Free Transport (2019)

Book Review from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free Public Transit and Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Escalators. Ed. Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince. Black Rose Books. 2018. 274 pages.

As the subtitle suggests, it is not the idea that people should be able to travel for free from one part of a city or town to another that is odd but that they should have to pay to do this. They wouldn’t have to in socialism but in a number of places this is not the case under capitalism either. Fares-free public transport for all users exists, we are told, ‘in as many as 97 cities and towns worldwide’ (56 in Europe, 27 in the US, 11 in Brazil, 2 in China and 1 in Australia). Partial free transport, where a section of the population such as pensioners can travel without paying is much more widespread.

The book, made up of articles by various authors, covers the subject comprehensively, both past struggles and current arrangements. It begins with the free transport policy introduced in Bologna, in Italy, for a while in the 1970s and covers failures, as in Montreal and Toronto, as well as successes, including Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, the biggest place to have introduced it.

The authors approach the subject from an ideological point of view, seeing free transport not just as an answer to the pollution and congestion caused by private cars, but as a move towards a change of society, writing of ‘socio-ecological transformation’ and ‘decommodifying public services.’ However, where it has been introduced, this has been more for more pragmatic reasons. In the US the driving force has often been ‘downtown’ businesses wanting to encourage customers to visit their stores. In France schemes are partly financed by a tax on employers, who benefit from not having to include an element for travel to and from work in the wages they pay. In some small towns it has been a cost-saving exercise as, given the relatively small number of users, it has proved cheaper to subsidise the service from local taxes than to erect a superstructure to charge and collect fares.

Since under capitalism money has to be found to pay for everything, how free transport is funded is a big issue. Various ways have been advocated or implemented – national or regional subsidies from general taxation, local taxes, one author here suggests a tax on land values near stations and bus stops.

The ideologically-motivated campaigners have often ended up relegating free transport for all (let alone socialism) to a long-term aim and concentrating on obtaining it only for disadvantaged groups as ‘transport justice’, clearly a reform to capitalism’s poor law system rather than a step towards a change of society. As reforms go, not having to pay for local public transport is unobjectionable, even of benefit to workers, but it’s not a step towards free access for all, although it does show that there is nothing unfeasible about this given the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life.

Adam Buick