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Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

reuters.com

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Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#21

Post by cyprien_g »

mvieira38 wrote: post #10

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities. You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making t…

Completely agree with you. I live in Montpellier, France, and we have had free public transportation for a year and a half, and it's very good. I definitely use my car less and take public transport more often.

Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#22

Post by komali2 »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #12
dukoid wrote: post #11

Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.

Because drivers are still a majority of the population, so this would be wildly unpopular

It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.

https://opendata.tpg.ch/pages/accueil/

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#23

Post by komali2 »

mvieira38 wrote: post #10

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities. You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making t…

> and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.

Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.

The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#24

Post by elashri »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #3

For the record this is already par for the course for all the French cities surrounding Geneve.

Ironically the small French cities next to Geneva are served by the TPG, the operator of busses in Geneva. And they don't have good coverage because of that.

They are the only public transportation available.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#25

Post by roflmaostc »

mertleee wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Also look at the historic CO2 emissions per capita.

And btw, we also burn plastic, just in facilities. Doesn't make it fundamentally better as the CO2 is still released into the air.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#26

Post by bluGill »

thmsths wrote: post #15

How effective do they expect a measure like this to be? Once a car and its insurance are paid for, the marginal cost of a single trip is quite low. I seriously wonder how many people woke up that day and thought "instead of driving I will take the train today because they are waiving the $3 fee" not many I bet. If we want to encourage people to take public transports we need to keep them competitive against the car a…

It might be enough to get someone to try transit and see that it actually does work. If you are used to driving everywhere and have never used transit then you won't actually know how it works. Routes, timing, transfers, missing the bus... - there are a lot of things that are different about using transit, none of it hard, but all of it needs to be learned. Free transit may be enough to get you to try it once (exactly once!), and if transit works that will be enough that you become willing to figure out how to buy the fare in the future.

In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#27

Post by mvieira38 »

komali2 wrote: post #23
mvieira38 wrote: post #10

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities. You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making t…

> and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so. Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars. The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.

We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.

Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#28

Post by theappsecguy »

dukoid wrote: post #11

Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.

This is a very naive take. For one, we don't do this because a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country, good luck living without a car in Texas.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#29

Post by misja111 »

dukoid wrote: post #11

Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.

I'm not sure if you're referring to the article, but that was about Ozone pollution.

In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#30

Post by bluGill »

mvieira38 wrote: post #10

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities. You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making t…

> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs

Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.

Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.

Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.

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