The country where all public transit is free

From March 1st 2020, Luxembourg will have free public transit throughout the country: you’ll be able to travel on buses, trains, trams, and that one funicular railway without a ticket. It sounds like a good idea: but is it?

Edited by Michelle Martin https://www.youtube.com/@OnTheCrux
Thanks to Leonard French at Lawful Masses for holding the camera out on the Casemates: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChBJtu4BhT8b8t9Qe9R-EZg

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Luxembourg is a small country.
It’s about 50 miles by 35 miles, with just over 600,000 people
living in it. And here in the capital,
Luxembourg City, around 200,000 people
commute into work every day, half from outside the country, but less than 20% of them
travel by public transit. But from Sunday, March 1st,
all public transit in the entire country will be free. Pretty soon, there’ll be no ticket machines,
unless you want an international ticket. There’ll be no fare dodgers,
unless you count people who are sneaking into the first-class train cabins
that you will still have to pay for. And on the face of it, free public transit
seems like an easy decision. Get people out of cars
and into buses and trains. But it’s a little more
complicated than that. – We are the country,
besides Qatar, with the highest degree of
cars per household, in Luxembourg, and we have definitely a big problem,
especially in peak hours, with enormous congestion problems. We have a problem also that
quality-of-life in our cities, in our villages, it’s really worsened. That comes because
Luxembourg is a country where you had not only the highest average
of economic growth in the last 25 years, but also our population growth
is the highest in the European Union. Having mobility behaviour
that is mainly based on individual cars cannot really function anymore, and at the end, it’s also a problem then
for our economy itself. – Making public transit free
is not a new idea. There are quite a few cities around the world
who’ve already done it, and a lot of Estonia now has
free public transit for residents. Luxembourg, though, is the first country
to abolish fares entirely, and partly that’s because it can afford to do it.
The country is a small, rich tax haven. The thing is, public transit here is
almost free already. A ticket valid for a full day on every
bus, tram, and train in the country is €4. The whole transit network costs the government
€700 million a year to operate, but all the tickets sold
add up to just 10% of that. By comparison, London’s transit network is
about half-funded by fares. So from the Luxembourg
government’s perspective, there’s not actually that much difference
between a €4 day ticket and free transit, but “free transit” is the sort of headline
that gets you a lot of good publicity. But hey, if transit is free,
why would you want to get around by car? Well, it’s because
the transit here isn’t great. It’s okay,
by European standards. The buses and trains will get you there.
I’ve had no problems as a tourist, but the commuter lines are
already overcrowded in rush hour. A lot of the rolling stock is dated,
and there is a litany of complaints about the paths they take
and how they deal with breakdowns. Driving here, even with the congestion,
is usually quicker and more convenient, sometimes even for journeys
directly between city centres. – So every year, there’s more and more
people moving here, and the infrastructure system
is under a lot of strain. So the needs are to make it work,
not to make it free. There’s lots of research on this,
and what comes out over and over again is that the fare is not
the main motivating factor. The main motivating factor is
comfort, reliability, and safety. No one ever knows if the trains are
actually going to be on time. It has happened that people are standing
for an hour and a half on the platform waiting for the train,
with no substitute buses or anything. So that’s an extreme case, obviously,
but if one wants to be somewhere on time, one has to take this into account,
that these things do happen. – The cities who are doing this
investment into public transport, into free public transport, that’s really the bit of cities that,
from a competitive point of view, will be, in the world,
the winning cities. Even if I say it’s free to use,
somebody pays it. So at the end, the 700 million euros
will be paid by the taxpayers in general. Someone, for example, with minimum income
pays no taxes. So he has the public transport,
really, for free, but somebody who pays high taxes,
he pays much more. – That’s an important point:
for someone like me, who’s a tourist with a travel budget,
€4 for a day pass isn’t a big issue, but for someone on minimum wage
who has to commute an hour, or two hours from wherever housing’s affordable,
that makes a big difference. – I don’t think the key social issue
in Luxembourg is the price of the transit. One needs to look at the housing costs. The increasing prices of housing
are pushing people to the border regions. So it might be financially more sound
to live in Belgium, or France and Germany, buy a house, or rent a house,
and buy a couple of cars, than it would be to live here in Luxembourg
and use the transit. It needs investment,
and it needs investment now. It’s behind. And so Luxembourg needs to catch up
and plan for the future. – You must see the
free public transport additionally to the investments
that we are doing in the improvement of the network
and the quality of the public transport. If you only introduce free public transport,
that will change not very much behaviour. It can only function if you do it combined
with a complete strategy that will switch from individual mobility
to multi-modality, so even including pedestrians, cyclists, and if you invest at the same time, a lot of money,
in the infrastructure of public transport, so that at the end,
you can combine everything. We say, if we built an infrastructure,
we will build it to move people and not to move cars. – I’m not saying free transit
is a bad thing. I think it’s a great idea, personally, but having good, frequent,
well-connected transit that isn’t too crowded to board
is also important. The question isn’t as binary as
“Should public transit be free?” because in a utopia,
of course it would be. It would also be autonomous,
zero-emission, and it would run from anywhere
to everywhere all the time. But until we’re in
a post-scarcity society, the public are paying one way or another,
either through taxes or fares. The more important question is about
planning and long-term investment, because if your bus is always late,
and your train’s always cancelled, it doesn’t matter if they’re free.