Should Public Transit Be Free? - Freakonomics
"Marcus Finbom didn’t just dodge fares himself, and encourage others in Stockholm to do the same; he and his comrades at Planka also had a scheme to mitigate the risk of fare-dodging.
FINBOM: We mainly did this by organizing a solidarity fund. So if you got caught and you got a quite hefty fine — at the moment, I think it’s somewhere in the vicinity of $150 — the solidarity fund would pay this.
DUBNER: So this is a group you join, where you’re not going to pay for the transit that you ride, but then you contribute to — it’s kind of like an insurance fund, right? You contribute a little bit, and if you get caught and get fined, the fund will pay it for you. Is that the way it works?... They wanted to challenge the idea that anyone should pay for public transit. For Finbom, this gets at some bigger questions about the relationship between transit and society...
DUBNER: So in a 2019 Boston Globe op-ed — you were a City Council member then — you wrote a piece titled, “Forget Fare Hikes, Make the T Free,” the T being the Boston public-transit system; it’s the T in M.B.T.A., which is the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. “Free public transportation,” you argued, “is the single biggest step we could take toward economic mobility, racial equity, and climate justice.”...
WU: We know that the foundation for equitable access to opportunities, is connectedness, the ability to get around. A 2015 longitudinal study of several hundred people that Harvard conducted showed that the factor most closely linked to a family’s ability to rise out of poverty, in fact, wasn’t the test scores of schools in the area, it wasn’t the public-safety statistics. In fact, it was the average commute time to work. So there’s a relationship between transportation, and particularly transportation-infrastructure decisions, and which communities have access to economic opportunity...
TAYLOR: We can think about price elasticity, which is: if the fare goes down to zero or goes up. And we can also think about service elasticity, so if the service becomes more frequent, people don’t have to wait as long. And it turns out that people are at least as service-elastic as they are price-elastic... They really like reliable service. We know that people weight wait time — they w-e-i-g-h-t w-a-i-t time at about 1.5 to 4.5 times in-vehicle time. So let’s just call it three times. That means if you wait 10 minutes for a bus, in your perception of the burden of that trip, you weighted it like it was a half hour. So what I would say is that experiment tells us both that people responded to the free fare, they also responded to the fact that the boarding and alighting times are faster. If you have systems where people are fumbling in their pocket and uncrumpling dollar bills and sliding them in, that takes time. And that brings us to a thing about the way we charge for fares. Ah, the way we charge for fares. This is one of Brian Taylor’s pet peeves about public transit. A few years ago, he took his daughter to Boston to look at colleges.
TAYLOR: We did not wonder how we would pay for the hotel we stayed in. When we walked in at a restaurant, we didn’t say, “Do you take cash or credit cards or what? How will we pay for this?” There was no uncertainty.
But when it came to the public transit in Boston:
TAYLOR: We walked out to get on the T — and I’m someone who works in this field — we had no idea what to do. Absolutely no idea what to do. There was eight-point type laying out all of the fare policies. And I needed to go to a convenience store and buy a card. Could I pay cash? I didn’t know, there was confusion. Why public transit should it be so complicated and difficult to figure out? I have cards from Sydney, Australia, from Brisbane, from London, from Tokyo, from Shanghai — all of which are different, all of which have different rules.
To be fair, some of these places are much easier than others, and some use technology better — including, and this may surprise you, New York City.
TAYLOR: In New York, recently, I was visiting my daughters. I used Google Pay to use the train. What a breakthrough that was.
So why don’t all transit systems let you just use an app on your phone to pay?
TAYLOR: The problem is, because public transit is publicly owned and operated, and we see as our goal to give mobility to everyone. Not everyone has access to a smartphone or to a credit card, so in our efforts to try and be as inclusive as possible, we end up making paying to use transit as confusing as possible. And that’s a serious problem... BART in the San Francisco Bay Area, going into downtown San Francisco, those peak-hour, peak-direction commuters — that is going downtown in the morning — have higher incomes than the average driver.
DUBNER: So you’re saying making public transit free for those commuters doesn’t make a lot of sense?
TAYLOR: First of all, they’re not that price-sensitive. And secondly, it’s just transferring a benefit to very high-income commuters. On the other hand, local bus service in Lubbock, Texas — the users are almost uniformly low-income. There, are-free transit is essentially a transfer to lower-income, disadvantaged populations. Just saying generally, “Make it fare-free for everything, for all types of trips,” I would not agree with that.
DUBNER: Okay, so that context is noted and appreciated, but it sounds as though one simple adjustment might be, “Hey, let’s just make it means-tested.” We do means testing for a lot of things in society. Is that a sensible way to think about public transit? Fare-free public transit for, let’s say, students and seniors, which a lot of places already have, and everybody under $X annual income?
TAYLOR: Yeah, there’s a movement around trying to do that. The criticism is, “Well, you have lots of undocumented residents, you have other people who aren’t able to document their income, you create bureaucratic barriers that the most disadvantaged travelers can’t overcome. And you may end up excluding people that you ought to help.” On the other hand, the question is, do we need to give something valuable away to rich people for free on the argument that we want to help low-income people?... The thing you have to understand about public transit is there’s New York and everything else. And in fact, I just reviewed an academic paper where they simply held New York out of the equation because New York accounts for about four out of 10 transit trips in the entire United States...
I have another colleague who has gotten herself in a lot of trouble over the years doing research showing that when low-income households get access to automobiles, all sorts of good things happen... Better access to food, better access to healthcare, to education, which many concerned about the problems of dependence on automobiles chafe against that and say, “Well, that’s a problem.” Her response is that we shouldn’t balance our environmental policy on keeping poor people out of cars. “You all have spent the last century building cities around automobile travel. Why should it surprise you that when low-income people get access to cars, they’re better off?” We can say that low-income travelers drive too little and most of us drive too much...
VERMA: The negative incentive is very much on driving, but the answer cannot be, “Well, we’ve started charging you, and go to the public transport system that already exists, which is now going to become worse because there are more people using it.” That cannot be the answer. So the two things — the incentive and the disincentive — have to go hand in hand. If you tell people you can’t use your cars, you also have to give them an alternative...
FINBOM: By decreasing the cost of public transit and at the same time increasing the cost of car, you will definitely switch riders. One really good example is when they introduced the congestion fees in the Stockholm region here. At the same time, they built a lot of park-and-ride systems. So if you lived in the outer parts of the region, you would take your car and park it and then take one of the new express buses directly into the city. And at the same time, they also introduced a one-zone system. With just $2 you could jump on the bus from anywhere. And this really increased the attractiveness of the public transit. And if you compare this with when they introduced the congestion fees in Gothenburg, it was quite contested... And it’s the main port city of Sweden as well. And they did not put as much resources into getting new access to public transit. So it just made car ridership more expensive. And this got people really, really angry and actually shifted the whole political situation in the local parliament in Gothenburg. The ruling party lost power — it had a big effect."
Just because public transport is free doesn't mean it's good (in this case, reducing commute times). And given the crazy price of housing in Greater Boston (which pushes people out, increasing their commute times)...
Should Public Transit Be Free? (Update) - Freakonomics
"LIEBER: M.T.A. is the New York state agency that operates the subways, the buses, the paratransit operation, and the commuter railroads, as well as a lot of our tolled bridges and tunnels in the New York area.
DUBNER: I read here that the M.T.A. network has not only the nation’s biggest bus fleet, but also more subway and commuter rail cars than all other U.S. transit systems combined. Is that possibly true?
LIEBER: Yeah, that’s definitely true. We carry close to half of the nation’s mass-transit passengers...
All of the evidence that we’ve gathered so far is the thing that riders want, and that really turns them on the most is more service, more frequent service, more reliable service, and faster service. The best move may be to invest in service rather than investing in free... when transportation historically becomes free, all of a sudden it becomes not just a transportation facility, but it becomes responsible for dealing with lots of other social issues where people don’t have anywhere else to go. And that could have an impact on the experience of the ride... what I’m not certain I really want to do is to spread a ton of money to middle- and upper-middle and even upper-income people, which is a big cohort of our ridership, rather than targeting affordability efforts at the people who need it most...
For politicians, he said — and I would put transit activists in this camp as well — supporting free transit is an easy win; it makes them look good and it costs them almost nothing. But when you talk to transit scholars, and the people who actually run the systems — like Lieber — well, like most things in life, it’s complicated."
Related:
Why do voters support public transportation? Public choices and private behavior - "We examine American support for transit spending, and particularly support for financing transit with local transportation sales taxes. We first show that support for transportation sales tax elections may be a poor proxy for transit support; many voters who support such taxes do not support increased transit spending, and many people who support transit spending do not support increased sales taxes to finance it. We then show that support for transit spending is correlated more with belief in its collective rather than private benefits—transit supporters are more likely to report broad concerns about traffic congestion and air pollution than to report wanting to use transit themselves. These findings suggest a collective action problem, since without riders transit cannot deliver collective benefits. But most transit spending supporters do not use transit, and demographics suggest they are unlikely to begin doing so; transit voters are wealthier and have more options than transit riders."
Ironic: Voters favor increased funding to public transit so that others will use it and get off the road so they can drive better. This suggests that those who push public transit are champagne socialists and have no skin in the game