Free public transport “opens the city to all” and should be “provided as a public service, just like health, education and public parks”, a new Campaign Briefing from Fare Free London says.
Celebration of the introduction of free public transport in Montpellier, France, December 2023. With thanks to the Mayor’s office at Montpellier
Abolishing fares for public transport in London is “one of the drastic, demonstrative actions needed to tackle climate change globally and air pollution locally”.
Fare Free London, set up at a meeting of community, trade union and environmentalist activists last month, is calling on the city’s Mayor to adopt the policy, and commission research on how to implement.
It urges national government to support the fare-free approach around the country, and change local government finance rules so that it can be paid for.
“Free public transport opens the city to all”, says Fare Free London, a campaign set up on 10 February at the Waterloo Action Centre. Free public transport “is provided as a public service, just like health, education and public parks, and is supported by public investment.
“It is central to a vision of London as a city where people, their health and the lives they live, come first”.
Fare Free London is following an international trend. The photo is from Kansas City in the US, which has had zero bus fares for four years – and where campaigners want to make this highly successful scheme permanent.
Asked on the podcast about the objectives of the proposal for free public transport, I said there are two:
“First, to make the system more socially equitable. London is more socially un-equal than any other part of the UK. A higher proportion of households is in poverty, 25%, than any other region except North East England.
“Second, to take drastic, demonstrative action on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.”
On greenhouse gases, the mayor’s strategy is focused on electrifying vehicles. This can not produce results fast enough, as has been shown in detail by research published last year by a team based at Imperial College.
We have discussed this proposal in the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition, and now invite organisations, groups and individuals to join us in this initiative. We hope to have a get-together on this early in 2024. To indicate interest, please write to stopsilvertowntn[at]gmail.com.
Aim
Free public transport can help tackle climate change globally, and air pollution locally, while supporting households struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. Transport should be provided as a service, just as health, education and public parks are.
The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition on a trade union march to keep rail ticket offices open, in September
On climate, London is falling behind its own weak targets, and even further behind targets worked out by climate scientists. The transport sector is the city’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the built environment, and the sector that has made the least progress in cutting fossil fuel use over the last twenty years.
Drastic, demonstrative action is needed. Free public transport, implemented together with improvements to services, investment in active travel and ending subsidies to car drivers and the haulage industry, can help rapidly to cut the number of vehicles on the road. We need to make public transport Londoners’ first choice for getting around: make it enjoyable. This is the best way to reduce emissions.
Cutting down road traffic is also the best way to tackle air pollution that kills thousands of Londoners each year.
This series of articles by Tom Ackers presents an outline of the challenge of decarbonising the built environment – the buildings and infrastructure we use – as part of tackling global heating.
In contrast to all the valuable analysis and discussion material focused on this problem at local and national scales, Tom concentrates on the global picture. It is a comprehensive survey, covering the history of construction techniques and how the stock of buildings and infrastructure expanded together with the capitalist economy in the late 20th century, how China overtook the rich industrialised countries, and the scale of the challenge in front.
Review of Road to Nowhere: what Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation, by Paris Marx (2022, Verso)
Unleashing Uber on cities would cut car ownership, because ride-hailing would be cheaper, Travis Kalanick, then Uber’s chief executive, claimed in 2015. It would reduce traffic congestion, allow car parks to be converted to other uses, and complement public transport with its “last mile” service.
Uber drivers demonstrate in London in March 2021, when the IWGB union won a court decision that they are workers, not self-employed. Photo from IWGB
Investors bought into Kalanick’s story, that Uber’s innovative app would produce these benefits, to the tune of billions of dollars. Central to his patter was the claim that Uber was a tech company, not a transport company (since denied by courts in the UK and New Zealand), and his crusade against local government regulations and the “taxi cartel”.
In Road to Nowhere, Paris Marx not only unmasks these falsehoods, but also explains Silicon Valley’s place in the broader crisis of capital, and the social, economic and ecological damage it does.
Marx recounts how Uber expanded in the US after the 2008 recession, flooding the market with drivers, to whom it offered incentives that were then withdrawn, while pay was cut.
Uber’s predatory pricing, financed by stock exchange investors, drove traditional taxi companies out of business. Taxi drivers’ incomes plummeted and their lives fell apart, triggering a slew of suicides.
The post-recession environment provided both a large pool of precarious labour and what Marx calls “incredible technological optimism” (page 109). Central to Uber’s strategy was an assault on cities’ transport regulations and on the labour conditions won over decades by taxi drivers’ union power. Uber and the other technology companies, cheered on by US conservatives and libertarians, deployed technologies as weapons in the class war.
In the midst of the gathering climate crisis, Uber’s new technology drove greenhouse emissions upwards. Directly contradicting Kalanick’s promises, the Uber model put more vehicles on the road.
In this excerpt from Road to Nowhere, PARIS MARX explains how and why the big tech companies moved into urban transport in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Republished here with permission.See also People & Nature’s review of the book
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the tech industry grew substantially and claimed a dominant position not just in the United States, but across the global economy. The internet was firmly established by that point, and it began moving from the desk to the palm of people’s hands as smartphone adoption soared through the 2010s. Cloud computing and other software products made it much cheaper than in the past to launch a start-up and compete for a piece of the rapidly growing industry. Meanwhile, financing was abundant, not just because decades of inequality had caused more wealth to flow to those at the top, but also due to policy choices taken to combat the recession.
The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks through quantitative easing, and the low interest rates that persisted throughout the 2010s, created an environment that boosted the stock market even as most workers’ prospects continued to stagnate, which benefited venture capitalists and made it much easier for new companies in the tech sector to access capital. Such a dynamic granted investors, influential founders, and executives at the dominant companies in the industry a significant degree of power in shaping what the post-recession economy looked like – and who it served.
By 2010, today’s tech giants were continuing their rapid growth, but they were not yet the juggernauts they would become a decade later. Google had a number of popular services in addition to Search, but many people still believed its “do no evil” slogan. Amazon’s positions in ecommerce and cloud computing were growing, but it was not yet seen as such an existential threat to brick-and-mortar retail. Apple was reinventing itself with the iPhone, but it was far from being one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Yet, as they expanded, other companies made use of smartphone access, new digital tools, and the excitement around the tech economy, to make their own splash.
The climate crisis is leading to massive social rifts. Politics-as-usual will tend to accentuate the problem rather than solve it – and effective adaptation calls for radical transformations that push beyond the existing system. By Ulrich Brand, Barbara Fried, Rhonda Koch, Hannah Schurian, and Markus Wissen
Imagine a summer heatwave in Berlin in 2050. For weeks on end, the temperature fails to dip below 20 degrees, even at night. The heat builds up in poorly renovated, heavily populated residential areas—while neighbourhoods with green areas and private gardens are up to ten degrees cooler.
This is a just a single glimpse of the kinds of inequality produced in a world shaped by climate change—and it is far from the most distressing one. By mid-century, far more serious environmental crises will interfere with living conditions in many regions of the world, or even render them unbearable.
A man walks along the giant sea wall being built along the coast of Jakarta, Indonesia, much of which is sinking below sea level. Photo by Irene Barlian / Climate Visuals Countdown : Creative Commons
Yet, even in Germany, heatwaves will claim lives. Preparing for the coming increases in extreme weather and environmental crises demands massive action—however, this need continues to be ignored. Even a rich country like Germany is failing to take the measures that are necessary to adapt.
The price is being paid primarily by those who have access to the fewest resources and bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis.
Climate adaptation is a social question, conceivably the social question of the coming age. But even on the left it is often pushed aside.
To speak of adaptation suggests a posture of defence and resignation, and fails to inspire assent. And anyway, wouldn’t we be better off directing all of our efforts toward mitigating climate change than already starting to reconcile ourselves to the consequences?
The opposite is true. If we take climate prognoses seriously and consider what, concretely, a two-degree rise in average global temperatures will mean, we will see all the more clearly that a radical fight against climate change is urgently necessary in order to prevent an even worse fate.
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People and Nature 