In January 2013, Estonia’s capital city of Tallinn stopped charging fares for riders of its public transport system. The measure that allowed Tallinn residents to pay around $2 for a card that could be used for buses, trams and other means had been approved in a referendum the previous year by more than 75 percent of citizens.
Now the government is getting ready to roll out free public transport nationwide and, if successful, the Baltic state could become the first country to implement such a system.
On July 1, 11 out of 15 of Estonia’s counties will allow their residents to use county buses for free; four counties opted out of the scheme. Public transportation is generally only partially subsidized by the government in other countries, thus the free transportation measure in Estonia has already been contested.
“It looks like a pretty promise on the outside,” Jaanus Marrandi, a member of the Estonian Parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee, told the local media in May. “However, free public transport in the countryside is not possible with this level of financing.”
The groundbreaking national program, which officials running it say isn’t an experiment, comes five years after Tallinn became the first EU capital to provide free public transportation to its residents. According to the city’s website, local officials noticed an improvement in the city employment rate just a few months into the program, as people could reach more places for work. Labor costs fell for employers who didn’t need to cover parking spots for private vehicles, and Tallinn reported a growing population.
This year, city officials are reporting only a modest growth in public transportation use, but that metric isn’t the most important one to measure the success of the initiative, officials say.
“There (was) also (a) slight increase in (public transport usage) — around 10 percent — but most important is the increased satisfaction with the service quality,” says Allan Alaküla, head of the Tallinn European Union office and representative of the program.
Experts who have researched the subject, however, say no thorough evaluation has been conducted by the government because no one is eager to divulge potentially unflattering results.
“People find different ways to interpret the outcomes of free public transport and the city government has a motivation for defending it because politicians and city administrators carried it out,” says Daniel Hess, a professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo–SUNY, who looked at the issue. “What I found in my research is that there was not a thorough evaluation conducted by the city government for the program that it instituted and the main evaluations have been conducted by outside researchers.”
At the same time, while officials tout a decrease in car traffic in the city center, private researchers say the measure hasn’t actually met the important goal of reducing pollution.
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“A goal was to see a shift from cars to public transport and this hasn’t really happened,” says Oded Cats, assistant professor in public transport at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who researched on the Tallinn program. “What we saw is that there was a sizable but not very dramatic increase in public transport ridership — people shifted from walking to (taking) short public transport trips and those already using public transport used it more frequently, such as teenagers and (the elderly). Therefore, there is no impact on congestion so far and on emissions.”
Other Countries, Cities Consider Similar Programs
Public transport has long been a debate in many countries that wished to reduce pollution and offer an alternative that would reduce traffic congestion. Last year, Paris officials announced they are considering free public transport to fight against pollution one year after French President Emanuel Macron said all gas and diesel cars will be banned in France by 2040. Berlin officials made a similar announcement earlier this year with the purpose of reducing cars on the road.
Several smaller cities in France already offer free bus rides, while experiments have been carried out in Belgium, Sweden and the U.S. According to Alaküla, the representative to the EU, Tallinn inspired Dunkirk, a French city of around 200,000, to make public transport free beginning this September. Several other city officials came to Estonia to analyze the model, including some from cities in China, Hess says.
Whether making public transport free is sustainable depends on the financial model adopted, experts say. The idea seems more realistic, experts say, if governments are already subsidizing a large portion of the individual fare, so the transition to zero costs for passengers has minimal impact on budgets. On the other hand, cities such as Tallinn that made public transport free only for residents covered their costs by seeing more people officially moving into the city.
“In Estonia, you pay part of the income tax where you are registered as a resident,” Cats says. “About 20,000 to 30,000 people living in Tallinn were still registered in their hometowns, such as students or those too lazy to (change their registration). To become eligible to travel for free in Tallinn, they had to register, therefore they started paying their income tax in Tallinn.” Tallinn’s annual city budget increased about $29 million because of the higher number of taxpayers, Alaküla says.
Officials say the challenges of providing free transportation is not only implementing the program but also to maintain quality service. Still, any city could benefit from the measure, experts say.
“As we continue to urbanize and have denser places that need many people reaching them, there will be an increasing need for public transit to serve these places with high-capacity transit vehicles, such as buses, streetcars, or subways,” Hess says. “Any growing city where there’s a premium on land value and the traffic is choking, and where it’s very expensive to travel by car and park, seems a possibility for free public transport.”
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Estonia Set to Make Public Transport Free originally appeared on usnews.com
