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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
Making public transport free will encourage use
Fact:
It's not the cost of public transport that puts people off using it. Just
eliminating fares without improving services won't shift the habits of
enough people to justify the cost. But if service improvements can attract
more people to public transport, we might as well maintain reasonably cheap
fares so as to recover some of the cost.
A popular suggestion by sustainable transport advocates is that more people would be persuaded to leave their cars at home and use public transport, if public transport were free. One can also make a case for free public transport on social grounds, by analogy with free health care and free public education. However, the difficulty with this idea is its effectiveness, when compared with the cost. What primarily deters people from using public transport is not its cost (provided it's competitive with car travel) but factors like flexibility, convenience and door-to-door travel times. If you live or work in one of the many Melbourne suburbs with no usable public transport at all, the fact that it's free isn't going to make it any more attractive.
Economists acknowledge the existence of these non-financial barriers when they say that public transport has a low 'price elasticity of demand'. What this means is that, all other things being equal, a 10 per cent drop in price causes less than a 10 per cent increase in patronage. Thus Adelaide, despite having Australia's cheapest public transport fares, also had Australia's most steeply declining public transport patronage through the 1990s, and today has a low (albeit stable) modal share by capital-city standards. (Adelaide was also in the early 1990s the first city to experiment with free public transport for students, as was proposed by the Victorian Liberal Party in the 2006 state election. This did not help arrest Adelaide's steep decline in patronage, and is best seen as a policy that may or may not have benefits for education but probably doesn't for transport.) So, if the objective is to maximise public transport patronage, eliminating fares on its own is a rather ineffective strategy. As it is also the most costly strategy (even taking into account the savings from eliminating fare collection), it is probably not the first we should consider. An Age article in March 2006 estimated that free public transport would cost about $340 million a year. Logically, this has to be weighed up against the alternative, which is to spend an additional $340 million a year on improved services. This would likely boost patronage more than free public transport would, and because more passengers means more fares collected, there would be increased revenue allowing services to be improved further still. On the other hand, once you've made public transport free, the money for any additional services has to be found in government budgets. So does the money to employ staff, that are needed for passenger assistance and security even if they're not selling tickets. This means that the more well-used the system is, the more it costs the taxpayer - quite the reverse of the world's best public transport systems, which come close to covering their costs (often despite relatively low fares) because they attract high patronage and hence high fare revenue. Given the enduring popularity of the idea of free public transport, it's reasonable to expect that if it were truly a good idea it would have been tried already in at least one of the dozens of large cities around the world where public transport is popular, successful, and subject to a much greater degree of democratic control than in Melbourne. Certainly, it's a characteristic of these cities that their fares are much cheaper than ours. And yet, international experience with free public transport in large cities is rare. The one example usually cited is Hasselt in Belgium, a town of 70,000 people (roughly the size of Bendigo) where buses have been free since 1997. As a measure to revive a declining city centre by encouraging people to visit more often it has been an outstanding success. But it has been less successful at encouraging a shift to sustainable transport. A survey of bus passengers a year after implementation found that 18% were former cyclists, 14% former pedestrians and 23% former car users. In other words, the free service was actually more successful at reducing walking and cycling than at reducing car travel. Hasselt's buses now serve an average of 12,000 trips per day, and while bringing much-needed custom to the city centre, are not the majority mode of transport even for Hasselaars (let alone the 200,000 daily visitors from the wider region, who either drive or pay to use trains and regional buses). Notwithstanding all this, it's certainly true that public transport fares in Melbourne are higher than they should be. For many years Melbourne has had the highest fares in Australia relative to journey length, and recent fare increases have outstripped both the rate of inflation and the change in the cost of owning and operating a car (which actually decreased at the time the GST was introduced in 2000). They are now at the level where many trips can be made more cheaply by car. For this reason, at least part of the dividend from future patronage increases should be applied to reducing fares to competitive levels. International experience points to a more effective strategy for shifting travel habits from cars to public transport than just axing fares. It involves such measures as high service frequencies, central coordination of timetables, traffic priority for trams and buses, and a conspicuous staff presence. Provided fares are set at a level competitive with car travel, these measures have been proved more effective in boosting public transport use than making public transport free - and at a much lower cost to the public purse. © 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 14 September 2007
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