Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

The former Director of Strategy at Transport for London is with me.

He is Thomas Abelman and he has worked for companies such as National Express, Kilton Railway,

and he had a fantastic start-up called called SNAP which was all about filling

buses that would otherwise be unused now doing Transport Consultancy himself

but we have had a bit of an argument about free transport I've always been a

fan for the last four years of the great system they have in Luxembourg where they say,

right, we're spending a billion euros a year on transport.

We were taking 40 million in fares. Let's just abolish fares.

And that way we will see more people using it and that will be a huge public benefit in terms of the environment, the quality of life, which I think is great. But you don't necessarily agree, Tom. Well, I don't necessarily say that Luxembourg have got it wrong for Luxembourg. Maybe it's perfect for Luxembourg. I'm planning to go to Luxembourg quite shortly

and I will try it out for myself. But that's not the case. Those economics, those proportions

aren't the case everywhere. In general, in the UK, fares are a higher proportion of the overall

operating costs of most transport businesses. And if you take those out, you've got to find something else to replace them with.

And it's not obvious what that will be. There are a lot of calls on the public purse. So, you know,

you've got schools, hospitals. Are we really saying that we want those to be invested funds

from those taken away but into transport instead. It's highly unlikely

that would happen. Or is it investment in transport? Is it replacing tracks, replacing trains, new

services? I'm not sure we'd say that either. And obviously, I'd love to see free travel in an

ideal world. Maybe the government can start printing vast quantities of money.

But in the absence of that, is it the best investment that we can make? I would question that.

OK, well, as we speak, we're on a very, very busy Hoare Street in Walthamstow. A Superloop one bus has just gone round with them. Hardly any passengers on board. And there's loads and loads of cars as you can hear

shouldn't we just be saying let's get people out of those cars and the best way to do that is to

...