European cities consider making public transport free to tackle air pollution

By Rory Mulholland, Paris, The Telegraph, 25 March 2018

European cities are increasingly looking toward free transport in a bid to combat air pollution. 

Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, is the latest local leader hoping to make public transport free across the city, emulating the success of a handful of small towns across France which let residents board buses and trams without paying a cent.

The German government is also considering rolling out free transport across the entire country - with the same aim as in France of reducing air pollution - if a pilot scheme in five big cities this year works out.

Niort in western France has been running free buses since last September for its 125,000 inhabitants.

The scheme has been an enormous success, boosting passenger numbers by 130 per cent on some routes, slightly reducing the number of cars on the roads, and costing the town little more than when people had to buy tickets, said mayor Jérôme Baloge.

 

 Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is keen to make the city less polluted by the 2024 Olympic Games  Credit: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

But he agreed that making metros, buses, trams and suburban trains free in a big city is a far more radical, if not revolutionary, idea.

“In Niort the revenue from ticket sales represented only 10 per cent of cost of running public transport. In Paris it’s around half… And our buses were often half empty, while in Paris the metro and buses are packed,” he said.

Ms Hidalgo said last week that she was commissioning a study into free transport and wants officials and experts to report back by the end of 2018 on whether the scheme would be financially feasible.

The mayor has made a priority of tackling smog and is to ban diesel cars in the capital by 2024, when Paris will host the Summer Olympics.

The study will also look at the possibility of introducing a toll, like London's congestion charge, to discourage motorists from driving into Paris.

Supporters of the toll say it could be used to offset the cost of providing free transport.

Ms Hidalgo only has power over the city of Paris, which with 2.2 million residents makes up only a small part of the greater Paris region with a population of more than 12 million - 4.2 million of whom use public transport.

Valérie Pecresse, the conservative head of the wider Paris region and a rival of Ms Hidalgo, said she was "open to all new ideas" but warned the mayor against "going it alone" on free transport.

Ticket sales bring in €3 billion (£2.6 billion) a year that offset the total transport budget of €10 billion for the region, she noted, saying that this would have to be compensated for somehow and that she would not settle for "a euro less".

There was similar consternation about who was going to pay when it was revealed last month that the German government was looking at plans to make public transport free to try to reduce road traffic and lower pollution levels.

Free transport will be tested in five cities, including the former capital Bonn and the industrial cities Essen and Mannheim, by the end of the year, and if successful will be rolled out to more cities across the country, ministers said.

But Helmut Dedy, the head of the Council of German Cities, warned that the federal government would have to finance public transport if it wanted to make it free.

Most local transport in Germany is owned by municipalities.

Greenpeace came up with an original idea - it proposed that the government “should make sure that the car manufacturers finance the emergency measure” of free transport.

The Case for Free Public Transport

By Connor Beaton, The Bullet, 6 March, 2018 

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is a proud advocate of a world-class, fare-free public transport system for Scotland.

Transport has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, both in Scotland and across the world. Some have been cyclical: in Scotland’s capital, trams were built, dismantled, and then reintroduced. In other areas, we have seen consistent trends like the steady deregulation and privatization of services, which has left Edinburgh as the sole city in Scotland with a municipal bus operator.


Rail fares across the UK have soared in comparison to those of our European neighbours, and Scottish transport contracts go out to tender in a farcical franchise system whereby public sector companies in other countries can bid for control while those in Scotland are effectively barred.
Scotland, the country which gave the world the pedal bicycle and the pneumatic tyre, now has a public transport network which is broadly unfit for purpose.
Massive changes have to be made to ensure that our public transport network is not only of a standard befitting the people of Scotland, but one that is adapted to our environmental and economic needs – challenging climate change while connecting communities and creating jobs through enhanced mobility.

“We call unashamedly for the integration of services – whether bus, rail, ferry, underground or tram – under publicly-owned and democratically-run operators.”

The Scottish Socialist Party is brave enough to identify these changes. We call unashamedly for the integration of services – whether bus, rail, ferry, underground or tram – under publicly-owned and democratically-run operators.
But the bravest step we can take as a nation to totally transform the way we travel is to support the international movement for free public transport and become pioneers of true freedom of movement for working class people.
There is a strong economic, social, and environmental case for adopting this policy throughout the country. There is also precedent from successful fare-free public transport schemes in parts of France, Germany, Belgium, and Estonia as well as far-flung cities in China and the United States. [Ed.: see wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport, and FreeTransitToronto.org.] We have evidence of the policy’s affordability and benefit.
I would put to sceptics that the prospect of free healthcare was once unthinkable. With the creation of NHS Scotland in 1948, hundreds of thousands of people gained access to essential medical care for the first time; the positive impact on Scottish society has been immense. The threat of privatization and marketization is a terrifying prospect for many.
In the same spirit that the NHS was created over half a century ago, we can come together to build a public transport system that works for everyone. We can tackle poverty and social exclusion by extending access across urban and rural Scotland; this will be a financial relief for workers, parents and carers on low incomes, and make it even easier for families to switch from road trips to more eco-friendly bus rides and train journeys.
Building free transport links between rural communities even brings forward the possibility of economic regeneration in the Highlands, the Scottish Borders, and rural Fife, where greater interconnectivity and public investment could instigate growth and begin to reverse the exodus of young people from small towns and villages.
Free transport is neither easy nor cheap, nor can it alone transform Scotland. However, as part of a comprehensive socialist strategy, it can radically change the conditions of Scottish workers and help realise the full potential of totally under-utilized modes of transport.
The SSP has a good track record of winning others to our ideas. We championed free prescriptions in Holyrood and led the broad-based campaign to tackle poverty through the provision free school meals. We are committed supporters of universalism and pioneered many policies which were later taken up by the mainstream parties.

Ambition and Vision

Free transport is yet another distinctive SSP policy with ambition, vision and a firm footing in the needs and aspirations of Scotland. It is a policy whose implementation is not only possible, but increasingly necessary – addressing the pressing ecological crisis facing the world as well as the acute issues of poverty and exclusion at home.
These are among the reasons why free transport proposals are becoming more and more popular across Europe. Many in Scotland point to more affordable and efficient public transport systems in countries like Germany to highlight the shortcomings of our own – but to seek merely to emulate them is to limit our ambition, as proven by the spirited HVV umsonst! campaigners now pushing to scrap fares in Germany’s second-largest city.
In Sweden, anarchist initiative Planka.nu takes a particularly brazen approach to free transport campaigning by encouraging members of the public to leap ticket barriers, while operating a shared pool of funds to pay off any subsequent fines for its members.
Even in Scotland, understanding and appetite for the policy is slowly building. Scottish Green activists came close to persuading the rest of their party to back the progressive policy when it was revisited at their 2014 party conference.
It is often easier in politics to identify problems than solutions. For the SSP, free transport is a valuable idea that carries great potential as an innovative solution to an intersection of problems. For this reason, it is a policy that socialists will develop and promote further in the run-up to next year’s Scottish Parliament election. •
Connor Beaton is the branch organizer of Dundee Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). He serves on the SSP’s Executive Committee.

German cities to trial free public transport to cut pollution

German cities to trial free public transport to cut pollution

Plan to be tested in five cities in effort to meet EU air pollution targets and avoid big fines.

By Philip Oltermann

The Guardian, Wed 14 Feb 2018

 

Public transport is hugely popular in Germany, with 10.3 billion journeys being made in 2017. A plan to trial free public transport is part of an effort to reduce road traffic. [Photo: Alamy] 

“Car nation” Germany has surprised neighbours with a radical proposal to reduce road traffic by making public transport free, as Berlin scrambles to meet EU air pollution targets and avoid big fines.

The move comes just over two years after Volkswagen’s devastating “dieselgate” emissions cheating scandal unleashed a wave of anger at the auto industry, a keystone of German prosperity.

“We are considering public transport free of charge in order to reduce the number of private cars,” three ministers including the environment minister, Barbara Hendricks, wrote to EU environment commissioner Karmenu Vella in the letter seen by AFP Tuesday.

 “Effectively fighting air pollution without any further unnecessary delays is of the highest priority for Germany,” the ministers added.

The proposal will be tested by “the end of this year at the latest” in five cities across western Germany, including former capital Bonn and industrial cities Essen and Mannheim.

The move is a radical one for the normally staid world of German politics – especially as Chancellor Angela Merkel is presently only governing in a caretaker capacity, as Berlin waits for the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD) to confirm a hard-fought coalition deal.

On top of ticketless travel, other steps proposed Tuesday include further restrictions on emissions from vehicle fleets like buses and taxis, low-emissions zones or support for car-sharing schemes.

Action is needed soon, as Germany and eight fellow EU members including Spain, France and Italy sailed past a 30 January deadline to meet EU limits on nitrogen dioxide and fine particles.

Vella gave countries extra time to present further pollution-busting measures or face legal action.

“Life-threatening” pollution affects more than 130 cities in Europe, according to the commission, causing some 400,000 deaths and costing €20bn euros (US$24.7bn) in health spending per year in the bloc.

Countries that fail to keep to EU limits could face legal action at the European court of justice, the EU’s highest tribunal, which can levy fines on member states.

Even without the pressure from Brussels, air quality has surged to the top of Berlin’s priorities over the past year.

Suspicions over manipulated emissions data have spread to other car manufacturers since Volkswagen’s 2015 admission to cheating regulatory tests on 11 million vehicles worldwide.

Environmentalists brought court cases aimed at banning diesels from parts of some city centres, and fears millions of drivers could be affected spurred Merkel into action.

Titans like BMW, Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler or the world’s biggest carmaker Volkswagen agreed to pay some €250m euros into a billion-euro fund to upgrade local transport.

The government “should make sure that the car manufacturers finance the emergency measure” of free transport, Greenpeace urged, adding that more parking and road tolls in cities could help reduce urban traffic.

On their own account, the auto firms have stepped up plans to electrify their ranges, with a barrage of battery-powered or hybrid models planned for the coming decade.

Public transport is highly popular in Germany, with the number of journeys increasing regularly over the past 20 years to reach 10.3 billion in 2017.

In comparison with other major European nations, tickets can be cheap: a single ticket in Berlin costs €2.90, while the equivalent on the London Underground costs £4.90 (€5.50 or $6.80).

But cities were quick to warn that more planning was needed if free travel was to succeed.

“I don’t know any manufacturer who would be able to deliver the number of electric buses we would need” to meet increased demand if transport was free, Bonn mayor Ashok Sridharan told news agency DPA.

Meanwhile, the Association of German Cities chief, Helmut Dedy, warned that “we expect a clear statement about how [free transport] will be financed” from the federal government.

Other attempts around the world to offer citizens free travel have failed, including in the US city of Seattle.

Ministers “should think again during a ride on the U6 [underground line] in Berlin at 7.30 am,” Die Welt newspaper commented.

“The conclusion would be clear: more carriages, more personnel, and maybe even more tracks and lines would be needed. Where would the billions for that come from?”