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French city of Montpellier makes public transport free for all residents
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they're paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They've also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn't great.
For private business the tickets are to fund the business. But for public transport they are never expected to cover the costs of the business.
It is run as a public service, not to make money. The function of tickets is to prevent overcrowding.
That's why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
I don't know anything about montpellier specifically though.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don't like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it's very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don't fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can't buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late...
As an alternative I'd propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
It's not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they're replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.