By Emma Wertheimer, Year 9
As individuals, it is important to be aware of the climate crisis, and as we all know, cars have a big impact on pollution. Therefore finding ways to reduce the amount of cars driven can help with this urgent problem. One of the solutions is encouraging the use of public transport.
Public transport is something that many people can take advantage of at the same time, therefore it should be free. Making public transport free will not only encourage people to help the environment, but also it will help reduce traffic. By making it more accessible everyone one can benefit from it and more people will help take care of the environmental crisis.
On top of this, people living in big cities often don’t have parking spaces and find it impractical and expensive to own a car. So therefore using public transport becomes a need.
But how do you pay for it if it’s free for the public? Since it is a public service, it is the government paying for it by using the money they collect from taxes. However, is it fair to make everyone pay for something that they don’t use? Well, I don’t think so.
In my opinion, since public transportation helps solve many problems including traffic congestion and pollution as well as serving as a way for people to get to their jobs even when they do not have the means to afford their own car (therefore generating more taxes through the jobs), all of society benefits. Therefore, since everyone benefits from this, it makes it fair to expect everyone contribute to this cause.
For example, in March 2024, Geneva announced an unexpected surplus of taxes from 2023. They propose to use this money to partly lower taxes as well as make public transport free for anyone 25 and under. This helps students who do not make much or any money save some money on going to and from school.
Although this was excellent news, some people complained that retired people should also be given access to free transport, for the same reasons that it was given to the students.
What this shows us is that the Geneva government also seems to believe that the way to give back to society, like I described above, is to make public transportation free.
In conclusion, if free public transportation is such a good idea, why don’t more cities put this idea in place? Hopefully other cities will take note…
