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Producing public transport: the roles of fares in mobility governance, labor, and policing
Public transport (PT) fares policies are usually examined from an economic or social point of view, looking at whether they produce effects on passengers, modal shift, or mobility sustainability. This thesis examines instead the political aspects of fare policies, at the two levels of a) policy-making and b) social production of PT by workers and passengers. To this end, I ask two main questions: (1) How are fare policies conceived, produced, and implemented by policy-makers, planners, and transport operators? (2) How do these fare policies affect the everyday labor of policing public transport? This research addresses these questions throughout four empirical chapters, examining the cases of Luxembourg and Santiago de Cuba, which provide two highly contrasting examples of fare policies. In Luxembourg, fares were abolished in 2020, as part of an entrepreneurial project fueled by environmental and social rationales. In the city of Santiago de Cuba, strategies to mitigate the long-lasting mobility scarcity resulted in an increase and diversification of fares.
The first empirical chapter looks into the ideological struggle of Luxembourg’s fare-free public transport project, before it was implemented as an entrepreneurial strategy without questioning the domination of car use. In the second chapters, I analyze how authorities and inhabitants of Santiago de Cuba are countering the daily struggle of mobility scarcity by developing various strategies of commoning and privatizing transport, aimed at collectively maximizing the use of motorized vehicles. The next two chapters compare the impacts of fare abolition and diversification on the micropolitics of PT. The third chapter examines the double role of fares in PT policing and surveillance through flows management, maximizing passenger mobilities, or disciplining them. Paradoxically, fare abolition is linked to the re-bordering of PT spaces and fare complexification is linked to the horizontal management of such spaces. The fourth chapter studies how fares affect the working conditions of PT staff, whose daily tasks and pricing practices are monitored by supervisors, colleagues, and passengers, and highlighting in addition how workers engage in struggles with the State over these fare policies. Overall, this work sheds light on the various political dimensions of fare policies, allowing to go beyond assessments that would be solely economic, technical, or behavioral, and show the impacts of fare policies beyond passengers.
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Veronique Van Acker (LISER, Luxembourg, and Ghent University)
Prof. Dr. Kobe Boussauw (VUB)
Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski (VUB)
Members of the jury
Prof. Dr. René Kreichauf (VUB, chair)
Prof. Dr. Markus Hesse (University of Luxembourg, secretary)
Prof. Dr. Lucas Melgaço (VUB, Department of Criminology)
Prof. Dr. Vania Ceccato (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Dr. Sonja Ruud (KU Leuven)
Curriculum Vitae
Merlin Gillard is a researcher in geography and holds a master in urban studies from VUB and ULB. Since 2021, he has been working within the project “From low fares to no fares: an analysis of economic, operational, socio-spatial and political dynamics of fare-free public transport” as a PhD candidate at Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research and at VUB. His research relates to the political economy of mobility policies, the labor conditions of transport workers, and the policing of public space.