Mass Transit: Preferred over Cars, Except When It Isn’t

F or decades, environmentalists and urban planners have been on a mission to get Americans out of their cars and on to buses, light rail, commuter trains, bicycles, their feet, and, these days, even electric scooters. For reasons that have shifted over time from the Arab oil embargo to smog to climate change, advocates have pushed a similar suite of policies to make mass transit more attractive than private car ownership. The world of anti-car advocacy is also full of arguments that transit activists will be treated as liberators by millions of Americans who secretly hate driving, disdain the country’s low-density suburbs, and desperately yearn for an authentic big-city subway experience.

So why don’t these millions of supposedly self-loathing motorists make the jump? The pro-mass-transit argument is that while most Americans do want to move from cars to mass transit, they’re unable to because they’ve been failed by generations of “car-brained planners” and politicians who have spent all the available transportation budget dollars on freeways rather than communal mobility options. What we need, we’re told, is more government investment in transit infrastructure. This would include lowering transit fares and shrugging off concerns about cost recovery from users (and ignoring the fiscal cliff created by the long-term liabilities of U.S. mass transit, let alone its short-term problems in cities such as New York).

A recent article for Fast Company provided some fascinating data relevant to this debate. The piece describes the experience of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which decided a decade ago to drop all of its fares for local residents on buses, trains, and trams inside the city (visitors still pay). This was not primarily designed as an environmental initiative to lure people out of their cars and onto other transit modes. Rather, it was portrayed by its supporters as an economic-justice measure, letting the city’s lowest-income residents (who probably couldn’t afford a car in the first place) get around without having to pay. In reality, grubbier pork-barrel considerations almost certainly counted for much more.

That said, in a weeklong citywide referendum held in 2013, 75 percent of Tallinn’s voters approved of the elimination of fares. Then again, only 20 percent of them bothered to vote. Regardless, Tallinn’s move has been praised as an enlightened, forward-thinking measure that will be good for both the environment and society at large. A 2021 story from the environmental website Grist in particular celebrated how Tallinn’s transit pricing has “incentivized” suburbanites to move into the city center, and the socialist magazine Jacobin was particularly effusive, claiming that fare-free public transit like Tallinn’s is both “socially just” and “politically transformative.”

Given the evolution of contemporary conventional wisdom, it’s no surprise that several cities around the world have either adopted or seriously considered this strategy, including Kansas City, Mo., and Raleigh, N.C., here in the U.S. The district council of Washington, D.C., initially announced that they were going to be adopting zero-fare buses on July 1, 2023, but delayed that plan, and currently have a July 1, 2024, target date. And that’s just the places that have adopted zero-fare as an official policy. Some urban transit systems during the Covid pandemic dropped evasion enforcement or simply stopped collecting fares entirely.

While the believers and proselytizers of that new conventional wisdom would like us to believe that zero fares would lead to a new golden age of bus and tram travel, the results revealed in the data reported by Fast Company have shown the opposite. Transit’s share of Tallinn commutes has fallen from around 40 percent in 2013, the year fares were eliminated for residents, to under 30 percent last year. During that time, the proportion of commuters who drove rose from just over 40 percent to almost 50 percent. And, perhaps most surprisingly, transit’s decline has been most pronounced among city residents with the least money. Transit use among those in the bottom fourth of income plummeted from over 60 percent of commutes in 2013 to around 35 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, their car use surged: In 2013, less than a fifth of low-income residents drove to work; by 2022, that share had more than doubled.

So, if even the poorest city residents are driving more than ever now that transit fares are zero, what happened? The biggest effect seems to simply be that the average standard of living for Estonians went up. Since breaking free from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia has taken a strongly free market course, and as they got wealthier, they decided that they were willing to pay for the luxury of a private automobile and the freedom and convenience that comes with it. Real GDP per capita has increased by around two-thirds since 1995. Estonians in 2021 owned 621 cars for every 1,000 people, more than all but four other European Union countries, including significantly more developed economies such as Italy and Luxembourg. Estonians, like lots of people in other countries, simply like driving their own vehicles — even when that comes at a significant additional cost.

One additional reason, however, may be cultural. The legacy of nearly half a century of Soviet occupation has cast a long shadow. As was the case everywhere under Soviet control, rates of private car ownership were very low. A story in the New York Times published in 1971, for example, reported that 300 private cars a week were then being sold in Moscow, a city with a population of over 7 million. Total private car ownership in the Soviet capital was estimated at 110,000. The United States, by contrast, had a car-ownership rate in 1971 of 0.44 per person, which would have meant 3.1 million cars for a city that size. While the number of new Soviet cars did increase significantly after 1980, the U.S. was still producing almost six times as many total units in 1988, a time when the Soviet Union’s population (284.5 million) was somewhat higher than that of the U.S. (244.5 million). Any way you slice it, the USSR had very low rates of car ownership, even in the relatively prosperous constituent republics like Estonia.

There have been plenty of testimonials from people who grew up in former communist countries on what it was like living with so few cars. In 1998, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a study by Waldemar Hanasz, who described the experience of his family in communist Poland. Hanasz zeroes in on why the Soviet-aligned states were so slow and stingy in allowing individuals to own their own vehicles, despite Moscow waging a high-profile campaign throughout the Cold War for global recognition that their industrial capacity and standard of living was gaining on that of the U.S., or in some respects, superior to it:

The growth of car ownership undermined one of the key elements of the Communist regime’s ideology and practice, namely the abolition of private property. Communists understood that private ownership, as a form of one’s sovereign dominion over a certain sphere of one’s life, was a denial of their monopolistic rule. If an individual has a right to use, consume, lend, rent, sell, or even destroy a thing owned, the dominion of the state is seriously limited.

Hanasz also wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in 2000, reacting to the trend of activists in various countries attempting to popularize the “car-free day” as a national observance, during which cars would be banned from city centers and public-transit fares would be waived. In his piece, he explains his lack of enthusiasm for this new holiday:

Under the old communist regime, I lived in a world of very few private cars. Today, in America, I live in a world with an abundance of cars. And I can speak from personal experience that automobiles have dramatically increased and extended my liberty in countless ways. My car gives me the opportunity to travel, to learn, to meet other people, to enjoy life. It expands my choice of where to live, where to work, where to dine, where to shop. The privacy of car ownership is a major part of this automotive liberty. People buy cars not only to travel from one place to another, but also to enjoy many things while they travel: music, conversations with friends, landscapes and sunsets. In a sense, it is not only my home that is my castle; my Toyota is my castle too. Underlying all this is the freedom to choose where to go, when to go, and whom to go with. Westerners take these liberties for granted; survivors of communism do not.

The younger generation of Estonians don’t remember what life was like during the era of Soviet rule, of course, but cultural attitudes are handed down through the decades even when their origins grow distant. And the experience of those who once lived under communism is not unique. It is similar to that of people in many places around the world. Whether because of political repression or simply poverty, when people finally had some money and opportunity, they have opted for a car. When they have had the choice between the bus and the car, they have chosen the car. And even in just the past few years, when they have had an option between the jostling crowds of the subway and their own privately maintained passenger vehicle, they have chosen the car. Expecting Americans — of all people — to give up that freedom because urban planners start manipulating transit fares and swapping subsidy budgets is sheer delusion.