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French city of Montpellier makes public transport free for all residents
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don't want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that'll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn't keep vagrants out.
It's not even the first city in Europe to do so. It works, but also causes some issues.
What type of issues?
In the short term, there's also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won't be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country's population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
Not an issue, but in many cases the issue is service quality, not price.