Yay!
Be better if it was free though.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Small steps :)
I could see it being justified as a progressive measure to increase capacity. Lower the prices , increase demand and get more people on the bus paying fares that you can use to expand service to meet the new demand. Once the infrastructure is built to handle the increased demand then you can make it free.
Vs. if you make it free right away demand spikes with no resources to increase capacity.
You could make that point but I wouldn’t give Burnham that much benefit of the doubt. He may be better than starmer but he’s not so progressive.
Free would definitely be better, but requires solving other problems in lockstep. E.g. homeless people using the busses as a place to exist/stay warm. It disrupts the bus as a function.
A small (deliberately) token fee gets the best compromise. It's akin to charging 10p for a plastic bag. For most people 10p isn't enough to be problematic, in the grand scheme of things. It does massively reduce frivolous usage.
I would prefer pushing it down to £1 return, or even lower, but £2/trip is still better than the current option.
Oh, and just to clarify I also definitely believe we should be using taxes to give homeless etc somewhere better to exist. The busses/trains/underground are not the place for that to happen.
The thing is that ticket machines, staff whose job it is to check tickets, all other infrastructure that exists in order to enforce fares, also all cost money... so at a certain point it becomes absurd to have very low fares because if it's free, you can get rid of all that infrastructure. I don't know enough about public transport in the UK to know how the calculation works there.
That's fair. However, a lot of it is already in place and is quite automated. E.g. on busses they have a contactless card reader. Many have already moved to a fixed ride fee too. Basically you just tap as you walk past the driver, who already has to be there.
The London underground has intermittent enforcement. A lot of the time the honour system is all there is. You just swipe your oyster card or bank card at the read point next to the entrance. They do random checks just to keep people honest.
Even if you expand things, the cost of the tech is low enough to almost be a rounding error.
The goal is to limit completely frivolous usage saturating capacity or otherwise forcing the target riders off completely.
Anecdotally, LA works pretty well as a case study on this particular matter: https://youtu.be/vTS897tcu6Q
There has been research done into this, showing that free stuff can exhaust a resource like this much faster. E.g. cheap tickets could get drivers out of their cars, but not the people who'd walk two blocks. Plenty of countries with free public transport that seem to work just fine, but you might end up happier with cheap public transports rather than entirely free buses. Not having to deal with tickets would be really nice though, for everyone involved.
Link it
The entire municipality of Fredericia has free busses and literally none of the problems everyone keeps describing has happened.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11116-016-9695-5.pdf
My opinions on this subject are nuanced. While I think free fares are definitely the ideal assuming unlimited resources, they are probably not the best intervention you can do for improving the overall transit posture of a given city. Infrastructure investments are almost always going to be a better bet.
Why do you have to assume unlimited resources? That is frankly a very dumb approach to this topic. Social mobility pays for itself. It is a net-positive for a city to allow residents to move freely and easily, even if the bus, when nothing else is accounted for, does cost fuel. Busses, trams and trains are infrastructure investments.
I think you might be misunderstanding. My point is that resources are not unlimited, and hence prioritizing infrastructure investments - meaning a more comprehensive transit network with better headways - is preferable to fully removing user fees.
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Noooo! Now by cycling to work I am only saving £20 a week rather than £30 a week!
Okay, now do something about how insanely expensive train tickets are. This is a good step forwards, but I feel way more people rely on the train to travel than busses.
You could be more appreciative than "okay, now do another great thing". I agree like but when people do sit things we fuck em up, we should give propers props for good deeds.
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Enjoy the guy as long as he lasts.
Is this guy also going to tax the rich? That would be a game changer. #TaxWealthNotWork !twnw@fedia.io
Unfortunately he’s paying for it by scrapping £500m of foreign aid aimed at climate change mitigation.
This might do a lot of good towards climate change mitigation, I get it it sucks for whoever was receiving the foreign aid but it's not an entirely bad thing.
I wonder if a study can be conducted of where we could invest having the best impact for the world, but also we have to consider governments are naturally (and should be) incentivized to invest in their own communities.
Anyways, it's a difficult position to just be against or for this proposal, there's an argument to be made about social justice and how the global south will bare the worst consequences for climate change while having contributed the least to it.
Do you have a link? Because that turns this minor win into a distraction tactic. I knew this guy was gonna be more centralist than we need but I thought he'd at least fake it for a couple of quarters.
Sounds like it won't be long before he's booted too if this is true.
This action to ease the cost of living is being funded by savings from reprioritising the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s budget, including by switching funding for international climate from grants to loans.
Thank you so much! I'd like to know more of the details on what reprioritizing means in this context, I'm not certain a dollar off of fares is equivalent to some meaningful green energy projects but at least according to this article they're simply moving from grants to loans which on its surface isn't the worst thing. I think grants make more projects possible regardless of their economic feasibility, while loans are potentially more self-sufficient and reoccurring.
I'd also have liked to see a push for more trains, trams, and street cars. Buses seem to me to be the worst of public transit options. But I'm happy they're getting more long term funding. Roads are a plight but if it helps the UK people value public transit more that's a good thing in my book.
The sorts of countries involved can’t necessarily afford the loans. This is going to have a big negative impact in the developing world.
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This is where chicago is at about. little over 2 bucks a ride. Its a pretty good compromise between having it cost something but for it to be not to much and low enough that its a great option cost wise. I honestly don't get why so many people don't use it but then again many do. im talking the metro to.
1.1 million people use Chicago transit every day. I don't think a lack of ridership is the issue. It's all the space that's been given entirely over to cars (looking at you, Lake Shore Drive, monument to pestilence that you are)
Im not really pointing out an issue. Honestly LSD would be hard to get rid of but I could see it taken away from cars. Would be a great cooridoor and line park. Would like to see the whole downtown area bounded by the lake, the river, and congress made car free. Just ambulances, busses, and shipping trucks allowed. LSD would need to have exits and cross streets removed in that case. No getting off in that area. If I had one thing it would be that.
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