Comment by xp84
16 hours ago
Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive?
I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
i hadn't considered that Seattle might be an outlier; the numbers vary by city more than i knew.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2...
page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex.
the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet.
the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that.
(apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).
There are probably some savings in externalities not accounted for as well.
Seems to me mass transit could reduce road maintenance costs, parking infrastructure, and such. Not to mention reduction in pollution and increase in desirability.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to “capture” those savings explicitly. So it ends up looking like a taxpayer funded charity program…
I can't remember what the paradox is called but it has a name - in any big city, public transit sets the speed of car traffic. Cars always go at the same speed as public transit, door-to-door. If you want to eliminate traffic jams, improve the metro.