Capital Metro Fare-Free Imperative

 

(photo from Austin History Center)

by G. Gaven

In 1991, bus driver Bob Bovay did a short speech during a Capital Metro Board meeting entitled Punks, Skunks and Drunks. He complained that because bus fares had been suspended, his bus had become overrun with bad riders who made his job harder. With that, bus fares were reimposed and the fare-free era at Metro was over with the exception of a small handful of "ozone action" days and election days. Austin bus driver lore marks this as the one day in human history that the transit authority acquiesced to the union, but according to then Metro Board chair, Stephen Bayer, he lost the vote because of pressure from both anti-tax and pro-train factions on the board and in the community.

After leaving the board, Bayer and Tracor CEO Jim Skaggs crafted the High Performance Bus Plan but by then the board was focused on trains and the plan was dismissed as anti-train.
Enlightened communities started adopting fare-free transit, and in 2008 the Bus Riders Union-ATX proposed another fare-free system. Metro leadership rejected the proposal and instead raised fares.
Fare-free is still as good an idea as ever for equity, the environment and traffic. Bad rider mythology has been debunked by Kansas City's huge reduction in security incidents and increase in driver/passenger rapport.
Early wisdom on fare-free saw it as a no-brainer for small municipalities because fares are an insignificant sliver of the revenue pie. Now larger cities are like Kansas City and Boston, MA are going fareless because they know the benefits outweigh any negligible amount fares represent.
In Austin, not only is fare revenue negligible, it is negative.

Around 2010, I asked then Metro Planning VP, Todd Hemingson how much Metro spends collecting fares. He said he didn't know. Determining how much is difficult. Hardware costs are fairly straightforward but fare collection is systemically integrated and breaking down how much of a driver's or administrator's job is fare related is difficult and often subjective. It is the same for things like bank fees, apparatus maintenance, customer service, and facility maintenance. How much of the Metro Police million dollar budget goes toward fare enforcement? 85% of security incidents are fare-related. Seattle's King County spends $1.7 million dollars on fare enforcement.  Presumably all of the $2.7 million dollars of Metro's Bytemark fare system upgrade are fare related, but how much of the rest of the $27 million dollar IT budget goes to fares? Procurement fluctuates tremendously from year to year and is currently at an all time high at Metro.
An itemized audit would show that Metro spends more collecting fares than it takes in. It would also be costly and add even more to the deficit.
Fortunately, an excellent examination of the cost of fare collection was done in Los Angeles by transit advocates SAJE. Los Angeles compares favorably with Austin modally and demographically. Most importantly they have similar fare recovery ratios, which is the industry's sole metric for all things fare.
They found LA Metro spent $78 million dollars, or 3.5%, of their $2.8 billion dollar operations budget administering and enforcing fares.
Capital Metro collects $11.6 million dollars in fares (passenger revenue minus $7 million dollar UT contribution)
3.5% of Metro's $440 million dollar operations budget is $15.4 million dollars. They're spending $3.8 million dollars more cash than they're taking in.

To this day, Stephen Bayer is the only Metro chair to ever ride the bus. While researching the High Performance Bus Plan, he would ride and measure the amount of dwell time devoted to fare collection with a stopwatch. Dwell time is when a bus or train is in service but motionless for any number of reasons. Motorists might think of it as that time you spend stuck behind the bus. It is huge. Dwell time can be a third of service hours. 
If 98% of Metros dwell time is poorly timed traffic lights and gridlock because Metro riders all have their exact change ready and their fare cards swipe correctly the first time, every time, the 2% caused by fares, at $87.27* dollars per service hour,  is over $4 million dollars.
Together the net loss collecting fares is $7.8 million dollars and probably a lot more.
Fare-free transit is sensible and smart and in Austin it will also be frugal. If Metro is committed to ethical stewardship of public money, they have to do it.

(Figures are from Capital Metro budget unless otherwise cited)

*This is the lowest figure achieved nationwide in 2018, highest over $220