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Disagree

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As someone who is a strong advocate of sustainability and conservation, the reflex reaction on this debate topic was to agree. Free public transport, and I should clarify that we are talking about mass public transportation here, namely buses, trains, trams and ferries, sounds good in theory. In theory, if more people utilise public transport, less of those same people would be driving to and from work. Less gridlock and frayed tempers, less pollution - it sounds too good to be true.

Taking a bit of time to reflect on this topic, like nearly all things that sound too good to be true, I think this is one of those ideas.

The major flaw in the idea is that it assumes people are primarily driven by cost. The bigger issues are flexibility, convenience and door to door travel times. In many suburbs of the large Australian cities, public transport networks are sporadic at best and non-existent at worst. It is not going to make one iota of difference to commuting habits for people living in these suburbs as a free service is of no use if it is not available. Even in areas where public transport is available, the timetables may not fit in with your work schedule or follow some circuitous route that takes forever to get you to and from work.

Most major cities have reasonable public transport networks when you live near suburban hubs and need to travel into the central business district during peak periods, but move away from that ideal and you are looking at problems. An example is when I used to live in Brisbane. My suburb was some 18km away from the city as the crow flies and you could catch a bus on the half hour during peak periods, on the hour outside of this. The bus painfully meandered its way through two adjacent suburbs before turning express and the trip took more than an hour door to door. A quicker and more frequent option was to catch a train, but the nearest railway station was 5km away meaning that you would need to drive there, leave your car there all day (risking theft and/or damage) and then drive home at the end of the day. Yes, it would save you about 15 minutes, however you could drive into the city and save another 10 minutes on that. Both the bus and rail systems in Brisbane were heavily congested, rarely air-conditioned and not in the best state of repair (I say 'were' because that was more than ten years ago and I don't know if things have improved). Brisbane has a similar climate to Miami, so the lack of decent air-conditioning was enough for

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