Last week, Rita Haskin of SamTrans/Caltrain gave a presentation about the MTC process for Clipper 2.0 requirements gathering.
Some good news with regard to ideas for increased fare integration. The MTC committees are considering station (distance?) based fares and a ride accumulator model, where instead of a monthly pass, you ride until you reach a fare limit.
With regard to fare integration ideas such as a regional day pass, Haskin’s perspective is that it would cost too much to have a fare that covered the maximum possible usage. Asked whether it would be possible to do statistical analysis to set fares that would cover more likely cases on average, Haskin commented that “we are mass transit agencies” – cross-regional travel is rare enough that it is probably not worth it to create fares that encourage cross-regional travel. Besides, cross-regional service is so poor that integrated fares would help only minimally to encourage use.
Haskin commented that ideas for fare integration that would increase ridership might not be seen favorably, since some transit services are at capacity. (This perspective does not consider regional growth, climate goals, freeway congestion, or planned transit improvements between now and 2019 when the system will go live.)
The process is converging fairly rapidly with input from the transit agencies and their formal advisory committees. The Mission and Vision have already been set, and the agency task forces are now working on goals and objectives. There is only 1-2 months left to have an impact on the goals and objectives of the project. The Clipper 2.0 project does not yet yet have any processes to take input from stakeholders other than transit groups, and would need board guidance to do so.
The next board review step is at the BART board on Thursday April 24 – if you want to see more rider input, sent a quick note to the BART board to give this guidance today.
If you want to see deeper regional integration with Clipper, sign this petition.
Station/distance-based fares are long overdue for Caltrain. The 13.5-mile zone system is grossly uneven and unfair in that very short one- or two-station-stop trips across a zone boundary cost the same as far longer trips spanning the length of two entire zones (e.g. Redwood City to San Francisco is 25.4 miles). This has long made Caltrain cost-prohibitive for those whose short trips happen to cross Caltrain’s arbitrarily-placed fare zone boundaries. So those folks self-select themselves off Caltrain.
I’m not sure what is meant by the “accumulator model” however, but it sounds very troubling if it means abandoning the all-you-can-ride time-based tickets such as day-, week- or month-passes. (Yes, I know, Caltrain does not currently have week or year passes … but could and probably should since it should be trivially easy to “load” a Clipper Card with a pass valid for any number of days across a selected station pair.)
Ms. Haskin’s comment about anything that would boost transit ridership would be viewed negatively due to capacity problems is just sad. Welcome to the United States, land of championship-winning transit dysfunction.
An accumulator means a day, week, or month pass – but you don’t need to decide in advance. You just keep riding and the price is capped once you hit the day, week or month limit. This is very good and sensible as far as I can tell.
What is *not* on the table yet is a regional accumulator – if you go from the Peninsula to Oakland and back during a day, you might pay 4 different agencies without limit.
Okay, so the accumulator does sound good since it means riders don’t have figure out (and “gamble”) up front whether the more costly all-you-can-ride time-based pass will be a better deal over pay-as-you-go.
I say “gamble”, because sometimes you don’t ride as much as you had thought you would when buying a pass and wind up spending more than if you had stuck with pay-as-you-go.
[…] Update on Development of Clipper “2.0″ Fare Integration (Green Caltrain) […]
Short distance trip will not have impact on capacity, since they are OK to stand for 5~10 min travel. Even they occupy some seats, those will be available for next passenger few minutes later.
In addition, short distance trip should provide more profit since revenue per mile is higher than long distance passenger.