RTD’s free fare program failed to make a meaningful climate impact, new research finds
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DENVER — In July of 2022, in the middle of an “ozone alert day,” Colorado lawmakers and officials from the Regional Transportation District (RTD) introduced a plan to make public transportation free during the smoggiest summer months.
The initiative, dubbed “Zero Fare for Better Air,” had a primary goal of reducing emissions by incentivizing people to switch from driving cars to riding the rails or buses.
“The number one emitter of carbon is the transit sector, and we can’t afford to miss our climate goals,” State Sen. Faith Winter (D-Westminster) said at the time. She was the primary sponsor for the bill that funded the initiative.
However, “Zero Fare for Better Air” did little to help Colorado meet its climate goals, according to new research.
Grant Webster, a Ph.D. student studying environmental economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, recently published his findings on the initiative’s climate impact in a scientific journal focused on transportation policy.
“All of my results, I get pretty insignificant results. If anything, I even get the opposite — that air pollution actually increased during this time,” Webster said.
However, If RTD’s goal was to increase ridership during the summer months, then “Zero Fair for Better Air” (ZFBA) was a success: Webster found that ridership numbers increased between 15-20% when fares were eliminated.
“The 2023 Zero Fare for Better Air initiative was successful for many reasons. During the two-month program, the agency experienced an increase in the overall number of boardings across its bus, rail, and paratransit services,” Tara Broghammer, a spokesperson for RTD, said in an email.
“The Zero Fare for Better Air initiative was designed to attract new customers, welcome back previous patrons, and foster relationships with current RTD customers,” Broghammer said.
But the initiative was frequently marketed as a climate policy.
The “Zero Fare for Better Air” name, not to mention that the legislation from which the program came from was called “Programs To Reduce Ozone Through Increased Transit,” emphasized air quality.
In fact, Broghammer’s statement is a deviation from the official web page for the zero fare initiative, which says “It was designed to reduce ground-level ozone by increasing the use of public transit.”
Following the 2023 ZFBA initiative, RTD partnered with Regional Air Quality Council (RAQC) to study the initiative’s environmental impact. According to a press release, “the RAQC estimates that RTD’s zero-fare initiative led to a total reduction of 9,014,370 vehicle miles traveled, 2,583 pounds of volatile organic compounds, 2,385 pounds of nitrogen oxides and 6,161,772 pounds of greenhouse gases [sic].”
In May of this year, Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill called “Methods to Increase the Use of Transit” into law. Also co-sponsored by Winters, the bill gave transit opportunities the funds to either remove fares during ozone season (i.e., summer) or provide year-round free trips to minors. RTD went with the latter, which is why riders 19 years old and younger can now use RTD’s bus and rail services for free.
According to Webster’s research, ridership needs to increase dramatically to make a noticeable impact on ozone levels.
“Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that public transit ridership would need to increase by 74% to 192% in order to decrease ozone levels in Colorado by 1%,” Webster wrote in his paper.
Another reason why the bump in ridership during “free fare” months didn’t lead to a reduction in ozone, Webster said, is because the data do not indicate that riders were switching from cars to buses or trains. They may have been taking more trips on the bus or light rail, but those trips didn’t necessarily replace car travel — they were an addition.
“What I see in my traffic numbers is that we don’t see a real dip in the traffic volumes,” Webster said. “So it doesn't seem like this kind of major shift is coming from people reducing their driving.”
Richard Bamber, one of the co-founders of the transit advocacy group Greater Denver Transit, supported that analysis.
“We have anecdotal evidence that a lot of people using the bus [during free fare months] were actually people who used to walk,” he said. “I think nobody would argue that [Zero Fare for Better Air] was a bad thing — everyone deserves accessible mobility. But I think the buses became full of people who were not really damaging the environment that much in the first place.”
As David Zipper reported for Bloomberg in 2022, transit agencies across the globe — from Estonia to France to Chile — have found that providing free fares often does not reduce car travel, which is one of the main sources of ground-level ozone.
Bamber argued that more meaningful change where transit is concerned would come from an investment in reliability and frequency, not a reduction — or elimination — of ticket prices.
“If you want to get people to use transit, you have to provide quality transit — fast, frequent, reliant, accessible transit. There is no substitute,” he said.
RTD’s most recent customer survey shows the number one issue for both bus and rail users is frequency of service. For both groups, the second-most important issue is fare price. Travel time, hours of operation and location of bus/rail stops were also important factors, the survey found.
CPR News reported August 20 that RTD has plans to add a “noticeable” amount of service in 2025.
CPR News reported August 20 that RTD has plans to add a “noticeable” amount of service in 2025.
Transit advocates have long been emphasizing the importance of reliability as opposed to affordability. When ZFBA was first introduced, Denver Streets Partnership’s policy director, Molly McKinley, told Rocky Mountain PBS “a lot of it comes down to the frequency of service and that’s really where we need more operating funds for the long haul.”
Bamber said that for more people to switch to public transit — in 2021, only about 2% of Coloradans used public transit on a daily basis, according Webster’s research — taking a bus or riding the light rail needs to be as convenient as calling an Uber.
“If you’re going to run what is almost, to most people, a marketing promotion — free fares for the month — you’ve got to provide a transit system that is worth marketing,” he said. “And that was always our worry about it, is people will try it out and actually have a bad experience on it, and then we’ve got a real problem.”