Free public transportation: there’s a Socialist idea if ever there was one, but it’s a concept that is being tried out at an ever-expanding list of European towns. One of the latest examples – and probably most prominent, since it is after all a national capital – is in Tallinn, Estonia, where city trams and buses have been free for around three months now, as we see from Czech Business News:

V Tallinnu je MHD už čtvrt roku zdarma, město si to chválí: Estonské hlavní město Tallinn před tř… http://t.co/RxuMgp06e9 #czech #news

April 5, 2013 6:17 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

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Czech Business News

Free to those registered as having a permanent residence within Tallinn, that is: not for those just visiting. So it seems you still have to check in at some ticket-punching or RFID chip-reading apparatus while boarding, it’s just that you’ll get the tickets/chip-cards you need for free if you’re a city resident. Others have to buy them – but don’t worry, you can use your regular euros to do that, Estonia has been in the Eurozone for over two years now!

(Be sure to save a 1- or 2-euro piece or two as a souvenir for the unique Estonia image on the reverse side! OK, it’s just a map of the country, but it’s different!)

As the piece reports, yearly spending on public transport amounts to around €12 million, but this scheme does tend to flush out those who can be regarded as city permanent residents – and so can otherwise be taxed – but just have not been up to now. Plus there are the other more-obvious effects: ridership up 10%, traffic on main city arteries down 15%.

As it turns out, if you’re curious about this urban experiment but don’t read Czech (or don’t want to put up with Google Translate’s version), the Washington Post recently offered its own coverage.

I recently covered here the Deutsche Bundesbahn’s troubles this year with operating their trains satisfactorily in extreme-ish weather, both hot and cold. But – How could I forget? – there has always been a bigger problem with the German trains, one that shows its ugly face year-round: they’re damned expensive! Now, anyone familiar at all with transportation and/or public-sector economics will have already known about this, whether s/he has ever travelled on the Bundesbahn or not, for this is an affliction shared by most public monopoly transportation systems requiring substantial prior capital investment (therefore also e.g. for city public transport systems): since it’s generally messy and often even politically unpopular to play the Grinch and show any resistance to escalating wage-demands from unions representing the labor required to keep these systems running, the costs and therefore ticket-prices inevitably rise higher than the rate of inflation. For myself, then, as much as I otherwise like the German trains, I tend to only travel on them as a result of some special offer and/or early booking which offers considerable savings. (more…)

Been to Berlin recently? Noticed how everything seems to flow particularly smoothly when you navigate the subway system (the U-bahn) there? But that’s just because it’s Germany, right? I mean, seemingly in exchange for exhibiting certain, shall we say, strict and humorless character-traits, and sustaining themselves on Sauerkraut and other tasteless food (at least according to popular imagination outside of the country), Germans can at least be sure that their trains run on time.

Actually, not really. I don’t mean that the subway-trains don’t run on time in Berlin, it’s quite likely that they do. Rather, it seems that they have recently addressed the entire issue of U-bahn efficiency – especially the problem of minimizing transfer times between one line and another – with a bit of higher mathematics, as Holger Dambeck recounts for us in Der Spiegel (Waiting faster).

Consider: you pull into a transfer-station in your one subway train and cast an anxious eye across the platform to where you rather hope the other subway-line to which you want to transfer has a train already waiting there for you. Of course, it’s rare that you’re so lucky; usually you’ll need to get out and wait for some period of time before that follow-on train ever arrives. And sometimes – oh, the frustration! – you do see the train there across the platform as your first train pulls into the station, yet the other train-driver can’t even wait a minute and instead pulls out of the station just as you are arriving! (more…)