In the second of a series of articles about experiences of free public transport around the world, Ellie Harrison from ‘Free Our City’ presents the arguments for free public transport from Scotland. Ellie spoke at Fare Free London’s strategy meeting on 29th September, and Get Glasgow Moving’s statement of support for Fare Free London is on our list of supporters here.

Read the article on the Ecologist website here, and we have copied the text below:

Glasgow: how free transport drives better health and happiness.

Glaswegians have rallied behind Free Our City’s call to abolish fares. We argue that free public transport will be much easier and cheaper to deliver if bus and train services are first taken into public ownership.

This is one of the key lessons I have learned over the last decade-and-a-half of campaigning for better public transport in Glasgow and beyond.

This began with the national Bring Back British Rail campaign, which I set up in 2009. More recently I’ve localised my activism with Get Glasgow Moving, established in 2016 to campaign for fully-integrated public transport network.

This article is the second part of our FREE PUBLIC TRANSPORT series based on talks given in the international session at the Winning Free Public Transport event, organised by Fare Free London on 29 September.

Possibility

We want a system similar to the one that London already has, where buses, trains and subway are planned and coordinated by a public body in the public interest.

It has been impossible to deliver such a system anywhere else in the UK since the insane policy of bus deregulation was implemented everywhere (except London) in 1986.

Free local public transport could and should form the centrepiece of such an integrated system. This is an idea we have been popularising in Glasgow since launching “Free Our City” in 2020.

It was Transport for Quality of Life, and their researcher Lisa Hopkinson, who first opened my eyes to the possibility – and necessity – of free public transport.

Their reports We need fare-free buses! It’s time to raise our sights in 2018 and A Radical Transport Response to the Climate Emergency in 2019 provided compelling arguments.

Summit

My awareness of these ideas coincided with being invited to join Glasgow City Council’s newly-formed Climate Emergency Working Group, which was to guide Council policy following their declaration of a “climate emergency” in May 2019.

I was able to influence the transport policy quite a bit. Specifically, the recommendation to “initiate a formal assessment of the potential for making the transition to a public transport system that is free to use”, which made it into the working group’s final report.

This caught the eye of Jennifer McCarey, chair of the Glasgow Trades Council, who in turn approached Get Glasgow Moving about starting a new campaign – a coalition of trade unions, environment, student & transport groups – specifically for free public transport.

The aim was to raise the stakes in the run-up to COP26, the UN climate summit Glasgow (initially scheduled for autumn 2020, but postponed due to the pandemic until November 2021). And so “Free Our City” was born.

Manifesto

Our first step was to meet-up at the Unison trade union offices for a Power Mapping & Analysis session – to work out how to shift things within the Scottish political system, where we needed to apply pressure, and what we needed to argue.

We also worked with Jeff Turner, an independent transport consultant, to produce this short report, How much will free buses for Glasgow cost, and what are the benefits?, which was published in March 2020.

Then we all know what happened. We went into lockdown and our Free Our City meetings had to shift online.

But we continued meeting up on Zoom every few weeks to develop the campaign, riding on the ‘Build Back Better’ feeling that we all had at the start of the pandemic.

We commissioned Marcela Terán, who was working with the COP Climate Coalition, to design our logo and identity. And we wrote our own manifesto, building on Jeff’s research and that which Transport for Quality of Life had done previously.

Unions

We made plans for a big online conference to launch the campaign. We had two local speakers and two international: Xavier Dairaine, Director in Urban Communities in Dunkirk, France, who had overseen the roll-out of free public transport there; and Katrin Winter, a citizen of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, who had experienced the benefits of free public transport.

The event was very well attended, with more than 100 people on Zoom and more watching a Facebook live stream. Several local Green politicians joined, including Martin Bartos, then Chair of the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), our regional transport authority.

In March 2021 – in the run-up to the Scottish parliament election in May – we organised another big online event to “Put Free Buses Back on the Agenda”.

The format was a “town hall meeting”, to which we invited representatives from community groups to come and speak about the problems they face with the current transport system, and the difference that free public transport would make to their lives. Elected politicians from the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), Labour and the Greens were there to listen.

Representatives from disability groups (DPAC), trade unions, Community Councils and many more took part, which is all archived on our Facebook page if you’re interested.

After the election, the Greens entered into coalition with the SNP, and I will return to that point below.

Capitalise

But first, let’s talk about COP26 – which was an absolute gift for the campaign, as we soon discovered that all delegates were going to be given free public transport passes.

This of course did two things:

1. Showed everyone that such a thing is possible – really mainstreaming the concept of free public transport

2. Made Glaswegians really angry – if they can do it for the delegates, they can do it for us!

We were able to capitalise on all of this, and got loads of media coverage for the campaign.

Inspire

Looking back over the last four years, here are a few of the key wins for our campaign:

Nationally – the Greens entered the SNP Coalition in August 2021, which led to the Free Bus Pass Scheme for under-22sbeing delivered in January 2022, and the Fair Fares Review which was finally delivered in March 2024, although it was unfortunately a total “damp squib”.

Locally – Green Councillors secured £100,000 funding in the city’s February 2022 Budget to commission a Scoping Study for a Free Public Transport Pilot. This was delivered in May 2024.

Internationally – we were delighted to inspire the Fare Free London campaign!

Cheaper

By the time Glasgow City Council’s Scoping Study had been published, we had moved on to launch a new region-wide campaign, specifically to lobby SPT to use its new powers to take the bus network back into public control.

Better Buses for Strathclyde is part of a movement across the UK trying to do the same, with Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and West Yorkshire leading the way.

The new Labour Government is now working to accelerate this process across the English regions through its new Better Buses Bill.

The fact of the matter is that it is much easier and cheaper to deliver free public transport if you own and run the buses yourselves.

Baton

The cheapest, and most efficient, forms of free public transport have no ticketing at all.

Now that Fare Free London has been set up, it is worth mentioning that, just before the mayoral elections in May, Sadiq Khan pledged that if he won – and if Labour won the general election – he would set up a new publicly owned bus company for London.

If this becomes a reality, it would make it much cheaper to deliver free fares. I think a central plank of the Fare Free London campaign should be to hold him to his pledge!

Whilst we fight to take our buses back into public control, we pass the baton from Glasgow to London in the fight for free fares.

Let’s “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!”

This Author

Ellie Harrison is an artist & activist based in Glasgow, Scotland. Harrison’s work takes a variety of forms: from installations and performance / events, to lectures, live broadcasts & political campaigns. She is a senior lecturer in contemporary art practice at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Published: 8th December 2024.