Quite simply it comes down to social justice. Free public transport would cost today $340 million (more if it came into effect). Suburbs with a good public transport services/ public transport market share are more well off/richer etc suburbs then those suburbs with poor transport choice.
Its my strong view that I would prefer to spend the $340 million per annum (or even more) in providing genuine transport choice to suburbs of acute disadvantage. VCOSS has done some excellent work on how lack of public transport in disadvantaged areas helps to entrench inequality. It seems to me that a better use of government money, and indeed of rates, is in expanding transport choice to all of Metropolitan Melbourne (and indeed regional areas as well).
Another factor is that the cities with free public transport (like the Belgian example citied by the Sunday Age) are almost exclusively small cities. Melbourne has one of the world's most extensive tram and train systems. It is not a small city and the economics of dealing with increased capacity demand arising from a free system would be almost too much to bear.
ALSO, the actual impact on congestion seems to be rather minimal. Free Public Transport is adressing the price points of transport from the wrong end of the stick. Consumers of public transport largely pay a fair price - the big problem is that users of private road transport do not! The massive externalities of provate road transport are not born by users, but by society as a whole and we need to make private road transport users bear more of the costs before we should address the public transport user costs (ie, removing tax incentives for car use, congestion charges anyone, remove GST on public transport fares)
And only after this is all done, then we should we have a debate about ticketing/free public transport.
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Date: 2006-03-11 03:34 am (UTC)Its my strong view that I would prefer to spend the $340 million per annum (or even more) in providing genuine transport choice to suburbs of acute disadvantage. VCOSS has done some excellent work on how lack of public transport in disadvantaged areas helps to entrench inequality. It seems to me that a better use of government money, and indeed of rates, is in expanding transport choice to all of Metropolitan Melbourne (and indeed regional areas as well).
Another factor is that the cities with free public transport (like the Belgian example citied by the Sunday Age) are almost exclusively small cities. Melbourne has one of the world's most extensive tram and train systems. It is not a small city and the economics of dealing with increased capacity demand arising from a free system would be almost too much to bear.
ALSO, the actual impact on congestion seems to be rather minimal. Free Public Transport is adressing the price points of transport from the wrong end of the stick. Consumers of public transport largely pay a fair price - the big problem is that users of private road transport do not! The massive externalities of provate road transport are not born by users, but by society as a whole and we need to make private road transport users bear more of the costs before we should address the public transport user costs (ie, removing tax incentives for car use, congestion charges anyone, remove GST on public transport fares)
And only after this is all done, then we should we have a debate about ticketing/free public transport.