Now the city (population 88,000) seeks to become a beacon of a greener economy, by building infrastructure such as a large-scale wind farm off the coast and transforming its city center to be more pedestrian-friendly. Key to this effort is its free bus system, inaugurated on 1 September, 2018. The network connects Dunkirk to a cluster of neighbouring towns, with five express lines running every ten minutes throughout the day, and a dozen other lines serving less dense areas. [...]
Accessibility has been “one of the keys of Dunkirk’s success” with free transport, says Maxime Huré, a political scientist at the University of Perpignan and president of the think tank VIGS, which specialises in urban development and transport issues. Over the past year, Huré has led an in-depth study of Dunkirk’s free bus experiment, commissioned by the city and carried out by an independent team of social science researchers. The study will officially be released on 11 September, but some of its initial findings have already been published. They show that ridership has spiked over the last year, more than doubling on weekends and increasing by around 60 percent during the week. [...]
Styling itself as a “laboratory” of free transport, Dunkirk has attracted an “incessant” stream of visitors intrigued at whether it could work in their cities, says Delevoye. Among them was Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who took a ride on Dunkirk’s buses last October. A few months later, she announced that Paris would extend free transit passes to children under 11 and young people under the age of 20 with a handicap, taking effect this Sunday, 1 September [see the tweet below]. That’s in addition to senior citizens earning less than €2,000 a month, who already benefited from free ‘Navigo’ passes.
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