A lot of people are talking about Zohran Mamdani.
He recently won the Democratic primary to be the party’s candidate in the race for New York City’s next mayor. Coming into the campaign, he was virtually unknown, yet he managed to win against former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
He had a bold vision that appealed to a lot of people. One component of that vision was free public transit.
This is something I can get behind. In fact, it is something I have advocated for years.
I even remember talking to incumbent candidate for Lethbridge city council, Tom Wickersham, about this during the 2010 election campaign.
You see, this city—and, to be fair, plenty of other cities—view public transit as something that should generate revenue.
They don’t see it as a public service.
No one, for example, would ever recommend that we charge admission rates on all city parks as a way to cover the cost of park maintenance. Because we see city parks as a public service.
No one would ever recommend that we charge tolls on all city roads as a way to cover the cost of street sweeping, snow removal, and repairs. Because we see city roads as a public service.
No one would ever recommend charging victims of a house fire as a way to cover the cost of the fire department coming out to save their house. Because we see the fire department as a public service.
And so on.
Yet for some reason, we have this idea that transit can’t also be a truly public service. We think it has to be a cost recovery service.
And so when there’s a discrepancy between revenues and expenses, we increase fares, reduce service, or both. But then we complain that ridership is too low.
Reducing services or raising fares are not ways to increase transit ridership.
Transit, like visiting one’s family doctor, should be free to the end user. Punishing transit users by demanding that they pay to use a public service is unfair, especially when, for some people, it is their only transportation option.
The best way to increase ridership is to make it more attractive than driving. Lethbridge has no plans to shrink it’s geographical footprint, so we probably will not see shorter routes anytime soon. Same goes for creating more compact communities, so residents would not need to live on one side of the river yet work on the other side of the river, again reducing the route lengths.
And since we cannot make our routes shorter, another way to make buses more attractive is to make them fare free. As this increases ridership, improvements will naturally come to the system.
Buses will fill up, so the city will need to increase frequency and the number of routes. There will then be motivation for implementing tools for reducing trip lengths, such as queue jump signals and right-of-way when pulling from curbs.
Public transit in Lethbridge should be fare free.
