Sun 16 Jul 2006
When I ride the bus, it usually costs me $1.50 in the morning and $1.25 on the return trip — even though I’m going the same distance on the same exact route. The reason for this is that King County Transit has decided in all their wisdom and glory that rush hour trips should cost more than non-rush hour trips. This makes sense from a business perspective, you want to match your busiest times with your highest prices so that you can smooth out labour costs. However, we’re not dealing with business, we’re dealing with public transit — and for this circumstance King County Transit has it completely backwards.
The point of government being involved in managing city transit is that it makes sense for a large public institution to build and provide the infrastructure that everyone can use free of charge (except for taxes). Once the infrastructure is in place people will be able to live there, businesses will thrive, and so forth — all but the most shrill and ignorant libertarian agrees with this point of view. And people generally accept this for roads but at least in most North American cities they are hesitant to pay for trains and buses. The cost of roads of borne and given to the public for free, except that people wanting to use transit have to pay a monthy or trip-based user fee and for many people they except these fees to make money or at least break even. As if this part of transit infrastructure isn’t somehow as worthy of investment compared with the relatively more inefficient road system?
But whatever, that’s the culture here and I suppose I’ve got to accept it. But when I see them charge extra money for peak hour usage I really have to wonder: why are they trying to discourage people from going to work on the bus? Even from the perspective of someone who never rides the bus at all, each person they can convince to train or bus or whatever will be one less person clogging the roads they use every day. If anything, the situation should be reversed and people should pay less money to ride at rush hour, not more. Bah. I’ll pay the extra quarter, I don’t really care about the money all that much. In fact I pre-paid a set of $1.50 tickets so none of this actually matters, except the principle of the thing.
July 16th, 2006 at 10:24pm
Translink here in Greater Vancouver more or less does the same thing. The “zone” fare system means that, for example, going from Vancouver to Surrey costs $4.50 during the day, but only $2.25 after 6:30pm or on the weekend. If memory serves, Translink’s previous incarnation, BC Transit, used to have a reduced fare during the late morning and early afternoon before rush hour started again, but people found this pricing system confusing, so Translink only rolled with cheaper fares in the evening or on weekends.
July 17th, 2006 at 11:23am
Seattle also has a zone system, though the zones are so big you usually don’t notice it unless you commute from an entirely different city.
Also, the peak-time “labor costs” are bullcrap because the buses don’t run any more often during peak time than any other time. Also since during peak time more people are using the bus (by definition) they ALREADY get extra income just because of the extra volume.
I don’t really care either, though, since Amazon buys me a yearly FlexPass.
July 17th, 2006 at 11:38am
fluffy: the labour costs come into effect because to hire enough labour to meet peak traffic times you need to pay the drivers for a day’s wage which means that they will be sitting idle during non-peak hours. So if you can get more people to use the system on non-peak hours and offload them into the times where less people are using them, you’ll have a smoother schedule so you’re running fewer buses and running less empty buses in non-peak hours while delivering equivalent service.
But the difference is that transit is NOT a business. The above works very well for things that people have a choice on, like electricity usage where you can use pricing to try to get people to use their dishwashers/washing machines/etc at non-peak hours to save money. But for transit, you start work at a certain time and you likely have little control over what that is. And because of these pseudo-fixed schedules it makes more sense to treat this as infrastructure investment and try to get more people riding the bus to reduce stress on the roads, which should mean CHEAPER rush hour prices instead of more expensive. Hell, make it free during those hours by giving out free rush hour bus passes to businesses to give to employees who commute during those hours.
Bah.
Joey: Good point, I never thought of it that way but the same basic point applies.
July 17th, 2006 at 7:52pm
fluffy: Really? Seattle doesn’t add extra buses during rush hour? That totally sucks.
Translink is far from perfect, but they have lots of express buses that run out to the suburbs for commuters in various areas only during rush hour – into downtown in the morning, and out of the city in the late afternoon / early evening. And there are a lot more regular buses on the streets at busy times too.
RT: Your transportation policy ideas are intriguing and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.
July 18th, 2006 at 8:30am
Not only do they not add more buses but every other one is an “express,” so if you don’t happen to be at an express stop, you have to wait on average TWICE as long during rush hour. Also depending on where you are on the route this leads to all sorts of other oddness; I live pretty close to an express stop but it’s at a point where the express bus has gotten so far ahead that it shows up at about the same time as the local.