Cara Buckley, “reporting from a bus in Iowa City,” for The New York Times:
Iowa City eliminated bus fares in August 2023 with a goal of lowering emissions from cars and encouraging people to take public transit. The two-year pilot program proved so popular that the City Council voted this summer to extend it another year, paying for it with a 1 percent increase in utility taxes and by doubling most public parking rates to $2 from $1.
Ridership has surpassed prepandemic levels by 18 percent. Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles on city streets, according to government calculations, and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads.
Iowa City’s fare free buses have been a big success. Popular and an easy win. The program started as a two-year pilot and was recently granted another year. Are we ever going to just say “yeah this is a thing we do”? This graf suggests not this big win isn’t something the City of Iowa City considers a core service:
Darian Nagle-Gamm, the city’s transportation director, said that the unknowns in federal and state funding, along with proposed property-tax changes, meant that the city would most likely have to review the program every year. But there was eagerness for fare-free buses to stay, she said. “The transit system is one of the greatest tools communities have to combat climate change and reduce emissions,” she said. “You can make a pretty immediate impact.”
Of course there are questions about the budget ever year, but it sure is maddening that things like free buses, which are a success and directly align with the City of Iowa City’s strategic plan, get put in the category of something to revisit every year while, um, other things we spend millions of dollars on every year go forward without question (at least until recently).
The year-by-year assessment is a little bit disconcerting since the long-wished-for Sunday service was approved by the City Council and then implementation was delayed and then everyone seemed to forget.