Report a Comment

@andrew schmadel: By law, Senior fares have to be no more than half of the regular fare, so -0.25 isn't legal.

You need to list the paper farecard prices on the list, because the people using the list are more likely to be using it to purchase a paper farecard for their trip.

Anything that requires the installation of an electronic sign of any sort is going to cost about $500,000, because it has to be installed in at least 100 locations, and there are development costs to boot. I would guess $100,000 for development costs, and $4,000 per installation is not an unreasonable estimate. And then, you have the issue with there being only one or two of them per station, and they get overloaded by too many people trying to figure out the fare, like with the rally a couple weekends ago.

@Alex B. If there is a different fare for every station pair, you're still going to have to have a 86-row table to lookup the fare.

Matt Johnson and I are looking into a zone fare system. Right now the design has five zones and costs between $2.00 and $5.75 for peak fares. Some people have fare increases of over 100% under the new zone system. (for example, West Falls Church to Ballston crosses two zone boundaries).

@Kathy: Zone fares are nice and simple but typically don't collect as much revenue unless they're very punitive for some trips.

@Matt R: An offpeak fare that high is approximately double the current off-peak fare for short trips.

@Redline: That's a pretty big fare increase for short-distance folks, I'm pretty sure DC would veto that plan.

by Michael Perkins on Nov 17, 2010 1:52 pm • link • report