As reported in The Guardian Tallinn in Estonia has been providing free public transit to its citizens since 2013, and also says it has made a 20 million euro profit.
While a monthly travel card in London costs $320 Canadian dollars a month, it is free in Tallinn on the Baltic Sea after their populist mayor Edgar Savisaar called a referendum on the decision, dismissed by critics at the time as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.
To enjoy Tallinn’s buses, trams, trolley buses and trains for free you must be registered as a resident, which means that the municipality gets a €1,000 share of your income tax every year, explains Dr Oded Cats, an expert who has conducted a year long study on the project. Residents only need to pay €2 for a “green card” and then all their trips are free.
Since the scheme launched, an additional 25,000 people have registered in the city that previously had a population of 416,000, but this is where the tension lies. The more money for the city of Tallinn, the less there is for the places they leave behind, explains Cats, “so it’s not hard to see why the government and the mayor’s office might see things differently”.
Tallinn also can’t rely on increasing tax revenues by attracting new residents forever. Before the scheme started, 6,000 new residents registered annually. And while the numbers shot up to about 10,000 new registrations in the immediate years after the scheme launched, early figures suggest that only 3,000 to 4,000 have registered in 2016 so far.
Tallinn is the role model for other cities trying to find how to make transit accessible to all and affordable. However there is a mixed review whether it has improved mobility and accessibility of low-income and unemployed residents … [and] no indication that employment opportunities improved as a result of this policy.
Although a small system, you only need to go to Whidbey Island to see a free transit system. Suppored by an extra 1% or so supplement on their sales tax. I have used it – seems to work fine.
Observing the most recent civic elections in Vancouver, one conclusion became very clear to me.
No civic issue stands alone.
For example, you can’t deal with housing issues by merely building accommodation. Each issue is interconnected with others, and to simply state an intention to “solve” any given urban problem is at best naive.
Perhaps the most interconnected civic issue is transportation. Being able to get from where one can afford to live, to where goods and services are available, is one of the single most important factors in making a city livable for the greatest number of people.
Public transportation is the great leveler. It is essentially democratic, enabling people to move collectively where individually they could afford to. Spending tax dollars on transit can ease the demand to spend less effectively in other areas of the public realm.
Should we opt for a free-to-the-user system in Vancouver?
Yes, I think we should, but we have to be aware of how it will dramatically affect how our transit system develops and works in future.
With greatly increased demand, we will pass that threshold where buses can address the need for capacity on many routes. We will need to reconsider a lot of past decisions.
Fortunately for Vancouver, most of our main streets are graded and engineered for streetcar lines. One reason our streets last as long as they do is that under many of them is a railway roadbed. That is one of the most expensive aspects of building surface rail, and it already exists in many strategic places–a resource waiting to be used.
How important is that? Surface rail can easily cost over $50 million per km. With roadbed already in place, it can reduce that cost by half.
If a free-to-the-user system is implemented, I strongly suspect that the vanity subway project will be shelved, because it could not deliver sufficient service soon enough at a fiscally responsible cost. Under the close scrutiny that it would be subjected to, it would become obvious to all that the subway proposal is not about transit in the first place–it’s all about real estate.
One positive aspect of a free-to-the-user system is that public transit would morph from the “loser cruiser” to the mode of choice. Rather than de-valuing transit, it would once again become an element of civic pride, an aspect of public space that was largely lost in the past century when people opted for cars and city planning catered to that change.
How about making transit free during low demand and charge shoulder and peak fees when demand is high? And the same for roads. It would help with limited capacity during peak demand.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.