“Free public transport will make the situation worse by degrading the ability to finance more alternatives to the car”

Lhe recent experience of the single ticket at 9 euros in Germany for TER and urban public transport questions French decision-makers who are looking for solutions to fight against global warming. But this German initiative had a very low impact on road traffic and is very expensive: 1,400 euros per ton of CO2 avoided, nearly 30 times the amount of the carbon tax. Germany also runs twice as many TER trains as in France and German users pay twice as much for their urban public transport: the situations therefore have nothing to do.

Should we go as far as free transport, an idea that is increasingly attractive in France with a simple equation: free transport = fewer cars? From simplicity to simplism, there is often little. In France, it is the lack of alternatives in public transport from the peri-urban area and in the inner suburbs which explains why hundreds of thousands of cars clog the agglomerations at rush hour. This is also the reason for the Grand Paris Express project.

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In the provinces, the TER offer is three times lower than the demand. It is a lack of alternative supply to the car that we have to fill and not a problem of demand. Free public transport makes a diagnostic error and will only worsen the situation, by degrading the ability to finance more alternatives to the car, with a loss of 5 billion euros annually if we generalize it, without gain on car use.

Free, bad solution, but good question

Opinion polls show, moreover, that the French are asking for more public transport and not free transport. If free is typical of the real false solution, it nevertheless raises good questions about the pricing of public transport in France. Public transport costs users three times less on average than the car.

However, if we distinguish subscriptions from ticket prices (so-called “occasional” travellers), the price paid per kilometer by occasional passengers is slightly higher than that of the car. It will be retorted that beyond the monetary cost alone, what counts is the travel time. By adding to the monetary cost the travel time multiplied by the value of the time (which depends on the income and the reasons for travel), we obtain an overall cost of transport.

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The travel time accounts for 90% of this overall cost for the subscriber, but 60% for the non-subscriber, or even 50% for lower incomes: if the tariff does not count for the subscriber, it is much less true for the occasional traveler. Overall cost calculations show that the traveler who does not subscribe to public transport always loses out to the car, whether in urban areas or from suburbs.

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