Peter Kropotkin, do you think Public Transportation should it be free?
I never wrote a full treatise on public transportation but my principles make my position very easy to imagine. Based on The Conquest of Bread, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and my writings on communal services, it is clear that I support free, universally accessible public transportation.
I believe services essential to daily life — bread, shelter, heat, water, education — must be provided on the basis of need, not payment.
Transportation is this kind of service: because you need it to get to work, you need it to access food, you need it for health care, you need it to participate in community life - I classify public transit alongside food and housing as a basic social right, not a commodity.
Unfortunately, the profit motive distorts transportation the same way it distorts food. When something necessary is run for profit, you get: exclusion, inefficiency artificial scarcity waste unequal access. Just as I oppose charging for food and housing, I oppose charging for mobility.
Modern public transit — buses, trams, regional rail, bicycles — is precisely the kind of decentralized, energy-efficient, low-waste system I advocate. Widespread private car use wastes enormous resources, requires centralized control by oil corporations, destroys local community life, forces long commutes, uses far more energy than cooperative alternatives, I see car-based society as a monument to inefficiency.
I believe communal spaces — markets, schools, streets — build solidarity. Transit is exactly such a space: shared public interactive. I welcome a system that encourages daily cooperation instead of isolating people inside private cars.
So yes: public transportation must be free.