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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

#31

Post by sofixa »

dfxm12 wrote: post #17
SkiFire13 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

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

#32

Post by jewayne »

bluGill wrote: post #30
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 d…

I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?

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

#33

Post by dotancohen »

sofixa wrote: post #31
dfxm12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.

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

#34

Post by bondarchuk »

dotancohen wrote: post #33
sofixa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.

It's true though, quite amazingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

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

#35

Post by smsm42 »

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.

Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.

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

#36

Post by jewayne »

mvieira38 wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 overta…

Actual Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems are in place all over the world, where there are physical barriers protecting the bus lane, and transit signal priority along the entire route. They work extremely well when they don't rely on motorists being on their best behavior.

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

#37

Post by dmoy »

komali2 wrote: post #22
SkiFire13 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Geneva Metro area has a million people. Still could be a majority of people using public transit. If true, I suspect it's not the vast majority though Switzerland as a whole is still majority car commuters I think.

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

#38

Post by aqme28 »

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…

I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.

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

#39

Post by aaronmdjones »

misja111 wrote: post #29
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.

In the UK, VED is based on the vehicle's CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled under prescribed driving conditions. This means the registered keepers of EVs (and some hybrid ICE/EVs) pay nothing.

There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.

I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.

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

#40

Post by mvieira38 »

bluGill wrote: post #30
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 d…

Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).

Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.

I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".

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