Can free buses save public transit? Martha Velez answered with a resounding “yes” during last Friday’s MassInc/Gateway Cities’ online seminar framed around that question.
The City of Lawrence spent $225,000 over the last two years subsidizing fares on three bus routes running through the city’s most densely-populated neighborhoods. Velez, who is the city’s health and human services director, said the free routes saw an increase in riders for a very simple reason: Free buses overcome the financial hurdle people face in getting to their jobs.
Already burdened by budgetary and maintenance problems, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) reeled under a staggering blow beginning last spring when COVID-19 business shutdowns emptied buses and trains.
Vaccines are helping to get people back to work. But employees who endured pandemic-driven unemployment and struggled to pay their rent now need every financial advantage they can grasp to get to their jobs and make ends meet.
Free buses and, by extension, free public transit is a big financial advantage and one that Massachusetts’ major cities, including Lawrence, Worcester and Boston, are already embracing.
The City of Boston distributed 1,000 free MBTA and Bluebike passes three weeks ago to provide transit-expense relief to small-business employees, including people living in the city’s low-income neighborhoods.
Free transit, said Boston Transportation Director Vineet Gupta, can revive an economic sector crippled by the pandemic and bring riders back to the MBTA.
If free buses can prime the ridership pump and open the spigot for riders to pour back onto buses and trains, then the MBTA will be better positioned to achieve financial stability.
If business owners know their employees have a free and reliable form of transportation, they will have one less worry as they recover from the pandemic and, even more importantly, stitch together the connecting bonds to underpin a revived and growing economy.
Massachusetts’ overburdened roads, highways and bridges are an economic- growth impediment standing in the way of serious efforts to meet emissions-reduction goals. Free buses provide the greatest incentive possible to pull people out of cars.
Velez summed up the environmental and economic benefits of free buses last Friday by asking rhetorically: “Why free? I think the question would be, ‘why not?’”
