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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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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...
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!).
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!
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.