Fare-free public transport (FFPT) is the policy of letting people ride without paying a fare at the point of use. It is usually discussed as a curiosity or as a slogan. I have spent a decade treating it as an object of research: mapping where it happens, asking who decides to introduce it and why, and measuring what changes once the fare disappears.

The theme has followed my entire academic path. It began with my bachelor’s thesis and master’s thesis at Charles University in Prague, and continued into my doctoral dissertation at Jagiellonian University, written as a collection of published articles. The grant-funded phase closed in 2023 and I defended the dissertation in 2024. The research interest did not end there: my most recent paper on the topic appeared in 2025.

Research questions

Five lines of inquiry run through the work as a whole.

  1. Where is fare-free public transport located, when did it appear, and how do these systems actually operate?
  2. Which socio-economic, fiscal, demographic and political factors determine whether a local authority abolishes fares?
  3. What environmental, social, economic and political rationales do mayors, councils and activist movements use when they argue for zero fares?
  4. How does removing the fare change travel behaviour, mode choice and how passengers judge the service?
  5. To what extent does the international literature account for gender, income, sexual orientation and other dimensions of inequality when it evaluates who benefits?

Cases and methods

The empirical base combines local case studies, national surveys and a global review.

Frýdek-Místek, Czechia. A network of 19 municipalities that went fare-free in March 2011, studied through operator performance data for 2010–2017, eleven interviews with municipal planners, and a survey of 272 residents.

Wrocław, Poland. A study not of a city government but of a social movement: how the Wrocław Anarchist Federation built and framed a campaign for zero fares after the city council declared a climate emergency, traced through six years of the movement’s own online output.

Twelve peripheral Polish communes. A survey of 1,376 residents in rural municipalities with low transport accessibility, ten of them fare-charging and two fare-free, designed to test how much the price of a ticket actually matters where service is thin.

Poland as a whole. Successive national inventories of fare-free networks, from 66 municipalities identified in 2019 to more than 130 by 2023, built from municipal surveys, council resolutions and press records, and analysed against demographic, financial and electoral data.

International scholarship. A review of 146 studies published between 1970 and 2024, screened from 580 records across Scopus, Web of Science and TRID.

Methods across these studies include municipal and household surveys, semi-structured interviews, GIS and spatial typologies, logistic regression, qualitative document and discourse analysis, and systematic literature review.

The work was carried out with Václav Jaroš (Charles University in Prague), Łukasz Fiedeń (Jagiellonian University), Wojciech Kębłowski (Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Université Libre de Bruxelles), Monika Maciejewska (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Kamil Mróz (Institute of Urban and Regional Development) and Daniel Baldwin Hess (University at Buffalo, SUNY).

What the research found

Fare abolition is a policy of medium-sized towns. Among 93 Polish fare-free municipalities, adoption was most common in cities of 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, among them Bełchatów, Lubin, Nowy Sącz, Pruszków and Żory. It was absent from every large regional capital and rare in municipalities under 10,000. Zero fares are not a quirk of tiny networks; they are a solution for networks large enough that ticketing is an administrative burden, but small enough that the lost revenue is bearable.

It is a spending decision, not a wealth decision. Fare-free policy is not more likely in richer municipalities. It correlates with higher municipal expenditure per capita and, holding other factors constant, with lower revenue per capita, and it is more frequent in left-leaning localities. What predicts fare abolition is the willingness to spend on a public service, not the capacity to absorb the loss painlessly.

Where service is thin, price is the least of the problem. In twelve peripheral Polish communes, residents ranked frequency, accessibility and safety as the factors governing whether they use public transport at all; ticket price and comfort came last. Nearly a third named the outright absence of service as the main obstacle. Price mattered mostly to older women in economically vulnerable positions. Removing the fare cannot shift travel behaviour where there is no service to shift to.

Ridership doubles, but not at the expense of the car. In Frýdek-Místek, annual patronage rose from 3.8 million journeys in 2010 to 6.9 million in 2017. Most of that growth came from existing passengers making additional short trips, and from journeys that would otherwise have been walked or cycled. Around 40% of residents reported no change in their habits, and traffic in the city centre remained as it was. Without measures that make driving less attractive, fare abolition does not empty the roads.

The literature does not ask who benefits. Of 146 international studies on fare-free transport, only a quarter explicitly considered any non-dominant group. Gender-disaggregated data are frequently collected and then not reported. The evidence base is concentrated in Europe and North America and largely silent on the Global South. A policy justified in terms of equity is being evaluated without asking whose mobility actually improves.

Funding

National Science Centre, Poland

The core of this research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, under the Preludium-19 scheme (grant no. 2020/37/N/HS4/01285), for the project Is it all about sustainability? Unpacking the framework of fare-free public transport policy (2021–2023), with me as principal investigator.

Earlier work on Frýdek-Místek was supported by the Doctoral School of Social Sciences and the Priority Research Area Society of the Future under the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme at Jagiellonian University.

Publications

Articles

Štraub, D., & Hess, D. B. (2025). Re-examining fare-free public transport for greater inclusivity. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 33, Article 101558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2025.101558

Fiedeń, Ł., & Štraub, D. (2023). The importance of ticket price in public transport in non-metropolitan rural areas in Poland. Bulletin of Geography. Socio-Economic Series, 59, 57–68. https://doi.org/10.12775/bgss-2023-0004

Štraub, D. (2023). On the road to a fare-free public transport policy: A case study of the Wrocław Anarchist Federation. Transport Geography Papers of Polish Geographical Society, 26(1), 40–51. https://doi.org/10.4467/2543859XPKG.23.003.17400

Štraub, D., Kębłowski, W., & Maciejewska, M. (2023). From Bełchatów to Żory: Charting Poland’s geography of fare-free public transport programmes. Journal of Transport Geography, 111, Article 103650. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2023.103650

Štraub, D. (2020). The effects of fare-free public transport: A lesson from Frýdek-Místek (Czechia). Sustainability, 12(21), Article 9111. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219111

Štraub, D. (2019). Riding without a ticket: Geography of free fare public transport policy in Poland. Urban Development Issues, 64(1), 17–27. https://doi.org/10.2478/udi-2019-0020

Štraub, D., & Jaroš, V. (2019). Free fare policy as a tool for sustainable development of public transport services. Human Geographies – Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography, 13(1), 45–59. https://doi.org/10.5719/hgeo.2019.131.3

Chapter

Štraub, D., & Mróz, K. (2023). Transport bezpłatny i na żądanie jako alternatywne systemy kształtowania oferty przewozów pasażerskich. In P. Pistelok (Ed.), Transport i mobilność miejska. Obserwatorium Polityki Miejskiej, Instytut Rozwoju Miast i Regionów. https://doi.org/10.51733/opm.2023.12

Book review

Štraub, D. (2021). [Review of the book Free public transit: And why we don’t pay to ride elevators, by J. Dellheim & J. Prince, Eds., Black Rose Books, 2018, 250 pp.]. Transport Geography Papers of Polish Geographical Society, 24(1), 101–102. Read online

Writing for wider audiences

I also write about fare-free transport in a less formal register on my blog, where the posts are gathered under the fare-free public transport category.

The complete list of my publications, including work on other themes, is on the research page.