Public transport system in France is already pretty cheap. A customer only pay around 30% of the real price, all the rest is subsided by personal or company taxes.<p>What are they trying to accomplish with this? They want more people to abandon their car and move to the public transport system? If you already made the trade off between 200euros / months for your car (don't forget to include initial price, gas, maintenance, etc) and a 40euros/months for the train, making the train free will not make a difference (or a negligible one).<p>People prefer their car not because of economical reasons, but because it's damn more practical, especially if you don't live in the hyper-center of a european city.<p>If you want people to abandon their car you will have to increase your QoS. Densify your network in the time and spatial dimension. I would be willing to pay 10x more to have a subway station 10 minutes walk from my home. But have a free bus every 20 minutes that take me to a train station on strike 50% of the time? Cool...<p>Actually, what they are going to catch with this are all the people who were walking or taking their bike suddenly overcrowding the buses and make their service degrade due to overcrowding.<p>The problem with all this is priority. What do we want to prioritize? Public transport? No. We should prioritize the only mode of transportation that is truly green: Walking. Rethink how cities are organized so that anybody can find a decent home at a decent price from a 20 minutes walk of their office. Give incentives to employers to allow telework, subsidies home close to work, etc. Don't force everyone to live inside a city that is as big as it used to be 300 years ago and surrounded by a super highway.<p>For the public transport system, make people pay depending on their income. It should be free for poor people or students. As an engineer, I should pay through my nose if the service is really great. If it's not, I'll keep using my car whatever the price, thank you.