Omnibuses

The new pilot scheme to offer free public transport in Glasgow is welcome – but it’s far too limited and we could write the report already. We need universal free public transport.

Image Credit: Unsplash

You might not know where the word “bus” comes from. It’s a fascinating piece of 19th century history. The “Omnibus carriage” was an evolution of the private horse-drawn stagecoach with the first word being Latin meaning “for all” in reference to the idea that such transport shouldn’t just be restricted to the upper classes (maybe we should set up a bus company to honour this legacy...we could call it Common Wheels). Horses gave way to steam then electricity and then to petrol (yes, in that order) and the Omnibus car became an autobus and then simply the bus we know today.

One of the problems facing us right now is that alongside the later parts of that evolution came the rise of the privately owned internal combustion horseless carriage (you know it is a car) and especially how policies favouring cars were pushed over or even to the direct detriment of public transport options. Too many cities became designed around the cars themselves rather than the people using them and never mind the people living in the city who had much less need of them at all. Public transport – especially buses – started to become the mode of transport for people too poor to own a car...and the costs of using that transport started to creep up, isolating people and communities from their needs. The result is that our cities become traffic-jammed collections of steel and fumes that make no-one happy (except maybe Donald Trump who for some reason seems to like that kind of thing?)

This week, Glasgow Council introduced a plan to launch a free public transport scheme covering not just buses but also the train and the subways within the city. The problem is that it’s only going to cover 1,000 people for nine weeks.

The limiting factor is almost certainly cost but part of that is by the design of Glasgow’s public transport system. Unlike Edinburgh with its single, publicly owned bus operator – Glasgow still maintains its twisted network of private bus companies all using different routes and all demanding high profits (bus tickets in Glasgow are around 50% higher than in Edinburgh). The Scottish Government devolved powers to the Local Authorities a few years ago to enable them to bring their bus networks into public ownership or to set up their own public bus company to compete with (or simply take over the franchise of) the private companies. But without the Government giving Councils any resources or tax powers to enable those takeovers, none have actually happened at scale yet.

So we end up with the “next to the next best thing” approach of a very limited trial for a very limited time period. This is a major problem. We’ve already seen the Scottish Government cancel its “trial” of removing peak fares from trains after six months despite experts telling them that it would take much longer for behavioural changes to set in so it’s hard to see how a nine week trial will help. Limiting it to just 1,000 people also isn’t going to result in the broader benefits of behavioural shifting on others (pro-car people who absolutely must drive in a city have a vested interested in getting as many other people out of cars so they don’t have to be stuck in traffic jams).

So I expect the final report to say something like this:

“Initial uptake for the chosen 1,000 people was high but tailed off through the course of the trial as the novelty factor wore off. Uptake was highest amongst those who already regularly used public transport. Users reported frustrations that attempts to travel to unfamiliar places or at convenient times was difficult due to lack of clear information and impractical due to lack of services. Permanent behavioural changes were limited. After the trial ended, most users returned to their previous modes of transport – citing cost and practicality reasons. We recommend a future pilot scheme be both broader in scope and duration.”

The problem with the idea of free public transport isn’t cost but the way that it’s framed as “free”. “Free at the point of use” doesn’t mean “free”. It means “we consider this service to be so vital that a transactional purchase is the wrong way of obtaining it”. Policing in Britain is “free at the point of use” because we don’t think you should be fleeced down by someone who is preventing you from being mugged. Healthcare in Britain is “free at the point of use” because the surgeon shouldn’t have to open your wallet before they open you. Public transport – transport for all – has a very strong case for being the same. But it’s not free. It’s “paid for” by all of us because doing so benefits all of us even if we don’t need or use the service right now, because we might need it in the future and we derive benefits such as a safer, healthier society with fewer traffic jams even if we don’t ever need healthcare, policing or a bus ticket at any point.

One of Common Weal’s very earliest policy papers – from back before we were an independent think tank – was an argument in favour of Universalism as the default strategy for public services. Means testing is always, by definition, less efficient than universalism as you need to sort those “with means” who don’t get the service from those “without means” who should get the service. Then you have to police the line to make sure that those “with means” don’t cheat to get the service anyway. And you also have to chase people below the line to make sure they DO get it (this is why the UK’s cuts to winter fuel payments were a false economy as the “savings” were dependent on the level of people who could claim but didn’t even after the line was lowered remaining higher than the amount taken away from people who used to get the payment). And you also have to police the people out there who use the opportunity to scam people.

Universalism deals with almost all of that. The only real scam someone can do with, for example a Universal Basic Income is to claim for children they don’t have or for people who have died or left the country but it’s really hard to see how someone can scam a universal free bus ticket. What are they going to do...ride the bus...more? Sure, if we keep the buses in private hands then the bus companies might try to scam the Council by claiming payment for more rides than were taken, but that’s another good reason to bring the service into public hands too.

As we said more than a decade ago in The Case for Universalism, the case for SELECTIVE services – restricted only to those with the means to pay for them – has only made companies wealthier and people’s lives worse (again...even for the drivers in the traffic jam who will still need to drive once everyone else is on the bus).

We don’t need another small scale, short term pilot to tell us this when we have decades of this experiment played out across the globe. And we need to stop thinking so much about “who pays for it” because we all do anyway, one way or the other. I wish Glasgow the very best of success with their public transport pilot. May it lead to omnibuses. Transport for All of Us.