Ciarán Meers: Should Cork's buses be free?
The public transport system has a whole host of problems that make usage more difficult for ordinary riders, including the overall reliability of the service, with never-appearing ‘ghost buses’ making the schedule unreliable, and longer journeys as a result of inadequate bus lane infrastructure.
In January 2023, Cork City Council voted to send a motion to Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan calling for a fare-free bus route pilot scheme, with the logic of incentivising increased public transport usage. But when buses are still stuck in traffic, and there’s a severe lack of drivers, and services are generally unreliable, would this actually be the change that is desperately needed?
The main rationale for the move is that though cheaper than the car, buses and trains can be expensive when used daily, and removing fares would lessen financial impacts on frequent users — and present a handy incentive to hop on the bus more instead. While Cork’s bus riders come from all backgrounds and walks of life, many people who depend on it the most are those on lower incomes, and costs can add up week-on-week if multiple family members are using it several times a day.
There’s also a strong argument that we already pay for public transport services through general taxation, so it is effectively already paid for.
However, it isn’t completely a clear-cut decision. It's useful for transport networks to ensure that at least some expenses are covered by money from fares. The current government has increased public transit funding, but that may not be the case with future governments, or if there is a sudden decrease in the overall amount of funds available. While we’re hardly ‘all partying’ now, if economic conditions worsen and public expenditure shrinks, the amount allotted for Bus Éireann would also go down — except in this scenario, there would be very few options but to significantly cut service.
In 2020, Luxembourg famously introduced free nationwide public transport, though headlines alone don't quite tell the full story. It was an intervention to fix a specific problem of low public transit usership in a country that is top of the table in European car ownership per capita, though three years on it doesn’t seem to have meaningfully reduced traffic congestion. The government has also been hesitant at providing more train connections to suburban areas — which would result in increased numbers of the population moving to cheaper commuter towns.
The city of Boston has also had a long-running campaign aimed at removing fees across the entire transport network. This more targeted approach eventually saw three bus routes go completely fare-free as an initial assessment by transit activist turned mayor Michelle Wu. Though this is positive-sounding, Boston’s transport network currently has more serious issues, including the aging of much of the system equipment resulting in a subway train catching fire, and a subsequent one-month shutdown of the network’s Orange Line subway. Boston’s transport network has bigger priorities, and none of these fundamental problems will be solved by using limited funds for fare-free transit experiments.
From these cases, it is clear that free public transport has a specific use to deal with one problem of a transport system — low ridership. For all its faults, the Irish transport system doesn’t have a ridership problem, with numbers for both rural and urban transport users matching or surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
The public transport system does, however, have a whole host of other problems that make usage more difficult for ordinary riders. As was highlighted recently, these include the overall reliability of the service, with never-appearing ‘ghost buses’ making the schedule unreliable, and longer journeys as a result of inadequate bus lane infrastructure — not to mention the truncated size of the rail network, or the overly long schedules for implementing new tram lines in Cork and Dublin.
Research from the National Transport Authority suggests that fare-free transit would cost between €340m and €540m annually in lost revenue, and all for only a 1% reduction in motor vehicle trips. This doesn’t hit the goal of incentivising usage, especially when two or three years of this gap is equal to the cost of building a Luas line for Cork City.
By and large, increased funding would be better used to add bus lanes so journeys can be made faster and more reliable, and further expanding rural routes. The far less glamorous fixes are the ones that will make things functional — bus shelters at every stop, more Park and Ride routes and buses, and, of course, massive amounts more for transformative projects like BusConnects and the All Island Strategic Rail Review.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be an all-in or all-out approach, as there are some solutions that might be well suited to Cork’s transport landscape. Increasing targeted free usage may be a better track, such as free buses for young people (like resurrecting and extending the pre-covid free transport for children in July) or those who receive Jobseeker’s Allowance — ensuring the benefits of a fare system remain in place, while also increasing the social equity of the system.
The cost of travel simply isn’t the biggest issue for most people or the system itself, especially given recent price cuts make it more affordable. As great as the idea of a fare-free bus network is, it means remarkably little if the only difference is how much your never-on-time bus ends up costing, or that your non-existent transport service is still non-existent. After all, the train from Skibbereen to Cork is completely free.
Ciaran Meers is chair of the Cork Commuter Coalition
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