Human Transit

new york ferries: the first smartphone payment system for transit?

That's what I'm being told about the new fare system at the Hudson River ferry operator New York Waterway.  You can now buy a ticket using your smartphone and then use the phone itself to present the ticket to the fare reader, similar to the "digital boarding passes" already used by airlines.  No paper required.  Expect this to spread in high-end commuter markets.

It would be great to see this spread in urban bus transit, where boarding times are still a dominant problem, but that will rely a very easy-to-use app and compatibility with smartcard media now under development.  My guess is that we'll get a ubiquitous commercial smartcard-creditcard first, which will do the same job.

Photo: Hoboken Condos

information request: fare revenue impact of free transfers

We're looking for case studies in which:

• A transit agency that had been charging for transfers (changing from one transit vehicle to another) eliminated that charge.
• No other major changes happened at the same time.
• A result could be measured in fare revenue, and also ridership.

If anyone's familiar with cases, or with studies of this issue, please let me know.  Thanks!

frequent-rider discounts to decongest the peak?

Just in from the Aspen Ideas Festival, via Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic.  Stanford Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Balaji Prabhakar thinks he has the solution to peak overcrowding.

The frequent commuter program has two goals. One is to increase people's loyalty to the public transport system. We want people to be disloyal to their cars, to cheat on their cars. And the second major goal is to decongest the peak time trains and buses. The problem is that it is unpleasant to take a trip during the peak time. If we could achieve both goals with the frequent commuter project, it would be great.

The nice thing about this project is that it is going to do exactly what the airline miles do. You take a 10 kilometer trip, you get 10 credits. And Singapore can measure the kilometers. But if you make that same trip in the off-peak time, you'll get 30 credits. This creates new bonding between you and the system. People don't think of the indignity of taking a three-stop trip on their preferred airline versus a direct cheaper flight sometimes. In fact, they see the angle as, "I'm earning more miles."

Does anyone with regular experience in transit think this is a good idea?  If so, I'd like to hear.  My first reaction:

This sounds like a very very complicated way to do discounts for off-peak riders, and to reward very regular riders.  The fact is, the transit industry already has a system for rewarding frequent riders; it's called a monthly or annual pass.

A simpler solution to the peak overcrowding problem is to provide discounts for off-peak trips, as Seattle, for example, has done for decades.  This costs very little to administer and has the desired effect much more directly. 

When the need for sheer service is so urgent, why would a transit agency take on the massive administrative cost of a frequent-rider program, when the same money could go into driving buses and trains instead? 

I'm sure transit professionals will appreciate the interest from the "big ideas" people.  But from Madrigal's summary, this idea sounds like a fun metaphor inappropriately applied, suggesting the lack of any technical understanding of the transit capacity problem.

But I'm curious what others think ...

connection fare penalties: why they happen

Is it fair to have to pay more if your trip requires a transfer or connection?  I've argued that it isn't, but I also have an appreciation of the difficulty of eliminating these penalties.  So when complaining about a fare penalty, try to understand the situation from the transit agency's point of view.  Not because they're right and you're wrong, but because you many need to help them solve the problem that it presents for them. 

Definitions first.  A connection penalty is any element of a fare policy whose effect is to charge people more for a trip that requires two or more transit vehicles than for a trip using only one, even when the trip is of exactly the same distance and when there's no evident difference in class, amenity, or inefficiency to justify a surcharge.

For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald's inquiry on Sydney's public transit, I prepared this table showing the difference between rail fares and rail+bus fares for trips of exactly the same distance:

My basic view of connection penalities has always been this:  The connection is not an added convenience for which the customer should pay extra.  It's an inconvenience required by the geometry of any efficient, legible, and frequent transit system.  Transit systems must therefore do what they can to minimize this inconvenience and encourage people to make connections.  Connection fare penalties are exactly contrary to this imperative.

As near as I can tell, most fare penalties for connecting arise from some mixture of four basic issues:

• Practical security problems around the physical tools used to record connections, such as the opportunities for fare evasion created by abundant transfer slips.  If this is the primary reason for a connection penalty, smartcard systems will eliminate the problem and should lead to removal of the connection penalty.
• Laws and funding arrangements that refer explicitly to the cash single-ride fare.   A key funding formula that governs Los Angeles County transit agencies gives these agencies more subsidy if they push their base fare downward.  The formula is actually trying to reward ridership, but because ridership is hard to measure across multiple agencies, it estimates ridership as the fare revenue divided by cash single-ride fare.  This penalizes agencies for raising their cash single-ride fares, and encourages them to invent other fees and fare penalties instead, for reasons that have nothing to do with the real intentions of the formula.  Again, smartcards, which will provide a more accurate and direct measure of ridership, should eliminate the need for such approximations and the perverse incentives that follow from them.
  
  
• A journalistic obsession with single-ride cash fare as the key measure of fare cost.  The single-ride cash fare is easy to talk about, and journalists and other non-transit-experts tend to focus on it, producing soundbites such as "Los Angeles fares are cheaper than San Francisco's."  Prevalence of these soundbites motivates agencies to try, for reasons of appearance, to keep their cash single-ride fares down.  Again, this is just like airlines: If you become obsessed with reducing your base ticket price at all costs, you'll have to invent more and more fees, and connection penalties are one fee of that type.
  
  
• Conflicts between the self-interests of geographically entangled agencies or operators.  In multi-agency or multi-operator environments, the introduction of a free connection can come at the expense of the bottom lines of multiple operators, and tends to affect different operators differently.  These problems are sometimes overcome through heroic negotiation, in which the operators agree to shift money among themselves in complex ways in order to present a simple integrated fare system to the customer.  In other cases (as in Brisbane) the solution is to create a new meta-agency that sits over all the operators, pays them for operations, receives their fare revenue, and takes responsibility for a single region-wide or city-wide bottom line.

So it's hard.  It's important, and good transit agencies are at least thinking about the problem, but it's still hard.  In multi-agency cases, for example, the problem may impossible to solve without creating a meta-agency, with all the attendant anxiety about "adding another layer of government."   

What can a citizen do?  One thing is to confront journalists and others who try to make simplistic comparisons based on cash single-ride fares.  Journalists: if you want to do quick pieces about fares, look for average fares (fare revenue divided by ridership) rather than published base fares.  Yes, this is harder because not all agencies can calculate ridership reliably, or (as in Los Angeles) they may actually be relying on fare revenue to get to a ridership estimate.  Again, though, smartcards should eliminate that problem.

Finally, since I've now referred twice to smartcards solving the problem, let me be clear:  Technology can solve information problems, but not ethical ones.  Connection penalties based on the inadequacy of information-tracking tools should fade away once smartcards provide the necessary tool.  But technology won't change the poltical problem: to eliminate fare penalties without losing revenue, you will probably have to raise the single-ride cash fare to compensate.  Effectively you'll be admitting that you've been subsidizing some riders at the expense of others, and you should expect all the blowback that we see anywhere when we tell people that we're removing a subsidy on which they've come to rely.

That's the real problem, and courageous leadership is the only solution for it.

connection penalties as "de facto redlining"?

Sometimes a comment is so representative of a common point of view that I want to share it even though I neither agree or disagree exactly.  Sometimes too, a comment raises a language point that's worth noticing.  From David Vartanoff:

From my [point of view] lack of free transfers and distance based fares are de facto redlining of neighborhoods. The [Washington DC] WMATA and [San Francisco area] BART [rail transit] systems compound this by making feeder bus usage a further charge. Given that fares have almost no relation to the actual cost of the trip in question, high fares and transfer surcharges are simply disincentives to use. In the[San Francisco]  Bay Area, each agency has different fare policies making longer trips confusing and unnecessarily expensive compared to similar mileages in say Chicago or New York.

"De facto redlining" is almost but not quite a contradiction, as "redlining" is generally intentional while "de facto" can refer to a pattern that's observable in outcomes but was never anyone's intention.  Still, we often have to take responsibility for "de facto" outcomes of what we do, so an accusation of redlining is a good way to raise the stress level of transit managers and the elected officials that they report to.  However, stressing out your leadership is not always the key to solving a problem, if the leaders may perceive the problem to be out of their control.

I don't believe that many transit agency managers and boards are motivated by animus toward particular neighborhoods.  But accusations of de facto disfavor toward certain neighborhoods are very emotive, especially to people with experience in racial politics and to older people who remember much more explicit kinds of redlining practiced in the not-too-distant past.   And of course, they're also emotive becuase they're about home, which is always an emotional topic. 

So before you go too far with "redlining" accusations, tempting as they are, try to understand why connection penalities happen.  That's the subject of the very next post.

the peril of low base fares

Are transit fares in Los Angeles cheaper than in San Francisco?  That's the impression you'll get from a direct comparison of the base adult cash fare.  The travel blog Price of Travel just compared the base fares of 80 major tourist cities around the world, and noted that while San Francisco Muni's base fare is $2.00, that of the Los Angeles County MTA is $1.50.

Yes, but San Francisco offers a free transfer, so that a $2.00 fare takes you anywhere in the city.  In Los Angeles, you can travel along one line for $1.50, but many trips require a connection, and in that case you'll pay $3.00.

The journalistic temptation to cite and compare base fares is one reason that transit agencies feel pressed to keep that number low, which in turn pressures them to raise revenue other ways, such as by charging for transfers.  It's a bit the way budget airlines work, offering huge discounts but then charging fees for all kinds of things.

Los Angeles County transit agencies also labor under a peculiar funding arrangement in which a certain countywide funding source is allocated according to fare revenue divided by base fare.  So if you keep your base fare down (by charging for "extras," such as connections) you get more money from the county!  This formula was intended to be a proxy for ridership, which is hard to measure, so one hopes that once smartcards become a reliable way to count riders, the formula and its perverse consequences can be left behind.  Of course, the real challenge will be to count complete passenger trips rather than boardings.  (The latter are easier to count, but double-count trips requiring a connection.)

Even Southwest Airlines will sell you a ticket from your origin to your destination, rather than making you buy each segment separately.  In fact, the ticket from A to B via a connection at C usually doesn't cost more than the ticket from A to B nonstop, because the airline recognizes that you're changing at C for their convenience, not yours.

the horrors of "transferring" in 1974, and a happier future

Connections, or transfers as North Americans depressingly call them, are the foundation of a simple, frequent transit network that's there whenever you need it.  I laid out the basic argument here, but in brief, a transit system that tries to run direct service from everywhere else (so that nobody has to make a connection) ends up as a confusing tangle of hundreds of overlapping lines, few of which are frequent enough to rely on or simple enough to remember. 

But once you decide to offer free connections, you face challenges.  Rail rapid transit systems usually let you change trains behind the faregates without paying another fare, but surface transit systems (bus, rail or ferry) struggle with how to encourage transfers without encouraging fare evasion.  If you give paying passengers a transfer slip providing a free ride on a connecting service, you get all kinds of abuse: people who don't need the transfer slip sometimes sell it, or give it away, or simply drop it where someone else can find it, and ride free.

The blog of Vancouver's transit agency TransLink, called The Buzzer, recently featured this 1974 explanation of "transfer regulations" in that city, as printed on the route map. It's a nice example of the kind of regulation that was common at that time.

Note how much complexity follows from trying to insist that transfer slips must be used only for connections, and that you must not do anything else while connecting. The authors have thought of everything you could conceivably do that isn't exactly what they intend, and are resolved to prohibit all of it in meticulous detail.

Fortunately, not many transit agencies take this tone with their customers anymore.   

There seem to be three defensible approaches to connection-pricing, at least in the North American and Australasian contexts where I work:

• One is to stop giving transfer slips, but instead sell a reasonably priced day pass.  This is now common in parts of the US, especially in the sunbelt.  With a day pass, you charge a bit more and in return you give up trying to control how the slip is used.   Of course, this is still unfair to people making spontaneous one-time trips, which are, in my view, a pretty foundational element of healthy urban life.  
• An intermediate approach, modeled by AC Transit in Oakland, is to provide a transfer slip for a nominal extra charge, such as 25 cents.  This is supposed to deter people who don't need one from taking them, and thus reducing the number that are discarded where others can pick them up and use them. 
• The third approach, which I have to say I prefer, is to take a deep breath and just not worry about it. Give out free transfer slips because the design of your system is based on encouraging connections.  Treat the transfer slip as a 90-minute or two-hour pass, good for unlimited rides within that short period.  Do what you can to discourage them from being sold or transferred, but don't try to control how they're used by the person to whom they're issued.  If someone can make a quick round trip in that time, or do a stopover, then that's fine.  Portland's TriMet, Vancouver's TransLink and San Francisco Muni all do this, as do the integrated networks in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia.  In all these places, and many more, a base fare buys you unlimited use for 90-120 minutes with the fare zones specified.

Of course, there are lots of other kinds of connection-pricing policy out there, including a range of partial policies and non-policies, and it all gets much more complicated where there are multiple entangled transit operators watching their own balance sheets, and no citywide agency with the power to co-ordinate them. 

Many of the security problems around transfer slips should disappear in the new era of smartcards.  A good GPS-based smartcard system will know that you got off another transit vehicle nine minutes ago, so it will be able to determine whether you should be charged a new fare when you board the next one.  It will be interesting to see whether agencies that still have fare penalties for connections take the opportunity to elminate them.  It will still be politically hard: if you eliminate your connection penalty without raising the base fare, your revenue will tick downward.  If you raise the base fare to compensate, lazy journalists will do stories about your evil fare increase, ignoring the larger fairness of the change.

But one thing is true everywhere, because it's a matter of geometry: if you want frequency and simplicity in your network, you have to encourage connections.  So any pricing scheme that penalizes connections, or that shrouds them with punitive rules like this 1974 policy, is in conflict with those basic goals.

guangzhou abandons free-fare experiment

Guangzhou, the southern Chinese megacity that is to host the 2010 Asian Games this month, has abandoned a plan to offer free public transit while the Games are on. 

The plan was to ban half of all of the city's private cars from the road each day (using an "even-odd rule," a scheme by which certain license plates can be used only on certain days), and also to ban traffic unrelated to the Games from certain roads.  In return, public transit would be free during the Games. 

The problem?  The same one that you have when you give away valuable road space for free.  Congestion -- or as we call it in transit, overcrowding.  If you don't pay in money, you pay in time.  From Life of Guangzhou:

However, the even-odd rule, together with free rides on buses, subways and ferries, has caused a huge surge in public transportation, especially in subways, in this city of 14 million people.

Temporary traffic controls were introduced in at least eight subway stations during peak time on Monday due to the huge passenger flow, sources with the local metro company said.

"This is the most people that I've seen in the subway. It took me 20 more minutes than usual to get to the office," said Huang Chunhong, a local white-collar worker.

"It's like a nightmare to get into a train. Many people are forced to use public transit due to the even-odd license plate rule. How can I go through the next two months?" Huang said.

So they're backing off.  From Xinhua:

Now, officials with Guangzhou's transportation authorities said they had to rescind the offer as more than 8 million passengers took the subway on an average day beginning November 1, a figure "much, much higher" than the subway system was designed to carry. 

Average daily ridership when fares were charged was 3.8 million, so the free fare caused a doubling of demand. 

Guangzhou authorities plan to roll back the free-day scheme on Nov. 8 and replace it with a cash subsidy program in which each household in Guangzhou will receive 150 yuan as a transportation subsidy from the government.

Fares are the source of so much controversy and hassle that it's always tempting to try to make them free.  A quick scan of "success stories" in this regard shows the pattern:  You can do it in rural areas and small cities where demand is low.  You can do it in university-dominated towns, where students are most of the market and are riding anyway.  And you can do it in a downtown area, specifically to make short trips within downtown easy. 

In each of those cases, you're giving away something for which you anticpate low demand, and for which you have adequate supply.

But citywide free transit in a big city, especially during the peak commute, is the opposite.  You're giving away something that is in high demand, and for which you have a limited supply. 

You could also design and scale a transit service from the beginning with the intent that it be free.  New York's Staten Island Ferry comes to mind, along with many specialized shuttles and most elevators.  Many road networks, of course, have been designed and scaled with exactly this intention.

But if you propose to just eliminate the fares on an existing big-city transit system, the answer is always the same:  Even while charging a fare, big city transit is crowded during the peak.  Inevitably, you don't have enough buses and trains to handle the flood of ridership that would result from free fares.  Now, thanks to Guangzhou, we can see the same point proven in practice.

Could a big city transition gradually to totally free fares?  Sure, but only in the sense that an American city could build 100 mi of subways in the next decade: i.e. if money were no object.  If you assume that eliminating fares would double ridership -- including on the peak -- then you'd have to double your fleet, double your workforce, and duplicate any track or roadway that's already congested with full trains or buses.  In most big cities, that would mean duplicating downtown subway lines and stations, which is at least as expensive as building new ones, if the space to do it exists at any price.  Would you save a small bundle on fare equipment and staffing?  Sure.  Would that be enough to pay for all that new capacity?  Not even close.

guest post: aaron renn on universal fare media

(Aaron Renn, who writes The Urbanophile, is an opinion-leading urban affairs analyst, consultant, and speaker, based in the US Midwest.)

When I'm at home, I ride bus and rail transit about equally.  But when I travel to a new city, I travel on rail systems frequently, but almost never use the bus.  Why?

For me, while I know how transit systems generally work, the specifics of fares and fare media are different from place to place. I know that if I show up at a rail station there is likely to be a station house where I can look at maps, read about fares and rules, and use nice machines with step by step instructions for purchasing tickets or other fare media. 

On the bus, by contrast, often it's difficult to find route maps and fare information at a stop, and if you board a bus you must have exact change if you don't already have some type of fare media. This can cause a lot of embarrassment and irritation, particularly if you are holding up boarding or delaying the bus departure because you don't know how it works. I generally decide discretion is the better part of valor and skip the bus.

A plan out of London could possibly help eliminate part of the problems with the bus for out of town visitors.  Transport for London, along with various other agencies around the world like the NY MTA and Chicago's CTA, are looking to replace their current proprietary and expensive to operate fare card systems with open fare media based on the same types of payment options available in the marketplace.  Transport for London would like to see these efforts coordinated, such as the resulting systems would share an open architecture that would allow you to use the same fare media in all of the cities.

This would eliminate one of the major barriers to riding the bus in an unfamiliar city.  With my fully charged Chicago fare medium, I could board with confidence, not having to worry about exact change or unknown types of ticketing systems. Even if signage does not improve, my mobile phone probably will, allowing me even easier access to transit info than I have today. Hopefully, this combination will make it much less intimidating for people to ride buses in unfamiliar cities.

good question of the week: transfer penalties

A frequent commenter on HT asks this in an email (the links are mine, not his):

On Second Avenue Sagas, one of the discussions went on a tangent that left me wondering about transfer penalties. If you need to walk from one station to another on the street to transfer, do the ridership models assign a higher penalty than if there's an enclosed corridor between the stations? In addition, for systems that have faregates, is there an extra penalty for transfers that require exiting and reentering?

Modeling can be a murky business, and I'm definitely not a modeler.  But the bottom line is that the factors used in a ridership model have to be based on some sort of reality, and the reality of North America and Australasia is that most connections are not especially pleasant or easy, especially when there are fare penalities or delay-inducing features such as fare gates.  Ease of connection varies a lot from one situation to another based on factors that are hard to model -- not just walking distances but things like street crossings, vertical circulation systems (stairs or escalator?  elevator?), and of course fare co-ordination.  Improvements in other areas can make a big difference.  Smartcards, for example, are faster and easier to use than magnetic strip tickets, which must be manually inserted in a slot; these should make connecting easier.

So my guess is that it's hard to model transfer penalities very exactly.  But let me pass on the question to all the anonymous modeling professionals that are reading.  What's your answer to this reader's question?  If you're working in North America, do your transfer penalties consider very high-quality transfers, such as the cross-platform connections that often occur in European subways?  BART in the San Francisco Bay Area may know something about this, since they do have a cross-platform connection in Oakland, though it's only used for low-demand trip pairs and so may not offer sufficient robust information.  Agencies that do a lot of timed-transfer among buses, especially at island stations where no street crossings are required, may also know something about this. 

Modelers!  If you're not comfortable posting a comment here, send me an email, and I'll use it anonymously.