Fare Free London

Pearl Ahrens (03 November 2024)

Fare Free London is a new campaign group, founded on the 10th February 2024, asking the Mayor of London to abolish fares on buses and all trains. Free public transport has two main aims: a ‘social justice’ aim of reducing costs for existing users, and a ‘climate change’ aim of switching journeys from cars to public transport (also known as ‘mode shift’). Ideally, free public transport would be implemented all over the country, but we focus on London because we happen to live in London and because, outside of the capital, the priority is franchising or public ownership.

In this short piece, I introduce you to our campaign and explore the tension that can sometimes emerge between the claim that free public transport can lead to mode shift, and the reality that it cannot do that alone.

Free Transport: A Bold Idea to Inspire a Fundamental Shift

In campaigning for free public transport, we are asking for the demonetisation of a service so that people have a more direct relationship with their city and its infrastructure. Demanding free public transport challenges pre-conceived ideas about ownership (both real and perceived) of the services in the city. What does public ownership mean without workers’ control over how the services are run?  How can public transport be reoriented to serve residents as people, not just as commuters?  How can the value transport workers create be returned back to them?  At a wider level, free public transport is part of a demand for access to public spaces in cities and rural areas and for a say in how these spaces are controlled and funded.  

Demonetisation and common ownership of public space are ideas that are far outside the political mainstream. Yet this is precisely why they need to be championed. By re-invigorating classical Marxist ideas of working-class control of the spaces and conditions of life, we want to shift people’s ideas of what is acceptable and possible and move closer towards a socialist horizon. Campaigns which ‘demand the impossible’ promote a different vision of the world than, say, campaigns for a 30% reduction on some bus routes for NHS workers. Those more moderate types of campaigns are great when they succeed, but they don’t inspire a fundamental shift in how we all relate to the places in which we live.

A Different Investment Model

When survey companies ask people across the UK ‘what would make you switch to public transport’, people do say cheaper fares, but they also say more (and more frequent) routes and more reliable services. Cheaper fares, frequency, and reliability: no other factors come close to competing with these three.

A critic of free public transport might say, ‘it would be great if the bus cost less money, but it sometimes doesn’t show up at all, and that’s a bigger problem for me; that’s what keeps me in my car’. This is a reasonable argument. But we advocate free public transport precisely because our vision of social justice includes those who do not own cars, and because we believe it is the means of getting a more frequent, reliable public transport service.  

It’s the means because it necessitates a different investment model. Currently, income from fares constitutes the main pot of money for public transport, which results in inconsistent year-on-year funding and gives transport authorities an excuse to cut services.  If there was no income from fares, it would mean the state, in national or local form, would have to front a consistent funding stream to operate trains and buses. By prioritising public transport as a public good that offers value in its own right, free public transport operates through a logic of equity that ensures greater consistency and reliability for all residents (and visitors) needing to get around their city.

The implications of the fare free model are many, including more secure, reliable jobs. By creating a culture in which public transport, like healthcare, is seen as a necessity , transport workers would be valued as indispensable workers. Making public transport free would almost certainly increase usage, which would mean increased services, expanded stations, and more jobs. Economically, this would mean a fundamental change in government thinking, moving away from the last few decades’ drip-feeding little pots of money for discrete projects, and instead towards regular funding sources and long-term thinking. It could also encourage a move away from Transport for London’s ‘self-financing’ model, itself a relic of the former Conservative national government and clearly not resilient to shocks or dips in passenger numbers – as experienced during and after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In terms of the implications for route planning, we could actually build a public transport system around our priorities as Londoners, and put routes where people really want to go, rather than chasing fares income. For instance, the authorities could put on ‘unprofitable’ bus routes without caring how many people got on them: non-radial routes, or night buses, and night trains, lots of fast buses or trams from specific housing estates into the centre of town. In this way, both reliability and frequency could increase, and passenger numbers would further increase, because the public transport system would be designed for who needs it most, and where it would be most useful for people.

As a campaign, we’re addressing the public: our fellow public transport users (with the support of the workers). Although more public funding is one of the things we’re demanding, we’re not the campaign for ‘more investment in public transport’ because you can have more investment in public transport without users and workers seeing any of the benefits. For that reason, we’re also not directly talking about how to fund it, because it’s not the service users’ responsibility to work out how to fund public services. That’s the politicians’ job. 

However, we do have some suggestions. Alongside road user charging, we want free public transport everywhere, but London has privileges that other cities don’t have in terms of forms of governance. The Greater London Assembly is an authority ready and waiting to be handed powers by the national government: to make council tax more progressive and raise more money from the wealthy, or to implement a small payroll tax which could raise a billion pounds a year[1]. These are both equitable methods of raising taxation money.

National government could fund free public transport in London by doing some other actions to directly reduce carbon emissions, such as ending the fuel duty freeze and stopping road-building. A consistent approach to taxing wealth, combined with clamping down on corporate tax evasion, would also raise money for free public transport in London and for the rest of the country too[JM1] [PA2] .

Is Mode Shift Important?

At Fare Free London we have been doing some thinking about our strategy, and how much we should care about mode shift away from cars, versus a focus on supporting existing public transport users.

At our strategy day in May 2024, I highlighted the tension existing in the campaign’s demands between claiming that free public transport is a form of climate action, without backing it up with a central demand for road user charging. This led to an interesting discussion between some organisers who described themselves as proud drivers – some of them had actually organised against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in their area – who believed it was wrong to add another (financial) burden on stressed, overstretched drivers. Other organisers acknowledged the subsidies drivers already receive, and how public transport users are already hemmed in by car-dominated streets. All present agreed on the transformational nature of the demand for free public transport, and the other demands it necessarily invokes like universal access for disabled people, and free public transport across the UK.

The difference in vision between the two groups is, in my opinion, that the former emphasised the car as a tool for individual freedom and perhaps a ‘necessary evil’ that normal people must use to get around, while the latter see the car as restricting everyone’s freedom and thus wish for the removal of most cars in London so as to return streets to being social spaces again.

These two groups are not necessarily opposing constituencies – people who own cars also use public transport – but they focus on different aims of our campaign: social justice for existing public transport users versus mode shift from cars. It is key that we keep these discussions active and continue to reflect on how much weight to give each aim.

Free Public Transport and Climate Action

In September 2024, the campaign held a public strategy day where this discussion about mode shift continued. Researcher Drew Pearce highlighted the urgency of mode shift if the Mayor of London wants to meet his carbon budget targets – which he is very far from meeting as of today. Based on his recent paper, Pearce claimed that ‘the only thing, the only lever, that got us anywhere close to these [carbon] budgets, was a “severe” to “highly severe” reduction of car use across London.’

Currently, the Mayor’s ‘central aim’ is for ‘80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041.’ As of 2022, 62% of trips are made by walking, cycling or public transport, with the rest by private modes: car (35%), or motorcycle or taxi (3%).

In order to bring the 38% private mode share down by nearly half (to 20%) within the next 17 years, the Mayor must make some radical changes to London’s transport networks. But even that plan would mean London emits more than would keep it within 1.5°C. To stay within a fair carbon emissions budget, which is even lower, Pearce stated the Mayor would have to bring the distance travelled by car down by 85% and even sooner.

Free public transport is an absolute minimum in any of these scenarios, with frequency increases and more bus lanes for reliability also necessary for keeping new users on the network. The larger network would need a higher number of staff, and the authorities would have more of an incentive to improve pay and conditions to attract new staff and improve retention.

Car Use Reduction Measures

The arguments for free public transport in climate terms are clear. But free fares are not enough to get people who own cars to leave them at home. Evidence shows that for mode shift to happen you need a combination of free public transport and some type of road user charging.

While there is a strong case for fairness in restricting the liberty of those who own cars in order to fund transport for everyone, road user charging is one of the most difficult policies to persuade politicians to implement, and one of the toughest issues for campaigners to grapple with.  While free public transport has some chance of being implemented, that chance is reduced when attached to an effective, but unpopular, policy such as road user charging.

Part of the reason Fare Free London campaign was brought into being was to neutralise some of the toxicity in the transport debate, following the last few years’ Low Traffic Neighbourhoods counter-reaction and 20-minute cities disinformation. Free public transport presents a positive message of opening the city to all. And it’s been working: Free Fare London has been met with a very positive response from the public, thus providing a real boost to the campaign. There’s long been a sense that public transport users have no other choice, but to suffer through the price increases. It’s time to challenge that kind of thinking.  

We’re talking about freedom, getting things for free, not the punishing regime environmental action is usually associated with in some quarters. Public transport users are some of the poorest people in society. They can’t necessarily afford a car.  Free public transport would literally put money back in their pocket for doing the right thing for the climate. In this context, defining road user charging as ‘the way to pay for it’ would ruin all that, undermine the positive message, and make it about trade-offs and taxes.

A Compromise?

Fortunately, we exist within an ecology of other campaigns, spanning from social justice campaigns like migrants’ rights and trade unions through to ecological justice campaigns on climate change and land rights. In this context, putting road user charging front and centre would fit better in another campaign, one more willing to take the political flack. 

Helping existing public transport users doesn’t mean ignoring mode shift – it might encourage users to remain on public transport and stop them from buying more cars. Free public transport could be seen as a way of reducing car use without talking directly about reducing car use. We would just have to rely on other campaigns to say it more explicitly, such as Transport for Quality of Life which recently released an excellent new a two-page report on ‘Transforming transport funding – how to fill the budget black hole and simultaneously reduce transport related climate emissions.’

59% of the public actually support road user charging when it’s presented with the condition that all revenues raised would be used to improve public transport. But politicians get scared very quickly when these measures’ introduction receive loud criticism from a powerful minority, as we’ve seen with the sudden U-turns by authorities from  New York City to Cambridge, and the Mayor of London’s pre-election statement ruling it out.  

The compromise is that, to give free public transport the best chance of being implemented in London, it should be presented without the baggage of car use reduction measures. It's clear from our discussions and real-world evidence that the policy of free public transport is not a silver bullet, it’s a base to build from.  The test, in climate terms, will be to rely on other campaigns to bring forward the other policies necessary to reduce emissions, and for which free public transport is a prerequisite.