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many people to stick to their cars.

There is also the safety aspect. The railway stations are supervised during peak hours and you would get the occasional rail inspector wandering the carriages, again mostly just in peak periods, but that was about it. Robberies, assaults and occasionally worse were not uncommon. Buses are slightly safer, mainly because the driver is there with you, but assaults still occur and you are on your own once you get off the bus. Most of the security features of buses and trains (and it is the same for trams and ferries) is not really installed with the thought of preventing crime, although it could be argued that the visibility of CCTV cameras has a deterrent effect, it is more for the identification of those committing a crime and the quality of the footage being good enough for evidentiary purposes. Apart from the risk of an accident, once you are in your car you are generally quite safe and the big plus is that you don't tend to get out of your car until you arrive home.

In economic-speak, public transport has a low price elasticity of demand. What this means to you and I is that if you reduce the price of public transport, you are not going to gain the same amount in patronage. Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia, has among the best and most comprehensive rail and bus networks in Australia. In the early 1990s, it went down the path of reducing public transport fares and providing free public transport for students. With the cheapest fares in Australia, combined with a robust network, one would reasonably expect it to have the highest proportion of commuters. Not so. Its proportion of public transport users fell sharply during the latter part of the 1990s and remains among the lowest users of public transport (when compared to other Australian capital cities). If reducing costs made little or no difference to patronage, could we reasonably expect the situation to improve if these same services became free? Perhaps, but unlikely.

Those in favour of free public transport will often cite the example of the Belgian city of Hasselt. It has about 70,000 people, hardly representative of a major city with a population of one million plus, and has had a free bus service since 1997. It was introduced ostensibly to revitalise its city centre, which had fallen into decline. Trip and passenger numbers did improve and there is no question that it achieved what it set out to do. The problem is that, apart from its scale being

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