Free Fares for Young People: Good Intentions, Poor Outcomes
Key Takeaways
- Free and discounted fares for young people are one of the most popular transport policies in the world, and one of the least scrutinised.
- The evidence shows free or cheap fares for young people produce, at best, a modest reduction in car use.
- Where mode shift does happen, it often comes at the expense of walking and cycling rather than driving.
- Cheap fares for young people add to costly peak demand without generating meaningful new revenue or significantly reducing car trips.
- There's little robust evidence that youth discounts build lasting public transport habits that carry into adulthood.
- Blanket fare discounts disproportionately benefit middle and upper-income households, diluting the policy's equity value.
- A more targeted approach, such as a means-tested mobility wallet, would likely deliver stronger outcomes at a lower cost than a blanket discount.
- The rise of privately owned autonomous vehicles threatens to make fare discounts irrelevant by removing both the cost and convenience barriers that currently push young people toward public transport.
- Without a price on AV trips, such as a road user charge, cheap public transport fares alone won't be enough to compete with the convenience of a private AV.
- The most effective reform is to replace blanket youth fare discounts with a means-tested mobility wallet, reinvesting the savings into better walking, cycling and public transport infrastructure.
What Next?
How good is your evidence for the impact of young people’s fare discounts?
Introduction
Free or discounted public transport fares for young people are older than you might think. Versions of the policy have existed since before the turn of the 20th century, and today they're one of the most popular and least scrutinised ideas in transport policy.
The case for them seems obvious. Get young people into the habit of using public transport early, the thinking goes, and they'll keep using it as adults, driving less and easing pressure on the road network. There's also a welfare case: cheaper travel should make life easier for young people and the families supporting them.
It's a reasonable-sounding theory. The question is whether the evidence backs it up.
Regular readers will know I'm a consistent critic of generic free and very cheap fares. They don't get people out of cars, they starve public transport of the funding it needs to improve, and there are better ways to deliver equity benefits than a blanket discount. But young people are often treated as a special case, exempt from these criticisms. Is that exemption justified, or does the same logic apply?
This blog examines whether free or discounted fares for children and young people actually deliver on their promise. It also looks further ahead, to what happens to this policy once privately owned self-driving vehicles become a normal part of family life. As you'll see, the case for reform may be about to get a lot stronger.
Examining Discounted Fares For Young People
To get a rounded view of this policy, it helps to examine it through five different lenses.
Lens 1 - Mode Shift
Despite public perception, one of the core problems with free or discounted fares almost everywhere they've been tried is that they don't produce a significant shift from driving to public transport. In fact, where mode shift does occur, it tends to come from people walking or cycling less. That's the opposite of what good transport policy should achieve.
Does the same hold true for young people?
Given how widespread youth discounts are, it's surprising there isn't a stronger body of research on their effectiveness, likely reflecting how hard this data is to collect. What research does exist suggests cheap or free fares deliver, at best, a modest reduction in car use, and that other measures are needed to shift young people away from cars. A 2022 synthesis of the research puts it plainly:
“A critical finding is that free transit on its own is not sufficient to be helpful to youth, and must be integrated into broader comprehensive policies and strategies. Saphores et al. (2020) specify this includes ensuring the transit needs of intended recipients are understood; coupling free transit policies with other initiatives to reduce private vehicle use; and providing transit that is useful, safe and clean.”
What about the shift away from walking and cycling? The evidence here is consistent with the general population: young people also walk and cycle less as a result of free or discounted public transport. Given that walking and cycling sit above public transport in most transport hierarchies, this is a step in the wrong direction, even if the shift is modest in scale.
Lens 2 - Peak Demand for Public Transport
Public transport costs are driven largely by the need to meet peak demand, typically in the morning. That's when the extra fleet and infrastructure required to handle demand becomes most expensive to deliver.
Cheap fares for young people add directly to this morning peak demand, pushing up costs without generating much additional revenue to offset them. The resulting crowding also degrades the experience for other passengers, and there's evidence this leads some existing users to give up on public transport altogether.
If young people were replacing car trips at scale, this added cost might be worth it. But because that shift largely isn't happening, the system absorbs the cost with little to show for it.
Lens 3 - The Creation of a Public Transport Culture
A common argument for youth discounts is that they build long-term riders, embedding a public transport habit that carries into adulthood. The behavioural evidence for this is thin.
These discounts aren't new. If they reliably created lasting cultural change, we'd expect to see it by now, in the form of sustained reductions in car use and higher public transport uptake over time. That shift generally isn't happening at scale, and where it is, it's typically being driven by other policies, such as reduced free parking or congestion charging, rather than youth fare discounts.
Lens 4 - Equity
The equity case for youth discounts usually runs like this: young people are on lower average incomes, so a fare discount disproportionately benefits them and improves their access to jobs and training. What does the evidence say?
Research from Madrid found: “Results show first that households of medium and high-medium income levels are the main beneficiaries of this measure, which has increased their individual welfare because their PT expenditure has decreased by 42% and 49% respectively. Second, PT has become more accessible to the poorest households. Finally, there is no effect on the richest households and on the low-medium income level ones.”
In other words, while there are genuine equity benefits for the poorest households, blanket discounts disproportionately benefit middle and upper-middle income groups. A more targeted policy would likely deliver stronger equity outcomes at a fraction of the cost.
Lens 5 - Is It the Best Use of Limited Transport Funds?
No policy needs to be good in isolation; it needs to be better than the alternatives. On that test, free youth fares struggle.
A more targeted approach, such as mobility wallets for low-income young people, paired with reinvesting the savings into better active and public transport infrastructure, would likely deliver far greater benefits, both in the short term and over time.
Taken together, these five lenses show that the same problems undermining free and cheap fares for the general public apply just as strongly to young people. Despite their popularity, discounted and free fares for young people deliver poor outcomes relative to their cost.
Given how popular these schemes remain with the public, I don't expect them to change any time soon. But their long-term future looks considerably less certain.
The Bleak Future for Young People's Cheap or Free Fares
One development that's given hope to those wanting less car dependence is that young people are getting their driver's licences later than previous generations. Unfortunately, that trend is likely to become irrelevant.
In the not too distant future, households will have access to privately owned autonomous vehicles (AVs). At that point, whether a young person holds a licence, and how much public transport costs, could stop mattering altogether. They'll simply choose the AV instead. Here's why.
Today, young people use public transport for two main reasons. Discounted fares make it cheap, but the bigger factor, and one that gets far less attention, is that it's inconvenient for parents to keep chauffeuring their kids around once they're old enough to get around independently.
Autonomous vehicles remove both of these barriers. First, running a parent's AV, especially one charged by solar power, will in many cases cost next to nothing per trip. We're already seeing this effect play out in places like Norway, where the low running costs of EVs are inducing extra driving.
Second, and more significantly, an AV lets a young person access a private vehicle without relying on a parent to drive it. The AV can take them to work, to see friends, or to a social event, at no direct cost and with far more convenience than public transport can offer. Once a family owns an AV, a discounted public transport fare may barely register as a factor in a young person's choice.
This shift will bring real benefits: greater mobility and independence for young people, and freed-up time for their time-poor parents. But it comes with a significant cost.
This scenario, and many others like it, is one of the reasons AVs are expected to increase vehicle miles travelled substantially. Estimates vary, but figures around 40% are commonly cited. That points to a future with meaningfully higher congestion than today.
Rising congestion might push some young people back toward the train, where one is available. But that assumes they mind sitting in traffic, and in an AV, where passengers can be entertained on their devices from the back seat, tolerance for congestion is likely to be much higher than it is behind the wheel. That may blunt the effect considerably.
Whatever happens, one thing seems clear: free public transport fares alone won't be enough to pull young people out of their AVs.
What We Should Do Instead
If AVs are subject to a road user charge, as I've long advocated, this whole scenario changes. Suddenly there's a real cost to taking an AV trip, which restores the incentive to consider walking, cycling or public transport instead.
So in a world with road user charging for AVs, do discounted fares for young people still make sense? Given the problems already outlined above, I'd argue no, and that the policy needs reform in two ways.
First, replace the fare discount with a mobility wallet. Rather than a subsidy tied to one mode, young people would receive funds they could put toward whatever combination of transport best meets their needs, whether that's public transport, bike share, or even gear from a local bike shop. This gives young people the flexibility to solve their own mobility problems, particularly in areas where public transport is limited, and other options serve them better.
Second, target the wallet at young people from low-income households. Means-testing keeps the cost of the scheme down substantially, freeing up the savings to be reinvested in the infrastructure that benefits everyone: better walking, cycling and public transport networks.
Together, these two changes would deliver a transport system that serves young people far better than blanket fare discounts do today, while also strengthening the system for everyone else.
Conclusion
Free and heavily discounted fares for young people are one of the most politically popular transport policies around, and one of the hardest to argue against without sounding mean-spirited. But popularity isn't evidence of good policy.
Across all five lenses, the same pattern shows up. Mode shift from cars is modest at best, and some of what shift does happen comes at the expense of walking and cycling, not driving. Peak demand rises without a corresponding fall in car use, adding cost to public transport systems for little benefit. There's no strong evidence that discounts in childhood translate into lasting public transport habits in adulthood at a societal level. And while there are real equity benefits, they're diluted by handing the same discount to higher-income households who would have used public transport anyway.
The conclusion is that free fares for young people suffer from the same structural problems as free fares for everyone else. They just get less scrutiny, because who wants to be the person arguing against cheap travel for kids?
The case for reform is only going to get stronger. As autonomous vehicles enter family driveways, the two forces that currently push young people onto public transport, cost and parental inconvenience, both disappear. A young person with access to a private AV won't need a discount to make the alternative attractive; the AV will already be almost free and far more convenient. Unless we put a price on that convenience through road user charging, free transit fares will be competing with a private car that costs the household almost nothing to run.
None of this means we should abandon supporting young people’s mobility, but it does mean that the form of support needs to change. A means-tested mobility wallet, targeted at low-income households and usable across public transport, active travel and micromobility, would do more for the young people who actually need help, at a fraction of the cost of a blanket discount. The money saved could go straight back into the walking, cycling and public transport infrastructure that provides both young people and the rest of the community a genuine alternative to the back seat of an AV.
Cheap fares for young people feel like good policy. The evidence, and the road ahead, suggest otherwise.