People don’t seem to understand that the greatest barrier to public transport use isn’t the cost – especially right now when fuel prices are sky high. It’s the abysmal service.
In my area, trips by public transport can take three times as long to get to a destination compared to driving (20 min vs 1 hour); people won’t magically be enticed to suddenly hop on such a poor service simply by making it free.
Pre-COVID, PTV fare revenue was approaching a billion dollars a year. Let’s assume that by taking away such fare revenue, Government subsidies must therefore increase by the same billion dollars to make up for the otherwise lost revenue. Is this really a good use of that money, and what else could we spend it on?
A few years ago the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated it’d cost just $200 million to get us trains and trams every 10 minutes seven days a week (6am-9pm) and to run them at max capacity during peak hour, which alone would be a game changer; and even then you’d still have $800 million left. Imagine $800 million pumped into our state’s bus networks, for example – that’s the sort of stuff that will actually get people out of their cars and onto public transport.
People of course will make any argument possible against investment or improvement. When I originally wrote these words as part of a Reddit comment, someone jumped on to say something along the lines of ‘Much analysis has already gone into public transport schedules, therefore there is no need to improve them.’ What nonsense! To say analysis has gone into current operating schedules is a stretch for some modes and quite frankly laughable for others. When it’s done, it happens within the confines that the Department of Transport sets, and it’s about operator stuff, like making sure trains don’t conflict; the tendency seems to be that many other considerations are often ignored. And for buses, a lot of them don’t even get reviewed for ages; there are loads of buses in Melbourne with slow, winding, indirect routes as a carryover from when buses were unregulated, for instance, and they were all competing to drive each other out of business.
People shouldn’t have to endure public transport—because endure is what it currently is—just because they don’t own a car. Being convenient for the public is exactly the point: if you provide better quality, more frequent services, people will use them.