In 2019, Berlin announced that public transport will be entirely free for school children and also reduces fares for apprentices [1]. Following the footsteps of Luxemburg, who said earlier this year they would introduce fare free public transport in the city, Berlin are now making incremental progress towards this concept to ensure equal access to all, while simultaneously addressing climate change.
In the summer of 2019, Berlin introduced free transport for all students while also reducing the price for apprentices [1]. The revised cost of an annual ticket for apprentices is €365, which equates to €1 a day, and provides access to all zones of the city. By providing access to all zones within this price, Berlin has hit the nail on the head in terms of reducing spatial inequality. Normally, the cheapest yearly ticket which provides access to all modes of public transport is €728, and this ticket restricts you to the ‘AB tariff zone’ [2]. Hence by removing the zone restrictions, the city of Berlin is able to provide more equitable access to public transport, and price will no longer be dependent on where people work or live in the city.
The mayor of Berlin, Michael Muller has expressed his interest in extending this annual tariff of €365 to all age groups of society, which would further enhance equitable access to public transport [3]. His efforts in forming a political consensus has proved useful, as it was only a month after the previous scheme was implemented when the governing coalition of Germany considered implementing this tariff across all their cities [4]. Due to the providers of transport being privatised, it is important to ponder on whether Muller’s idea is an economically viable scheme for the city.
Firstly, it important to note that Germany is presently governed by a coalition between the ‘centre-right’ Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the ‘centre-Left’ Social Democrats. It is the social democrats that are pushing for this proposal, where one of the MP’s stated that ‘mobility is a fundamental individual right’ [3]. Meanwhile the other half of the coalition have kept rather quiet on these debates. However, private transport service providers in Berlin are concerned with the impact on revenues, a somewhat predictable narrative. As the political consensus of this proposal snowballed, the Senate investigated the economic impacts of implementing this tariff. The internally generated figures revealed that it would cost €160 million per year as a subsidy to introduce this scheme, which would require the raising of federal funds [2]. Furthermore, Muller’s enthusiasm for this proposal came from Vienna, who implemented this exact scheme in 2012. However, the scheme in Vienna proved less effective than expected, which was used by stakeholders in Berlin to oppose the scheme.
Overall, this post has considered public transportation mainly as a political issue rather than just a technical issue, and in doing so, has introduced this rather new concept of transport justice [5]. Despite the ongoing struggles of implementing this scheme, it still shows that a policy aiming to tackle transport accessibility issues can also tackle goals that are loosely related to transport, namely, the combatting of climate change [6]. The complex setup of stakeholders and their varying viewpoints makes this scheme somewhat difficult to currently implement. Nonetheless, Berlin’s senate have taken a long-term view and have planned an injection of €28 billion into public transport infrastructure over the next 15 years, which is definitely a step in the right direction towards implementing this scheme [7].
Here are the references I used:
[5] – Martens, K., 2016. Transport justice: Designing fair transportation systems. Routledge.
[6] – Kębłowski, W., 2019. Why (not) abolish fares? Exploring the global geography of fare-free public transport. Transportation, pp.1-29.
Urban Political Ecology UCL 