Public Transportation is a form of transportation that charges fares on fixed routes and are available for use by general public. Buses, Trains, subways etc. are some of the most common forms which constitute public transportation. Though it could be both privately and publicly owned, in most cases governments and responsible for public transportation as it forms an important and vital part of a city’s or country’s infrastructure. Though the history of public transport dates back to thousands of years back in ancient Greek, Paris in France is believed to have got the first modern and organized public transport system consisting of omnibuses. Quite recently there have been suggestions about making public transit systems free to counter growing pollution and burgeoning numbers of private vehicles, but the argument in itself is flawed and I think that free public transportation does more harms than benefits.
Free public transportation leads to serious degradation in the quality of ridership, Internal Transit environment and system effectiveness as a whole. Fare-free systems are usually responsible for attracting problem riders causing inconvenience to other riders. In Austin, Texas experiment for free public transit service, officials claim that transit operators came close to “insurrection” as their transit system became flooded with truant school children, vagrants, and other “dubious categories”. (Perone, p.15). Safety of the operations is also a big question mark when it comes to free transit systems.
Harm to community and its image is one more disadvantage that comes coupled with free public transportation systems. Transit dependent riders are exposed to choice riders, which creates troubles and hence leads to an irreparable damage to the community. Moreover, free public transport might create a negative modal shift from walking and cycling, which leads to negative influence on the public health and increase in CO2 emissions (Belter, p.5)
The advocates of free public transportation are of view that the measure is capable of reducing pollution levels, number of private vehicles, and congestion and traffic problems. Though at the outset this argument seems logical and true but it hardly represents the right picture.
In most of the cases across the globe it has been concluded that free transit hardly leads to any reduction in traffic or pollution levels. An experiment was conducted in 2004 on the Leiden-The Hague bus corridor regarding free transit systems that continued for 1 year. Due to free buses, number of passengers increased three folds but the experiment hardly had the desired results as reduction in car use or traffic had almost no effect and it was so small that it could not be measured (Governed, p.5). This is just one of the many glaring examples of the failure of free public transport systems.
The cost of fare free transit systems is too high. It leads to loss of revenues for the exchequer and indeed burdens it with extra expenses leading to increase in deficits. Moreover, these systems have been found to promote or induce high taxation by the local governments but leads to increase in inflation and frustration to those who do not use public transportation and hence the move in itself is not feasible and just.
Public transportation systems, with reasonable fares and good infrastructure, is the only approach that is practical and economically viable. Free transit systems come with their flaws and problems and hence should be shunned and done away with it.
Works Cited
Belter, Torsten, Maike von Harten, and Sandra Sorof. Advantages and disadvantages of free
Public transport services, European Union, 2012. Web
Goeverden van, Cees, Piet Rietveld, Jorine Koelemeijer, and Paul Peeters. Subsidies in public
Transport, European Transport, 2006. Web
Perone, S. Jennifer. Advantages and Disadvantages of Fare-Free Transit Policy, National Center
for Transportation Research, 2002. Web
