'Do we care about the public?': Cities weigh free public
transit amid rising costs
Progressive lawmakers across the U.S. say mobility is a
human right and want their residents to be able to freely move around their
cities, no matter their income.
Commuters at the North Station T station in Boston wait as
an Orange Line train pulls in on Bill Greene / Boston Globe via Getty Images
By Ben Kesslen and Ludwig Hurtado, NBC News, 18 February
2020
Michelle Wu, a City Council member in Boston, wants everyone
to ride for free on subways and buses that crisscross the region.
Wu says the city is experiencing a "transportation
crisis" as ridership declines, rush-hour traffic rises and the
infrastructure of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority continues
to crumble.
The transportation authority needs salvation and money for
repairs, commuters and local transit advocates say, but instead of raising
fares beyond the $2.90 it costs now if you pay for a subway ride in cash, Wu
thinks a solution may lie in dropping fares altogether.
Her position is shared by other progressive lawmakers across
the country who say mobility is a human right, like health care and education,
and think residents should be able to freely move around their cities, no
matter their income brackets. They propose eliminating fares on city buses,
light rail and trains to achieve their vision of universal mobility. But some
experts warn that free rides wouldn't solve the issues besetting many public
transit systems, including crumbling infrastructure, infrequent and unreliable
service, and routes that take workers nowhere near their jobs.
Kansas City, Missouri, could become the first major city to
eliminate bus fares in June under a proposal in the budget the City Council is
expected to approve by the end of March.
Mayor Quinton Lucas said scrapping the $1.50 bus fare would
be a windfall for working-class families that spend a good part of their
incomes on transportation, and he believes it would benefit the city's economy,
allowing people to move around more easily and patronize local businesses.
"Making transit free makes more job opportunities
accessible for more people," Lucas said. "We're a car-based city, so
if you don't have a car or bus fare, you don't get to where you need to
be."
The city would lose $8 million a year on fare-free transit,
but Lucas insisted that it would not be "a significant amount" of
Kansas City's $1.7 billion budget. By not paying for maintaining and using a
fare collection system, the city would save about $3 million a year, leaving
Kansas City officials to come up with only $5 million to cover losses, Lucas
said.
He said critics rarely ask where the money comes from for
other projects, like the hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on
building and maintaining streets or the $325 million to renovate Arrowhead
Stadium, where the Kansas City Chiefs play.
"That costs us and local government tens of millions of
dollars a year," he said. "So I think the real question people have
to ask is 'Do we care about the public?'"
Robbie Makinen, CEO of the Kansas City Area Transportation
Authority, said public transit is the glue that holds a community together.
"The return on investment for social justice,
compassion and empathy far outweighs the return on investment for asphalt and
concrete," he said.
The Kansas City transit authority partnered with the Center
for Economic Information at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to analyze
the economic impact of the proposed zero-fare policy. The
study found that free transit would increase Kansas City's regional gross
domestic product by more than $13 million a year and improve the livelihoods of
regular riders along with new riders encouraged to try public transit without
the fare barrier.
"For those living paycheck to paycheck, as most
Americans are, even an additional $50 (the cost of a monthly bus pass) per
month of income can make the difference in deciding which bills to pay,"
the study said.
Kansas City has embarked on similar but smaller experiments
before. In 2017, it made transit free for veterans and the next year for ninth-
to 12th-graders in four major school districts.
While advocates have championed the move, they say fare-free
policies aren't enough if transit isn't accessible.
Comparing 100 metropolitan areas of similar size to Kansas
City, a 2011
report from the Brookings Institution found that Kansas City's transit
system was among the 10 worst at connecting workers to their jobs, with only 18
percent of jobs in the metropolitan region accessible to job seekers by
commutes of less than 90 minutes.
For that reason, city leaders should not look at eliminating
fares as a "panacea" for transit problems, said Hayley Richardson, a
spokeswoman for TransitCenter, a nonprofit group based in New York City that
works to improve public transit around the country.
"A bus that comes once an hour that's free isn't useful
to people," Richardson said. "The way we make transit useful to
people is by making it come frequently and reliable."
