There’s a great piece out today on the Atlantic Cities blog, about what happens when a city makes its transit system free. The focus is on a couple of smaller cities in France, especially Chateauroux. I’ve written about this before, here.
One interesting note from the piece: It mentions that Chateauroux was able to do this because their farebox recovery is in the 15-20% range, while other larger cities typically are 35-40%. That may be true in France and other European cities, but most large American cities still recover at best 25% of farebox on their bus systems. Now, part of that is the sprawling nature of our cities compared to Europe. Even still, it reinforces my point that we need to embrace some new models, and reinvent the basic bus system.
One Response to Update on Making Bus Service Free
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Thank you for pointing out this article Kevin. I think we need to be cautious about this and it certainly has to be on a case-by-case basis. I believe that the best way to increase ridership is to decrease our priority on moving single-occupant vehicles. When there is a time and money balance between the two modes of travel, transit ridership will increase.
My concern with free buses stems from experience in a City with very poor ridership and very high SOV Levels do Service—Colorado Springs. We had a free ‘circulator bus’ downtown that was eventually shut down due to low ridership. The ridership was supposedly low because of the perception of homeless utilizing it to stay warm. It was a good system, and I think in its instance, a low cost fare(a quarter?) may have been enough to dismiss the misperception.