Several cities have made public transport free for all residents.

Some cities have decided that buses and trams are free for all their residents. This decision has important advantages, but it also creates several problems.

The first advantage is help for poor families. A person with a small salary can spend a large part of his money on transport every month, and if the ticket is free, this money stays in the family. Some unemployed people also refuse a job in another part of the city because the transport is too expensive, so free travel helps them to find work.

Another advantage is for the environment. If travelling by bus costs nothing, some drivers will leave their car at home, so there will be less traffic and cleaner air in the centre of the city.

On the other hand, the city loses the money from tickets, and this money paid for drivers, fuel and repairs. The government must find this money from taxes, or the quality of the service will become worse: old buses, fewer buses and long waiting.

In addition, when transport is free, more people use it, so the buses become very crowded. Some passengers who paid before now prefer to take their car again because they cannot find a place to sit.

In conclusion, free public transport helps people with low incomes and can reduce pollution, but the city must pay for it, and without enough money the service becomes crowded and unreliable.

Several cities have abolished fares on their public transport networks. The measure achieves a great deal for some residents, but its effects on the transport system itself are more ambiguous than its supporters usually suggest.

The strongest advantage is distributional. Transport costs consume a substantial share of a low income, so removing them is equivalent to a meaningful pay rise for the households that need it most. It also removes a real barrier to employment: a job on the other side of a city can be genuinely unaffordable to reach when the fare is weighed against the wage, and free travel eliminates that calculation entirely. There are practical gains too, since boarding is faster without fare collection and the administration of ticketing disappears.

The central disadvantage is financial. Fares typically cover a significant proportion of operating costs, and that revenue does not vanish along with the ticket — it has to be replaced from general taxation or the service deteriorates. Where cities have not fully funded the gap, the result has been reduced frequency and deferred maintenance, which harms exactly the passengers the policy was designed to help.

The second difficulty is that free travel does not reliably reduce car use. Evidence from cities that have tried it suggests most additional journeys come from people who previously walked or cycled, since drivers are influenced far more by journey time, parking and reliability than by fare level. The environmental benefit is therefore smaller than expected, while crowding on popular routes increases.

In conclusion, free public transport is an effective way of supporting low-income residents, but as transport policy it can produce a busier, less reliable network unless the lost revenue is fully replaced.

Free public transport is usually proposed as environmental policy and usually succeeds as welfare policy, and most of the confusion surrounding it comes from that mismatch. Assessing its advantages and disadvantages properly means being clear about which objective is being pursued, because the measure performs very differently against each.

As a distributional measure, the case is strong. Transport absorbs a large share of a low income, so abolishing fares delivers a real-terms increase to precisely the households with the least margin. More significantly, it removes a barrier to employment that is invisible to anyone who has not faced it: a job across the city can be genuinely unaffordable to reach when a month of fares is set against the wage on offer, and eliminating that calculation opens work that was previously theoretical. Operational gains follow as well — boarding is quicker without fare collection, and the cost of ticketing, inspection and enforcement disappears entirely.

The financial objection is the obvious one, but it is more specific than it first appears. Fares typically recover a substantial share of operating costs, and that money is not simply lost — it is the portion funding frequency, rolling stock and maintenance. Where cities have removed it without fully replacing it, the observable consequence has been longer headways and deferred renewal. The policy then harms the people it was meant to serve, since a bus that is free but comes every forty minutes is worse for someone without a car than one that costs a little and comes every ten.

The environmental argument is weaker than commonly assumed, and the reason is instructive. Studies of cities that have abolished fares consistently find that most new passengers previously walked or cycled rather than drove. Drivers respond principally to journey time, reliability and parking, not to fare level, so the price signal being removed was not the one keeping them in their cars. The result is a policy that increases public transport use, reduces active travel and achieves modest modal shift from driving — while adding crowding on the busiest routes.

Taken together, this suggests a fairly clear reading. Free travel is a good welfare instrument and a mediocre transport instrument, and the same money spent on frequency would attract more drivers off the road while leaving fares low for those who need help. Whether that trade is worth making depends on which problem a city is actually trying to solve — and much of the disappointment with this policy stems from cities not having decided.