For residents of Montpellier, the new year has brought new travel possibilities. Since just before Christmas, locals have been able to sign up for a free pass to the entire bus and tram network in France’s seventh‑largest city. The majority of a population of 300,000 have, not surprisingly, taken up the offer. Yet the city council is not presenting this as largesse on its part. Rather, says its head of transport, Julie Frêche, it is making the change “because mobility is a right”.
Slowly but surely, the dial on public transport policy across Europe is shifting. The pandemic – and the apparently long-term change to working patterns it triggered – has played a part, as has the cost of living crisis. Prior to both, the environmental need to rely less on cars had already begun to chip away at longstanding assumptions about how we get around.
In 2013, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport, financed by the city’s resident tax. Luxembourg’s 640,000 citizens became entitled to the same in 2020. In France, the Observatory of Cities with Fare-Free Transport estimates that 43 towns and cities now offer at least some access without charge. In Germany and Austria, heavy public subsidies on tickets introduced during the cost of living crisis look as if they are here to stay in modified form.
In England, the sense of transport as a public good was lost amid the late 20th-century drive to privatise the bus and train networks – subsidising operators rather than passengers along the way. But even here, change is in the air. Liverpool city region is set to emulate Greater Manchester in moving to take buses back under public control. Following a public consultation, West Yorkshire Combined Authority may follow suit. The widely adopted £2 bus fare cap scheme, in place in England until the end of this year, is further evidence of a changing zeitgeist. Removing it in 2025 would be a deeply unpopular political move.
For larger European cities, which are generally more heavily dependent on ticket revenue, a move to totally fare-free services would be challenging in the short term. But for places like Montpellier, where fares generally finance a smaller proportion of the running costs of the transport network, it is both eminently doable and transformatory. In Dunkirk, where bus services have been funded by tax revenue since 2018, the result has been a boom in usage and perceived service quality, along with a widespread sense that the new system enhances the town’s image.
Such experiments and innovations have a particular relevance in the context of Covid and the cost of living crisis. But they should not merely be seen as a policy option in hard times. Flourishing and accessible public transport systems are an essential feature of sustainable 21st-century living. They are a means of social inclusion and wellbeing, helping to generate a sense of place and collective belonging.
They are also politically smart. Various studies have pointed out that moves to restrict car usage achieve more reliable results in cutting congestion, carbon emissions and pollution. But the politics of the green transition needs pull as well as push factors to ensure popular consent and change lifelong habits, while inculcating new ones in young people. Reconceiving public transport as a common good similar to health, education and other services can become part of the wider cultural reset that is the task of our times.
