Motivations for public transport subsidies are mainly social and economic welfare concerns. It is important therefore to study the social effects of public transport subsidies and to identify welfare effects for different groups of the society. Gannon and Liu (1997) have argued that with few exceptions the distributional effects of transport projects and the potential for transport projects to play a direct proactive role in assisting the poor has received little attention. A comparison over time shows that bus use has increasingly become the transport mode for the lower-income groups. There has been a considerable shift from an almost evenly distributed propensity to travel by bus across income groups in 1972, to a situation in the late 1990s where the lower-income households are hugely over-represented as bus users. The bus has emerged as the low status mode of public transport. The distribution of train use has, on the other hand, shifted in the direction of becoming more and more the public transport mode for the highest income group. The following is structured thus: Section 2 looks at who benefits from public transport subsidies. Section 3 sums up previous evidence of distributional effects of transport subsidies. In Section 4 a methodology for the analyses is developed and justified. In Section 5 the use of public transport by several socioeconomic groups is explored through the concept of travel propensities. Finally, Section 6 sums up the results and draws conclusions and implications of the findings.
Abstract