Episode 6260 custom

Why Free Transit Fails to Clear the Roads

Eliminating transit fares increases ridership by up to 49 percent, but research shows it rarely convinces motorists to leave their cars at home.

Oct 25 22:02 Transcript

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Episode ID: MWP-6462
Published: Oct 25
Duration: 22:02
Audio: Direct link
Pipeline: V5.22
TTS Engine: chatterbox-regular
Script Writing Agent: GPT-6.1 Sol
Topics: public-transit rail tourism cars-and-driving

AI-Generated Content: This podcast is created using AI personas. Please verify any important information independently.

The prompt

The prompt that started this episode, as sent in (production notes for the hosts removed).

Today I want to talk about free public transportation. What triggered this was election day in Israel. Because you have to vote at your registered polling place, people sometimes have to travel quite a long way to vote, and public transportation to the polling place is free. I also saw that the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv train is going to be free that day and running more frequently, and it immediately made me think: why don’t we do more of this all the time?
The Jerusalem–Tel Aviv train is great, but one of its biggest flaws is frequency. Twice an hour just isn’t enough for a major commuter route. If you miss it, suddenly you’re waiting half an hour, and that alone can make driving feel more practical. The same goes for cost. Public transport here is relatively affordable, but it still affects behavior, especially for teenagers, young people, and anyone making more discretionary trips. If trains and buses were both free and frequent, would people actually travel differently?
What I’m interested in is the bigger economic picture. There are cities and countries that have experimented with fare-free public transportation, and I’d like to know what happened. Did ridership increase? Did traffic decrease? Did it help local businesses? Did the cost to the government get offset in any meaningful way by less congestion, less fuel use, fewer wasted work hours, or other benefits? And how important is frequency compared with price? Because making transit free but inconvenient probably doesn’t solve much.
Basically, if we stopped treating public transportation as something that has to recover as much fare revenue as possible and instead treated it as public infrastructure—like roads—could spending more on frequent, free service actually make the whole economy work better?

An election-day transit arrangement in Israel, pairing nationwide free travel on Israel Railways with boosted service between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, serves as a jumping-off point to explore whether eliminating fares or improving timetables does more for public transit. While zero-fare policies consistently boost ridership—as seen in cities like Tallinn, Hasselt, and across several American agencies—evidence suggests free rides rarely prompt drivers to leave cars at home. Instead, lower costs primarily generate entirely new trips. Meanwhile, research shows passengers often respond more strongly to increased service frequency than to price cuts. Ultimately, because fareboxes cover only a modest portion of operating costs, transit debates hinge on whether public funding is best spent removing fares or running trains more often.

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What the research for this episode read before the script was written. Primary sources first.

Mentions

Germany 9-euro ticket 2022 nationwide cheap monthly rail pass
Hasselt free public transport Belgian city's 1997 fare-free experiment
Israel Railways National train operator in Israel
Justin Tyndall fare-free transit study Comparison of 16 US agencies' ridership gains
King and Taylor transit synthesis UCLA review on service vs fare response
Luxembourg free public transport Nationwide fare-free transit since 2020
Malta free public transport Free routes for residents since 2022
My Weird Prompts The podcast hosting this episode
Santiago transit randomized experiment Study finding 12% more overall travel
Tallinn free public transport Residents' free transit since 2013

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#6260: Why Free Transit Fails to Clear the Roads

Hannah spotted the election-day train announcement, and the tempting part wasn't just the free ticket. It was the train you wouldn't have to wait half an hour for. Jerusalem to Tel Aviv gets an extra departure each hour, and suddenly a very familiar railway looks rather more useful.

The same stations, the same journey, but a missed departure costs you less of your day. That changes whether you risk taking the train in the first place.

Her prompt asks what happens if we make that combination permanent. Frequent service, no fares, funded as infrastructure, like roads. Would people leave their cars behind, would businesses benefit, and would the wider economy recover enough to justify the spending? I like the distinction she's making. Public transport here can be affordable and still charge you heavily in waiting.

Time is the payment you don't get a receipt for. Although the global experiments give us a rather uneven answer about what removing the money payment achieves.

The platform still accepts entire afternoons.

Fare-free service reliably brings more passengers. Whether those passengers previously drove is a different matter, and that's where the economic claims need much closer inspection.

Tuesday's arrangement covers nationwide Israel Railways services and intercity bus routes longer than fifteen kilometres. Free travel starts at eight on Monday evening and continues through the end of service on election day. It helps people reach their registered polling places, including people who now live somewhere else.

Worth distinguishing that from every local bus automatically becoming free. The announcement has boundaries, even if the headline doesn't.

The Jerusalem to Tel Aviv line also gets three trains per hour in each direction between noon and eight in the evening. The added service starts or finishes at HaHagana. That's an important destination detail for anybody imagining an identical extra train all the way through the existing service pattern.

You're about to call this a perfect natural experiment, Herman. I can hear the spreadsheet opening.

Useful natural experiment. Not perfect.

I saved us one adjective.

You did. Election day changes work patterns, destinations and reasons for travel. Price and frequency change together, so a busy platform won't tell us how much each contributed. Still, we can observe whether the extra departure attracts passengers, and whether crowding shifts between departures.

Also whether people trust it enough to leave home without planning their entire morning around it. A special timetable can fill a train without changing anyone's ordinary commuting decision.

Permanent policies give us a longer view. Luxembourg made public transport free nationally in twenty twenty, apart from first class on trains. Tallinn introduced free travel for residents in twenty thirteen. Hasselt started much earlier, in nineteen ninety-seven.

Very different propositions already. A national network, a residents' benefit and a city experiment shouldn't produce one universal promise.

Malta made most routes free for residents in twenty twenty-two. Kharkiv introduced free transit that year too, under exceptionally difficult wartime conditions. Belgrade followed in twenty twenty-five. American agencies supply another set of examples, often bus systems with relatively low fare revenue.

My guess is the cheap, already popular system barely changes, while the expensive system with empty seats changes considerably.

That's broadly the pattern, although service changes alongside the fare policy can make the headline spectacular. Hasselt is the example where you really need to keep that in mind.

By two thousand six, Hasselt's ridership was reported as much as thirteen times its pre-policy level. That was nine years after fares disappeared. You cannot take the whole increase, attach it to the zero on the ticket and assume another city can reproduce it next month.

Thirteen times is a network story, not a coupon.

Routes, service provision, the starting level of use and the time people have to adapt all matter. Tallinn gives a more restrained result. Ridership rose fourteen percent after a year. It already had good service, high transit use and low fares, so eliminating the remaining price barrier had less room to work.

Fourteen percent still sounds substantial if those are people finally able to make ordinary trips. We should resist treating the smaller headline as a disappointment. If you've already made something useful and affordable, the final improvement ought to look smaller.

What would convince you the extra trips were valuable, Corn? Beyond counting bodies through a door.

I'd distinguish somebody replacing a walk they enjoyed from somebody taking a job interview they couldn't otherwise afford to reach. Both register as another boarding. Only one tells me we've removed a serious restriction. I'd also want to know whether existing passengers can still get aboard.

Capacity matters. Justin Tyndall's published comparison across sixteen American agencies puts the average ridership increase after fare elimination at forty-nine percent, with substantial variation. That's a large response, but it doesn't tell you whether the additional demand appears on an empty midday bus or an already packed morning departure.

Free standing room remains standing room.

A broader American comparison found gains around seventeen percent for partial-route fare-free policies and forty-five percent for full-system policies. Different methods, different agencies, broadly consistent direction. Removing fares attracts riders. We can stop being surprised by that and ask what those riders would otherwise have done.

Stayed home is the answer that gets unfairly dismissed. Someone takes an extra trip to visit a friend and the transport debate says, regrettably, no motorist was harmed.

New mobility has value. Santiago's randomized experiment found overall travel increased twelve percent, with off-peak trips up twenty-three percent. There was no evidence of substitution between modes or periods. People weren't simply shifting an existing car journey onto transit, or moving a peak trip into a cheaper period. They were making additional journeys.

That weakens the traffic claim without weakening the visit to the friend.

Germany's nine-euro monthly ticket points in a similar direction. Leisure train journeys increased strongly, but substitution between modes was limited. Cheap travel encouraged people to go somewhere, rather than reliably persuading drivers to abandon journeys they were already making.

A crowded Saturday train photograph cannot show you the cars that supposedly stayed home. It can barely show you the floor.

The evidence on reduced car use is mixed, often small or absent. European experience includes very large passenger increases without clear, corresponding reductions in driving. If the objective is congestion, you need to measure traffic and driving directly.

I'd go further. The person with a car may be paying for reliability, carrying things, making several stops, or getting home after the last train. Saving a modest fare doesn't fix any of those. For somebody already struggling to afford the bus, though, the same saving can be decisive.

That distinction explains why frequency is so powerful. King and Taylor's UCLA synthesis says riders tend to respond more to service improvements than fare reductions. At the margin, the revenue surrendered to make service free may attract fewer passengers than spending that money on better service.

Here's a voicemail from a listener about precisely that waiting problem.

Hello there, it's Agnes from the Highlands, I'm listening on the wee portable radio in my kitchen in Inverness while I wait for my scones to come out the oven, and I wanted to say something about your free buses and trains, because back in two thousand and one my late husband and I took the bus to Oban every Tuesday when the fares were waived for the pensioners' week, and I'm sure we went more often than we would have otherwise, though we still took the car when the weather was dreich.

So my question is, if you made the trains free but they still only came twice an hour, would folk like me actually bother, or would we just stay home with the kettle on?

Some would travel more, Agnes, but a free fare can't make an awkward departure convenient. Twice-hourly service can work for a planned outing. It is much less forgiving when the appointment finishes late or the connection slips.

My objection to half-hourly service is the return journey. I can arrange when I leave home. I can't arrange when the dentist releases me. A timetable can look perfectly manageable until a real person tries to complete a round trip.

With evenly spaced departures and random arrivals, half-hourly service means an average wait of fifteen minutes. Three trains an hour brings that to ten. That's a simplified calculation, though. Timetable-aware passengers don't arrive randomly, and three departures needn't be evenly spaced.

Five minutes sounds small until it happens at both ends, several days a week. The bigger difference may be confidence. You stop treating one missed train as an event requiring a phone call.

Would you pay a fare for that improvement rather than keep the current frequency free?

I would. Someone with very little money might reasonably choose differently. That's why I'd rather discuss a frequent network with targeted free travel than assume every passenger has my priorities. Universal free service saves administration, but universality also spends money on people who would cheerfully pay.

There's a complication to the fixed-budget argument. Tyndall found no evidence that fare elimination was followed by service cuts. Service levels and total investment tended to increase. External funding usually replaced the lost revenue.

Meaning the choice on the council table may be new funding for free buses or no new funding at all. Not free buses or my preferred timetable.

Economically, service may be the stronger purchase. Politically, a fare-free proposal may unlock money that a service proposal doesn't. We shouldn't confuse those claims, but both affect what passengers actually get.

The revenue side deserves the same care. People talk as though ticket sales pay for the railway and taxpayers occasionally help with the curtains.

American agency figures make that assumption look particularly strange. In twenty twenty-four, fares covered thirteen percent of operating expenditure for the average agency. For the median agency, it was six percent. Those measures exclude capital spending.

Six percent. Quite a small till to build the entire philosophy around.

Small can still matter, Corn. An agency that loses it without replacement has a real budget hole. The median also describes agencies, not the share paid by the typical passenger across the entire country. A large, heavily used system can depend much more on fares than a small local operator.

Agreed. I wouldn't take an American median to an Israeli railway budget and declare the tickets irrelevant. I would stop pretending fare recovery is the only respectable measure of a public service.

Fares commonly cover none of the capital cost and a varying share of operations and maintenance, roughly five to fifty percent across the range discussed in the synthesis. Building stations, buying vehicles and replacing infrastructure are already public funding decisions.

Roads make that easier to see. We don't ask each residential street to sell enough entry tickets to justify its existence. We ask whether people need access. Although roads aren't costless either. Fuel taxes, vehicle taxes, tolls and general taxation all sit somewhere behind the apparently free journey.

How far would you take the comparison? Would you remove fares even where a well-used service collects substantial revenue?

No automatic answer. I'd ask what collecting the money costs, who it prevents from travelling, and what replaces it. Infrastructure status doesn't exempt a service from arithmetic. It changes the benefit you're willing to count. Access to work matters even if the passenger never pays the full cost of providing it.

Fare collection itself consumes resources. Machines, payment systems, administration and enforcement all cost money. Removing fares can also permit boarding through every door, reducing time spent at stops. Though that requires the operator to allow it and organize the service accordingly.

A free bus with everyone still queuing at the front has retained the least attractive souvenir.

Some paid systems already use all-door boarding, so that benefit belongs partly to boarding design rather than the fare itself. I nearly bundled those together. Faster boarding can improve reliability, but savings don't magically replace the entire fare stream.

Your enthusiasm had reached the rear door before the evidence.

It was a very efficient boarding process.

I'll allow it. The lower-income passenger's benefit seems less slippery. Money not spent on getting to work stays available for something else. A teenager who can reach activities without requesting a lift gets independence, even if household car mileage barely changes.

Tallinn showed improved mobility among low-income residents. Across a recent review of forty-five peer-reviewed articles, the recurring benefits include increased access, greater transit use and more physical activity, especially for older adults. Transit journeys often involve walking to and from stops.

Which is a reason to care about where those stops are, rather than assume any extra boarding improves health. Someone swapping a long walk for a short bus trip is different from someone leaving the house instead of staying indoors.

Hm. The direction can differ by person. The access argument is stronger than a blanket claim about every health outcome. It also depends on practical usability. A free vehicle with an inaccessible entrance remains unavailable to somebody who can't board it.

You can predict Herman's station review from the doorway width.

You can predict yours from the nearest shaded bench.

Both are transport infrastructure.

Local businesses are harder to put a number on. More people reaching shops and services sounds beneficial, and saved fares leave some riders with more spending money. But I don't have a quantified retail-effect result that supports saying a fare-free policy raises local sales by some dependable amount.

Spending can move rather than multiply. A free train might bring customers to one shopping street while carrying customers away from another. A government shouldn't count every purchase at the destination as new economic activity.

Nor should it count every passenger as a worker whose productivity just increased. Some journeys are errands, some leisure, some new access to employment. The benefits are different, and the government's cash return is different again.

That's where the phrase pays for itself gets ambitious. Better access can justify spending without sending an equal amount back to the Treasury. A visit to an elderly relative is valuable. It is not a tax receipt.

Tallinn did produce a municipal revenue gain, but through an unusual channel. People declared residency in the city to qualify for free travel. Estonia's tax arrangements then directed more revenue to the municipality.

The bus attracted taxpayers on paper.

A real fiscal result, but not evidence that congestion savings funded the service. It also doesn't guarantee a gain for the country overall if revenue moved between municipalities. Elsewhere, replacing fares with a government grant keeps the buses running, but that replacement itself is a cost.

Hannah's fuel, congestion and wasted-hours question therefore remains open. We can't add up benefits we haven't measured and announce the fare has disappeared from the public budget.

Especially when the strongest car-substitution results are limited. Less driving could save fuel and time, but the mechanism needs to occur before we book the saving. Meanwhile, a bus carrying new passengers may have strong access benefits with little measurable effect on road congestion.

There's a political temptation here too. Zero is wonderfully legible. Better evening connections and less bunching are harder to put on a poster.

Those service promises also require drivers, vehicles and operating capacity over years. Announcing fare removal can be simpler than delivering a reliable increase in departures. Yet the agencies that secured replacement funding show that free service and expanded service can coexist.

I'd want the promise written in operating terms. Which hours improve, where the connections work, and whether there's room when passengers need it. An extra departure at the wrong time is a very expensive way to improve a timetable's appearance.

The extra vehicle has to turn up when somebody actually wants to get...

Their mother to pay the mayor. Mine tried. Cardboard mayor, not the elected one. She said she was being polite. This was my cousin Len's depot in the early nineties. Mid-sized town. The council waived fares for a pilot, and the drivers liked not having to argue over change. Len said it was the first quiet week he'd had at the front of a bus.

Your mother maintained the previous tariff.

She offered forty pence. Len's depot had added a bus, but it ran after the factory shift had already started. Empty most of the day. The transport department's Mr. Selwyn Pike called it the ghost bus. I was checking ticket machines then, and Pike kept telling me the public needed to see an occupied vehicle. He put a cardboard cutout of the mayor in the driver's seat while it stood outside the library. Mum walked up and offered it the fare. Pike entered that as passenger interest.

A parked bus outside the library would at least be visible. It still wouldn't reach the factory before the shift.

Len told him that. Same conversation you've been having, Herman, except nobody said elastic. I appreciate that you eventually translated it. Pike commissioned another passenger count. Mum appeared in that too, although she'd only gone back for her glove. The cutout belongs to Len now. It's behind his freezer in Dunmore Road. Your point about the return journey has changed my view of Mum's second visit. Anyway, the pilot ended. They moved the extra run earlier. Len said he carried eleven people the first morning. Mum got the ordinary bus home at quarter past four.

I'd watch what happens to the journeys people need to complete, not just the departures we add. The evidence supports spending on access, with frequency often the stronger purchase than removing fares. Free travel can help substantially, but it hasn't earned a general promise to clear traffic or repay the Treasury. A permanent service that gets people there and home would give us something much firmer to judge.

Our thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing the show.

For more along these lines, there's episode four oh six, Policing Shekels, Losing Dollars; episode six fifteen, Beyond the Vibe; and episode thirty oh eight, Israel's Rail Network. This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast.

If you enjoyed the conversation, leave us a rating and review. It helps other listeners find the show.

I'm Corn.

I'm Herman Poppleberry. See you tomorrow.

This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities. It may contain errors: disclaimer · report an error

Why Free Transit Fails to Clear the Roads

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#6260: Why Free Transit Fails to Clear the Roads