What If Public Transport Was Free?

It’s been shown that people will evade even the lowest of low public transport fares. The article deals with Queensland, Australia, where the fare has been lowered to a ridiculous 50c – and still show people not paying the fare or tapping on.

I’m going to make a connection: People know value – but their concept of value isn’t necessarily the same as the planners’ values.

If the transport system is composed of sub-standard vehicles and schedule irregularities, passengers are liable to not waste the effort of even tagging on for free. If things are good, passenger vehicles are clean, folllow their schedules reliably, and there seems to be a bit of personal connection, fare evasion rates (or tag-on tag-off rates) go down.

And here’s a suggestion: Stop wasting money on enforcers, and start asking them to be more social. Rely less on tags/fares for numbers and use either proximity counters (or the people that used to be fare enforcers) to estimate service usage.

People – I think – appreciate a personal touch, a way to interact with their public transport service. They’d like clean vehicles, that are on time, and that the operators/staff are approachable and friendly. (And I know that many public transport services may feel that they are that. But they obviously aren’t.)

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My “Ted” Talk:
“Keep the bastards honest!”
The end, thank you for coming.

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