French city of Montpellier makes public transport free for all residents
French city of Montpellier makes public transport free for all residents
Visitors and tourists will still have to pay 1.60 euro per trip as southern French city becomes latest in Europe to make bus and tram rides free for locals
Cross posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/4701018
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Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they're paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They've also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn't great.
For private business the tickets are to fund the business. But for public transport they are never expected to cover the costs of the business.
It is run as a public service, not to make money. The function of tickets is to prevent overcrowding.
That's why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
I don't know anything about montpellier specifically though.
That's why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don't like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it's very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don't fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can't buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late...
As an alternative I'd propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
It's not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they're replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.
Replace tickets with tap payments, problem solved
It's still infrastructure to maintain all over the system.
I don’t like the idea of requiring folks have chips on them & needing bank accounts to access transport. Worse if a for-profit payment processor gets to skim a little off on every transaction.
What the fuck are you talking about, contactless payment with cards and apple/google pay are not subdermal chips
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.
Bruh, those payment methods are ubiquitous in developed countries, like those in Europe.
the advantage of credit/debit cards is that you don't need to fucking buy some obscure city specific card for public transport or need to figure out the tickets, you just tap your card when you get on.
New York is also rolling this out btw
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
It is when the system serves thousands or hundreds of thousands a day...
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.