单项选择题

When Jean-Francois Mayet became mayor of Chateauroux in 2001, the town’s transit system was descending into irrelevance. Each of Chateauroux’s 49,000 inhabitants took the bus, on average, 21 times per year, well below the 38 per annum average for small French cities.
Mayet, a member of France’s socialist party, did what few mayors confronted with a struggling mass transit system would do: He made the whole thing free. Ever since, the otherwise ordinary French town has become a canary in the coal mine of transportation policy, closely watched by the dozens of other municipalities in various stages of free transit experiments. According to a report released this year, per person ridership in Chateauroux has jumped from 21 trips a year to 61. Total ridership is up 208 percent in 11 years.
The dozen or so bus lines of Chateauroux, which is about halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, became free in 2001, after Mayet was elected. It wasn’t the first French city to offer free transit, but it was the biggest and the only larger city to demonetize its entire network. But Chateauroux didn’t just test the viability of eliminating fares as a social experiment; it used free rides to save its mass transit system. In 2002, ridership had already increased 81 percent.
There were growing pains: the number of slashed or tagged seats grew from a dozen in 2001 to 118 in 2002. Drivers complained that passengers treated the bus like a personal car, expecting to be dropped off at their doorsteps. But overall, the project has been considered a success. In 2008, the conservative newspaper Le Figaro reported that Mayer was the most popular mayor in France among towns with between 30 and 50,000 inhabitants. He’s still in the job, as well as being a regional representative to the French Senate.
The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership can relieve traffic, improve the environment, boost the system’s efficiency, give residents more spending money, help the poor, and rejuvenate central business districts. Unfortunately, the Chateauroux report contains little large-scale analysis of the effects of the system.
But as it turns out, the change nearly paid for itself. Forty-seven percent of bus-goers were already riding for free, and tickets covered only 14 percent of the city’s transit expenses. By slightly increasing the transit tax on big local businesses while eliminating the costs of printing, ticket-punching technology and the human infrastructure of ticket sales, the city turned a profit on the transit system in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2007. Since 2008, returns have not been as positive, though the report attributes that to a shift in control from the city to the region.
Not everyone is jumping on board. Bruno Cordier, author of a 2007 report Totally Free Mass Transit cautions that fare-cutting won’t work at all for many cities. Plus, he says, the system won’t work at all in big cities, where 30-40 percent of transit revenue comes from ticket sales, as opposed to a mere 14 percent in Chateauroux.
According to the passage, making a transit system free means