Someone made a point recently that the UK government's plan to counter inflation by reducing the tax on petrol (by 10p/litre) amounted to roughly the same cost to the taxpayer as making all public transport in the country free. So it's something that's not outside the realms of possibility, it's just very unlikely that either of the major parties would actually do it.
In the UK if you make public transport free the main beneficiaries are going to be Londoners and people in the South East. So this is a political issue because people will then complain that everything is always for the benefit of the "London bubble". On the other hand, cutting petrol price makes most of the country happy.
Well that is certainly possible (and speaks volumes to how areas like the North of England repeatedly get the short shrift) but I think the main take-away for me is that the 10p fuel duty reduction was seen as no big deal ... but a "free public transport" policy that would move the country closer to their emissions goals and make people's lives better while reducing financial burdens would've been considered a ridiculous, impossible extravagance.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the national rail networks in DE and UK is already operating at near-capacity so adding more passengers wouldn't exactly help, but making it cheaper to use local bus, tram and train networks would be brilliant.
I am not sure free public transport will make such a big difference. It would probably make some people commute by train instead of driving where that's possible because of cost. On the other hand there is also a push to switch to EV cars nationally so what would impact emissions the most is not clear to me.
This not just the North by the way. Most of the country drives with the only public transport being very impractical buses. Really this is the same in many European countries as well.
