In addition to proposing a small sales tax increase to expand bus service, King County is also proposing to raise bus fares by an average of 75 cents over the next decade. That got me scratching my head about the bizarre way that we price bus rides. The incentives are precisely the reverse of what they should be.
Leaving aside discounts for children, seniors, and the disabled, the fare structure is pretty simple. You pay $1.25 for a ride anywhere in King County. But if you ride during peak hours—i.e. commuting hours—then you pay $1.50 if you stay in one zone (within the city of Seattle, say) and $2.00 if you travel through two zones (like from downtown to Redmond). But why on earth should riders pay more during commuting hours? If anything, riding the bus during the commute should be cheaper.
The cost of running a bus is essentially the same whether it is carrying 1 passenger or 100. Fuel economy doesn’t vary (much) with additional passengers. The driver’s wage doesn’t change. Neither do the operational costs of maintenance, bus storage, and so on. What varies is the revenue.
Imagine a city bus during the day with 10 riders each paying $1.25. The fare box is collecting $12.50. But during commuting hours if 40 people get on the bus paying the same fare, then the fare box is taking in $50. And because commuters actually pay more, $1.50 per ride, the fare box is taking in $60 to provide the same service that it was providing earlier in the day for less than one-quarter of the revenue.
Instead, why shouldn’t commuters collectively pay the same as the daytime riders—$12.50? That would mean that each commuter paid just 31 cents apiece. Even if each commuter paid 50 cents, for a total of $20, the commuters would still be a windfall to the bus company.
Of course one reason why the price is higher is that raising the price during high-demand hours is a good way for bus companies to generate revenue. But the added revenue comes with a cost: fewer people ride the bus.
And that’s related to a second reason why it costs more to commute by bus: an age-old transportation planning principle called congestion pricing. Raise the price for a desirable good—such as a freeway lane during rush hour—and the economic principle of demand elasticity says that fewer people will use the good, thereby reducing congestion. This works pretty well in practice. When faced with higher costs a certain number of people will change their behavior—driving during non-expensive hours, switching transportation modes, or avoiding trips.
Unfortunately, congestion pricing for buses works just as effectively. People stop riding the bus at precisely the time when bus riding is most convenient. Commuting is, in fact, the ideal form of travel for buses.
Because jobs are often clustered in centers, commute trips are easier to serve with transit than are the diffuse trips to stores, friends, or recreation. And because the parking costs in job center are often high, commuters are already willing to try other forms of travel besides driving. And commuters normally don’t need to carry much—at most just lunch and gym clothes—as they do when they travel to, say, the grocery store. Commute trips represent only about one-quarter of all trips, but they are the easiest trips for people to get people out of their cars.
Cities and counties ought to have a large interest in getting people to ride the bus. Buses are easily one of the most energy-efficient, space-efficient, congestion-efficient, city-friendly, cheapest, and safest modes of commuting. When it’s most practical to do so, bus riding ought to be encouraged, even—dare I say it—subsidized. But under the current pricing system, the fare box is actually used as a disincentive to getting on the bus. Raising the price, as King County is proposing to do, just makes the problem worse.
Rodney
Yes, the fare structure in the Puget Sound area is crazy. Peak/off-peak, multiple zones, adult fares start at 18 on KCMetro but 19 on SoundTransit.We need a unified transit policy organization. I was hopeful that Sound Transit would take this role, but they’ve failed to do so…instead, they’ve just created yet another set of policies.Instead of peak-hour pricing, I would suggest one fare all the time. However, in off-peak hours, two should be able to ride for the price of one. In addition to encouraging more off-peak use, it would help introduce new people to riding the bus that might not otherwise. (i.e., “Hey, I’ve got a pass—want to ride along?”)The ride free zone in downtown makes it even more confusing: pay when you get on, unless you’re leaving downtown on a bus that started its run before 7pm—then you pay when you get off. The original intent of the ride free zone was to speed-up loading of busses through downtown by eliminating pocket-digging/fare-paying time on the valuable real estate of downtown streets. Instead, we should have transit ticket vending machines throughout the existing ride free area to expedite in-city bus loading. Payment could still be allowed on the bus as long as there was some incentive to use the machines (i.e. perhaps a discount to those who pay at the vending machine).There is one aspect that is good about congestion pricing on busses: to maximize revenue when all your busses are full anyway. On one hand, it means that perhaps they should buy more busses; on the other hand, busses are expensive, especially if they’re only used for four trips per day (although they’ll probably last forever since they won’t have many miles on them!) Then again, congestion pricing doesn’t work on the most congested routes anyway because most riders on these routes have bus passes, effectively negating the effect of congestion pricing.
Steve Mooney
Of course, there’s another way of looking at this: the bus has more *value* at commute times, too. During off-peak hours, there’s much less congestion to bypass via HOV lanes or at least to ignore while reading a book. So Metro recoups more of the customer’s value by charging more.Devil’s advocating aside, I actually agree with you—anything that makes fewer people take the bus when the roads are most congested is probably a bad thing from the transportation system’s point of view.
Anonymous
Buses are pretty packed at peak commute times. I’d say bus fares are just priced by demand at this point. If they lower fares, then more people might ride the bus, but then Metro somehow needs to come up with some cash to buy more buses to keep up with the demand. Plus – how many commuters are really paying full price for their commutes by bus? Almost all the bus riders I see at peak commute times are paying with a company subsidized bus pass (and these are way discounted for businesses )What we really should be talking about is why pass sales for individuals riding the bus are so expensive? A one zone peak $1.50 pass for a month is $54 (36 rides to break even) which means that you really need to be riding the bus every day to work for it to be worth your while. If you sometimes take an off peak bus then you might not even break even purchasing the pass. The pass fare structure is absolutely terrible for people that commute by bike and bus like me. Since I cross 520 (which means 2 zones) and take just about any bus going across the bridge I can pay anywhere from $1.25 to $2.50 to ride the bus. I’d buy a pass if I could avoid having to carry cash or if I saved money, both of which aren’t true right now. A $2.50 yearly pass (the ideal pass for me since I wouldn’t need to carry any change) is $990. Now my employer can get one of these passes for $43 (since the company I work for is located in Kirkland), but they need to provide bus passes for everyone in the company which they aren’t inclined to do since the majority of people drive to work. The total to provide passes to 50 employees is $2150, but for the three of us at work that actually take the bus it would cost us $2970 for individual passes. It just doesn’t add up. Individual bus passes should be priced much cheaper to encourage people to commute by bus. Forget the one ride fares prices. You want people to commit to bus riding every day and the best way to do that is to have cheap monthly and yearly passes.
Alan Durning
I think Tanya makes a great point. I’ve always used bus tickets rather than a pass, for exactly her reason. I bike sometimes, bus sometimes, and often don’t commute according to a routine. So an individually purchased pass is expensive. (I actually just bought one for the first time last month. Being carless for the next year at least, I’ll use it for enough noncommute trips, and let other family members use it for their trips, that it pencils out. The other problem is that if you lose an annual bus pass—not hard to do, since it’s small and you must carry it constantly—you’re out some serious money.)