Election Day Free Transit: Worth Trying Otherwise?

The Quad Cities will have free public transit on Election Day, November 5, to help people get to the polls. This includes the two transit systems in the QC: CitiBus in Davenport and MetroLink in the rest (technically MetroLink is the name on the Illinois side and Bettendorf Transit runs in Iowa, but with the apparent exception of the drivers, MetroLink has run Bettendorf Transit operations for a while).

Is this a good idea? Well, everything that might help people get to the polls is good, because representative government relies on participatory democracy. But is it a good idea for more than election day?

Well, the data we have suggests that free transit isn't the best use of transit money. That is to say, when you eliminate fares the money comes out of the system, and it's better to use it instead improve service rather than to cut fares beyond a certain point. 

And boy could the Quad Cities use better service (more on that on a later post). So free transit wouldn't be the best tradeoff: the dollar fare isn't likely barring most ridership. Instead, it's issues like coverage, frequency, speed, and connectivity, all of which would be harder to fix without even the small amount of cash a fare generates.

But if it were a different pot of money? After all, it might be easier to get larger political entities to fund 'free transit' than 'a small increase in service' with the same cost.

In that case, I will merely note anecdotally that students at the local universities already get free transit -- and that in my observation informing them of this and getting them on the bus makes them much more likely to use the system at cost 0 than they were when they thought cost was higher.