6 years ago
8
Germany considers making public transport free to fight air pollution
The German government is considering several measures for improving the quality of air in major cities, including making all inner city public transport free to use. The potential measures come as a response to the threat of legal action from the EU over the fact that German air quality still does not meet EU-prescribed standards.
Continue Reading
https://www.thelocal.de
Join the Discussion
"Free" means taxpayers will pay for it, whether they use it or not.
Freeways aren't free. You saying there's something wrong with freeways? Lighthouses, buoys and harbors don't build themselves. Should we not have public roads, airports, shipping lanes, or global communications links unless there's a little Monopoly man with top hot, tails and a monocle collecting a shiny silver coin for every toll? Public postal service, public libraries and schools, public health and code inspectors, public fire police and medical services, aren't all these investments we make as a popular government in a democratic society? I don't have kids. Doesn't mean I'm getting nuffing out of my taxes funding public schools. How much do you have to love pollution for its own sake to mind making somewhat less if that were readily possible? Ask me what's worse, your habitat rapidly becoming uninhabitable or somebody rides the bus without paying fare now and again somewhere in this world, I know where I'm going to come down on that.
Lets just roll out the dead corpses of whole families starving together because there was no infrastructure to get plentiful food to them to save them/shall we, again? I get it. We all do. Because that is going to kill them before the lofty ideal of saving the planet is. Balance and priorities.
All true. My point was, "Free" sounds great, everybody like "free" stuff.
My taxes are already paying for the bonds that built municipal mass transit infrastructure. Is it too much to ask that the people that use it pay for ongoing costs, or do we lay that off on the public at large as well?
Can I have a free car?
That was a bad analogy about the car, but in principle, you are correct. There is no free ride.
Damn, I was hoping for someone else to pay for my stuff. =)
No harm in trying.
Here a small city, Hasselt, had free public transportation for years. It was hugely succesfull, but you know, politics had to destroy a great idea once again.