Sallee on King's Free Ride
Rad Sallee follows up Bill King's "Free Metro" proposal with a rather quick shooting down:
King writes that Capitol Metro in Austin eliminated fares and saw ridership jump 75 percent. He doesn't mention that after 15 months the agency began charging for rides again. (Its popular 'Dillo shuttles, however, remain free.)Chronicle clips from 1991 mention a 50 percent ridership boost in Austin, along with major negatives.
"Some say the buses increasingly are filled with street people who annoy regular patrons and schoolchildren who jump on and off the buses every few blocks," one story said.
Other complaints included crime, people using the buses as a place to sleep, slowdowns caused by frequent stops, and buses that wouldn't stop because they were already full.
King notes that Metro's light rail plans have become embroiled in a lawsuit over a route on Richmond and other alleged violations of the voters' wishes, and he says correctly that other lawsuits are likely.
But he doesn't mention the lawsuits that could follow if Metro abandoned the rail that it promised voters.
"The nice thing about the idea is that it is not irrevocable," King wrote. "If it does not result in the hoped for benefits, we can always reverse course and try something else."
Can we? It's become increasingly difficult for cities to get federal funding for rail transit in recent years, and there's little evidence that this would be easier five to 10 years from now, if the free ride experiment failed.
And judging from the Federal Transit Administration's recent actions, Metro would have to start over at square one. All those public hearings and all that environmental work might have to be redone.
I have to admit to being open to hearing King out for his all-but-announced 2009 Mayoral campaign. But seeing this idea fall so flat on the common-sense and fact-checking level don't exactly instill confidence. Granted, it may not exactly disqualify him from the other contenders, but still. And be that as it may, the idea may have more merit on select-use concepts, like if there's any air quality measure to decide by, or even just as the occasional "try it out" mode which Metro has been known to try on a very limited basis in the past.
Kuff adds a few more cents to the dialog, notably pointing out that rail shouldn't be viewed as an either-or in this discussion. To that, I agree wholeheartedly.
Lastly, fellow blogger, Peter Wang gets some run in Sallee's column, too.
Greg,
I want to let you and readers know that my free-fare proposal was not made flippantly. There are a number of free-fare studies in the transit literature. Most are ambivalent as to the probable benefits. These studies rely on standard elasticity models that projects a 3-4% change for every 10% change in the fare amount. Thus, those articles conclude that eliminating the fares will result in a 30-40% increase. I also had HGAC run its sensitivity model which came out in the mid-20s and had TTI and Bob Stein at Rice check my numbers. San Francisco shows increases of about 50% on its free-fare days. All of the ridership numbers for Metro came directly from them.
I have copies of the internal reviews that Austin did after there roughly 15-month experiment in 1990-1991. Their internal report shows a 76% increase in ridership during that period. It also shows a 200% increase security incidents in the initial months. By the end of the free-fare trial, the security incidents were down to about 20% more than the pre-free-fare period and actually lower on a per rider basis. I talked to several individuals familiar with this attempt and they indicated that had Capitol Metro better anticipated the security issues, they would not have been such a serious problem.
Austin discontinued the service based on several factors. One of the principal reasons was that while the program increased ridership, it did not bring many new riders to the system. That is, the increase was mostly from existing customers using the buses more frequently. Since one of Capitol Metro’s principal motives was acquiring new riders, they did not consider the experiment a success. This combined with bad publicity from the early security problems and financial pressures convinced its board to start charging fares again.
It seems less significant to me if the increase in ridership comes from existing riders or new riders. Either way it is one less car on the road. I think it is also critical to note that at that time Capitol Metro did not offer a suburban-oriented Park & Ride system as does Metro. The models seem to suggest that most of the increased ridership (and congestion relief) would come on these lines. It also seems unlikely that these lines would have the kind of security issues that Austin’s primarily inner city bus service had.
I have a lot of respect for Rad and read his column regularly. However, this is a subject that I have been studying for months.
As I said in the editorial, we clearly do not know exactly how this would play out. It might be a boon or a boondoggle. But we won’t know unless we try.
Bill King