Slashdot Mirror
Luxembourg To Become First Country To Make All Public Transport Free (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Luxembourg is set to become the first country in the world to make all its public transport free. Fares on trains, trams and buses will be lifted next summer under the plans of the re-elected coalition government led by Xavier Bettel, who was sworn in for a second term as prime minister on Wednesday. Luxembourg City, the capital of the small Grand Duchy, suffers from some of the worst traffic congestion in the world. It is home to about 110,000 people, but a further 400,000 commute into the city to work. A study suggested that drivers in the capital spent an average of 33 hours in traffic jams in 2016. While the country as a whole has 600,000 inhabitants, nearly 200,000 people living in France, Belgium and Germany cross the border every day to work in Luxembourg.
Luxembourg has increasingly shown a progressive attitude to transport. This summer, the government brought in free transport for every child and young person under the age of 20. Secondary school students can use free shuttles between their institution and their home. Commuters need only pay about $2.27 for up to two hours of travel, which in a country of just 999 sq miles (2,590 sq km) covers almost all journeys. Now, from the start of 2020 all tickets will be abolished, saving on the collection of fares and the policing of ticket purchases. The policy is yet to be fully thought through, however. A decision has yet to be taken on what to do about first- and second-class compartments on trains.
Luxembourg has increasingly shown a progressive attitude to transport. This summer, the government brought in free transport for every child and young person under the age of 20. Secondary school students can use free shuttles between their institution and their home. Commuters need only pay about $2.27 for up to two hours of travel, which in a country of just 999 sq miles (2,590 sq km) covers almost all journeys. Now, from the start of 2020 all tickets will be abolished, saving on the collection of fares and the policing of ticket purchases. The policy is yet to be fully thought through, however. A decision has yet to be taken on what to do about first- and second-class compartments on trains.
First off - the state already pays for something like 80% of the cost of public transport. Going 100% won't make much of a difference on the budget.
Traffic is indeed quite horrible, with all the commuting and street works. Luxembourg (which isn't only one city btw) is by far the most active economic center of the region, and so pulls in a lot of workers who live up to 2h (in normal conditions) driving away. It's also gotten a lot worse these past decades.
Public transport isn't very effective now on many lines, because it will suffer from works too (trains as well as buses), buses will be stuck in traffic just as much as cars. And "people incidents", let's not forget those. Lots of economic areas are badly covered, as the public transport lines are mostly aligned for Luxembourg City only - if you want to go somewhere else, good luck, count in a lot more time. To get people to switch from private cars to public transport would take a massively better quality, different lines... which isn't really on the to-do list as far as "we the people" can see.
Making things free won't automatically improve the quality of public transport, thus... things will probably remain as they are.
There's also the impression that something free isn't worth anything, some people will think they're entitled, will show poor respect to personnel etc., so we're really not that happy about this upcoming change, fearing that quality will actually go down.
Not much impact for me anyway - I live close enough to work for walking, which I do when weather won't permit the use of the motorbike (much easier to find parking space that using a car!).
"If you do it on a first come, first serve basis, I guarantee it won't take one week for the first physical encounters to happen over a 1st class seat..."
Indeed. Disclaimer: I'm from Luxembourg and I worked as a railway dispatcher for 40 years.
1. Class (+25€ per month) is used by people who want to get seated in overcrowded commuter trains where half the people are standing. The rest is occupied by railway workers from middle management upwards, because they can use that one for free, just like the rest uses 2. class for free.
Also, train ticket controllers and sellers earn between 60.000 and 80.000€ a year, (not to mention QA, Finance and other top jobs who earn much more) so if those jobs are not needed anymore, just as all the expensive electronic ticketing, the vending machines and their IT, the 'free' part doesn't cost much in the end.
Also bus drivers won't be attacked for the money if there isn't any anymore.
Welcome to Luxembourg, where the definition of 'free' is 'the government pays for it".
When something is "Free" there is ALWAYS someone else paying for it. (or someone else forgoing collection for service rendered)
Of course the people are still paying for it (via taxes), as does anyone else who pays VAT or sales tax inside the country. However, it may be a net-gain for the people. Places with subsidized transport typically see increase in property value (desirability goes up), along with that wages often increase too.
That's not always the case of course, but frequently is. So yes, the people may be paying for the service in their taxes- but their wealth might also be increasing because of the transportation (case by case basis if it does)- so there is probably a net gain for everyone because of this. Especially so for anyone who might be able to now do away with a car. Now they have lots more discretionary income. More than they're paying for taxes in transportation.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How many transit systems actually operate at a profit? In most of the US, transit systems operate at significant losses, with something like 70-80% of the costs covered by general taxes, not the ticket. And the transit is often-times under-utilized. Moving to a free model may just fill up the transit systems, for not a whole lot more tax dollars.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
When something is "Free" there is ALWAYS someone else paying for it. (or someone else forgoing collection for service rendered)
A good example is a hospital nurse. There are two ways I know of. 1) Either she's paid a hourly salary, and then no matter how many shots given or bodily function attended to, we don't give a crap. The job will get done and patients will be cared for. 2) Every ass wipe must be an itemized bill, everything will be nickel-and-dimed so that hospitals and private insurers have bullcrap to haggle about. The nurse won't be paid more, all she gets is "performance metrics". Cost of healthcare goes up to pay for all the needless accounting and parasites, employees get pressured and need to taylorize their wiping ass acts and flu shots.
Now, both 1) and 2) were not "Free" so you might wonder why do I reply with this to your quote about not paying vs paying. Well, to me 1) is more "Free" than 2).
It is ironic that Luxemburg transports are to fully move to 1) and abandon 2) (public transports always are a mix of both, often more than half is paid with taxes and the rest with fares). I think European Commission forced my country to switch from 1) to 2) in the context of hospital nurses, to satisfy some grand "liberal" capitalist ideology with a badly veiled longer term goal of dismantling national public healthcare.
In my home city of Tampere, we have one of the cheapest tickets in Finland for a city of its size. Additionally city's population density is so low, that when we joined the EU, it was classified as a "village of ~200.000 people" by EU standards. Additionally our central street that most bus lines use is a historic street made of stone pavement, which causes excessive vibration on the bus structures over time requiring additional maintenance and making buses that operate on gaseous fuel impossible as valves cannot handle vibration for long. That kind of population spread coupled with unique problem of pavement on the central street makes public transit a significant challenge, so being one of the cheapest in terms of ticket prices in the country has been one of the point of pride to the folks doing the planning in the organisation. I listened to a couple of lectures on the topic in my old university some years ago.
To my understanding, the public company that handles the public transit lines is profitable and highly competitive with private bus companies. Latest city budget proposal for 2019 reports that it was profitable to the tune of 3,6 million Euro on the revenue of slightly under 28 million revenue in the latest numbers they have which is for year 2017. Revenue includes 2,1 million "support and assistance from the region".
Here's the document I took the numbers from:
https://www.tampere.fi/tiedost...
Page 115 has the numbers First column is the final numbers for 2017, to which plans for 2018-2022 are contrasted. You can find what individual lines mean by running the document through google translate.