grue"Free public transport in Victoria through April as fuel prices continue to climb"
Subsidizing cars by making transit free because cars suddenly got expensive is the most ass backwards way to get people out of cars and it might just work.
Transit should be free.
Yes.
There is some nuance to this. Transit SHOULD be free, but it takes extremely strong political will to improve transit (add more funding) once it has been made free.
Example: X transit is 50% government funded and 50% fare funded.
Government decides to make if free, 100% government funded. Great!
Or government decides to increase funding to 100%, but fares remain. Now there is a 150% budget to improve the transit.
Yesthat’s what scares me about the free transit idea. If you remove fares but also don’t increase funding you’re just defunding transit.