Two recent articles in the news are highlighting free-transit programs being used as a way to fight air pollution (which kills 7 million people each year!) and get people to try transit.
Salt Lake City is surrounded by mountains and suffers terrible pollution as the smog gets trapped, but it’s seeing some early strong results from its program.
Seoul, South Korea isn’t seeing quite the level of success, but it did an interesting thing in tying funding for free fares into its emergency-management system.
From a Next City article on Salt Lake City:
The free fares had the desired effect. the Utah Transit Authority saw a marked system-wide bump in ridership and estimates a big reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But, free rides cost the agency money and, short of a dedicated funding stream or new partnerships, it doesn’t think it can afford to make free fare days a recurring event. Local transit advocates were happy to see the bump in ridership, but rather than focusing on free fares, think the agency should spend money to improve transit service in a way that will naturally draw in new riders.
On Free Fare Friday, ridership increased 23 percent across the entire system compared to the previous five weekdays. On FrontRunner commuter rail, ridership jumped 66 percent. On TRAX light rail, ridership increased 32 percent. Bus ridership remained mostly flat. In total, UTA had an extra 22,800 people riding transit. They estimate the event got about 17,560 cars off the road that day, which equates to 200 fewer tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
From a CityLab article on Seoul:
As part of an emergency plan announced last year by Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, the city will make public transit free during rush hours on days when the air quality index reaches above 50 and is expected to stay there for at least a day. Free rides will be provided on the second day as well. To pay for the measure, Park set aside about $23 million in December, declaring the worsening air as a disaster in order to tap into the city’s disaster management fund.
Making transit free (or at least cheaper) is not an uncommon strategy to combat air pollution: Paris began offering free transit in response to smog in 2014, Milan slashed fares on its worst days, and Madrid has put out a proposal to do much the same. As a megacity with one of the most highly praised transit systems, eyes were certainly on Seoul to make the strategy work.
The article continues on about the difficulties involved with making free transit work over the long run.
The science of whether free-transit incentives can actually alter commuting behavior hasn’t exactly been promising. It has been shown to be effective in some small cities and communities, like around college campuses. In 2002, Chateauroux, France, saw an 80 percent increase on its mass transit system after only one year of making rides free, even turning a profit in the following years. Chateauroux’s population at the time clocked in at 49,000.
Seoul, on the other hand, has almost 10 million people. For the car-oriented megacity, whose mayor has characterized its residents as “addicted to cars,” a meager 2 percent increase in ridership isn’t far from what other big cities experience. There’s the problem of free transit incentives attracting the wrong crowd, as The Atlantic noted in a previous report on the use of free public transit in Estonia’s capital city of Tallinn: “Wealthier people with cars aren’t very sensitive to price changes. Free subway rides entice people who would otherwise walk, not people who would otherwise drive.”
Regardless of those hurdles, free transit is certainly worth further exploration. In an era when the air we breathe is so dangerous and the transit systems we have are underwhelming in terms of providing a quality service and product, we have to try harder to make people healthier and provide better travel options.
Other good articles on free transit include:
- American University’s free transit pass is a success, and the idea is slowly spreading (Mobility Lab)
- Missoula, Montana’s program (Mobility Lab)
- Whistler, British Columbia’s program (Mobility Lab)
- Can fare-less work? (LA Metro’s The Source)
- Seattle youth get a summer break on public transit (Next City)
- Sneakers that get you a free ride on Berlin transit (CityLab)
- Free public transit would make Rhode Island healthier economically and environmentally (ecoRI)