport network, is one of the poorest cities in France,
its economy decimated by the closure of an iconic steel plant in the
late 1970s as well as surrounding coal mines. It was an early base of
support for the Yellow Vest movement last fall and winter.
Dunkirk remains a heavily industrial, working-class city with an active harbor.[Etienne, Flickr Creative Commons]
For Damien Carême, the mayor of Grande-Synthe (which
neighbors Dunkirk), improving the lives of working-class residents,
revitalising small cities and fighting climate change go hand in hand. Speaking in 2016, Carême (of the Green party, Europe Ecologie les Verts), said
he hoped Dunkirk’s fare-free model could “make the urban area a
figurehead for industrial territories undergoing environmental
transition.”
So far, it’s been a “winning bet”, says Huré. He adds
that, despite the different challenges they face, larger cities should
not rule out going fare-free. In the interim, Dunkirk’s example is
winning over skeptics. Even for supporters like Delevoye, the policy has
revealed unexpected benefits. One year in, free transit is increasingly
looking like an idea whose time has come.
