This is a thing in several municipalities in Europe.
Although I like this in principle, I have reservations based on the story I’m sharing below.
The story:
There was a system where women could come and get clothes for free in special women’s shelters.
However, they would just either discard clothes, as being thrash, or not good enough, or grab way more than they needed.
So the fix was to put each bit of clothing at .15 or .50€. And suddenly, people fell back to an actual value for each item.
And the interesting thing is that free things are always worthless.
To give worth to (most of) people, you have to add a price (which can be tiny).There have been many studies about this. It’s a strange thing
I see what you’re saying here, but how does someone throw away a free train ride or use too many transit trips they don’t need? I get sometimes homeless people will sometimes try to use transit as a place to sleep, but decent security and staff could easily handle that if it becomes problematic. I think the freedom of movement and environmental benefits are worth dealing with a couple of hiccups in free transit.
Too bad Germany, Switzerland, France etc don’t have the “financial stability” to make our public transit free. Or so the neo-liberal politicians say.
There are cities with free public transport in France. Germany has the 49€ monthly pass. Luxembourg has free public transportation.
The situation can still be improved a lot all around the EU, there’s no denying it but it’s not has bad as you say.
At least they even have decent transit. So many places in north america have never on time hourly bus service that takes 3 times as long, or buy a car. Thats it. Those are the only options unless you have the time and capability to walk 7 kms one way to your grocer, and another 10 to your employer.
49 EUR/mo smells like bullshit. Trains easily cost hundreds for a one way ticket
It doesn’t include any high-speed rail, only the regional and local trains.
Yeah, that sucks.
It’s actually pretty nice, it includes all the metros, subways, light rails, buses, etc
Yeah but theres a catch as well - the timetables/schedules are scrapped too. So you wont know when will the bus arrive or will it even arrive at that day.
It doesn’t sound great when you realize you cant really enjoy a free bus ride when theres no bus coming.
That‘s a pretty lame joke, right?
Eh I wish - Im not sure which media can be considered as reputable sources in Serbia, but you can find more info here. Just use a translator or something.
Tl;dr - they’ll basically switch to a dynamic plan which indicates when circa the bus will arrive, but this is just a ploy to hide that busses are not arriving on time or at all.
I wouldn’t praise this move at all, it is not doing anything good for those living in Belgrade.
Damn what a spin. I’d rather pay for transit than have that.
It was always unofficially free.
First time it ever occurred to me, but now that I’ve read it, of course! Why wouldn’t every city make this free?! Solving transportation woes is a surefire way to stoke your economy, and removing payments is going to make public transportation more efficient and cheaper to maintain (no ticket kiosks getting vandalized, no payment processors to pay). Seems like a win win for any congested city.
Germany just raised the nationwide ticket from 49 to 58€, awesome.
D-ticket was well intentioned but a bad idea from the start. Discalimer: not a German and I only used it once (well twice because it was impossible to buy just one month)
The administrative overhead of centrally gathering all the funds and then portioning them to individual agencies must be hell. And according to what criteria? It makes the responsibility for funding even more murky than it is. Regional tickets also have to keep existing so it means the entire old ticketing system must remain functional even though few people are using it.
Germany led the way on tariff integration with it’s “Verkehrsverbund”. The difference being that service planning and ticketing were done by the same agency. Involving the central government doesn’t seem like a good idea, sooner or later national politics will start influencing local transit.
For a year? Still seems cheap!
Per month.
And it already was so expensive before that most customers were those who had (more expensive, regional) tickets before.
It seems like they want to drive up the price until hardly anyone uses it anymore and then drop it for lack of demand.
You call that expensive? That’s still only 2/3 what a monthly transit pass costs in my city in the US.
And they probably have higher frequency and shorter transit travel times compared to most US cities
It certainly attracted me as a tourist to Germany. I travelled a lot in Germany in the last few years, probably wouldn’t have (as much) if train rides had cost as much as before the Deutschlandticket.
That’s how it was done in US. Also created a strong car brain that is nearly impossible to argue with. Just need to upgrade the trains until they are the better option then they will start understanding.
They do like EU trains but some how it doesn’t connect that we could have them here outside of NE
NE being New England?
North East, but really ne to mid Atlantic. Ie Boston to DC
ah yeah fair, I used to live near Boston and while it was MUCH better than where I am now (near Atlanta) it wasn’t even close to European standards
Facts but that’s about the best we got lol
It ain’t much but corruption destroys any investment
honestly when it comes to holidays the best part is having a cheap and easily navigable public transport system so you can get around to do all your cool shit painlessly. Serbia had suddenly become an interesting prospect!
Meenwhile, Nato europe about to make people into soylent green.
This is not only an efficient path to decongestion, and assiciated productivity improvement, plus poverty benefit, it us also social harmony instead of pig fucker liars vs nazi divisiveness.
