The brilliance of your post rings true as just today (June 9) I heard on the radio that the half-percent sales tax increase in 2002 did quite a bit. Yeah, the main thing it did was pay off $700 million in EXISTING debt. Great.

Everyone else here is far, far better informed than I, but I do have a story about mass-transit in Miami…

I was once asked to take part in a sit-down survey of Miami mass-transit users back in 1990. I was still in high school. Everyone there seemed quite happy with the bus system, then running about one bus per hour on streets like Kendall after 9am. That was my main complaint. One bus per hour at after 9am seemed stupid to me. They all laughed, ignored me, and moved on to patting themselves on the back.

I would like to add that it is almost impossible to get anywhere on the MDTA without at least one transfer. So the 2005 hikes meant that in reality you paid 50 cents more for the base round-trip fare, and 50 cents more for the round-trip transfers. That means that you paid $1 extra every day for your commute.

The cost of transfers is one reason why I would oppose charging for the MetroMover. It may make sense in an abstract argument to charge for it, but for people who use it everyday, it would be an extra burden and even disincentive. As it stands now, I have to pay for one transfer and get the MetroMover transfer free. If I had to pay for two transfers, I would be paying $2.50 each way — more than the base fare on NYC’s MTA but for much slower and less reliable service

There is more than one real problem. I’m not well enough informed to gauge Dave’s points, but they certainly seem reasonable. I wanted to highlight a different problem that concerns not just the absolute price of transit, but the pricing structure that is employed.

In 2005, transit wanted to raise fares. Instead of raising fares by a set percentage like say 20%, they set a different percentage increase for each of their types of fares:

2005 percentage
full fare: $1.25 $1.50 20%
transfer: $0.25 $0.50 100%
token: $1.00 $1.43 43%

This change reduced the discount for tokens to 3% from its previous 20% discount, substantially eliminating a very important opportunity for transit to maximize revenue without increasing expenses. See the explanation on wikipedia for an idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Explanation

The costs of operating a bus on a route don’t vary much with the number of people riding the bus. Transit still has to pay the operator and fuel whether 20 people ride the bus or 80. Not everyone is willing to pay the same amount for a ride on a bus. In order to maximize revenue, transit would want to set prices so that each rider were charged the maximum amount that they were willing to pay. This is one of the primary reasons why tokens and passes are even offered for sale. The way they are priced now, there is very little benefit to buying a token or pass to the riders.

The pricing structure of transit in Miami is completely out of step with theory, and probably every other transit agency in the world. Do we need new trains? Yep. Do we need bike lanes? Yessir. Should we be plan our development to encourage transit use? No doubt. Those things matter tremendously, but while we are all arguing about how to fund transit, we may as well restore the revenue that is being lost because of inefficient transit fares by the filling the buses we already operate.

Thanks for your great website!

As to fares and the ‘incentive to ride’: I don’t know what cost/benefit anaylsis you use as far as transit is concerned but transit is still a bargin compared to filling up my tank every few days at $40 a tank.

A fare hike? Maybe, but a total restructuring of the pricing schedule? Definitely not. Look, a 25 cent hike in the fare represents a 20% increase from $1.25 to $1.50. However, the price of a token jumped 43% from $1.00 to $1.43. The price of a transfer jumped 100% from 25 cents to 50 cents. Both of these increases hit the everyday transit commuters hard. A transit token is no longer an incentive program in this new pricing schedule. It had been that a token represented a discount of 20% off the regular fare, but now that discount is a mere 3%. In an unscientific 2 hours of internet research, the least percentage discount I could find for tokens or similar transit passes was 10% and in that case transfers were 25 cents not 50 cents like they are now in Miami (that city was Chicago). But like I said, that was the worst discount I could find. Atlanta and NY don’t charge for transfers and offer 15% and 20% discounts on tokens or token equivelants respectively. Philly offer tokens at a 35% discount, although their transfers are also the most expensive at 60 cents.

The point here is that balance of transit ridership cannot possibly improve without some sort of incentive discount for daily riders. The new fares were evidently instituted to balance the budget, but this cannot possibly work by reducing (nearly eliminating) the incentive to daily riders. These people, myself included, will be looking to get off the bus as soon as possible. Afterall, the price of a roundtrip with transfer just increased from $2.50 to $3.86 an increase of 55%!

Besides, aren’t there 2 ways to balance the budget? Increase fares or increase riders? I think so.