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17 Reasons (or More) to Stop Charging People to Ride the Bus
The case for Fare-Free Transit
Dave Olsen, The Tyee
[Tyee Editor’s note: Today we launch this five-part series funded by you, the readers who donated to a Tyee Fellowship for Solutions-oriented Reporting. To find out more about Tyee Fellowships, click here. To learn more about the series’ author, Dave Olsen, go here. Scroll down this page to find an audio interview with Olsen by Katherine Gretsinger.]
The time has come to stop making people pay to take public transit.
Why do we have any barriers to using buses, trolleys, SkyTrain? The threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. The hue and cry of the traffic jammed driver grows louder every commute. Yet since 2000, TransLink has hiked fares 50 per cent, and its board has just agreed to follow the staff’s recommendation to raise them higher still.
That kind of thinking is so last century. Just ask the mayor of San Francisco, a city similar in size to Vancouver, who ordered his staff to seriously explore the cost efficiency of no longer charging people to ride public transit.
Listen to Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, who recently voiced to a reporter his top dream: “I would have mass transit be given away for nothing and charge an awful lot for bringing an automobile into the city.”
Consider this sampling of communities providing free rides on trolleys, buses, trams, and ferries: Staten Island, NY; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Vail, Colorado; Logan and Cache Valley, Utah; Clemson, South Carolina; Commerce, California; Châteauroux, Vitré, and Compiègne, France; Hasselt, Belgium; Lubben, Germany; Mariehamn, Finland; Nova Gorica, Slovenia; Türi, Estonia; ÖvertorneÃ¥, Sweden.
Or speak, as I have, with transit officials in locales of Washington State and Belgium, where Fare-Free Transit has hummed along smoothly now for years.
It’s time B.C. joined the trend because forcing people to pay ever higher fares is not just tough on the planet and people with tight budgets, it’s bad economics and self-defeating public policy, as I will explain in this five part series funded by a Tyee Fellowship for Solutions-oriented Reporting.
Tough sell?
Over the course of the next few days, I’ll be doing my best to explain why taking the fare box out of our buses — wherever you live in B.C. and beyond — makes both dollars and sense.
Believe me, I know that’s a tough sell for skeptics.
Just seven years ago TransLink stated that their “market research” indicated that people wanted to pay when boarding the bus. But as Tania Wegwitz, senior transit planner in the Municipal Systems Program for BC Transit recently wrote: “Prepaid fares are better than cash fares, I don’t think there is anyone — passengers, municipalities, transit staff — who would disagree with you.”
Well, fare-free transit is simply the ultimate implementation of prepaid fares. We would prepay for all public transit through taxes, and then we’d ride for “free.”
(5 July 2007)
India races for the world’s cheapest car
Siddharth Srivastava, Asia Times
NEW DELHI – The telecom revolution in India has made cheap mobile telephones accessible to even the country’s poorest, and now India’s underclass is likely to be able to go from two wheels to four when the cheapest entry-level autos hit the roads in the near future.
The race for the world’s cheapest four-wheel vehicle was recently ignited by Tata Motors’ plans to launch a Rs100,000 (US$2,470) car in 2008. In comparison, China’s bargain auto, the Chery QQ, retails for about 20,000 yuan ($2,600).
(6 July 2007)
The report neglects to mention that considering the external costs, these cars may not be so cheap: A message from the melting slopes of Everest (Independent):
Fifty-four years after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to scale Everest, their sons have said the mountain is now so ravaged by climate change that they would no longer recognise it.
On the eve of the Live Earth concerts this weekend, Peter Hillary and Jamling Tenzing yesterday issued a timely warning that global warming is rapidly changing the face of the world’s highest mountain and threatening the survival of billions of people who rely on its glaciers for drinking water.
Local Rail – An Overview
“DoDo”, The Oil Drum: Europe
This is a guest post by DoDo, a railway professional in Hungary who front pages over at the European Tribune and posts here on TOD under the same name. – Jerome a Paris
BruceMcF introduced us to various local transport modes as potential ‘recruiters’ for high-speed rail. Pursuing most of these is worth on its own, for local traffic. This diary expands on one of these: local rail. As the Recruiters diary indicated, local rail is just one alternative, but it should be the backbone of any decent public transport system.
Below, I first want to chart distinct categories of local rail: describe their specialities, their differing best uses, and some newer developments. In the real world, however, the boundaries of those categories are rather blurred, what’s more, different locales use a bewildering array of rail terminology. But there are also some ingenious ideas mixing the ‘basic categories’, some of them will be described below, too.
This diary can also be viewed as a general guide as to what kind of projects local initiatives could aim for, and tries to give examples around the world that can be used as model for supporters and argument against opponents.
Stopping train/local service
A ‘normal’ railway line runs between two transport hubs (or radiates from one), and has stations in wayside towns. Running passenger transport on such a line is aimed for the outer commuter belt, it is the longest-distance (and potentially fastest) form of commuter service. It is typically also the most ‘concentrated’: it functions best if stations are transport hubs themselves (for buses etc.), it doesn’t run too frequently, but can have high capacity.
In North America, an example could be the services around New York City still maintained by Metro-North.
‘Normal’ stopping trains often share tracks with freight trains. This can be both a blessing and a curse: a blessing if with passenger alone the line would make too high losses, a curse if passenger has no priority and has to face delays.
It is generally a good idea to strive for lines that don’t end out in the nowhere, but in another major hub.
(6 July 2007)
