Essay on Free Public Transit

One of the largest barriers to sustainability in Canada is the use of motor vehicles as a primary means to get around. It comes with the landscape: a large nation with cities scattered all across it. But is all that driving really necessary?

In British Columbia, hundreds of people make the 45-minute journey twice daily along the highway between Vernon and Kelowna. If the only mass transit available, a greyhound bus, traveled between the two cities more than six times daily and did not cost twelve dollars each way then a lot more people would take that instead of polluting the air with the fifteen-to-twenty litres of gasoline burned by a midsize car during the round trip.

Vancouver is a similar case. Thousands of commuters travel from the residential townships that make the Greater Vancouver Area to the City of Vancouver. The transit system to get most of these people to work and back in a reasonable time exists, but only one in every six Vancouverites use it. Instead, they pay more than seven hundred dollars each month to fuel, maintain, and pay for a vehicle when a three-zone adult transit pass is on the order of a hundred dollars per month.

As a result of these cases and those of other cities, tremendous amounts of energy are wasted in moving people and we as a nation remain one of the worst emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world. Also, we remain privy to gas prices for our transportation costs.

The most effective solution to this waste and dependency is to mandate that all public transportation in Canada be free for anyone to use.

Transit is already heavily subsidized and the fee to ride is nominal. The inconvenience of having to carry change or buy tickets or a pass in advance is more of a detriment to using transit than the price itself. Therefore removing the nominal price of a ride has only a minor impact on the revenue of a transit system.

One immediate impact would be an improvement in safety. People that are intoxicated or otherwise unable to drive would always have an alternative to get home and no excuse not to use it. Nobody would have to drive to get home if they are unable to drive safely. Also, there would be less pressure on international tourists that may be unused to Canadian roads and laws to rent a car and drive.

Likewise, the convenience of being able to get anywhere with a large population in Canada for free would make an excellent tourist magnet. Canada will soon host her third Olympic games. There will be plenty of people from outside North America paying attention to Canada and considering visiting, but they may be deterred by the difficultly in bringing a vehicle overseas. Not needing a vehicle to get around will be the critical push for many to visit during and after the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

Implementing universally free transit by 2010 would also show that Canada truly is serious about being an environmental leader in a tangible, significant, and effective way, and show it when there are more than two billion people watching events in Canada.

If mass transit in Canada were free for everyone, ridership would explode. Each year more people would take transit than the last year, thus justifying an increase in service and therefore attracting more people onto the buses and out of their cars. With this kind of feedback loop, it is feasible that between 50 and 70 percent of Canadians in cities of 20,000 people or more would choose to use mass transit as their primary transportation.

Consider the difference in carbon emissions this would make. A diesel-using bus (let alone hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and electric buses) with a typical 15 riders uses less than a third as much fuel as 15 typical cars. If 50 percent of Canadians ride instead of drive, this results in a reduction of at least a third of all transportation emissions from a single program.

Providing transportation for ten million commuters may seem prohibitively expensive, but in less than a decade the program would pay for itself. According to Statistics Canada, 40 billion liters of gasoline were used in Canada in 2004 (Sales). A reduction of a third makes a savings of more than 13 billion liters, which can be sold to the United States and yielding an annual boost in trade surplus of more than 9 billion US dollars by the retail value of gasoline in the United States in December 2007.

A reduction of a third of transportation emissions makes mandated carbon caps a moot point, the carbon reduction of that many people using transit is so large that reaching emissions targets becomes almost trivial. Canada's contribution to fighting climate would be better than the target contributions of the United Nations.

According to Natural Resources Canada, Canadians “produce half of their annual five tonnes [of greenhouse gas emissions]... from driving.”(Fuel), so a reduction of driving emissions by a third is a reduction of all carbon emissions by a sixth. This is a greater improvement than any single program has been able to create so far.

Canadians would purchase fewer vehicles as the necessity to drive decreases, so demand for cars from foreign-owned companies such as Lexus, Ford, and General Motors will be replaced by demand for buses from entirely Canadian companies such as Bombardier and New Flyer. Therefore more money from consumers would stay within the country, and transportation would become less sensitive to international markets and events.

Also, demand for jobs in the maintenance of vehicles such as tire shops, garages and oil change shops will shift to servicing buses. Any loss of jobs in the field will be replaced by skilled, outsource-proof jobs in operating the increased transit system. Even with the loss of vehicle jobs, the overall unemployment rate should not be affected in any negative way.

If a universally free transit system is established and used, it will provide a great increase in the number of people that can travel on a given road at a time. Therefore the maintenance and upgrading costs of road infrastructure per capita will be dramatically reduced because each individual person requires a smaller portion of the road.

Those who take the free transit would find themselves with 30-60 minutes of each day freed up from paying attention to the road. This time that would usually be spent commuting could be instead spent reading, watching videos on portable video players, napping, socializing or just relaxing. Transit users today already take advantage of this time similarly. To most Canadians, these are more productive and more enjoyable activities than driving.

Those who continue to drive would at least benefit from sharing the road with fewer motorists and much greater proportion of professionally trained and accountable drivers from the reduced number of cars and increased proportion of buses and streetcars. Parking in major cities will also cease to be a problem. With fewer than half as many cars taking up premium space in the downtowns of the nation, there would likely be surplus of parking spots which could be replaced by businesses or parks and greenery.

The lessened demand for cars also decreases the demand for steel. This either frees up the steel for construction or export, or allows the closure of steel mills and iron and coal mines that both pollute the air and damage the environment on the ground. Again, the steel industry jobs would be replaced by skilled driving jobs.

The majority of transit in Canada today is in the form of diesel-powered buses because they are best suited for the low volume of riders today. However, as ridership increases, greener high volume mass transit systems such as railways and electric streetcars become viable in more cities. Finally, with a majority of commuters taking transit, communities would slowly develop to become more tied to central transit hubs, so urban sprawl would be reduce and less land would be needed per capita.

Mandating that the public transit systems of Canada were free for everyone to ride on is one of the most effective ways to make Canada more sustainable. Universally free transit provides dramatic improvements to Canada’s environmental impact, and is
beneficial to both the national economy and individual Canadians. Furthermore, the next two years are the perfect time to implement such a policy while both oil use and Canada are major players in the world stage and while the economy is still hot. Universally free transit should be considered in the House of Commons immediately.

Works Cited

“Fuel Consumption Calculator: Gasoline”. Energy Publications. 2006. Natural
Resources Canada. 4 Jan 2008. .

“Sales of fuel used for road motor vehicles, by province and territory”. 2007. Statistics Canada. 4 Jan 2008. .