The Study To Make New York Transit Free

Gothamist: "You're working on a releasing a study this month that shows how to make NYC's subways and buses free. Can you tell us what we might expect?"

Ted Kheel: "The premise of our study is that there is an interrelation between automobile travel and mass transit travel, so that it is critical to look at both together to achieve a proper balance. This is what our city should be doing, but instead, we did it."

"Our findings are preliminary, but I think you can expect the final numbers we release in January to be quite in keeping with them. We found that if you eliminate subway and bus fares completely, and offset the lost income through a combination of measures that make automobile trips into the Central Business District [CBD] more costly, those trips would drop by one-third, and traffic-both inside the CBD and in the entire city-would go down significantly. The same measure would also save a staggering $4 billion worth of working time, by eliminating more than 100 million hours of vehicle time that would otherwise be spent sitting in traffic. The plan would also generate about $2 billion in benefits from reduced pollution and various other types of savings."

Thanks to Streetsblog