Posts about Fares

The graph above shows the peak fares for Metrorail trips of different distances since the system's opening in 1976, including the "peak-of-the-peak" surcharge added in 2010. It also shows gas prices, and lists both fares and gas prices adjusted for inflation.

In 2010, Metrorail trips of 14 miles and above all cost the same maximum fare. Under the new proposal, Metro riders will have to pay more for miles 15 and 16, as they did before 2008. The net result is that trips longer than 14 miles will see a fairly substantial fare increase, while fares for all other distances will decline.

Although raising the maximum distance cap from 14 to 16 miles will probably prove unpopular among longer distance Metrorail commuters, opening the Silver Line to Dulles may require Metro to reevaluate the maximum distance cap again in the future.

Fares appear to follow a clear trend of increasing in times of economic hardship and decreasing when the economy is stronger. Today's historically high fares should come as little surprise given the severity of the current economic slump. Metrorail riders feeling the pain of these prices may have to wait for a stronger economic recovery to take hold before they can expect any lasting relief.

Sources for this article included WMATA: History of Fare Increases, Metrorail 1976-2010 (PDF); WMATA: Proposed FY2013 Fare Adjustments, Proposed FY2013 Capital Improvement
Program, and Federal FY2012 Grant Applications (PDF); U.S. Energy Information Administration: Motor Gasoline Retail Prices, U.S. City Average, 1976-1990 (PDF); and U.S. Energy Information Administration: Weekly U.S. Regular All Formulations Retail Gasoline Prices, 1990-2012.

Almost alone among transit agencies in the United States, you have no dedicated revenue sources, and you are subordinate to, and dependent upon, multiple jurisdictions across state lines. In recent years, the situation has been complicated further by the increased role in governance by the federal government and by the state of Virginia, neither of which contribute to the formula by which the daily operations of the system are funded.

The system is aging, its maintenance needs are growing—and still, the region looks for you to expand service. So, I appreciate the difficult choice the Board will have to make, and recognize that a fare increase may be unavoidable this year.

No one wants to raise fares. I used to say that raising fares is the next-to-the-last thing the transit agency should do. What's worse is cutting service or maintenance. That you must not do.

As one who has sat where you sit, and who will have to vote on your final budget as part of his jurisdiction's part in the approval process, here are my recommendations:

1. Don't put it all on the riders; don't let governments off the hook. Ask compact jurisdictions to accept some of the responsibility to meet the need. Press for greater support from the state: Now that they have imposed themselves on the governance of WMATA, displacing local representation, they should be expected to help Metro close its budget gap.

The same can be said for the feds. They vote on the budget. They depend heavily on the system on a daily basis for the delivery of their work force, no less than they depend on the delivery of electricity and water to their buildings. The system is substantially designed around the needs of the operations of the federal government. They should be contributing to the operating costs of the agency as a routine matter. The WMATA Board should press for inclusion of the federal government in the funding formula.

2. In structuring a fare increase, I urge you to consider the following:

1. Don't make it too big; consider possible effect on choice riders (especially in view of adverse federal benefit changes). It obviously won't help anything if we push riders back into their cars.

2. Consider effects on those least able to pay. As you well appreciate, there are many people in this county, and throughout the region, for whom transit is not a choice, but a necessity. For them, a fare increase is simply a reduction in the limited disposable income with which to pay their costs of housing, food, clothing, and medical care.

3. Don't punish the folks who take the shortest trips. Those who accept higher housing costs to live near their work, and to live a transit-oriented lifestyle, are providing a benefit to everyone in the region. Increasingly, they find it difficult to get on to trains that enter their stations already full, and they seldom get to sit down. Theirs is the least-subsidized ride. They should not bear a disproportionate share of the cost.

And finally,

4. Do something for the riders. They bear a larger portion of operating cost here than in perhaps any metropolitan area in the country. They're still going to be asked to put up with delays and service interruptions, even though they'll pay more. Press Metro management to find ways—even small things—to make life a little better for your regular customers.

   One good possibility that has been suggested is improving passes.
   

   1. We need a good monthly pass; not just a 28-day that is simply four times the 7-day pass.
      
   2. It's got to be useful for people who ride in the core of the system—that is, short-trip riders.
      
   3. It's got to be on SmarTrip.
      
   4. It should be a "flexible pass", one that lets riders choose their typical level of fare (which depends on their typical trip length) and select a pass that's works at that level. (Seattle, London and Minneapolis have done this; it is ideal for a system like Metro in which fares are distance-based.)

I thank you for considering these suggestions, and for your service to Metro and the region.

Crime against SYEP youth: The pay days for students participating in the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) are well-known around the community, which has led to youth being targeted for robbery outside of Metro stations like Deanwood and Minnesota Avenue.

In response to this problem, the students said they would like to see an increased police presence. They also noted that police have a tendency to clump together and talk to each other rather than fully patrol the stations, so the students suggested that police spread out to cover a larger area.

Subsidized fares: SYEP paychecks will be cut by $2 per hour this summer. Therefore, the students recommended having WMATA or the District subsidize transit fares for SYEP participants. At the very least, the presenters asked for subsidized fares during the first two weeks of the program while participants wait for their first paycheck.

Councilmembers Tommy Wells (ward 6) and Muriel Bowser (ward 4, the Council's representative on the WMATA Board) asked DDOT and WMATA about the cost of a subsidy and what its fiscal impact would be, noting that youth who go to summer school already get a similar transit subsidy.

Youth advisory council: After last year's summit, WMATA was interested in establishing a youth advisory council to discuss activity on buses. Unfortunately, there had not been follow-up from the local councilmember, Yvette Alexander, to move this forward. At this year's summit, WMATA reaffirmed their interest in a youth advisory council.

Aging in place: One resident noted that the very young and the very old have unique needs when it comes to transportation, and asked how WMATA can help residents age in place, and how it can better accommodate strollers on buses.

Deaf riders: Other participants said that Ward 7 has an increasing population of the hearing impaired and deaf, and that transit employees should be trained to both recognize deaf customers and help them use the system.

Pedestrian safety: Organizer Neha Bhatt discussed pedestrian safety concerns at Benning Road's intersections with Minnesota Avenue and East Capitol Street. She had organized a recent walking tour with Ward 3 councilmember Mary Cheh, chair of the committee overseeing transportation, to look at problem intersections.

Capital Bikeshare: WABA executive director Shane Farthing raised the idea of subsidizing bike sharing for residents east of the river, and suggested changing Capital Bikeshare rules to allow younger members. Currently, one must be at least 16 years old to use Capital Bikeshare.

There was also an open house where community members could find information from DDOT, WMATA, Capital Bikeshare, and WABA, as well as discuss ideas with representatives from these groups.

The summit's two-hour timeframe turned out to be somewhat too short, so presentations and discussion were rushed at the end. The organizers are hoping to reformat for next year to avoid this issue.

Overall, residents came away with a widespread belief that working to pick the low-hanging fruit is a smart way to move forward and begin to bring positive change to Ward 7.

Under Metro's proposal, riders could choose from two differently-priced 28-day passes, good for trips up to $3.25 or unlimited. Any trip of the pass value or less would be free. If customers use a pass for a more expensive trip than the cap, they'll pay the difference.

Passes need to be on SmarTrip

Metro's pass proposal calls for using paper farecards, at least initially, for the monthly pass. But that will depress use of the passes, as it does with the two existing weekly passes.

The weekly rail fast pass and short trip pass are not popular, in part because paper farecards are inconvenient and relatively fragile. The short trip pass is especially inconvenient since it requires Metro customers to carry exact change for every ride that is more than $3.25. With a Smartrip card, this extra fare could be automatically deducted from stored value.

The risk of damaging the card combined with the need to carry a bunch of coins for more expensive trips tilts the field away from using passes. And the calculus is even worse for a pass that needs to last a full month rather than a week. If the new passes are paper-only, customers likely won't buy enough of them to make the new passes worthwhile.

Add a 3rd tier for the shortest trips

While a choose-your-own-value pass is ideal, Metro believes it's too technically complex to implement. But they could improve upon their proposal by adding a third tier for shorter trips.

The two existing passes are good for trips up to $3.25 and up to maximum fare. This offers a good deal for customers that regularly take medium and long-distance trips, but is not a very good deal for customers that live closer in and rarely take a trip that long.

The new pass should be good for trips costing up to $2.10. Any additional fare would automatically come out of the stored value in the customer's Smartrip account. Metro should encourage customers to buy higher-tier passes by adjusting their prices. The higher-tier passes should be slightly cheaper in comparison.

Price 28-day passes differently than weekly passes

Under the current proposal, the "monthly pass" would actually be a 4-week pass, and it would cost exactly 4-times the amount of the weekly pass.

Mathematically that may make sense, but it doesn't make sense from a customer service perspective. Considering the added risk of losing or damaging a farecard, or of not using it on vacation or sick days, customers would have little incentive to purchase a monthly pass instead of 4 weekly passes.

The monthly version would be a greater risk, and would offer no corresponding greater deal to compensate. So why buy it?

If WMATA wants customers to pay more up front, there will have to be some added incentive to do so. One option might be to make the 4-week pass a true monthly pass, which would essentially make the 29th, 30th, and 31st days of each month free to pass holders. Another option might be to reduce the cost of the 4-week pass, to be slightly less than 4-times the cost of a weekly pass.

Based on these ideas, Here's table showing suggested passes and prices:

WMATA deserves praise for considering more flexible payment options, but needs to more carefully consider its pricing structure. If monthly passes don't offer a stronger incentive, customers will probably not use them. That should not be taken as a sign that monthly passes aren't needed, only that the math isn't working for customers.

Previously, Metro offered a few discounts for frequent riders: a 10% bonus fare for people who bought farecards of $20 or more, a weekly bus pass that cost about 8.5 trips, and the rail fast pass.

The 10% bonus fare was eliminated in 2003. The weekly bus pass discount was eliminated in 2010. Metro now charges 10 times the Smartrip fare for a pass.

For a regular commuter taking 10 trips per week which are long enough to hit the maximum fare, the rail fast pass currently offers about a 10% discount compared to 10 individual trips, as well as free trips after that. This proposal will eliminate the 10% discount and almost certainly drive customers away from using the rail fast pass.

More to follow after the Thursday board meeting.

With a SmarTrip card, rail fares will range from $1.70 to $3.50 off-peak and from $2.10 to $5.75 during rush hours. Regular local bus fares will rise from $1.60 to $1.70 for SmarTrip customers, while customers paying in cash will have their fares rounded to the nearest dollar.

Since use of SmarTrip by visitors and non-regular riders is expected to increase, SmarTrip vending machines will be installed at more all stations.

With the elimination of the peak-of-the-peak fare, station fare tables will go back to having just two columns. But riders shouldn't expect to save a whole lot, since the "regular" fare has been increased enough to cover the difference. With the peak-of-the-peak surcharge, the current maximum fare is $5.20. It will rise to $5.75 under the proposal.

Parking at Metro lots and garages will increase by 25¢ per day, about a 5% increase. Bike locker fees will be cut from $200 per year to $120 per year, something we argued for based on low demand for lockers.

Most disappointing to me is that discussion of implementing some sort of flexible monthly pass has stopped for this budget cycle, meaning that Metro customers will likely have to wait at least two more years to have the flexibility of paying for their commute and getting their off-peak trips for free. The topic of monthly passes was briefly discussed during an October meeting of the finance committee, but by November had disappeared from the discussion.

The fare increases are expected to raise about half of Metro's $120 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year, with local jurisdictions expected to chip in the other half of the shortfall in order to balance the budget. Metro's finance committee will discuss the fare increase along with the rest of the budget on Thursday morning.

Our current Breakfast Link editors are looking to move on from curating the links each day. Meanwhile, many of our contributors now use Twitter, and can submit or curate items through that service.

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Raising rail fares

There were two fairly standard increases proposed for Metrorail fares. The first is a fairly familiar increase where peak fares increase by the rate of inflation, which would be about 10 cents for the base fare and increases in the distance-based fares. The new maximum fare for peak of the peak with a paper farecard would be $6, up from $5.45 today.

As part of this option, Metro is proposing increasing off-peak fares by about 50%, setting them to 75% of the equivalent peak fare instead of the current three-tier system. This option would raise about $57 million and might reduce ridership by about 3 million trips per year, about 1.3%.

Another option for adjusting rail fares would be to increase only the off-peak fares. In this option, the off-peak fare would increase to 90% of the peak rail fare, and the peak fares would be kept the same.

Some board members expressed some concern that by reducing the difference in fares, customers would no longer be driven by price to avoid the busiest peak times. One board member pointed out that the revenue increases might be reduced by the cost increase of increased congestion during peak times.

Another drawback with this option is that it eliminates the long-standing Metro policy of selling less crowded off-peak service at a discount in an effort to spur ridership and promote transit use even when the roads are not as crowded. This option would raise about $48 million and might reduce ridership by 1.6 million trips per year.

Parking fees

Metro addressed parking fees by proposing an across-the-board $0.25 increase, as well as demand-based adjustments to reserved parking permit fees. For lots that have low usage, Metro would reduce the reserved permit fee. For high usage lots, Metro would be allowed to increase the number of reserved permits from about 15% of spaces to about 30% of spaces. Part of this option would be to reduce the fee for bicycle lockers to $120 based on low demand for lockers. This option estimates $3.4 million in revenue and 100,000 lost riders.

Two-zone farecard system

The last option is the most interesting, and is the largest change from existing policy. The peak of the peak fare would be eliminated, though it's not clear whether this means a 20 cent reduction in peak of peak fares, or a 20 cent increase in peak fares.

Possible core zone. Image from WMATA.

For paper farecards, the existing time-based and three-tier distance based fare would be replaced with a simplified and expensive two zone system, where riders would pay $3 for trips within a central zone and all other trips would be $6. It's not clear whether trips completely outside the zone would also be $6, which would be strange for some short trips like East Falls Church to Clarendon.

Board Members Jeff McKay of Fairfax County and Mary Hynes of Arlington voiced some apprehension about this plan, pointing out that many visitors to the area stay in hotels just outside of the central zone boundary, and especially that Arlington would likely oppose a plan where almost all Arlington riders would pay $6 with a paper farecard for trips that are about $2 today.

The fare ideas kick off a process that will see an official proposal by the General Manager in January. The next step will be the board's decision to send fare increase proposals to public hearings in the Spring. Final approval of a fare increase would probably come in late June.

As WMATA staff explained in their presentation on fare proposals, there's a tradeoff between simplicity and fairness in all fare proposals, and generally the region has chosen fairness in the past.

Metro could have a single, flat fare, but it would have to be about $2.70 per trip. This would mean that everyone who rides very long distances every day would save a bundle, while all the commuters who live just a couple stops from work and ride off-peak could see their commute costs double.

A zone system is similarly a problem, since people riding one station across a zone boundary would end up paying as much as someone crossing almost 2 whole zones. We can reduce the unfairness by creating more zones, but then the fares get more complicated. Fewer zones are simpler, but much less fair.

That's bad for regular Metro riders, but what about doing something similar for tourists? While the regular commuter probably has a SmarTrip which handles computing fares, it's a lot of work for the tourist trying to buy a paper farecard for the first time.

Since tourists are already paying for hotels, meals and more, an extra dollar or two on the fare might be less important than making the system easy to understand.

We can't make every paper farecard fare $2.70, since then everyone with a $5 commute would just buy these tourist fares instead. We could sell a single farecard for $5.20 (the current maximum Metrorail fare including peak-of-the-peak), but it's a little much to charge each tourist that much per trip even if they're taking the train from Smithsonian to McPherson Square.

But few tourists ride to Franconia-Springfield, anyway. What about a single tourist farecard which goes all the places tourists typically go? Metro could make it really easy to buy, with big, simple signs listing the cost, and a straightforward process on the fare machines. This "tourist fare" would take a rider anywhere in a certain zone, which Metro could prominently show on the maps.

At the last Riders' Advisory Council meeting, Michael Eichler briefed the RAC on a number of fare proposals WMATA's planning and budget offices are evaluating. Assistant General Manager Nat Bottigheimer showed the WMATA Board the same information in October. One of the ideas listed on the presentation is a flat fare for paper farecards. I suggested this "tourist zone" as a tweak to that idea.

Here's one possible zone. A lot of tourists go to the airport, and a lot to Woodley Park (a major destination for convention-goers and animal-seekers). The fare between these 2 spots maxes out at $2.90 (peak of the peak) with SmarTrip, or $3.15 with a paper farecard.

Hypothetical "tourist zone."

Any trip inside this zone costs no more than $3 (with SmarTrip), anytime. Metro could sell a "tourist card" for $3 a ride and make things a lot easier for the very high proportion of tourists who never leave this zone.

There's no incentive for SmarTrip users to buy one of these instead, since no trip costs more with SmarTrip. A few of the longer trips currently cost more with paper farecards, but that extra cost is basically the "tourist tax" today. If Metro replaced that with this system, they'd probably make more money off the tourists riding short distances and make it worthwhile to keep the "tourist fare" at a flat and easy $3 instead of a more cumbersome $3.25.

Or, perhaps there could be more zones, or different zones. For example, the zone would also work a little farther east, encompassing Potomac Ave and Stadium-Armory and not Court House and Clarendon. If we had data on how many fares are paid with paper farecards versus SmarTrip at each station, it'd be easy to determine which is a more appropriate "tourist zone."

As the planning department evaluates many different fare proposals (including some we've brought here on Greater Greater Washington just to recommend against), perhaps Eichler and the team can consider something like this. Can you come up with a better "tourist zone" system for them to evaluate?