By John Cookson, BigThink.
More
than half of the world’s population lives near an urban centre. But as our
cities grow increasing traffic has clogged roads and highways. In much of
the U.S., a car—there are 246 million registered, as of 2009—is a
near-necessity. Meanwhile, longer commutes have been linked with severe health
problems, according to a recent report by Gallup.
Public
transportation systems hold the promise of more efficient movement—and a
healthier population—but in many U.S. cities there are few incentives to
promote widespread use of buses, subways, trolleys and trains.
A
way to realign these incentives and increase public transit use is to make all
public transportation free to passengers, Erik Olin Wright, a professor of
sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Big Think. According
to Wright, the benefits of free public transit are broader than are apparent
with strict financial bookkeeping. The full value comes in a range of ancillary
economic, health and ecological benefits, including:
- "Reduced air pollution, including especially reduced greenhouse gases, which would help mitigate global warming."
- "More efficient labor markets since it is easier for poor people to get to jobs. This is a benefit to employers for it makes it easier to hire people and it is a benefit to the people without cars who now find it easier to get jobs. But it is also a benefit to the society at large because it contributes to a long-term reduction in poverty."
- "Health benefits: reduced asthma and other illnesses linked to automobile generated pollution."
- "Less congestion on the highways for those who do need to drive."
These
"positive externalities" need to be highlighted to gain public
support for free transit, says Wright.
College
towns have been a testing ground for free-ride transit—for students and
non-students alike. Programs currently operate in cities such as Clemson, South Carolina, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As well,
popular tourist towns from Park City, Utah, to Hawaii’s
Big
Island have created free systems. Baltimore, too, recently started
the Charm City Circulator, a fleet of twenty-one
buses traveling three free routes in the city. Other transit systems have
free-fare programs for children, students and the elderly.
The
key is to scale an already-subsidized industry with select free-fare groups
into a system-wide program free to all. This would create a tipping point
toward more people using public transportation. "Of course public
transportation has to be paid for,” writes Wright, “but it should not be paid
for through the purchase of tickets by individual riders—it should be paid for
by society as a whole through the one mechanism we have available for this,
taxation."
"This
should not be thought of as a 'subsidy' in the sense of a transfer of resources
to an inefficient service in order for it to survive," he says, "but
rather as the optimal allocation of our resources to create the transportation
environment in which people can make sensible individual choices between public
and private means of transformation that reflect the true costs of these
alternatives."
Link to original: https://bigthink.com/think-tank/should-all-public-transit-be-free
