September 10, 2026
00:00:00 Jennifer Marks
Hello, Jenn here with another audio edition of Streetwise. Public transit has been hard to miss in the headlines lately. From record-setting ridership as soccer fans travel between World Cup matches to high-profile debates about making transit faster, more affordable, and more accessible, how cities move people is getting renewed attention. One of the biggest questions, should transit be free to ride? I sat down with two of Kittleson’s transit experts to talk about why some agencies are going fare-free, what benefits they’re hoping to achieve, and the trade-offs that come with removing fares.
Thank you both for joining me today to talk about the wonders of fare-free transit. Could you start by introducing yourselves and giving a quick rundown of why you’re a great person to talk to about fare-free transit?
00:00:55 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
So my name is Jorge Diaz. I’m a transportation engineer. I did my PhD at Penn State. My concentration was in fare-free transit policies. So I studied fare free transit policies for almost four years.
00:01:09 Jennifer Marks
You’re like Doctor Fare-Free Transit.
00:01:11 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Technically, yes. [laughs] I don’t like it how it sounds, but yes.
00:01:16 Nick Meltzer
I’m Nick Meltzer. I’m a planner and an engineer. I have an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a master’s in community regional planning. I’ve used more than 30 transit systems across the world, and then for the last 10 years, I’ve been evaluating kind of public policy through different jobs I’ve had. Prior to Kittelsen, I worked for an MPO where transit was fareless, and I’ve also managed a regional transit board during COVID when decisions about fareless service were being made.
00:01:40 Jennifer Marks
And I’m coming in with relatively little background on fare-free transit, although I did get to experience fare-free transit a few weeks ago in Iowa City, which is one of the big case studies. And it was pretty great. I needed to take the bus back to my sister-in-law ‘s house and I just waited and got right on and I didn’t have to download an app. I didn’t have to worry about paying. It was pretty great, but I suspect that it is probably much easier to use than it is to implement. I think it might be helpful to catch our listeners up on the fare free transit movement. Could you maybe explain where it’s coming from, why it’s getting so popular, why we’re reading about it in the news all the time?
00:02:27 Nick Meltzer
Yeah, I can start with that one. So prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, fareless transit, I think was mostly a one-off for small agencies around the country. They would come to it through public movements or policy decisions or elected officials, and it was mostly kind of isolated across the country. During the COVID pandemic, nearly all transit agencies in the country went fareless just from the risk of exchanging money and things like that and being close to transit drivers. Around that time, the current mayor of Boston ran on a platform to make certain bus lines fareless. The current New York mayor, who was previously an assemblyman, also ran a pilot in New York to make some certain buses fareless. Post-COVID-19, when Zohran Mamdami ran for mayor of New York, he ran on a platform of fast and free buses, and that kind of thrusts it back into the spotlight.
00:03:16 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
I will only add that fare free transit policies convening the States for a long time. The first transit agency that went fare free was in the 70s. So it’s not a new policy at all, but recently it’s a really popular policy.
00:03:29 Jennifer Marks
So what are agencies or cities or even whole countries pushing toward fare-free transit trying to achieve by making buses and other forms of transit free to use?
00:03:42 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Most of the cities go with the goal to increase accessibility and equity. They have the intention to provide service to those who need it the most. So transit agencies mostly try to do this by decreasing the amount of money that people have to pay for the transit system.
At the same time, there is always that some transit agencies in the States have a really low recovery rate. If your recovery rate surpasses certain threshold, there is a moment when collecting the fare is more expensive than the money you’re receiving from the fare. So they decide to stop collecting so they can save that money.
00:04:18 Nick Meltzer
You know, I’m a big advocate that transportation is a means to achieve other broader goals. And so you also see some cities or countries promote fareless transit as a way to meet their climate goals that they have, or if they have congestion in cities, they could do it to help reduce congestion and promote riding the bus more, riding the train more. But I think the equity one is the big one. I would agree with Jorge.
00:04:41 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Cities, what they try to do is incentivize people to use more transit by removing the fare. So basically you’re removing a big part of why people don’t use transit. You don’t have to pay the fare. It is more accessible to you and it’s more attractive to you because it’s going to be cheaper than riding the car. At least that’s the basic idea that people are using to propose fare free transit.
00:04:59 Jennifer Marks
So a big component of fare free transit is the fare being free. And presumably, buses and other forms of transit are not somehow magically free to operate. If you decide to make your transit network fare free, where does your money come from?
00:05:16 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
So I would say there are three big pockets. The first big pocket is federal funding. The second would be the state funding. And the third is usually a tax. So there are certain cities that use a 1% sales tax to finance transit. So that money is going from that side.
00:05:30 Nick Meltzer
I think to add to what Jorge said, he mentioned previously that sometimes the fare box recovery for these agencies is really small. So if you’re only getting, say, 10 to 15% of your overall budget from fares, making up that difference is actually really insignificant compared to the rest of your operating budget.
One caveat to that is if you have a larger agency with a budget in the billions of dollars, 10 to 15% of that is significantly more than a smaller agency with a budget in the millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Where the money’s coming from is important, but it’s generally not kind of the driving factor for why they would decide to do so.
00:06:09 Jennifer Marks
Right, so some agencies, they’re not funding 90% of their bus system using the coins in the till?
00:06:17 Nick Meltzer
Yeah, I think the highest you see, it’s typically in bigger cities, larger cities across the world, is upwards of 40% fare box recovery. Is that right, Jorge?
00:06:27 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
That’s a typical number at least. I’m sure there should be other examples with 60 or 70%, but it’s an outlier.
00:06:35 Nick Meltzer
Whereas in the US, it’s outside large urban areas, it’s generally less than 20%.
00:06:40 Jennifer Marks
So if an agency decides to go full steam ahead, make everything fare free, they’ve found either a tax or federal or state funding of some kind to fund their network, what could they expect to see in the long term from fare free transit?
00:06:57 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
That’s a complicated question. So we have several outcomes. From the ridership point of view, transit agencies are going to experience a really big jump on the ridership. The number says that they’ve experienced around 40% ridership within the first three months. which is absolutely good for them.
And in the long term, it’s expected to see a 24% higher ridership compared to any scenario where they are charging the fare. From the moto choice point of view, they’re going to notice that they’re going to have more riders. Not only people are riding more, but people are going to ride more frequently. However, the profile of the people that are riding transit is pretty similar to the profile of the people that were riding before the policy. In other words, if your previous profile was certain social groups, those people that were in riding are going to be the same.
Basically what the policy does, it incentivizes those who are more predisposed to use transit. So it is not expected to reduce congestion because of that, because if you are not inclined to use transit, meaning you are used to ride your car, fare free transit is not going to make a big impact.
00:08:10 Nick Meltzer
In other cases, I think you’ll also see some improved reliability of the buses because there’s no fare payment happening at the front. You can use all the doors on the bus for boarding. So you’ll see some faster travel times on the buses. You know, maybe you’re not attracting new riders per se, but the people who are dependent on transit or who need transit to get around are using the system more.
And I think that’s really important because as he talked about, like often a goal is to increase accessibility especially for underserved populations. And what you find is those populations are riding the bus much more than they were before.
00:08:45 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Something interesting with the data is they’re not only riding more frequently, but they’re riding for purposes they didn’t use to ride before. So for example, in one of the surveys that I did with the transit agencies, we observed that people usually take transit to go to work. And after fare free transit, they’re starting to do shopping, to do errands, and to go to social activities.
And also we observed that people previously didn’t use transit during the weekends and now they’re using transit during the weekends. So basically you’re incentivizing these people to use transit more often and to rely more on transit.
00:09:17 Jennifer Marks
This makes a lot of sense because if I’m a low income resident, maybe I can afford the fare to get to work and back, but I can’t afford it to get to a doctor’s appointment or get to a grocery store that’s maybe a little further from where I live.
00:09:31 Nick Meltzer
You asked about what happens right after agencies go fareless? We talked about ridership. Some other things that I’m aware of and I’ve observed is that assaults on transit drivers go down drastically because often those issues are starting about fares and people paying fares or not paying fares. That’s, I think, another big benefit. And actually, you see transit drivers have a lot of support for fareless services because then they don’t have to argue with potential customers about paying the fare.
00:09:58 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
We also analyzed security in my dissertation. And one of the things that we observed was that transit agencies that go fare free have 24% or less incidents of transit agencies that charge the fare, comparing similar transit agencies. We also ask transit users how do they feel before and after the implementation of the policy, what is the safety sensation? And we observed that there is a significant increase in the safety perception in a positive way. So basically people feel safer now than before and at the same time you observe the numbers go down.
00:10:33 Jennifer Marks
Do you think it’s functioning like the more people you have, just the more people paying attention, the safer people feel? I know I’ve gotten on some buses sort of later at night and there’s one other person on there and that feels a lot less comfortable than a bus full of commuters at 8 A.M.
00:10:49 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Yes, we think there are two main reasons why agencies with fare-free transit policies are safer than agencies that collect fare. The first one, just as Nick said, you remove the interaction between the driver and the people who don’t want to pay the fare. And the second one is you have more people on the buses. So as you have more people on the buses, you create a Gordon effect. And this Gordon effect makes people less prompt to commit certain crimes such as vandalism.
[music break]
00:11:23 Jennifer Marks
Okay, so is making the buses free going to solve most major transit problems for a city?
00:11:32 Nick Meltzer
No, I think the biggest issue facing transit agencies in the US at least is long-term sustainable funding. I think the percentage of fares that contribute to budgets, as we’ve talked about, is relatively minimal depending on the agency. But you still need kind of long-term sustainable funding. And whether that comes from fares or whether that comes from somewhere else, I think is really important for agencies at this point in time.
00:11:53 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
I totally agree with Nick. The worst issue that the transit agencies face right now is funding. And I would add to that one, support, political support. There’s no requirement to go fare free. There is no good moment to go fare free. It’s just a political decision.
If a city or a transit agency wants to go fare free, if they know their objectives, why do they want to implement the policy, and how they’re going to implement the policy, that’s the good moment to do it. It’s not just like, we’re going to go fare free, we want to do it. It’s why and how. That’s the real question. Any agency can do it.
00:12:31 Nick Meltzer
And I’ll emphasize that it’s a policy decision, right? And when thinking about that policy decision, thinking about where that replacement revenue is going to come from, there’s lots of sources as we’ve talked about, but the reason, really the why you’re doing it, how you’re going to do it, and then kind of measuring the progress of it, I think is also really important.
00:12:50 Jennifer Marks
If an agency is excited about the idea of going fareless, what do they need to do to start implementing that and how do they get started?
00:13:00 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
I want to emphasize that if they want to go fare free, they have to have extremely clear objectives. Fare free transit policy is a big commitment. It’s a long-term commitment. It’s a policy that if you go fare free, the impacts that you’re going to have are going to be huge, but going back is extremely painful.
So for example, we observed in the data that even though transit agencies in the short term are going to have a 40% increase in the ridership, that decrease in ridership if they start charging first could be 60 or 70%. So if a transit agency wants to go fare free, they have to be extremely sure why they want to do it. Most people think of this policy as a panacea, as they are going to solve everything going fare free, but no, it’s not true.
The policy has its positive effects, but it’s not going to solve all of the issues. What’s the objective? Do you want to increase the ridership? Good. It’s a good policy. Do you want to attract people that use their car every day and never use transit? This is not your policy. Do you want to reduce the number of crimes? I wouldn’t go with this policy because it’s an extremely expensive policy while you have other policies that are cheaper. So it depends on what the transit agency wants. That’s how they should proceed. So they have to be really clear on their objectives.
00:14:25 Nick Meltzer
A lot of agencies went fareless during COVID and most returned to fares after COVID. And those agencies are still seeing ridership increase compared to pre-COVID levels. Any thoughts on that?
00:14:36 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Yes. First of all, I would say the amount of time that you require to become more sensitive to the fare wasn’t long enough. We were talking that most transit agencies implemented fare-free programs for one, two, or three months max. So that’s not a long time to make users more sensitive. And the second one, it’s everybody knew that was a short-term policy. It was really clearly stated by all the transit agencies.
So you were expecting it to come back. So it’s a different position than announcing a free transit policy. Now we’re going to make this free for everybody and then suddenly you put it back.
[music break]
00:15:19 Nick Meltzer
So one of the arguments you’ll hear against fareless transit is that when you ask riders of transit broadly in general, what’s more important, paying a fare or having bus come more frequently, they will often say having a bus come more frequently. And so the arguments against fareless transit are often, well, whatever you’re paying to subsidize the fares would be much better spent on providing more frequent buses, more buses, things like that.
00:15:49 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Actually, we analyzed that one on our study and we found that actually it’s the other way around. So we found that actually fare free transit has an implicit value. There’s a really good experiment that explains this. If you have a group of people and you have two chocolates, one is extremely expensive Swiss chocolate and the other one is a Hershey’s. I like Hershey’s, but the other one is a Hershey’s. If you only have a $0.50 difference between the two chocolates, people will always pick the expensive one because even though it’s more expensive. It’s the quality is so good that those $0.50 are acceptable.
So that moment, if you start lowering the rate until the Hershey’s get to 0, people are going to pick the Hershey’s because it’s free. Even though this one is super cheap, the Hershey’s is free. So that feeling that something is free changes the value in people’s minds. And that’s why fare free transit has huge impact. And we found that actually it has a better impact than frequency.
00:16:49 Nick Meltzer
That’s great research, Jorge. I’m so glad to know that you’ve found that in your dissertation, that it just reinforces that that’s like an assumed argument against it, right? And I used to think that for a long time too, and it wasn’t until I read Poverty by Matthew Desmond recently where he like really researches like how, you know, low-income folks and people who live in sustained poverty over time, and that kind of was what finally changed my mind about this kind of universal access to transit by removing fares as a good policy.
The other kind of argument you’ll hear against fareless transit is that there’s already low income programs for people who can’t afford the fare. And that’s true. I think, you know, when you step back and there’s been some research on the adoption of those fare programs, low fare programs or subsidized fare programs, and you find the percentage of people who qualify is much higher than the percentage of people who are enrolled in it.
Research about folks who are kind of consistently living in poverty find that like that time tax is one of the most important things. And so having to enroll and apply for a low income fare program, there’s usually still a cost to it for those folks. It’s just less. Jorge mentioned this earlier, but that’s why you see folks in low incomes, they’re riding the bus more because it’s providing more opportunity, more accessibility to them. And it’s also less stressful for them to have to search for the fares on a daily basis. And so what you’re trying to achieve becomes kind of the most important deciding factor.
00:18:08 Jennifer Marks
Are there any other common arguments about fare-free transit that are worth unpacking?
00:18:16 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
So one of the main arguments regarding fare-free transit is accessibility and equity. Like removing the fare is going to make it cheaper, so it’s more accessible and nobody has to pay. So you increase the equity. However, that depends on the transit agency and on the context.
So one of the things that we analyzed was accessibility and equity, and we found that it extremely depends on how the transit agency is built on the network. So for example, if your transit agency serves mostly neighborhoods with more money or serves neighborhoods with less vulnerable population, removing the fare is not going to increase the accessibility of neighborhoods in a more vulnerable position.
So we observed, for example, if your transit agency doesn’t provide good enough access within walking distance to schools or to hospitals or to jobs, removing the fare is not going to help people to access those positions. I mean, it helps a little bit because it helps you to take the bus more often. However, if they are not within walkable distance of the transit system, it doesn’t matter because people cannot reach those destinations using transit.
00:19:29 Nick Meltzer
I think, I don’t think it’s an argument against it. I think it’s something to be aware of is that it, while with fareless transit you may decrease boarding time at stops, what doesn’t change is the travel speed of the bus between stops. And so if you have a bus that’s sharing a lane with vehicles and your boarding time decreases, but then you’re stuck behind a long row of cars because of congestion, you’re not going to get any increases in travel time unless you have dedicated bus lanes.
And so oftentimes you’ll see cities that will pilot fareless transit and all door boarding and dedicated bus lanes for certain routes. And they’ll say more people are riding, the bus is on time more, et cetera, et cetera. And those are kind of unique policy choices that are all kind of getting lumped together. So if you just do fareless transit, you’re not going to get faster buses unless you kind of increase the speed of the buses through dedicated transit lanes.
00:20:24 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
Regarding question, there’s another thing agencies should be aware of. And I’m not going to stress this enough. Fare-free transit is a long-term policy. So if transit agencies decide and wants to go fare free because they want to achieve XYZ objective, they have to do it in the long term. Otherwise, they are going to be in a worse spot than they were before.
00:20:47 Jennifer Marks
Based on our conversation today, it sounds like fare free transit is like a way to supercharge an agency’s network. When it’s paired with other improvements like priority lanes, a network that reaches vulnerable communities, frequent and reliable service, it’s like a power of 10. Like you can get a large number of riders who use it more to go more places. but that by itself, it may not solve all of the largest pain points an agency has.
00:21:21 Jorge Diaz-Gutierrez
I like your example. Fare-free Transit is indeed a supercharge for the transit agency, but it requires other policies. It requires other changes to the network.
00:21:30 Nick Meltzer
Yeah, I think hopefully you’ve heard a lot of the nuance behind this choice and If there’s one thing I learned to share, it’s that policy choices should reflect broader goals and objectives. And so we’ve talked about this a lot, but fareless transit by itself is a policy choice and you should be certain it’s going to achieve the goals that you’ve set for yourself.
[music break]
00:22:03 Jennifer Marks
Thanks for tuning in to this audio episode of Streetwise. For more conversations about the latest ideas in transportation, visit kittleson.com/ideas. I’m Jennifer Marks, and we’ll see you next time.