Spot on. More points to consider:
The More people that use transit, the less congested the roads are. Giving a benefit to those that do not use it.
good transit give people access to jobs that they may not otherwise be able to get to. Hibbing them more opportunities and less depended not on welfare and food stamps.
Ranting about free fares, or reduced fares as a handout is not looking at the big picture.
Though I agree that to increase ridership, they need to focus on frequency and service.
But we are trying to figure out the best way to get a robust transit system. Whether making it a free shuttle is the right goal is questionable at the very least. Might make it doomed to nicheness without any advocacy for making its coverage thorough. Coverage and speed are probably the most important aspects to make the system beneficial.
We have that to it’s called the wolf line, captive audience.
Free fares is short sighted, it’s not a strategic transit plan. Is a scam for politicians and activist groups, period. It can be part of the plan but not the PLAN.
Looking at freebies for a transit plan is surely short sighted and pretty dumb IMHO. It’s not the point, the point is it is not being done for a reason of helping people, it’s helping CERTAIN people who have an agenda to ultimately take care of themselves. read the real truth about Seattle transit and you will get it, if you want to.
I’m not advocating for free fares. I think there are lots of other issues with Raleighs transit system that needs to be address. I was just pointing out some counterpoints to it being just a handout.
I mean at the end of the day everything the government spends money on is other people’s money. Schools, libraries, roads, police and fire, and transit, among others.
Not everybody will use everything all the time. The point is we need to tweak what’s the right balance rather than just step on the gas all the way to the floor on any one budget item, and say hey let’s make this free.
It’s never free It’s my money and your money paying it So somebody else doesn’t have to pay. There’s merit to having a well-balanced budget. Which is what political leaders run on and either get in office and have votes to enact their vision or they don’t.
I’m in the employment sector for my career, And especially around here there’s still a huge demand for solid workers. People can readily switch jobs and move up without having to have free bus service. If people can’t switch jobs and move up then I question how valuable of an employee they are in the first place, And those aren’t people I need to be giving “freebies” to…Those are people who need to work on improving their work ethic If they have no career options.
“Traffic” here is nothing compared to most cities, So realistically not much benefit if any about having marginal fewer people on the roads. My 2 cents
Ok. I don’t really care. If it works, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t. Just don’t weigh a salutary benefit as a negative.
I still think it’s a negative. It changes the focus on the system to the wrong argument and makes the whole thing a political and fiscal football before it even gets off the ground. We need a comprehensive plan that gets the most support possible.
Just a quick note that our free city streets and toll free Interstate highways aren’t free either.
Let’s make one thing clear: neither the city, county, nor CAMPO have committed to making all buses in Raleigh free to board. It’s just saying we should look into it and seriously learn if it’s a helpful or stupid idea.
Could we go back to my original post that seemed to make everyone flip out?
Emphasis on the last word: PILOTS. This is talking about doing a proposed experiment based on last year’s study about this.
If the slides’ constant branding didn’t make it clear, business leaders at the RTA, not some dark cabal of left-wing activists, are behind the current push for regionwide zero-fare buses. They even wrote a business- and money-based argument about this back in 2019.
To be clear, I’m not sure how I feel about making Wake County’s buses free to ride. I personally think the equity arguments make sense, but there’s no evidence to say if that and the practical benefits are worth the revenue loss in Raleigh.
…and this makes me think it’s worth an experiment. When something is uncertain enough to have arguments about it, why don’t we just test it out and find out what the science says?
The Wake County Transit Plan already decided that it prefers to allocate the majority of resources on increasing ridership (over coverage over a wide geographic area). It also elected to put more emphasis on faster, direct services with fewer stops (versus having more, slower services with less-efficient stops).
These are two of 4 trade-offs people need to choose about their favored transit system. This turns out to be a conversation about personal values and philosophy -and one that the county already surveyed residents about. See this post from last month for a summary of the Plan update, including the latest plan’s data on this exact topic.
I agree with you, in principle, that the best plan is a realistic and pragmatic one. But I think this is a case where reality kind of forces our hands.
Remember that we’re not talking about a sovereign state with fiat currency, but CAMPO through its Wake Transit initiative. Their short/mid-range transit plans are required by federal law to be fiscally constrained.
This means you can’t just make an infinitely long wish list of project and figure out how to fund each item as they go. Every planned project needs cost estimates as well as revenue sources to back them up.
You’re absolutely right, and it is redistribution of wealth!
…so? That’s the whole societal purpose of taxes.
I agree that there’s a point with public transit (and other problems) where you’d only get diminishing returns from your tax allocations. But isn’t that just a sign that we need information to know where that boundary is?
In case y’all didn’t already know, you can hide text within your posts by typing
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Transit good at some things and not so good at other things, but regardless of what you think of it (wasteful boondoggle subsidy, versus virtuous social justice win, urban planning panacea, and climate change cure all wrapped up into one), one thing that transit is really good at, everywhere in the world, is getting people to jobs or activities in a downtown area without having to bring a car.
A Downtown Raleigh that is well served by frequent, fast, reliable transit is a better Downtown Raleigh. Getting more people downtown without cars makes downtown a better place, because:
If Downtown Raleigh is worth “subsidizing” with things like convention centers, nice parks like Moore Square or even Dix, performing arts centers, possibly arenas, “focal” streets like Fayetteville, or even public parking decks, in order to make it a better place, then certainly some amount of subsidy" is worth it for transit, since it disproportionately benefits downtown as well.
Given the fact that we are all on this forum I think we can mostly probably agree that we want downtown Raleigh to be as nice as it can be. If planning and development downtown goes on essentially assuming a 1:1 person to car ratio, Raleigh’s downtown will never clear a certain plateau. It will cost too much for developers to build nice things, and all the activity will be too spread out by dead zones of parking and hazardous roads with rushing rivers of heavy traffic between.
Cities of Raleigh’s size can have functional transit. Look at Calgary. We’re a long way from that, but that just means there is plenty of room for improvement. Let’s do it.
I think the zero fare pilot is a nonstarter for now. The agencies just used a healthy chunk of Wake Transit money to contract with a smart card/mobile fare payment platform and will want to see how that shakes out when fare collection resumes before entertaining the idea of a fare-free program. We also spent (wasted?) quite a bit of time trying to align each agency’s fares to be consistent with one another. At the very least, that would’ve added to ridership and customer satisfaction just through streamlining until COVID knocked us on our butts.
But long term I wouldn’t be so flippant as to dismiss the fare-free idea entirely. Not only does this area’s farebox recovery (aka the percentage of expenses you recoup via fares) barely make a drop in the bucket, there is an expense to the actual process of collecting fares. This includes maintenance and upgrades of fareboxes. There is one company in the country that is a major player in the farebox game, Genfare, and they act and price their services accordingly for being the only major player. You also need to staff coin counters, procure armored trucks, order and service ticket machines like at GoRaleigh station. It’s certainly a process.
What you will see, when the time comes, is BRT priced higher than the rest of the bus system. Whether that’s through 1.25 for local/2.50 for BRT or something like free for local/1.25 for BRT, we’ll see. High capacity modes like BRT, LRT, and HRT also typically have higher farebox recovery already.
I swore I remembered someone committing somewhere that BRT wouldn’t have a different fare but maybe I’m imagining that.
You’re correct! It’s not just a random internet comment, but it’s the city itself promising that BRT would have the same fare as “regular” buses.
They’ve been mentioning this since the pre-planning stages of the BRT projects -long before the four corridors were split into their own projects. It still says so on the city’s Q&A on the topic:
I am curious about how much commuter rail would cost vs. the fare for the DRX/CRX today. I would imagine there would be a major price difference there.
That’s news to me! But I’m not involved in the BRT stuff
I’m curious too, but I don’t think we’ll know anytime soon. GTCR is way too early in the planning process for financial estimates, and we don’t know how much of a fit Norfolk Southern will put up.
I think the only reasons Raleigh’s BRTs have a defined cost are because:
They got far enough in the planning process. To make a solid budget estimate, you need to define your corridor, have rough engineering concepts, and stakeholder agreements to plan. The BRT project figured out their fiscal needs in 2016-2019 since they really only had to meet the city and NCDOT’s project requirements. GTCR, though, is still stuck at the part where they’re figuring this out since they have to please more people.
GoRaleigh just decided to make it an acceptance criteria. Once the project planning process started, they chose rules for what makes up an “acceptable” outcome, and an identical fare is one of those constraints. We obviously don’t have local rail service around here, so it makes no sense to just pick a number out of a hat and stick to it.
Oh I know, just a rhetorical question for the time being
I listened to a webinar at lunch today with Julie White, who is the NCDOT secretary of multi-modal transportation. She seemed pretty optimistic about the S-Line and thought that we could at least get a Wake Forest-Raleigh segment added to the Raleigh-Charlotte route up and running in the next 5-10 years (she mentioned that the NCDOT rail division is involved with the steering committee for the Garner-Durham commuter rail line and said that she thought GoTriangle was doing a “good job”, take that however you want haha)