(12-17-2015, 01:40 PM)MidTowner Wrote: I don't know what GRT's farebox recovery rate is, but I seem to recall it's in the high thirty percent range. I do know that their goal is to increase it to 50%.
Roads are by and large funded through property taxes paid regardless of the extent to which someone might use them. So maybe transit should be funded the same way. But I don't think the former case is right- roads should be to a much greater extent be paid for through tools like gas or vehicle distance traveled taxes (or, even better, direct tolls where it makes sense).
I've read that Tallinn's program hasn't significantly increased ridership. And I've also read suggestions that fare-free transit decreases user's sense of ownership of the system, with some unpleasant results (increased vandalism, that kind of thing). I don't know. I'm personally generally of the mind that giving people pricing cues (by charging them something, even if a far cry from the true cost) probably results in more efficient usage. Hey, maybe the sweet spot is to charge transit users enough to cover the costs of the fare collection system.
Not here... I think prices would have to be too high to get 100% farebox recovery at this point, and yeah it would cause problems for the lower income users. Farebox recovery for GRT was about 37% in 2010, so we'd be talking about an almost 3-fold increase.
With smaller, lower density cities, the problem is that in order to provide a reasonable level of coverage, you need to run a lot of buses that are largely empty. On some routes the buses will be well used, but others not. The goal would be to increase ridership to the point where the buses are more full, and tripling fares will probably reduce ridership significantly... if tripling fares causes ridership to decrease 10 fold and only allows GRT to cut costs by 50% while adjusting to lower ridership levels for example, farebox recovery isn't improving. Not to mention the various consequences that the region will have to pay for in other ways like more traffic and reduced mobility.
Edit: Just realized I misread your post.