Abstract
Fares are a tough issue for transit agencies and the politicians they answer to. If you see transit ridership as a benefit to the entire community (for either social or environmental reasons), then you want fares to be low, or even eliminated entirely. Right now, though, the financial bottom line of most agencies requires a certain level of fare revenue, and people focused on reducing the scope of government will want that level to be higher.
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Notes
- 1.
It can be very hard to get data on ridership on a stop-by-stop basis, especially on bus systems. Until recently, this could be done only by an expensive manual survey (people with clipboards on each bus, counting passengers at each stop). This data is crucial if you want to redesign a network intelligently, because it shows exactly how many existing riders are affected (for better or for worse) by any proposed routing change. Smartcards should provide a sudden feast of detailed information, which should lead to a flurry of much more effective network redesigns.
- 2.
Such a system would need many refinements to capture the subtleties of cost and market. For example, we know that on most services, the last scheduled trip of the night isn’t full, but that if we delete it, ridership on the preceding trip (now the last) often drops suddenly. People’s decision to use transit appears to be influenced by the availability of trips later than the one they use—presumably because later trips offer some reassurance that you won’t be stranded if late. So, the costs of these later trips would need to be spread over some of the earlier trips, to capture this interdependence.
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© 2012 Jarrett Walker
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Walker, J. (2012). Can Fares Be Fair?. In: Human Transit. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-174-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-174-0_11
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-174-0
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)
