Ask Slashdot: If Public Transport Was Free, Would You Leave Your Car At Home?

dkatana writes: The Estonian capital launched a program of free public transport to encourage people to leave their cars at home. But they never did. When Tallinn launched the program ridership numbers did increase, but not by the 20% the city had projected. Instead, they grew by a modest 3%, and by people already using public transport. What happened is that more pedestrians and bike users started to use public transit instead of walking and cycling. But car users continue to drive to work. Do you think the same would hold true in the U.S. if a similar program was started?

Comments

I would sell it

[prefec2]

If public transport would be free in all of Germany, I would not use this car thing again.

Re:Cars are investments.

[JoeMerchant]

The London tube is an amusing starfish... if you need to go to/from the center, it's great.

If you're out on an arm, and you need to get to a similar spot on the next arm, it's the bus for you, or even walking would be faster.

I tried to ride the bus, waited almost an hour before one showed up, but it wasn't one bus, it was all seven buses that run that line, apparently they had stopped off at the pub or something and then all hit the road at the same time.

Needs to be frequent and ubiquitous

[hawguy]

Unless public transit is frequent and ubiquitous, it can't replace a car regardless of price

When I moved to San Francisco, an unlimited Muni pass was so cheap ($35) that it may as well been free, but I still had a car because weekend service is infrequent, and didn't go everywhere I wanted to go. I thought about giving up my car, until I tried an out of town trip on BART one weekend, it would have been an hour (or less) round trip by car, but since it involved a train transfer plus a long wait for a bus (that never came so I ended up walking the 2 miles), the transit part of the trip ended up being being over 3 hours.

Even now an unlimited Muni pass is cheap ($70), much cheaper than owning and parking a car in the city so it's not the cost of transit that makes people hold on to their cars.

On the other hand, when I spent some time in Tokyo, a $170 monthly Metro pass was much better than having a car, few of my friends who lived there full time owned a car.

Re:Need more info

[catchblue22]

The question is flawed. The fact is that most US public transportation is awful. This is quite literally by design. In the 1950's, a conscious decision was made by policy makers to begin neglecting public transportation and to start investing public money in road systems in a big way. This is what built the interstate system, for example. A few places, Portland Oregon, for example, took some of that interstate money and invested in public transportation. Portland's system is actually quite good, now, and if you lived there, you would probably use it quite a bit.

But if you live in one of the countless suburban freeway islands, using public transportation is absurd. The way the roads and infrastructure are laid out make it almost impossible to install an efficient public transportation system. In many suburban areas, the mere act of walking somewhere is almost impossible or illegal.

There is a truism in transportation design: the freeways make the sprawl. And the converse is also true: passenger rail transportation increase creates clusters of density. Evidence of this can be seen in the observation that since the massive reduction of passenger rail transportation in the US, there have been almost no new dense walkable diverse large scale downtown core cities established. The big ones, New York, Chicago, etc. were established during the age of passenger rail. Most new cities are freeway places, and usually don't achieve the density of the older cities. By choosing to build freeways, we chose to create suburban sprawl. The only way to get out of this trap is to slow the building of freeways, and to increase investment in passenger rail.