Free public transport Is it the solution amid the fuel crisis

0:00Millions of Aussies will ride public transport for free as Victoria and Tasmania roll out temporary relief to help with the fuel crisis It's something our next guest says should be introduced here Tim Welch urban planning director at University of Auckland. Good morning. Good Thank you. Do we need a carrot when we already have such a big stick in petrol prices? Yeah, I mean that's the thing is since we import all of our fuel for vehicles that we really need we really only have control of the demand so we have no supply side control which means we can either help people with the price of alternatives or we can use a big stick and let prices rise and hope they consume less fuel I tend to favor the one that makes alternatives a little cheaper for everybody. So you're saying you want what the government or council or both to fund public transport so that everything's free How much would that cost? So we know that the total revenue for the whole country in terms of public transport fares is about $300 million

1:04So if we made public transport free for a year for everybody that's that that would be our cost is $300 million which is still less than the current proposed payment of $50 to you know for 143,000 households. But if I'm a billionaire and I get the bus I'll get that at the benefit of it too why not? Yeah, I challenge you to find a billionaire on a bus but there are people who have higher income that do ride public transport but the fact is that everybody that's on a bus is saving fuel for everybody in a car so even if we get people with high incomes on buses or trains or ferries that's still fuel that we're saving for everybody else that can't use public transport Where do we get the $300 million from? Yeah, that's a good question so we know we have roughly $150 billion of unspent money from that's dedicated to transport projects that we haven't used so we've got almost half of it already sitting around and we could even trial this for just you know three months that's $75 million

2:11I was $75 million so we've got money in places that we could use and we have options for lower cost but the fact is that it's still going to be cheaper than a lot of the alternatives most for households and for the government. The money you're talking about is for capital expenditure right? Yeah, that's true it's very different things. It's something that's meant for other places but you know we're an extraordinary times and we can move money around when needed. How many more people would get the bus if it was you know I mean if the bus is $3 now and it was zero how many more people would actually use it? Do we know? Yeah, well we know when we cut the fares in half during COVID and when people were not working away from home as much or going to school as much that we saw a 3% increase in people writing they were switching directly from cars on to public transport so with business kind of as usual right now people still going to school and work and with fares dropping to zero we could expect even more people switching.

3:16Tim I think I think it's a bad idea I don't think it's necessary I think Petra will do the price but I appreciate you coming on the program this morning. I'll get very nice things.