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380kmh's profile
Haunted Forrest 🌲
Haunted Forrest 🌲
Haunted Forrest  🌲
@380kmh

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Haunted Forrest  🌲

@380kmh

#TrainTwitter - trains & train stations - passionate opinions on public transit & civic design - transit bureacrat, but all views here are my own

Pioneer Valley
patreon.com/380kmh
Joined March 2011

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    1. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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)

      2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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    2. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      As someone who thinks transit should generally pay for itself through fares, I want to see these percentages go up--but getting above 100% is very daunting when the best we can manage right now is 37%. What options do we have?

      5 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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    3. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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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    4. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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?

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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    5. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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?

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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    6. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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...

      3 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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    7. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      ...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...

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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    8. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      ...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).

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    9. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      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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    10. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      ...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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      Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

      ...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!

      9:33 AM - 5 Dec 2017
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        1. Haunted Forrest  🌲‏ @380kmh 5 Dec 2017

          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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