FRENCH BUCK THE BUS MARKET

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: february 2013 :: RMTnews 15 When Jean-Francois Mayet became mayor of Châteauroux in 2001, the town’s bus network was descending into irrelevance as residents chose different modes of transport. So Mayet, a member of France’s socialist party, did what few mayors would do: he made the whole thing free and, according to a recent report, ridership in Châteauroux has jumped up 208 per cent in 11 years. The dozen or so bus lines of Châteauroux, which is about halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, weren’t the first to offer free transit, but it was the biggest and the only larger city to ‘demonetise’ its entire network. Only the Belgian city of Hasselt, which dropped fares system-wide in 1997, was even close to the same league. But Châteauroux didn’t just test the viability of eliminating fares as a social experiment; it used free rides to save its mass transit system. In 2002, ridership had already increased 81 per cent. By 2008, the conservative newspaper Le Figaro reported that Mayet was the most popular mayor in France among towns with between 30 and 50,000 inhabitants. He’s still in the job, as well as being a regional representative to the French Senate. The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership can relieve traffic, improve the environment, boost the system’s efficiency, give residents more spending money, help the poor, and rejuvenate central business districts. It was achieved by slightly increasing the transit tax on big local businesses while eliminating the costs of printing tickets. But not everyone is jumping on board. Bruno Cordier, author of a 2007 report Totally Free Mass Transit cautions that fare-cutting won’t work for many cities. "Gratuity alone does not make the network attractive," Cordier told Le Monde. He points out that Châteauroux also expanded their network by 42 kilometres at the same time, which could have played as much of a role as free rides. Plus, he says, the system won’t work at all in big cities, where 30-40 per cent of transit revenue comes from ticket sales, as opposed to a mere 14 per cent in Châteauroux. One of Châteauroux’s imitators also released a report this year: Aubagne, a metro area spread around 12 towns to the west of Marseille. This being France, the city’s mayor teamed up with a philosopher to write a book on the experiment, entitled, Liberté, égalité, gratuité. Aubagne has had a free transit system since 2009, when the city raised the transport tax on large businesses from 0.6 to 1.8 per cent to become one of the largest free-transit projects in the world. Since transit fares were abolished in 2009, ridership has increased 170 per cent. The authors told TerraEco that 99 per cent of residents are happy with the new policy and traffic congestion is down 10 per cent. The concept is about to meet its biggest test. At the end of this year, Tallinn, Estonia will eliminate fares on its transit system for residents, making it the world’s biggest city with free mass transit. predominantly those relied on by pensioners, children and disabled people and which the private sector won’t run because they can’t make any money out of the passengers. The bus industry continues to receive a hefty £2.3 billion subsidy from the taxpayer, mostly to pay for the pensioner bus pass and bus services for schools and adult social care which would otherwise be completely ignored by private bus companies. Although a paltry £70 million is being offered by the government to local authorities through the ‘Better Bus Areas’ policy, they are also consulting on how to devolve the £400m Bus Service Operators’ Grant to local authority level. The latter proposal will have the big five bus companies rubbing their hands and priming their lawyers to bully weak and impoverished local authorities into handing over the cash for providing a basic and expensive bus service. Those companies will also continue to lobby hard to maintain deregulation and against the regulation of bus services by local authorities. The government’s failure to end the scandal of deregulated bus services outside of London has been exposed by RMT’s Parliamentary group in Early Day Motion 855, tabled by RMT Group member Graeme Morris, Labour MP for Easington. This is the latest stage in the fightback against the profiteering and political failure that has allowed multinational transport companies cream huge profits out of UK bus passengers, workers and taxpayers for nearly 30 years. RMT will continue to be at the forefront of the campaign to take bus services back to passengers and the workforce. FRENCH BUCK THE BUS MARKET In 2001 the French town of Châteauroux rejected leaving bus services to the ‘free market’ and made services free, increasing usage by over 200 per cent