Posts about Unlimited Passes

The presentation also points out that as WMATA switched from SmarTrips to a more modern "commodity card" which will be much cheaper, it will become easier to drop the price of the cards. Based on this, just keeping SmarTrip prices the way they are until new cards come in seems increasingly persuasive. More commenters supported this option than any other in our previous discussions.

At Thursday's Board meeting, the finance staff will also present number of draft "fare policy principles," high-level guiding theories to guide any decisions around fares. The Board often makes its fare decisions based on immediate circumstances, but hasn't stepped back to think about the broader goals that could shape those decisions.

The proposed principles are:

1. Develop fares so they are easily understandable
   
2. Charge fares relative to level of service (people who get more service, like longer distance riders, or faster service, like rail over bus, should pay more)
   
3. Optimize use of existing system capacity (the fare structure should encourage more riding at times or in places where the system already has room)
   
4. Maintain adequate cost recovery while maximizing ridership
   
5. Facilitate movement between modes and operators throughout the region
   
6. Encourage use of cost-effective and efficient fare media (like SmarTrip or contactless credit cards)
   
7. Ensure fares comply with federal regulations (particularly civil rights laws around low-income riders and riders with disabilities)

According to the presentation, riders in focus groups thought the existing fare charts are hard to understand and that distance fares are too complex. They do not like peak-of-the-peak fares, but like daily or weekly passes.

The customer focus groups wanted a simpler time and distance based system with open payments and additional SmarTrip features. Some of the most popular features are likely automatic reloading, and being able to load additional fare from the Internet, both of which WMATA is working on.

These principles do give some guidance, though they are also general enough that many different policies could fit into them. For example, monthly passes like those Michael has recommended would satisfy all of the principles. Peak-of-the-peak, on the other hand, does a lot to meet #3 and #4 but isn't so good on #1. The presentation says that the current passes and peak-of-the-peak will be evaluated against these fare principles.

Metro is also considering approving a $351,000 grant to provide remote detonated bomb jamming equipment. The capability will allow Metro to deploy a vehicle-mounted jammer and portable jammer to reduce the likelihood that a detected bomb could be detonated remotely. After the initial three-year grant expires, Metro will have to apply for continued maintenance grants.

How about instead of paying for only the employees that say they want a bikeshare membership, the employer pays for everybody they employ? Not every employee would end up using bikeshare as much as people who specifically signed up to get a code, allowing for a much lower cost per employee.

It's possible that spreading out the cost of bulk memberships could reduce the price to less than $5 or $10 per employee per year. After all, when you buy health insurance, you don't pay as if you have a major surgery and hospitalization every year, you pay based on the risk that you might have one at some point. By spreading out this payment over many employees, the cost per employee decreases.

VTA, in and around San Jose, CA, uses this model when pricing Eco Passes. Employers can buy passes for all of their employees for a big discount, because not everyone is going to use transit. Prices vary by size of employer and the location, with the cheapest passes available at around $9 per employee per year compared to about $1,540 for a transit pass. Other Eco Pass examples exist in Denver and San Diego

The benefit of this arrangement is to put a membership or pass in the hands of people that don't even know they want one. If you have to fill out paperwork in advance and obtain a key after working out the payment through HR, you're less likely to get a membership even if you think you might want one someday. On the other hand, if every employee could swipe an ID card or enter a badge number to get a one-day membership at any time, employees might try it out and end up using it.

This would be particularly valuable for colleges. Every student could automatically be able to use bikeshare using just a student ID. If few students used bikeshare, then the cost to the university could be extremely low. If a lot use bikeshare, then it's providing a valuable service and reducing demand for expensive shuttles or traffic around the campus.

There's no word in the press release on how the passes will interact with Metro transfers. Will passholders who get off the bus and onto the Metro get the fifty-cent transfer that other bus riders get? In the pilot, they haven't been, and Michael Perkins recommended keeping the transfer cost equal to the cost for cash fare riders.

If you already use a bus pass, what do you think? If you don't, will you start now?

Before Smartrip, Metro provided a one-way discount for passengers transferring from rail to bus. Rail pass holders could get a transfer slip just like non-pass holders, and enjoyed the same discounts. Once Metro eliminated the paper transfers and implemented balanced transfers, that option went away. It was a infrastructure change that eliminated transfer discounts for pass holders, not an explicit policy change.

Without the transfer discounts, the usual "ten rides per week" price for passes breaks down, and passes become less of a good deal. We want Metro to offer a pricing model of paying for your peak service in advance in order to encourage off-peak use by giving free additional rides. Metro should allow pass holders to transfer from bus to rail, or rail to bus enjoying the same transfer discount.

Seattle regional transit is similar to Metro because there are many different fares offered, some distance based (by zone), some by time of day and others by age category. The Sound Transit express buses have a zone fare system, with three potential fare levels. King County buses have three adult fare levels based on time of day and on number of zones. Community Transit has a regular bus fare and two different commuter bus fares based on distance. Pierce Transit has four different fares for local and express buses, and that's just for adult fares. Washington State Ferry fares are complicated enough to require a two-page PDF. Commuter rail is based on a base fare and a mileage charge.

Unlike Metro, the philosophy in Puget Sound is one of very liberal transfers. As long as you're transferring to a trip that's cheaper, the transfer is free for two hours, even if it's between bus and rail. If you're transferring to a trip that's more expensive, all you pay is the difference. A third trip taken within the same two hours has the same rules.

With a level of complexity approaching WMATA's, the transit agencies in the Seattle Area decided to let customers choose the pass product that's right for them by offering Puget Pass. For the price of 36 one-way trips, you get unlimited transit at your selected trip value or less. If your trip is more expensive than that, you can pay the extra automatically from your smart card.

Transit agencies in Seattle offer their own passes, but they are not nearly as popular as the Puget Pass. According to the report obtained from Sound Transit, 35.5% of total ORCA boardings use a Puget Pass, while only 13% use an agency-specific pass, and 25% pay using a stored cash value. The remainder use a business-purchased passport program similar to SmartBenefits.

Puget Pass revenue is shared among the transit agencies based on the fare for each trip taken using the pass.

The Washington Metro area shares many of the characteristics of the transit operating environment present in Puget Sound. We have a universal smart card for transit fare payment, and a diversity in fares and transit service providers. For passes to work here, they need to allow a high level of diversity and flexibility. Other cities have more of a flat fare system and typically fewer transit providers. For them, a single pass or perhaps a couple of passes like what we have now would be more appropriate.

But here there are regular riders not adequately served by such a limited pass system. The Puget Sound region has an excellent example of a well-designed pass system. We should redesign our pass system so that it works more like theirs.

The piece is free to Metro, funded by the Chinatown Community Cultural Center, Target, the DC Arts Commission and Pepco. It will be placed near the 7th and F entrance, the one to the arena.

Try passes on SmarTrip: Metro is looking for volunteers to try loading unlimited-use passes on a SmarTrip card. They're offering a free week if you buy three.

The program asks riders to provide a credit card number and a registered SmarTrip card number. When you sign up, the pass you select will be purchased and loaded automatically for the month of August. Passes will be activated when they're first used, and after five days the next pass will be purchased, ready to be activated when the previous one expires.

If you receive a transit subsidy as farecards or SmartBenefits, you won't be able to pay for your passes right now. If you have a pass on rail or bus, you'll need to use stored value to ride the other system. There will not be a transfer discount when using the pass.

This proposal is relatively simple, the data is already collected or will be easy to collect using SmarTrip passes. This idea encourages local transit companies to get more people using passes (so that there's a larger pool of revenue to share) and also to provide valuable transit service (so that the pass users choose their service, increasing their share).

Here are some other pass revenue sharing ideas:

There's always the status quo option. Transit providers can agree to accept Metro's pass but not demand any revenue, or they can opt out of the pass and sell their own passes. This would complicate our regional bus fare system. First, if other agencies issue their own passes, would they be available on SmarTrip? If so, would the pass be worth anything as a transfer to Metrorail or Metrobus? Conversely, if a Metrobus flash pass holder transfers to a local bus, would the rider have to pay full fare? Transfer fare? Or nothing? This is a bad option which would require a lot of new and complicated rules for passengers that should be avoided if possible.

Metro could agree to provide a full bus fare every time someone uses a pass on a regional provider. But this would give the local bus too much in the case of a transfer from rail or bus, and for heavy pass usage could result in Metro charging $15.00 to a rider for a pass, but paying out more than $15.00 to the local bus service, losing money on the deal. All the downside risk of overusage falls to Metro, so it's unlikely Metro would agree to this.

Alternatively, Metro could share an average bus revenue per trip with the local provider, which before the current round of fare increases was about $0.80 per ride. This still puts the downside risk of high usage on Metro, but provides the local provider somewhat less revenue than "full" reimbursement.

Maybe a better solution would be for the local bus providers to earn revenue as if they were a Metrobus (including transfers from rail or other buses). That way, a rider who normally commutes by a local bus to a Metrobus in the morning, and the reverse in the evening, would pay one fare to each provider per day.

To handle the problem of the potential risk residing only with Metrobus or the local provider, the risk of frequent pass usage could be shared between the two. After a pass has been used a certain number of times (say, ten), no more revenue would change hands. That way, if a person rides daily on ART only, ART would get ten rides worth of revenue, but would have to provide free trips after that, just like Metro would. On the other hand, if a person rides Metrobus ten times but takes some extra trips at the end of the week on ART, those ART trips would not have a revenue transfer, just like Metro gets no additional revenue for extra trips late in the week. In other words, the local provider accepts passes and can "earn" as much as the pass value in revenues by providing trips, but cannot "earn" more than the actual value of the pass, and has to share the pass revenue with other service providers that accept the pass.

I think the first proposal, where providers earn a share of the total pass pool, is technologically feasible, understandable, not administratively burdensome, and fundamentally fair.

Under the Arlington County Board's recently approved transit fares, if a regional revenue sharing agreement cannot be reached, the County Transit system could withdraw from the regional bus pass and would issue a bus pass of its own. Combined with recent county efforts to replace Metrobus service with ART service, this degrades the value of a Metrobus flash pass, and hurts our regionally integrated transit system.

Board members Peter Benjamin from Maryland and Jim Graham from DC confirmed that those jurisdictions are interested in getting a share of pass revenue for the rides that are provided on local systems. Benjamin stated that the result would be "changing the subsidy level from local to Metro."

While it's true that this is all government money anyway, and any changes would be just payments from one government-subsidized transit system to another, the important thing is the amount of those transfers. Right now, the local governments provide service and get nothing from pass users. But a well-designed revenue sharing system would transfer revenues in a way that's related to how much service people are using, so a jurisdiction that provides service that a lot of riders are using would get a much larger transfer of revenue than one that doesn't provide much service.

Clearly, it would be preferable to maintain our region's interoperable passes, so some sort of revenue sharing needs to be devised. Tomorrow, I'll discuss some options and my recommended plan.

A third option would have been to require the pass riders to pay the surcharge in cash at the Addfare machine, as they do when Short Trip Pass holders take longer trips, which would be a communications as well as a logistical nightmare for passengers.

This complication highlights the need for flexible passes. Once passes become available on SmarTrip cards, Metro is going to look at redesigning the passes to take advantage of the flexibility the electronic farecards allow.

In previous articles, I made some recommendations regarding passes, some of which included interesting but complicated additional thoughts regarding bulk and volume pricing. This time, I'm going to keep it as simple as possible.

Recommendation 1: Metro should let you choose a fare level (the "face value"), and then sell you a weekly pass for ten times the face value. The pass would be good for any ride less than that face value.

Recommendation 2: Metro should allow these passes to be used on any transit in the system. If the face value is over $1.50, it should work as a regular bus pass. If it's $5.00, it should work as an unlimited rail pass. Since the longest bus and rail ride including peak surcharge is $5.00 + $1.00 + $0.20, an "Unlimited Everything" pass should cost $62.00 per week.

Recommendation 3: Metro should establish an agreement with regional transit partners to transfer $1.00 to their account for the use of a pass on their buses. While the exact amount will be subject to negotiations, this is probably close to the average fare for the bus system after the recent fare increase, and it's the transfer fare.

Recommendation 4: Metro should consider bringing back the monthly pass at a price of four times the weekly pass, or forty times the face value.

With this system, Metro's pass system becomes simpler at the same time it becomes a perfect fit for any customer. No longer will Metro have to set the prices for two kinds of rail passes, a bus pass and their equivalents for elderly and disabled. We have reflected the region's goals once in the fare structure, charging more for peak service and for rail compared to bus. Now the pass system will reflect exactly the same values and goals without additional administration.