A number of American cities have been looking hopefully towards free public transport as a cure for a whole collection of urban evils. Not the least of these are persistent city attempts to provide relief from ever-deepening poverty as city housing rentals become more and more unaffordable.
Just one tip of a pocketbook-straining iceberg that can be influenced by transport costs: gentrification. Older, impoverished inner city suburbs until recently made it possible to live within walking distance of lower-paid downtown jobs. Rapid gentrification of these suburbs has replaced lower income citizens with middle class citizens (and reliable voters) with the luxury of a fitness walk to work, requiring no public or even private transportation at all.
As for those low-income folk displaced towards decaying outer suburbs, transportation becomes a necessity. Cars are desperately expensive, and public transportation routes may well be scarce and not headed in the direction people need to go.
Gentrifying inner city suburbs is just a single example of the complexity of changing city transportation needs that might benefit from free service. But cautious cities with shopping lists for potential changes are often measuring success by experiments involving one or two transit routes, or by subsidizing a particular class of transit users with reduced fare cards.
Alas, ‘small potatoes’ experiments produce ‘small potatoes’ results, making it difficult to evaluate the benefit to a city of an all-customers, all routes adoption of free public transport.
For such a broad view of potential benefits, it’s necessary to look at existing public transit systems that don’t charge fares. For Americans who like to know better than everybody else (as well as Canadians happily along for the ride), that means reluctantly leaving the North American continent and travelling for study purposes at least as far as Europe. There, system-wide free transit for all users is happening in a number of cities. Read more about these radical transportation developments at TheMayor.eu: These EU cities have embraced free public transport
As for the promise and pitfalls of American political interest and action concerning free public transportation networks, Boston is currently a useful example. Read more at Politico: Mayors are wielding free transit to draw people back downtown. It’s not that easy.
