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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.
If you go for something like 5 bucks a day gets you 1st class, you'll once again need policing, clearly defeating some of the point.
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...
If you have a 9-5 in DC, Atlanta or LA you probably pull 33 hours in a single month.
You may not be paying for it when you use it, but it's being paid for though taxation. It's not free, far from it.
But let's be real. "Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way. Why? Because there is no way it would be possible for the private sector to do this kind of thing at a "reasonable" cost for the average user. The business model is unworkable. The only option is to throw taxpayer funds into it.
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33 hours a year in traffic jams on average? If you make 10 trips a week for 50 weeks that's 500 trips per year. 33 hours / 500 trips is abou 4 minutes per trip stuck in traffic. That's "some of the worst traffic in the world"?
Everyone thinks *his* traffic is the worst in the world...
Probably not but I didn't get that meaning from the article.
Collecting may have cost only 30 cents of that, however imagine how much time and effort is spent by everyone getting the ticket. Also calculate what it costs to make sure nobody cheated.
And then factor in a potential of more people using public transportation instead of private, thus relieving streets.
Not to mention tourism will like this, too...
Welcome to civilization.
mKaart (a smartcard) works on the train, tram, bus and self-service bicycles
young people (20 to 25) can get free travel now apart from travel to the international terminals
honestly I don't know why more places don't do this, sure charge visitors and if you want 1st class charge for it but ordinary TAXPAYERS who dont need to have an entire car then are not clogging up the roads... makes everyone happier
They aren't saying that. There is a cost associated to sell passes and tickets, to collect them when people ride the transit system, to check that people aren't cheating the system, and to count cash. It's probably on the order of 5% to 10% of operating costs.
I found a PDF that shows for one city in Ontario the PRESTO card (Ontario's version of London's Oyster card to pay public transit in the Toronto and Ottawa regions) takes up to 6% off for processing the transactions and the transit authority is responsible for the hardware. Plus they still have to handle the cash and pay for people where people get passes and check for people who don't pay the fare. Plus they don't need to pay rent on where you buy passes. In Ottawa there are a couple of places in shopping malls which most cost a fair bit of money.
Eliminating fares could allow the transit authority to add more active buses or do other improvements.
Given that the country is 87km long and 57 km wide why on earth would you even need first class? You will not be sitting in it for longer than about 30 minutes unless you are crossing a border in which case the travel is no longer free anyway.
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It's actually not that strange.
I'm in Canada, and I think like most of the world, public transit is subsidized. Whatever the number is. 30%-70% is covered by general taxation.
It's really not unthinkable to just make it free since you're already paying almost half the cost anyways. If a city is already subsidizing transit by $1 billion, and can make it free for $2 billion, it doesn't seem that crazy.
Then of course, there's the saving in terms of payment systems, inspectors, fares, security systems... whatever that works out to be. Probably like 5-15% of the fare cost.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if some routes do in fact cost more to collect in fares. Obviously not the major busy routes.
As far as government spending goes, this wouldn't be a crazy waste of money. I know in Canada, Calgary has a fare free zone, where you basically don't pay fares within the downtown core. Plus you can reduce traffic, drinking and driving, better for the environment...
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!).
"Does that include shared helicopter flights?"
The only way to share a helicopter flight in Luxembourg is to ride with the doctor to the hospital if you're in an accident.
"Did collecting $2.27 cost them more than $2.27?"
Exactly! That's why it isn't a big step.
"Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way.
So is private transportation. Who do you think pays for all those roads? Encouraging more people to use public transportation by making it free will reduce the need to build more roads and save on repair on the ones that are already there.
Whether the benefit is worth the cost requires detailed analysis but in a densely populated country like Luxembourg I suspect the maths is much more in favour of this than in less densely populated countries like Canada where our city council is both considering either making local transit free or increasing the price by ~30%!
Note that the total land area of Luxembourg (998 mi) is approximately that of Rhode Island in the U.S. (1,212 mi), according to Google.
Just sayin'. ;-)
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"A city is not a country. This isn't the middle ages."
They are not talking about Luxembourg-City, the are talking about the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.
Only crazy people use the car in the city.
No, we know what it means. It's "free" just like roads, the clean air we breath, 2 day shipping for Prime, the National Parks, sidewalks, over the air TV channels, libraries, the plastic straws at a restaurant, restrooms in a store, parking spaces at a mall, and the bloody door being held open for those after you....
We should be clear now.
Surprisingly I live in a house that was built as part is a subdivision. And the roads into that subdivision were indeed built by the subdivider and home builder.
It's not the norm, but it is done. And it's not exceptionally unusual for subdividers to actually pay for the community to build those roads, and to maintain them.
It does happen.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Thanks, now I have a rough idea of the size of Rhode Island. Not sure why I would want that, but thanks anyway.
I've proposed Maryland take this step. It would cost a tax increase such that someone making $100,000/year is paying around $80-$150 more in taxes per year.
That ignores all costs of administrating the ticketing system and all savings otherwise produced.
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Interestingly Washington DC has free public transport for all residents under 21 and has for years. They don't have a school bus system.
I do not think that word means what you may think it means.
Then you think wrong. The phrase "free public transport for all residents under 21" means people under 21 do not pay for transportation.
If you think it means something else, you're wrong.
The statements the libertarian ideologues have been repeating over and over, "it's not free, somebody pays for it!!" is really a statement with no content. When a restaurant gives out free samples to people passing by, that doesn't mean they don't pay for it. If the bar I go to says "free beer when the Browns win a game"-- yes, of course the bar pays for the beer. "Free" means you don't pay for it. Even "free comic book day" doesn't mean that comic books appear by a magic spell, somebody still prints them, and the printers and distributors and even the employees of the comic shop all get paid for "selling" the book for free.
Yes, the word "free" has multiple meanings. Anybody posting on /. ought to already know that. If you don't, try: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
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While around here, the developers are responsible for building the roads into and in the new subdivisions, the city still ends up upgrading the main roads. Where all the development has been happening has led to the main road being 4 laned with sidewalks and shoulders, multiple traffic lights and a new by-pass, all paid by the tax payers and making a trip to town for me, quite a bit slower, mostly due to the traffic lights.
More expensive coming home due to having to stop multiple times on the uphill too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"people under 21 do not pay for transportation."
I wonder how this applies to people under 21 in DC who work and earn pay that is taxed.
Or rent apartments and pay that rent.
Or even own property and pay taxes on that property.
Then again, knowing the special case DC is, perhaps they don't pay. And we do. It's possible that I am mistaken, that it is the word 'pay' that is misunderstood, for public transportation in American is by no definition free, and while it's pedantic, someone pays. Losing sight of that is leading to misunderstandings and questionable choices
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
instead of a 'perk'. You do need to build your cities around it though, which most European cities did. The problem with America is that our car companies got to decide how our cities would be laid out in the 30s, 40s and 50s.
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0) Bear in mind that some of those taxes are paid by the owners of those shiny new homes. Seems fair, though perhaps not equitable.
1) Growth, for whatever reason, does bring impacts. Some years ago a town near my old home in Maine levied a $30,000 or so charge on all new homes build within town boundaries, as an offset of costs for utilities construction and other costs. I don;t recall that it actually deterred new home building as much as expected, but it did minimize the burden, and the town was actually trying to limit growth without being denied the ability to actually refuse new home permits, s a legal challenge made that more expensive than charging builders up front. Growth management ('Planning' for the conventional) is a big deal, and communities that don't do it well suffer the consequences. Modern planning of course looks different, consider the differences between Boston MA and Gilbert AZ.
2) My commute is slower over the past year, in the morning due to the construction workers all hustling to their jobs, something much less prevalent in 2016 and early 2017, and in the evening due to all the new office workers, since I live within reach of 5 of the top job markets in America. The price of success.
3) One benefit to you is all those new businesses opening up to serve the new residents. Traffic a sign of success also.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Many would consider less cars on the road to be a benefit, especially less cars driven by teen drivers (even if you walk to work that could be a plus at every crosswalk).. Not having to pay for schools to have buses is a benefit (unless you want the people taking care of you when you're old to not even be able to read up on how to give you your medication).
And I'm sure those roads would be perfectly useless if they ended in the woods at the entrance to your subdivision.
The population of the country of Luxembourg is 590,00. This is about equivalent to the population of Wyoming, which is the least populated state in the United states. As another post in this thread noted, Luxembourg is slightly smaller than Rhode Island. However, Rhode Island has a population of 1.05 million, or about twice that of Luxembourg.
Luxembourg City has a population of 110,000, which is actually less than the number of people who would attend a University of Michigan Football game on a Saturday in the fall. In fact, the university does supply free bus service to all those people for many years, yet it doesn't seem to warrant a celebratory article on slashdot.
The city of Columbus, Ohio in the United States also offers free mass transit. Columbus has a population of 870,000, or more than1.3 times that of the entire country of Luxembourg, or about 8 times that of Luxembourg City. This is a bigger achievement by far, yet has not warranted a celebratory article in slashdot. Btw, Columbus is not a complete anomaly, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Miami also do this, to name a few.
Also, many other cities around the world do this.
The point of this not to downplay the helpfulness of free mass transit. For reasons mentioned elsewhere, like traffic, it can be a very good thing. Why all this needs to be mentioned is the tone of the article. It is making a big deal about how a COUNTRY has free mass transit, with some implied shame about why other countries are not following this lead. In a forum made of people who pride themselves as "nerds" logic and nuance must be a factor. In truth, many other entities that are bigger than Luxembourg have done this already. Saying in a breathless voice, 'but, it's a country." really does not have great meaning. In reality what is important is size and area covered. So, this is by far not a world first.
The real story should be, why not earlier Luxembourg?
Gas taxes are a pretty good proxy for that, and more efficient. Heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear on the roads and use more fuel, so it works. The US has been doing this since 1932.
I'm curious what country you live in.
0) The question is, do those new taxes bring in more then the cost of increased policing, increased fire department coverage, increased snow clearing and other road maintainence etc? I don't know the answer but the city council never mentions the increased costs when talking about the increased revenue.
1) The planning hasn't actually been too bad here, and I'm not really complaining, just stating things aren't clear cut.
2) My commute isn't bad due to not going into the big city. For those going in to the big city, one of the largest in Canada, the commute has become hell.
3) The new businesses are generally nice, but hard on the old businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That comment belongs to Crash Dummy Redux. Before you accuse someone of being a liar, make sure you have the right person.
there are security people who ride along most trains anyway
Will there still be as many in a system no longer generating revenue? I'm suspicious of how the end game looks here.
I was always fine with the system where people with money paid for public transit, and people without skipped paying fares. That seems to work pretty well most places, and it brought in a lot of revenue for public transit specifically.
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You're working hard to redefine words so that they don't mean anything in order to make a point that is banal. In this case, you're working hard to redefine the word "free" so that it has no meaning at all.
Yes, you're correct, if something is free, that means somebody else paid, so if you want to be "pedantic" you can say that the word free is meaningless, if you just redefine the word with the purpose of saying nothing is free.
But that redefinition is useless, and more to the point, it's not what the word means.
If you actually want to be pedantic, you may say that the word "free" always requires a prepositions: when you say something is free, that means it is free to a particular person.
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It's not free like they said it will be. It's just that they won't pay for it when you get on. It will be paid for from the taxes collected by the state, which will be going higher to cover the costs. TANSTAAFL.
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Good thing that's a straw man then. The "free" in free health care, free higher education, free public transportation is free to use . Same as it's free for you to use any of the public roads or highways without paying a toll to use them. Which none of the people who complain about the cost of mass transit had a problem with when it was time to spend trillions to construct them.
I think Vancouver decided to go the other way. I seem to recall that they recently installed improved ticket checking and gate infrastructure that cost some large number of million dollars (100?) and was expected to prevent a big but not as big amount of fare cheating (50 million?)
Ok, it looks more like 10 million to prevent a quarter million: http://www.railforthevalley.co...
Anyhow, I thought the fare gates made everything less friendly, but I do like the electronic payment smart card system.
If the bar I go to says "free beer when the Browns win a game"-- yes, of course the bar pays for the beer.
Of course the bar doesn't pay for the beer. The Browns would have to win a game first.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
When your entire country is the size of a postage stamp...........
Bravo!
Nothing in life is free.....
So, it's worth it to collect the fare via taxes, but not from the actual assholes using it? Okay...............
Does that make sense? Wouldn't eliminating fares reduce the resources available to add more busses or make improvements? That's the only independent revenue stream for transportation, so there is an absolute loss of resources if it ceases.
Is that fair? Seems to me you're making people in west Maryland pay for people in Baltimore to have free public transportation, when really, that's something that should be paid for by the people who use it.
It depends on what you want to call "fair". Taxes are the analogy for the fallacy of fairness.
Each person is a whole person, and should pay a fair share. We should tax them flat, e.g., $1,000 per person. If you can't pay, we arrest you and force you into prison slave labor.
Each person works similar or the same relative hours, or is unable to work (often due to economic conditions of jobs not being available in their area). They receive dissimilar income, and should pay a fair share. We should tax them a flat rate, e.g., 30%, such that a person making $10,000 pays $3,000 and a person making $1,000,000 pays $300,000.
Persons with lower income are more-heavily impacted by higher tax rates due to the high marginal utility of every dollar, while the poorest represent relatively little taxable income. We work the same relative hours, yet some earn much less than the per-capita income and some earn much greater than it. They should pay a fair share. We should use a progressive tax rate, with little coming from the poor and much coming from the rich.
Each of these can be called fair or unfair.
The last one is equitable: it identifies disadvantages of some groups and adjusts accordingly.
There's another consideration: efficiency.
Economists have shown that direct cash transfers from rich to poor increase GDP and thus overall wealth, meaning that the rich end up overall richer in the end. This is, of course, subject to the normal caveats of economics: for any given economic conditions, a maximum benefit to the economy as a whole and its members individually occurs at some point X; below and above that, the economy suffers.
In other words: even the most basic form of transfer--giving people cash--can cause an increase in overall wealth, elevating even the wealthy (who profit off the economy as a whole); but jacking up taxes excessively will damage the economy and cause a slowdown, making even the poor more-poor.
In the extreme: people living under a properly-operating government experience greater wealth growth than people living in anarchy.
We can examine transit fees and do some logical reasoning to see how this impacts the economy.
In poverty-stricken areas, there isn't a lot of wealth flowing in--if there were, then there would be jobs, people would be working, people would be spending, and people would be wealthy. Access to jobs through public transit allows people in those areas to work in wealthier areas, earning an income, which then comes back to their area of residence. Convenience services--e.g. a corner grocery store--become a destination for some of that income, being spent into the local economy, creating jobs in the area.
The goods and services consumed in the lower-income area are of lower quality and price; therefor a particular amount of spending creates more jobs. If you're shopping for premium clothes and groceries, you buy the same quantity of goods and spend more; for discount goods, you spend less. With more goods moving, you need more people stocking shelves and running cash registers, thus more jobs.
More people working means more people being taxed--even operating a cash register is productive, as it allows selling, which is movement of goods, which is necessary and useful, thus a taxable productive activity because it represents wealth--which means more revenue at the same tax rates.
Ultimately, as these local economies become strong and stable, they become capable of providing better labor capital and good locations for business expansion. More-productive business can be carried out, and the economy as a whole grows.
With this growth, whichever people are positioned to profit from the overall economy will become richer: the output is bigger than the input. Those people also tend to already be rich, since they'd necessarily need to e.g. own franchise chains and have the capital to expand into the now-less-poor areas to get at some of that
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As for equitability, is it more fair to treat everyone equally or to try and make their outcomes equal?
At least here the city determines the budget of the public transport organization. Right now the city insists that fares must make up 55% of the income and the city* will provide the rest. There is a bit of income from the selling of advertisements on the side of buses and ads inside. There are a number of expenses including the collection of fares. If the city decides to completely fund public transit at the current rate and remove fares then the cost of fare collection goes away and that money can go to extra service.
* While the city is the entity that signs the cheques for public transit it gets funding from the provincial and the federal levels of government to run the system. Of course it's all from the one taxpayer. It's just how far out the costs are spread.
Baltimore could increase municipal taxes to provide free transport within its borders and leave West Maryland out of it.
If Baltimore becomes wealthier, some of that wealth will tax-transfer to West Maryland due to the impact on the State's general GDP. We can't leave West Maryland out of it.
By the same token, if we make West Maryland pay for it, the impact on Maryland's GDP will return dividends to West Maryland, which means West Maryland comes out wealthier than they started. You're basically saying West Maryland should be left behind and not be made wealthier.
is it more fair to treat everyone equally or to try and make their outcomes equal?
Equitability is trying to make their opportunity equal. If you run around a circular track, the outer circle is longer than the inner circle; so instead of starting everyone at 0 degrees, we start some people ahead of others. On an oval track, you're started several meters forward on a straight area, so it looks like you start "ahead" because the road is longer. If you want to win, you still have to be actually faster than the next runner.
As stated above, the question of treating people equally is complex.
There's $60,000 of income per person in the US (it's like $85,000 per worker) and a 40-hour job is $30/hr (plus two weeks vacation). Some people make $12/hr; some make $120/hr; some make $500/hr. All jobs are necessary, even if some produce more than others: replacing a burger-flipper with a burger-flipping machine requires more total labor investment (currently) than just having a grill and an employee, and we keep buying hamburgers.
So even if everyone had the same education and investment, many need to stock Walmart shelves and flip hamburgers. Should they pay an equal tax (e.g. $5,000/year), an equal-rate tax (e.g. 30% of income), or a progressive tax adjusted to their income such that people benefitting less than average from our society (and struggling more to survive) keep more of their income while the rich are still rich but pay a larger portion of their own income?
If you have $1,000,000/year of income and pay 40% in taxes, that's 40% of your hours, or 16 hours per week. For the average $60,000/year income, that $400,000 represents 13,333 hours of work. For less than half a week's work, you get paid for almost 7 weeks of the average person's work. What's left after your taxes for the year? 500 weeks of the average person's work.
You're taking home 500 people's gross pay. The average person, paying 28% in taxes, is taking home 0.72 people's gross pay while investing equal time.
Seems fine to me.
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