Making mass transit free of charge

Will San Francisco be first? There is a whole movement out there that argues the best way to reduce traffic congestion is to make public transportation free. Now, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom has asked that the idea be studies:

He told The Chronicle that when all the costs associated with collecting the fares are factored in, the idea of letting people board for free may not be a big financial stretch. "When you add everything up, this idea certainly deserves consideration,'' he said. ...The city hopes to collect a projected $138 million in fares in the upcoming fiscal year. And while that may seem like a lot of money, it accounts for about 22 percent of the annual Municipal Railway budget -- below the average national fare-box collection rate.

In The Times recently, D. Malcolm Carson made the case for free mass transit rides, aruging it gives motorists a true incentive to get out of their cars:

Eliminating transit fares is the logical flip side to the anti-congestion pricing schemes so favored by economists. London, for instance, charges a daily fee equal to about $15.60 to drive in the traffic-chocked central city between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. weekdays. Just as such fees on cars supposedly discourage driving, eliminating fares could encourage public transit use.

What do you think? Do free rides make sense? Will they get folks out of their cars? Hit the COMMENT button and join the dialogue.

Comments

[Mark Sandelson]

London is not a suitable example to use as a comparison to Los Angeles for many obvious reasons. Additionally the costs of mass transit are high in London regardless of whether you prepay or not. London is broken into a series of zones that circulate the center moving from 1 out to 5. In Los Angeles you can board a bus in Santa Monica and ride for the same costs to Norwalk as to Brentwood.
There are more compelling arguments to get people to use public transit on a stand alone basis and they should be encouraged. For example, greater ridership would produce socially relevant benefits regardless of costs for usage. The more ridership the system had on a daily basis the more likely there is for a proper mass transit sysytem to exist. London cannot be used as an example for it is virtually impossible to think of anyone living further than a 15 min walk from an underground and far less to a bus line. That will never be possible in Los Angeles.
One additional benenfit of ridership would potentially prohibit the need for financial co's and the like to exist in every area of the city. These offices are not visited and seem to exist for the puirposes of business promotion. Los Angeles needs to look at other cities like San Francisco where BART has ovr the past decades built a huge daily ridership from scratch..but first was the system. We need to encourage the system and the costs are so easliy offset in other non directly measureable ways that the cost of ridership is not relevant to the argument.

[socialscientist]

everyone benefits - everyone pays

http://www.freepublictransit.org

[William Caloia]

Until US Mass Transit programs are flexible enough to compete with the automobile, they are doomed to be second rate. My family lived in Germany for 5 years. We left the car in the driveway because we could buy one ticket in Kerzell, a small town of 8000 near Fulda, and go to the Frankfurt Airport on two trains and one ticket. This included all baggage handling to the airline. We could just as easily take the train to Franfurt, the Trolley from the Bahnhof (Train station) to the Zoo or Botanical Garden, again on one ticket. They key is that it took about the same amount of time as driving it did.
When American Mass Transit gets this good, people will return. Besides, The train station restrooms were not homes for perverts or homeless bums and there were no panhandlers or other undesireables hanging around the premises. Do away with these negatives, and American urbanites will return to mass transit. ( By the way, we were in Germany in 1976!)

[Aviva]

Making public transportation free won't do any good if the buses and trains don't go where people need to go, and don't run frequently enough. Sadly, those are the two problems with public transportation in L.A. Not the cost.

[Kymberleigh Richards]

I stand by my statements in my letter to the editor on this subject, published last Thursday in the Times.

There is already a sales tax for public transit operations. It has existed since the 1970s, and it funds every urban transit operator in the state. However, it has ALWAYS required a minimum of 20% of operating costs to be recovered by fares (including sale of pre-paid passes).

The amount of that existing sales tax -- which is in the same percentage per dollar taxed as the one Mr. Carson proposed in his op-ed -- is obviously not enough to fund all operations, otherwise someone would have lobbied the Legislature by now to change the farebox requirement. If the tax is insufficient to cover costs now, how high would it have to be to cover the inevitable increase in ridership if the service was free?

I am reminded of the days when, as a condition of imposing one of the existing local sales taxes for transportation, RTD operated service on an artificially low 50-cent fare for a brief period. Hopefully, we will never see the levels of overcrowding on buses that we saw then. Going to a "free fare" system would cause precisely that.

[hiker]

I've often thought about this and glad for this blog comment. If free rapid transit would reduce congestion on Los Angeles streets, yes - of course, I would be in favor of it. Look at the Santa Monica Frwy heading east from 2-7pm every single week day. Or the 405 which is constantly crowded! How many millions of man hours are lost every year sitting in traffic on these two reeways?
Where is our subway down Wilshire? Why does it stop at Western? I would prefer to have buses (and rail) free, rather than charge to use freeways, as all that would do would encourage even more usage of surface streets.
This is a great idea. Make all public transit free. As a conservative, I hate the idea of higher taxes, but I would gladly pay to get our city moving again.

[Scott]

Mass transit? The mode of transportation that far and away moves the masses is the CAR. Public transportation or Collective transit should be free because it is a social good, but that is not going to make any significant increase to the number of riders. Several cities, states, MPOs, and DOTs are in significant financial trouble from chasing that very myth. They have been pumping millions, billions of dollars into so called "mass transit" while gridlock continues to get worse and worse. Even though it was people using their car that paid for the right-of-way politicians now take under the false premise that "WE ARE DOING SOMETHING TO HELP TRAFFIC". I challenge any politican that passes such expenditure to ride the bus for a year. It requires more than a free trip to Curitiba, Brazil to ride an arranged route with a margarita in your hand to understand transportation. It will not be the politicians riding the bus because they want the same thing that we all want; and that is INDIVIDUAL MOBILITY! Individual Mobility is what creates productive members of society, not collective transit.

[Joe Bishop]

Ah, the "free" government giveaways. It certainly does make it look like they care about the traffic congestion. But really, it is just a way to collect more tax revenue (yes a new sales tax) so that the MTAs can be a bit bigger. A stronger empire if you will.

I see the buses down here in Los Angeles and they are quite full.

The real issue is not the cost of the bus fare, but the politicians and wasted money.

There is actually a law now that restricts the LA MTA from using sales tax to fund subways. Because they had shown a conflict of interest in collecting that sales tax to pay for the subways.

Basically, it works like this. Ever since Proposition 13, the state has become more heavily addicted to sales tax. The largest sales taxable item in our lives is our car and the gas it consumes. They need us in our own separate cars to maximze sales tax revenue. And at the same time, if we are frustrated out of our mind in traffic, we will approve anything the transportation people put in front of us to relieve traffic. So we approve large bond measures to pay for carpool lanes. Large bond measures to pay for trains. And in the end the traffic on the freeway does not get any better.

If the politicians really wanted to help Californian's out, they would properly fund peoples ability to find each other to carpool and rideshare.

Sites like http://ridebay.com exist to help commuters find others that are already going the same way. And the best part of sites like http://ridebay.com is that they help the driver get reimbursed for the ride.

Look, as taxpayers we spend $1/mile for each person that takes the buses and $2/mile for each person that takes the trains. For a 20 mile commuter, trains cost us about $1000/month to subsidize and bus subsidies cost us $500/month per rider.

If we all took mass transit, we would go bankrupt. We need to rethink what we are doing. Why don't we guarantee a minimum level of funding for rideshare matching services? You know something more than the $367,000 we currently spend for the entire County of Los Angeles.