How to make Public transport attractive to people, or in other words: How to get people to use the car less

Note: This article is gonna focus mostly on Dutch public transport since that is what I am mostly familiar with. The things that I am about to mention in this article may not work or apply in every situation. Readers discretion is advised.

Not too long ago I was distraught by the news that Arriva was apparently gonna scrap some bus lines in the city where I live after 21:00(1). I was distraught by this news since these were cuts in not only city bus lines but also regional lines to more provincial towns and villages. I have been(at the time of writing) looking for a different home for some time now and due to my lack of a car or a driver's license I would be dependent on a bus line to get anywhere, should I find a home in one of these places. This feeling of distraught only intensified when I discussed this with some friends of mine and they informed me that even more bus lines were probably gonna be scrapped in the Breda region(another region I am looking at for a new home)(2). 

Now the stated reasons by the bus companies for the scrapping of these bus lines has been the COVID-19 pandemic. This has caused for less travelers and this means less profits. Local politicians have mostly reacted negatively to these state of affairs but alas there is only so much they can do. It has been 21 years since the privatization of regional public transport in the Netherlands with "Wet Personenvervoer 2000"(3) so municipalities can no longer determine which bus lines can stay and which need to go. Now I could make this another article about why privatization of public transport is a terrible idea(mostly because seeking a profit motive in something that should be a public service often leads to lackluster results and can have dire consequences for the people living in harder to reach places) but I trust that most people who will read this article will already be aware of this. Instead I want to focus on how we can make public transport more effective to people and how we can get less cars on the road. 

I want to tackle this angle because for the longest time I have often heard politicians complain about the fact that people don't use public transport enough and are instead too reliant on the car which has bad effects regarding climate change. Yet the actions taken by these same politicians often have exactly the opposite result. Trains and bus tickets have only gotten more expensive in the Netherlands and measures have been taken that only serves to limit access to public transport for a lot of people. 

1. The current issues

Dutch public transportation is in a weird spot right now. While it is still serviceable for the most part, it has also been marked by strange decisions that have been made in the last 20 years. Ever since the Dutch railways was forced into quasi privatization and forced to adopt a profit motive in the mid 90's the price of tickets have gone up and the Dutch Railway Company(NS) has often adopted weird gimmicks to try to get people to take the train. Busses are not a whole lot better off. The privatization of municipal bus companies has led to a lot of bus lines being scrapped and has reduced the traffic of the lines that still exist in many places outside of the very large cities. Now it should be noted that bus traffic tends to be a lot better in the more densely populated places of the Netherlands(like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag) and a lot of these places also tend to have regional bus companies owned by the largest municipalities in the country. However outside of the "Randstad"(a giant urban conglomerate of towns and cities in the western and central Netherlands centered around Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht) is bus traffic in a worse state. City bus lines tend to be quite selective to which neighborhood they go and regional bus lines to smaller provincial towns and villages tend to be flaky in their coverage and inconsistent in their reliability. Back when I still studied in college in the early 2010's, I had to take regional bus lines on a daily basis and I had more then often that I had to wait several hours for a bus to show up because the hourly bus I was supposed to take did not show up or just flat out drove past the bus stop I was waiting at despite me signaling for it to stop. 

Train traffic tends to be a lot better in my experience but even this is marred by some odd choices and annoyances for the traveler. The NS runs 90% of passenger rail in the country and for the most part are the cities and larger towns well connected to each other. However the NS has been marred by some strange decisions these last 10 years. The biggest issue I have with the NS is it's implementation of the OV-Chipkaart system. The OV-Chipkaart is a contactless smart card system used for all public transportation in the Netherlands and I have admittedly very mixed feelings about the thing. While I do recognize it's convenience I also recognize that since it's implementation, prices of public transport have increased a lot. This is especially obvious when paired with the NS and specifically the gates they have installed on most major stations. You need to put a minimum of 20 euros on your OV-Chipkaart to even be able to open the gate and this means that train platforms are now less accessible to people. If you pair this with rising fare costs then it becomes obvious the replacement of the old paper ticket with this new gimmicky technology only serves to drive up the price of traveling with a train. That is even without mentioning the major privacy concerns that come with the OV-Chipkaart. Another odd thing is some of the decisions that were made in regards to the train routes. One of the oldest train routes in the country has always been the train from Den Haag Centraal to Venlo. Yet a few years ago they decided that it would be a good idea to scrap the final part from Eindhoven to Venlo because apparently it was unprofitable to do so. Yet at the same time they didn't scrap it because they still had a separate train that drives from Eindhoven to Venlo, 5 minutes after the train from Den Haag arrives in Eindhoven. This kind of makes me wonder what even the point of scrapping the final part of that route was if you are just gonna run a separate train anyway.

This is all the result of the wave of Neoliberalism that has been flooding the Netherlands for the last 30 years trying to make public transport profitable. Weird decisions are made that often benefit only a select few people at the expense of everyone else. What Neoliberal politicians don't realize however is that it is impossible to run something like a bus company with a profit motive and at the same time getting the same services or coverage as before. If you privatize a public transport company then cuts to lines and departure times are gonna be made because it is quite simply unprofitable for them to run those lines. This in turn will remove the incentive from people to take public transport in the first place because why would you wait for a bus that arrives once every hour and takes 50 minutes to get somewhere less then 20km away, if you could just take a car and do the same thing in 15 minutes. As it currently stands is the main reason people take cars over public transport because it is simply more convenient to do so. Now the observant reader at this point might point out that I am contradicting myself here since I myself admitted that I have no car or a drivers license and as such that I won't be able to drive a car. However I should point out that I am the exception that proves the rule. I am in a very specific situation in regards to my disability and I should not be taken as the norm. If someone has access to a car and a drivers license then there is a big chance that they will take the car instead of a train or bus.

2. How to get people out of the car

Now cars are not the beyond all end all. I have noticed that people are getting more and more annoyed while driving cars. It is often a stressful thing to do with increasing amount of people on the road and you have to constantly pay attention to what you are doing. Driving a car can give you flexibility yes, but it is also a stressful affair that can be quite dangerous. Another thing that should be noted is that the large amount of car owners and drivers has also influenced the way we plan our cities. This is less of an issue in Europe where a lot of the larger cities are often historical and therefore it becomes harder to do stuff like building parking spots everywhere or building a highway through a neighborhood but this is very much a big problem in the United States of America, where everything is build around owning a car, often to the detriment of most people. Public transport on the other hand can fix a lot of these issues. It is more relaxing, you don't need to worry about driving nor do you need to worry about getting into an accident. There are however a few things that need to be done before public transport can be appealing to more and more people.

- Low cost of travel
This is probably the argument where I am gonna lose all the Liberal appeal but there is really no way around it. If you wanna make public transport appealing then you need to make it cheap. To get the amount of cars off the road that is needed to lower our CO2 output we need for a lot of people to be able to take public transport on a regular basis which means that tickets need to be a relatively low price. Currently is the price for tickets(especially train tickets) just to high to compete with the price of gasoline for cars, especially on longer distances. For many people it is usually a lot cheaper to just split the bill of a full gas tank with each other rather then just getting 4 train tickets so if you wanna circumvent that then you need to make the price of public transport cheaper then that, especially on longer distances. Remember, you are not gonna be able to make a profit off public transport anyway so there is not really a need to price the tickets up to compete with cars or other forms of transport(personally I think that public transport should be free but that is a discussion and conversation that our current capitalist society is not ready for). Another thing that should be kept in mind that by making public transport a lot cheaper, you are also making it more appealing to low income people. There are a lot of people that cannot afford a car but still need to be somewhat mobile to live their life. By having the option of cheap public transport you are also making it more likely for these people to be able to go to stuff like a different job, different social events and just live a better life. I hate to sound like an ivory tower Marxist but improving the material conditions of people goes a long way to improve their general welfare. 

- Consistency
Public transport needs to be consistent. By consistent I mean that it needs to go on a regular basis, ideally to the point that you don't even need to check beforehand. One of the current annoyances of public transport is that you often need to spend some time checking your route beforehand to see what kind of trains/busses drive at what time and whether those trains and busses connect well to each other in regards to transfer time. As it currently stands is the transfer time often too long in many cases. I have spent a significant portion of my life standing at cold bus stations twiddling my thumbs around and waiting for a bus to show up and ideally I would like to see that time shortened. Now I am well aware of the fact that we are just gonna have to accept that in some cases it is just not viable to run a bus to a more rural area every 15 minutes but to spend hours waiting for a bus that may or may not show up is not exactly a good alternative either. Ideally I would like to see that I can just walk to a bus stop or bus station and spend a maximum of 20-30 minutes for a bus to show up to a more rural area. For bus lines in the city itself I would like this max waiting time to be 15 minutes. Doing this would ensure that people would be able to take a bus or train without needing to worry about whether they are gonna miss their bus if they don't leave now and it would give them a similar flexibility as it exists now for people that use a car. Another thing that needs to change would be the coverage and the speed. There are a more then a few places in the Netherlands right now that are very difficult to reach due to how difficult it is to get there via public transport. Usually the bus takes a long time to get there or doesn't even get there at all. Another issue is that it takes a long time sometimes to reach certain places. Now the best way to remedy both of these issues is by getting more bus lines in addition to the already existing bus lines. For example if you have a bus line from City A to Village D via Town B and Town C then you could fix this by getting another bus line that goes directly from City A to Village D. This gives you more options in regards to getting where you want to go and more coverage but it also often speeds up the time you spent getting from point A to point B since if you just want to go to a certain places you are more likely to have a direct route.

- Reliability
The final thing that public transport needs to be is reliable. You need to be sure that if you plan to take the bus from 09:30 to train station A that said bus actually shows up. I have spoken in the past with bus drivers about why it is that busses often don't show up and they answered to me that they often lack the material or personnel to run those busses in those cases(which kind of makes me wonder why they schedule in those busses in the first place if they cannot guarantee that they will show up). This is a problem that can be solved by simply getting more material and personnel.  Unfortunately there is not really much I have to say beyond this. It would be nice if busses showed up at the times that they are said to show up.

3. In conclusion(and final bits and pieces)

The Dutch public transport system is by far one of the better ones in the world and you can do way worse when it comes to public transport. However there is still a lot of room for improvement and I think that a lot of strides can be made in regards to improving public transport. Doing this will not only make a lot of people more mobile but it will also solve some of the congestion problems we have been facing and reduce our climate footprint on the world. It should very much be said though that the things I am proposing here are not possible as long as public transport companies over here run on a profit motive. Nationalization is one option but I am not as keen on this as most of my other leftists comrades are since a nationalized company can still make a lot of mistakes(See British Railways in the 60's and 70's). A nationalized(or ideally unionized) public transport system needs to get the sufficient amount of funds to be able to make the improvements that need to be made and this is something that a government(or worker's syndicate) should not cut costs on. As it currently stands however is public transport too expensive and unreliable for the average person to be convenient and unless that changes are most people gonna stick to their cars. 

    

Sources:

1. https://www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/4008281/busreizigers-s-avonds-de-pineut-arriva-snijdt-fors-in-dienstregeling

2. https://www.ovpro.nl/bus/2021/09/10/opnieuw-bezuinigingen-op-ov-in-regio-breda-door-corona/

3.https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0011470/2021-07-01