Free Fare Public Transport and Road Congestion: Literature Review and Implication for Paris

In March 2018, the Mayor of Paris proposed a free fare public transport policy to reduce road congestion. While this is a recurring proposition that many cities have experimented, no scientific paper offer a comprehensive economic analysis to understand the expected effects of such a policy. The results from transport economics suggest that free fare public transport in Paris is not able to significantly reduce congestion because it would have a low impact on the modal choice of car users. The case studies and simulations of transport models reach the same conclusions. They show that the effect of such a measure on congestion is very limited. In practice, only cities that also pursued other goals may have retained free fare policy. It emerges from this analysis of the literature that reducing automobile pressure requires a change in the relative cost of using a car or public transport. To achieve this objective, various measures should be considered: taxing car owners or car users (urban toll is one way to achieve this goal), improving the quality of public transport to reduce crowding, reducing the space devoted to cars, promoting other transport modes.