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Germany Considers Free Public Transport in Fight To Banish Air Pollution (theguardian.com)
"Car nation" Germany has surprised neighbours with a radical proposal to reduce road traffic by making public transport free, as Berlin scrambles to meet EU air pollution targets and avoid big fines. From a report: The move comes just over two years after Volkswagen's devastating "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal unleashed a wave of anger at the auto industry, a keystone of German prosperity. "We are considering public transport free of charge in order to reduce the number of private cars," three ministers including Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks wrote to EU Environment Commissioner Karmenu Vella in the letter seen by AFP Tuesday.
Free doesn't mean free. It means now every time your neighbor gets on a bus you have to pay a fractional cent. Paying it for them motivates them to use it more. Now it means all your neighbors.
That might work there, but where I live the bus sucks so bad I couldn't use it if it were free. It takes a minimum of three hours to get to where I want to be, less than one to drive.
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That's the ONLY reason? I'm also dissuaded by the fact that my car starts and stops closer to where I want to be.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Here's the thing: It costs billions and billions, and billions to make and maintain those roads. That's considered a worthy service built by shared effort of the society. The additional cost of running buses across those roads is much less, basically a small percentage of cost to increase the the capacity and utility of those roads more.
It makes the overall society more efficient, since those tax dollars are saving millions of individuals much more money over time, usually folks who actually spend money in the economy instead of the savings/investment classes that tend to shelter their activities from the economy at large.
Ad described, at least, makes sense to me - and would be nice to use if I ever visit there.
Ryan Fenton
That's certainly true, but I think the GP's point is that anybody who can afford to drive will still do so, because the car runs on exactly your schedule, and goes exactly where you want to go. The route can be changed at any moment and offers much more comfort and a more pleasant experience.
Apart from this, even if parking is sparse, it will usually be much faster to drive. It depends on the city, but most people value less time spent commuting over all else.
Roads receive "investment", public transport (including rail) receives "subsidy". As if a layer of tarmac is somehow going to earn money on its own if only enough were spent on it.
Politicians love to play these verbal sleights of hand to fool the stupid and unfortunately it works a lot of the time.
Some cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, etc. are so spread out that providing reasonable public transportation, even if people are paying, is impossible. Europe has dense urban cores in their cities, and even car-centric German cities haven't spread out so much that providing transportation is a problem. A place like Dallas with zero natural boundaries has spread out to hundreds of square miles. In cities like that, public transportation isn't generally used as a way to get to work...it connects low-income housing with places of employment, hospitals and shopping areas because that's where the limited funds are best spent.
Other US cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington are at least candidates. Metro NY has a decent regional transportation system...there are 3 commuter railroads and several suburban bus lines, and a good amount of development has grown up around the rail lines. And of course, the city itself has subways and buses. Unless they absolutely need their cars to get around during the day, or are super-wealthy and don't care about parking costs, most people who are working normal-schedule jobs take the train or bus into the city. In other cities, you'd need way more than free fares to get people out of their cars.
Fare revenue from public transportation doesn't come anywhere close to paying for the real cost of running the system. Getting rid of it would make it even harder to run, unless everyone decided that it was a public good and should be paid for with taxes or reduced spending on roads. Also, people would have to understand that they can't externalize the cost of living on a 3-acre lot in a super-far flung suburb...making bigger roads just encourages more sprawl-based development. And that's a lifestyle change I don't think most Americans can handle.
6km is a pretty easy walk or a 15 minute bike ride.
You are forgetting that roads are also heavily subsidized. So, each time you drive to work you are taking money from a neighbor who cycles, or walks, to work. https://frontiergroup.org/repo...
"Aside from gas taxes and individuals’ expenditures for their own driving, U.S. households bear on average an additional burden of more than $1,100 per year in taxes and other costs imposed by driving. Including:
An estimated $597 per U.S. household per year in general tax revenue dedicated to road construction and repair.
Between $199 and $675 per household per year in additional tax subsidies for driving, such as the sales tax exemption for gasoline purchases in many states and the federal income tax exclusion for commuter parking benefits.
An estimated $216 per year in government expenditures made necessary by vehicle crashes, not counting additional, uncompensated damages to victims and property.
Approximately $93 to $360 per household in costs related to air pollution-induced health damage."
This is only a small snip from the article that I provided the link to.
Apart from this, even if parking is sparse, it will usually be much faster to drive. It depends on the city, but most people value less time spent commuting over all else.
The first claim is far from true for many European cities. When I moved to Munich (1995), I sold my car after it stood useless and rusting for 18 months. Going by subway, it took me about 10 minutes to get to work (and the subway ran every 10 minutes). Going by bicycle was 20 minutes. Going by car was unpredictable, but never less than 20 minutes, even with private parking at home (so no searching). Now I live in Stuttgart, and while going by car might be nominally a bit faster with no traffic, we cannot have any meetings at 9 in the morning, because during rush hour, my colleagues travel time goes up by an hour or so. The public transport system in most of the US is (intentionally or not) crippled. Try Singapore, Hong Kong, Munich or even Paris to see what it can be like.
Stephan
Germany is still the largest coal user in Europe. The mining unions are very powerful there, cars are a drop in the bucket as far as pollution, the thing is they are visible, not many people like to live next to large power plants. If Germany had not shut down there nuclear plants they would have easily met the EU mandate.
If they really cared about emissions they would keep their nuclear plants running. They care more about appearance.
Death by hobo and death by car crash are both very very very low probability events. If one is ten or a hundred times more likely than the other, they're both still inconsequential. Inconvenience of wasted time in public transit relative to car, on the other hand, is a near certainty outside of dense city centers with dense transit networks that are well-run.
Here in the US, there are maybe a half-dozen places where having a car is less convenient than driving, all dense city centers where a distinct minority of the population resides. Everywhere else, even in those same metro areas, all the subways and buses and commuter trains could be free, and they can run twice as frequently, but that'll make almost no dent in driving rates. Maybe Germany is dense enough for free transit to be of some real benefit to people, but my guess is that anyone who can take transit already does.
It's not crippled. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. NYC), the cities here tend to be a lot sparser than the European cities I've visited. The means the traffic problems which slow down driving your own car there are not as bad here (in time per distance), and that public transportation has to cover a larger area so either runs slower (more stops per trip) or leaves you with a longer distance to walk after getting off (fewer stops and longer distance between stops). Also, a lot of the European and Asian cities' roads are based on historical foot paths, cow paths, landowner plot borders, and organic city expansion over a half dozen to dozen centuries, so are curved and twisted making navigation and traffic management a nightmare. A subway has an advantage in being able to bypass a squiggly road route, and taking a more or less straight underground route. Most of the cities in the U.S. (Boston being a notable exception) have their streets laid out in a grid which eases navigation and traffic management, resulting in shorter travel distances by car and less traffic (per distance).
In other words, it's not that public transportation here is crippled. It's that the optimal solution changes depending on city density, road layout, traffic volume, and parking availability. And a lot of the cities in the U.S. have better road layouts and haven't yet reached the high enough density needed to make public transportation the optimal solution. The lower density also means there's more parking per distance so you can find a parking space quicker and closer to your destination that even if there were European-style public transport available.
Just because there's an optimal a solution which works in one location in one situation, does not automatically mean it's the optimal solution for all locations in all situations.