By Matt the Engineer on July 24, 2009
Today I took my first ride on Link. I’m currently a stay-at-home dad, and I took my baby son for a day trip. Since this was around noon, I asked my wife to meet us at Pioneer Station near her work. We were going to ride to King Station, get $1.75 sandwiches, and she’d ride back to work while we rode onward.
Her cost to ride Link one stop and back? $3.50. To get a $1.75 sandwich. It turns out that unlike bus transfers that are good for 90 minutes, Link requires a payment in each direction. There’s even a special section on the ticket vending machine for 2-way downtown only rides – $3.50.
How on earth is this a fair fare? Yes, she can wait for a bus – and actually decided to only ride Link one way to experience it and take the bus back. But since we’re running trains anyway, can’t we just charge some small fee that people would be willing to pay? Say, $0.25 a way. It’s not like it costs ST anything to have these extra riders, and this represents lost income for ST since people will just wait and ride the bus for free.
Posted in roads, ST, Uncategorized
By Frank on September 3, 2008
Catching up on my reading after a long, much needed vacation, and I see we’re going to get treated to not one, but two bus fare hikes in the next couple of years.
I sort of wish there was more predictability to these fare increases, so they didn’t seem to hit people off guard like this. But I guess you can’t plan a budget that way, without knowing what your expenses are going to be.
While bus fares in Seattle are relatively cheap, compared to other cities, I think Metro should try and do something positive with the fare increase to give people the sense that their money is going somewhere besides fuel (which they can’t see). Cleaner buses, for example. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just something.
I’ll have a transit-centric edition of the old “what I did on my Summer vacation” essay coming in the next few days.
Posted in alternative commute, policy, PPP, ST
By Frank on August 6, 2008
I was working up a response to Matt Rosenberg’s piece in Crosscut on buses, but Erica Barnett got there first and says what needed to be said.
Posted in policy, ST
By Frank on January 29, 2008
A press release on KC Metro’s website says:
By 2006, passengers will be able to easily transfer from one system to another without digging in their pockets for extra fares and tickets. It will just take a wave of a “smart card” embedded with a microchip that automatically calculates any fare due. The cards can be reloaded and used indefinitely, and will eliminate the current system of more than 300 types of tickets, passes and tokens.
Well, as you can see, it’s 2008 and the fabled ORCA card is not here yet (and is probably a year or more away). What happened?
Well, KIRO says that the problem could be the contractor, ERG. ERG was recently fired by the city of Sydney, Australia, for completely failing to deliver a smart card for that city, after 5 years of delays.
ERG has pushed back hard, countersuing the city and arguing that it was bureaucratic disinterest and incompetence that doomed the project. The company also designed Hong Kong’s Octopus Card, which by all accounts is incredible successful, so I wouldn’t be so quick to put all the blame on them.
Posted in prosperity, ST
By Frank on January 27, 2008
Neat post at Autopia comparing transit fares in major cities between 1952 and today. Seattle’s still a pretty good deal.
Posted in ST
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