Part of my work today involves farebox recovery rates on the local bus routes. Most routes in the system fall between 10% and 30%. The best route achieves 37%, and the worst route is 3% (and that figure is a bit dated--probably lower, around 1%, after recent service cuts)
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To think about this, let's focus on the routes that operate out of the Northampton garage. There are 6 routes here, and one of them--from Amherst to Northampton--dominates the rest in terms of ridership (about 30k riders a week vs 15k on the other 5 combined)
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But, when you look at farebox recovery, the busy route (B43) is outperformed by almost all the others: B43 = 9% R41 = 13% R42 = 11% R44 = 11% B48 = 19% X98 = 3% What's going on here?
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The answer is actually pretty straightforward: college students don't have to pay a fare to use the B43 during the school year, and guess who most riders of the B43 are?
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Look at how little ridership helps if people aren't paying an appropriate fare! This is today's lesson: you have to charge an appropriate price for the services provided if they're ever going to be sustainable. Consider one of the other routes, the B48...
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...with a farebox recovery of 19%. You want to double that number: you could either have twice as many people riding, or you could have the people riding pay twice as much. The former would probably mean extra operating costs, the latter would probably mean fewer riders...
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...but the crucial difference is that fares are more directly under the operator's control than ridership is. Moreover--though you can't count on this in every city or for every network--ridership demand here is pretty inelastic (2/3 recent fare increases saw ridership increase).
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So, we can assume that fares here are more or less nominal and that the existing ridership can (and has in the past) pay more. Great! We can safely raise them. But there's one more thing to consider here....
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...which is the sort of messages your fares send to your riders. The current base fare is $1.25, regardless of distance. If everyone in the system made the same trips they did last year but paid, say, $5 as the base fare, we would've made money. But if fares were *actually* $5...
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...then the message we would send our riders is "don't take the bus unless you're going a pretty serious distance: it's not worth it for short trips around town, or for going one town over." Not good! The sort of trips discouraged would be precisely the cheapest to provide!
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The current fare of $1.25 is actually reasonable for short distances--but it's hopeless to cover costs of longer trips. So, a distance-based fare system is of the utmost importance! This is why bus systems in Japan tend to rely on them.
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End of conversation
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Be incremental; 改善する.
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We have spent a LOT of time looking at transit operations. Buses = low upfront capital expense (mostly use existing streets)/ high operational costs (1 driver+ 1 maintenance per bus + fuel) Trains = high upfront capital expense/ low operational costs
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ON-BOARD MICROTRANSACTIONS OF SOME SORT
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Increase productivity. Increase speed and number of riders.
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