I became interested in fare free transit since  Michelle Wu was elected the Major of Boston. She was the first female Asian major of the city, though her reputation as a disciple of Elizabeth Warren, the liberal firebrand in the U.S. senate,  probably overrode her other identities.  Among many of her agenda items was fare free transit (FFT), which caught my attention  not because it is especially progressive, but because it is a transit policy, which I happen to know something about.  Another source of inspiration for this paper came from Steven Dubner’s podcast on the subject a couple of years ago, which is entitled “Should Public Transit be Free”.

I shared the preprint with my department chair, Prof. Kim Gray, who is an environmental engineer but has a broad interest in anything related to sustainability and climate change. She was impressed and asked her assistant, Miss. Gina Twardosz, to write a news article to be posed on the department website. If you don’t want to read the paper itself, here is the link to that article. The abstract follows.

Abstract: Using a stylized transit design model, this study examines fare-free transit (FFT) through the lens of distributive justice. We pose a direct question: Is FFT just according to John Rawls’s theory of justice? Specifically, is it compatible with the resource allocation that maximizes the utility of the most disadvantaged travelers? We compare this egalitarian principle with a utilitarian one, which asserts that an allocation is optimal when it maximizes the total utility of all travelers. FFT is of course not free. In the absence of farebox revenue, a transit system must either cut services or turn to alternative sources, such as local dedicated taxes and fees levied on drivers. Thus, our model incorporates both finance and operational decisions, and captures the interaction between traffic congestion and travelers’ income level and mode choice. Using a case study built with empirical data in Chicago, we show that fare is not the first choice under either moral principle. For the egalitarian, the most desirable funding source is the driver fee, whereas taxation is preferred by the utilitarian. It follows that FFT can be both just and utility-maximizing, if one is allowed to raise taxes and charge drivers with impunity. However, as the flexibility in finance diminishes, so does the appeal of FFT. In such cases, the proposed model serves as a decision-support tool for finding sensible compromises that address the varied interests and ideologies at play. For example, it reveals that at the current tax rate of about 1% in Chicago, the Rawlsian egalitarian can justify FFT only if drivers pay about $1,800/year to fund transit, which amounts to about 18% of an average U.S. household’s driving cost.