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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...
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"?
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.
Because TAXPAYERS in Luxembourg overwhelmingly people of the rest of EU, rather than its own citizens. Their primary means of income is providing safe haven for tax evasion for large companies that want an office within EU and all the perks that come with it.
There's a reason why the current head of EU Commission and former PM of Luxembourg has earned himself a nickname "tax evader in chief". It's easy to pay for large array of benefits to a microstate worth of people when you can fund it via providing safe haven for large multinationals.
If you're an actually productive rather than parasitic economy, the picture looks very different and perks like these don't scale well.
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!).
"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%!
You will not be sitting in it for longer than about 30 minutes unless you are crossing a border
You'd wish. From Troisvierges to Belval (no borders involved) the train takes 1 hour 45 minutes. If it is on time, which rarely happens.
Yes, some people actually object to fare-free travel saying that the money would be better used improving the service, rather than making it cheaper.
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.
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If you're an actually productive rather than parasitic economy, the picture looks very different and perks like these don't scale well.
If you're a productive economy then those workers are commuting to a place of work which then produces goods/services which contributes to GDP. You then tax those companies and their sales/trade. Those tax receipts should be sufficient to pay for the employee's transport costs, given that it's affordable out of their salary which is paid from a small part of their revenue. It should result in people using public transport more. Companies should benefit from more employees in their talent pool and the government benefits from reduced use of the road infrastructure which saves on costs.
They only fail to scale well over very large distances in countries with a sparse population, like America. Even then they would scale well in and around large cities.
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.
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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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?