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By John Neary (registered) | Posted January 24, 2015 at 15:03:53
I don't usually disagree with Sean or Ryan -- and when I do disagree with Ryan, I'm usually wrong -- but I think that free transit is the solution to the wrong problem.
Subsidizing any form of transportation encourages inefficient city-building by incentivizing lower-density development. (Look at what GO Transit has enabled in the v905 belt.)
The argument for free transit implicitly rests on the premise that the private automobile will always be subsidized, so it makes sense to subsidize transit if the subsidy required is less or the negative externalities are less (both of which are usually true.)
The better solution is to stop all forms of subsidy for the private automobile (e.g. free or below-cost parking, free roads) and charge automobile users for the negative externalities of driving (e.g. health effects of pollution and motor vehicle collisions). If we did that, transit wouldn't even need to be subsidized, let alone free, and developers couldn't make money by building car-dependent sprawl.
One could argue that we will never achieve proper pricing for motor vehicle use, although many other jurisdictions have gone pretty far down that road (pardon the pun). In that case, there may be an argument for free transit if it indirectly saves money by reducing the subsidy needed for private automobiles. But that argument ought to be explicit.
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