Here are a few facts about life in London. One, people over 60 years of age enjoy free travel on public transport. Two, fare dodging is rife: people push through the barriers at train stations, vault over them, or tailgate someone using their card to enter legitimately. Three, by and large fare dodgers get away with it as far as I can tell.
Thus it was only a matter of time before people started saying, given that free travel for oldies costs more than unpaid fares, the free fares scheme should be scrapped.
Newspaper headline about fare dodgers
What an invidious comparison.
I have three main objections to it.
Firstly, what about the externalities, that is the social costs and benefits? People who dodge fares are likely to shoplift and commit other crimes too. I’m a staunch advocate of the broken windows theory: by fixing the apparently small things you help to prevent more serious problems down the line.
Also, many older people do voluntary work. If they have to pay the fare to get to where they’re doing it, they’re like to stop. At least many of them will. Contrary to some people’s opinion, not every older person is “rolling in it”.
In addition, it’s a well-known fact that one of the scourges of our age is dementia in the older population, and that a significant contributory factor is social isolation. Free travel enables older people to attend courses and other social activities. I haven’t looked into this in detail, but I’m pretty sure that the societal costs of dementia are greater than the monetary cost of providing free travel.
Secondly, I’ve seen people quoted as saying that older people are well off, so they don’t need free travel. Well, even where that’s true, isn’t there a moral obligation to give something back to people who have spent forty years or more working and paying thyeir taxes?
Thirdly, it’s a ridiculous argument. I teach, and applying the logic of the “scrappers” I can say without hesitation that the most costly students in terms of my time are the ones who do the work and hand something in each week. In my last course, some students even handed in two pieces of work for some assignments, thereby doubling my workload in terms of marking and feedback. The ones who handed nothing in took up almost no time at all. I just had to fire off an email reminding everyone that they would derive more benefit from the course if they did the homework, and then got on with my life. Perhaps next time I run the course I should get rid of the students who engage and do the work, and just teach the ones who turn up for the lesson but do nothing outside of that hour. It would definitely make my life easier and take up less of my time.
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