From April, commuters in the delightful Transylvanian city of Braşov will be able travel for free on public transport (on Fridays, at least). The city revealed the plan last month, calling it ‘Green Friday’, granting free travel on all buses and trolleybuses across the metropolitan area. George Cornea, president of the Braşov Transport Association, hopes neighbouring municipalities will follow suit.
The Braşov scheme is the latest experiment in a global question that continues to offer confused, mixed answers for urban planners: Does eliminating fares persuade motorists onto public transport?
Luxembourg became the first country to abolish fares entirely in February 2020, extending free travel across its buses, trams and trains to residents and tourists alike. With 696 cars per 1,000 people (the highest vehicle density in Europe), the Grand Duchy had ample reason to act. Six years on, congestion remains at pre-pandemic levels or worse. Data from Eurostat shows more than 75 per cent of all journeys are still made by car.
Tallinn, the Estonian capital, was the first major European city to trial free public transport, back in 2013. It made buses, trams and trolleybuses free for registered residents after a referendum in which 75 per cent of residents voted in favour of the move.
Mixed results, to say the least
The initial results were promising, given that public transport usage jumped 14 per cent within a year, and low-income households reported improved mobility. Grigori Parfjonov of the Tallinn Transport Department told researchers ridership continued climbing at roughly one per cent annually.
In the longer term, however, public transport’s share of total trips fell over the next decade from over 40 per cent to under 30 per cent, according to government figures, while commuters driving to work rose from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Even among those in the bottom income quartile, transit use plummeted from over 60 per cent to around 35 per cent.
What happened? Mari Jussi, a sustainable mobility adviser to the Estonian Transport Administration, points to a familiar culprit: driving remains too easy and too cheap.
A 2016 study of Tallinn revealed another problem, that walking trips dropped by 40 per cent after fares disappeared. People who had previously strolled to the shops now hopped on a bus instead. Car usage fell just five per cent. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich found similar patterns with Germany’s Deutschlandticket, introduced in 2022 to get the country moving again after Covid-19, and which offers unlimited monthly travel on regional and local transport for 63 euros. Though millions of people use the tickets, only one-fifth of new ticket holders reduced their car use. Most gains came at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians.
A different kind of evacuation
More optimistic findings come from Dunkirk, the French port city forever associated with wartime evacuation. Since introducing free buses in 2018, ridership has increased by an average of 85 per cent. A 2019 study by the Observatory of Free Transport Cities found roughly half of new riders were making journeys previously taken by car; city hall figures suggest use of parking lots dropped 30 per cent. Maxime Huré, a lecturer in political science at the University of Perpignan who has studied the scheme extensively, notes it has “revitalised the city” and functions as “a kind of social redistribution”.
Dunkirk paired free fares with substantial service improvements, such as buses running every ten minutes on major routes, while keeping the network compact enough to serve the needs of most residents. Contrast this with Luxembourg, where cross-border commuters (some 200,000 daily) still pay for transport in France, Germany or Belgium before reaching the free zone, rather defeating the purpose.
Scotland has taken a different tack: targeted rather than universal free travel. Since January 2022, anyone under 22 living in Scotland can travel free on buses with a National Entitlement Card. More than 100 million journeys have been logged, and an evaluation published in 2023 found 34 per cent of cardholders had accessed new opportunities such as jobs, education, and social activities they otherwise could not have reached. The scheme costs the taxpayer but attacks a specific problem: transport poverty among young people. It notably makes no pretense of emptying roads.
Free is no substitute for decent services
A report published in September 2025 by France’s Court of Auditors examined free transport across multiple cities. Its conclusions were blunt. In smaller places with underused networks, scrapping fares increased ridership at limited cost. In larger cities with busy systems, the policy proved “very costly” thanks to lost revenue and the need to expand services to cope with demand. In Montpellier, which made travel free for residents in late 2023, as in Tallinn, most new trips came at the expense of walking and cycling rather than driving.
Lyon meanwhile did something different. Rather than abolishing fares, the city raised them to 90 euros per month and used the extra revenue to finance more services, better coverage and improved reliability. Car traffic fell.
Price, it seems, matters far less than convenience, reliability and speed. A 2021 study in Bonn found subsidised 365 euros annual passes succeeded in shifting some commuters from cars, but only when combined with better routes serving congested corridors. Research by Odo Cats at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm concludes that since fare elasticity is lower than the cross-elasticity to petrol prices, making driving more expensive delivers bigger modal shifts than making transit cheaper.
Braşov’s Friday experiment, then, may achieve something modest. Free travel one day a week is hardly a transformation, but it costs little to test whether Romanians respond. Extending it further would require harder questions. Are services frequent enough? Do routes serve the places people actually want to go? Is parking still cheap?
Making public transport free is politically appealing, given that few people object to a freebie. It carries genuine social benefits for the elderly, students, and those on low incomes. But as a cure for congestion, the evidence suggests it is largely snake oil. Cities genuinely hoping to get motorists out from behind their steering wheels might do better investing in faster, more reliable services, restricting parking and heretical charging accordingly. Luxembourg’s free trams carry plenty of passengers. The roads remain jammed regardless.
Photo: Dreamstime.
