Steps Forward in Free Access to Public Transport
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- Published on Sunday, 11 November 2018 19:32
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1704 ... November 12, 2018
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Steps Forward in Free Access to Public Transport
Lukasz Lugowski
Thirty years of neoliberal domination, culminating in the economic crisis that began in 2008, have resulted in the introduction of charges for public service throughout Europe, particularly for education and health services. But this is not the case in all public services. In recent years there has been a renaissance of free public transport, particularly in Eastern Europe. While in Hasselt, Belgium or Colomiers, France -- cities that were until recently symbols of the success of free public transport in Western Europe -- tickets have been reintroduced as part of the neoliberal trend to charge for services, in the East candidates for local power compete with each other in many cities on the basis of... free public transport. Currently, it is possible to travel free of charge in more than 100 cities around the world. And Poland and Estonia are at the forefront in this field.
When in 2012 the Free Trade Union "August 80" (WZZ "Sierpien 80") started the campaign for free public transport in Poland, to fight against the increasingly frequent and high ticket price increases throughout the country, public transport was free in only two cities. Today there are 44 Polish cities that practice it, from the small town of Swieradow-Zdroj -- 5,000 inhabitants, but invaded by tourists and their cars in high season, whose free public transport is common with the Czech city Nove Mesto pod Smrkem -- to the canton of Lubin with a total population of 106,000.
Many other cities are considering establishing free public transport and it may be that next year the city of Czestochowa will be part of the lot -- it is a larger city than Dunkirk in France and it would be the third largest European city with free public transport.
At first, mayors in many cities considered the idea of free public transport absurd and the media treated our initiatives as a curiosity, if they ever mentioned them. We cannot therefore fail to ask the question: why is Poland now ahead of the curve in this area? It is not easy to answer them, as free transport is introduced for many reasons.
