Free Transit Boosts Ridership by 16 Percent, Maybe

Bloomberg reports that, when Utah Transit (UTA) eliminated transit fares on a trial basis in February, weekday ridership grew by 16 percent. Overall, the latest data show, average daily ridership was only 18 percent greater than it had been in January. That compares with 25 percent for the nation’s transit systems as a whole, suggesting that free transit may not have been the reason why ridership increased.

Utah Transit buses have an average of 36 seats but carried an average of just 5 passengers (that is, they carried 5.0 passenger-miles per vehicle mile) in 2019 and just 3.6 in 2020. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Considering that passenger fares brought more than $48 million into UTA’s budget in 2019, such a small boost in ridership hardly seems worth the loss of that revenue. Transit agencies, however, desperately need reasons to justify their heavily-subsidized existence. Offering free fares may boost ridership, if only by a small amount, but more important it insulates agencies from ridership fluctuations. If the agencies are solely dependent on taxpayers to keep their buses and trains running, then all they have to do is convince taxpayers or appropriators that transit is somehow vital to cities even if hardly anyone uses it.

Bloomberg’s writer, David Zipper, buys into the erroneous claim that free transit is good for social equity when the truth is that transit subsidies are disproportionately paid by low-income people who don’t ride transit. But at least he doesn’t buy into claims that free transit is good for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019, Utah Transit buses emitted twice as much greenhouse gases per passenger-mile as the average light truck and in 2020 it was almost three times as much.

But that’s not why Zipper says free transit isn’t good for reducing emissions. Instead, he points to studies showing that even if free transit boosts ridership, it doesn’t reduce driving. The reason is that the main people who are attracted to free transit are low-income people who don’t have cars, so giving them transit rides doesn’t cut down on driving.

“There’s no evidence at all that cities introducing fare-free public transport have seen their car traffic reduced,” the CEO of the International Association of Public Transport told Zipper. That organization’s study of free public transit found that, “most of the [new] people taking [free] public transport used to walk.”

As I’ve said many times before, people who want to increase transportation equity give more low-income people access to cars. People who want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars. Outside of New York City, transit is insignificant as a form of transportation, but reducing subsidies to transit would probably result in a net decrease in both inequity and greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, people are using climate change and income inequality to try to socially engineer American cities, and that always proves an expensive failure.