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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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?
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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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Replying to @380kmh
But if students had to pay, ridership would take a hit, right?
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Undoubtedly--but the earnings could very well offset the losses
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