Farecards Revisited

I wanted to talk a bit more about my proposal for a standard nationwide farecard system. The main objectives to this, interrelated, are that changing all the transit systems to have a new farecard system would be expensive and that the actual benefits of doing this would be rather modest.

I completely agree. I wasn't really envisioning a massive outlay to totally change existing systems. But I do think that more uniformity would be better. What I would have in mind would be the creation of a new standard "federal system" that would be based on the existing system of some large city that was willing to cooperate. Then one would hope to see the new standard spread over time. Cities that don't currently have rail systems but are building them could adopt the new standard, as could any city that for whatever reason is considering changes to its bus or rail network that would involve making the switch.

As I'll happily concede, the benefits of doing this would be non-enormous. But I think there would be some benefits, and the cost would be low.

Comments

by "main objectives," do you mean "main objections"?

Posted by jake | July 18, 2008 3:16 PM

Why not just make all subways accept debit cards?

Sk

Posted by Sk | July 18, 2008 3:28 PM

A national farecard would lose its utility if some systems used it and some systems didn't, wouldn't it? That would kind of defeat the purpose. If it was universal, what you would have is a national cap on fares. Seems like a Tragedy of the Commons problem waiting to happen.

Posted by Robert Fiore | July 18, 2008 3:37 PM

You find way too many weirdos on public transit.

Posted by Anon | July 18, 2008 3:40 PM

What sk said. Can't you already use a debit card to get an NYC subway card from a machine? (Or am I remembering my last visit to NYC wrong, which is possible?) Why not just make that more widespread? Or have the turnstiles themselves read debit cards, if that could be made to work fast enough (don't know if it could).

Posted by evil | July 18, 2008 3:45 PM

What I would have in mind would be the creation of a new standard "federal system"

Gross. After the last eight years, you still think more power should be centralized in this country?

Why not take that money and grant it directly to the regional agencies' advertisement, education, and PR departments, for the purpose of explaining and promoting the system to out-of-towners, particularly at the city's entry ports and high-traffic tourist areas?

Then, as Sk said, they can simply exchange money for tickets, like every other system in the world, regardless of how they get the machine to read the little stripe.

Posted by scythia | July 18, 2008 3:48 PM

I'm having trouble getting even a little excited over this idea. I live in the DC area and visit New York a couple times a year. I get a New York farecard when I go. It's not even remotely difficult. Would it be nice if I could wave my Smartrip at the New York turnstiles? Sure, I suppose, but who gives a crap? Did we really need a second blog post on this idea?

Posted by Jake H. | July 18, 2008 3:59 PM

"As I'll happily concede, the benefits of doing this would be non-enormous. But I think there would be some benefits, and the cost would be low. "

The Benefits:

1. A small number of people would reduce the crap in their wallets by 1/32 of an inch for a few weeks out of the year.

That's it. That's the list.

The cost of The Atlantic paying you to think about this issue has already exceeded the net benefit that this could provide over the next twelve centuries.

Posted by Njorl | July 18, 2008 4:00 PM

This actually seems like a reasonable idea. I recently took a business trip to Chicago. Having lived there I knew that I could get to my hotel about a half hour quicker by train than cab. It did not occur to anyone else on the trip to do the same. I suspect they did not want to learn a new system and think of each cities subway systems as something foreign to be avoided.

If the presumption was that the new cities subway system was an extension of the old, I think more people would use it. This may not come up much for each person, but there are a lot of people in this country, and making the subway system more central is not a bad idea.

I still have an IPASS from my time in Chicago. And although it is a different system than the EZPASS that they use in most places, they work interchangeably in each others systems, so there does not appear to be any need for a federalized system for this. Although the subway systems being public, and with the scope invovled federal involvement might be helpful in terms of setting standards.

Posted by Lon | July 18, 2008 4:16 PM

Why not just make all subways accept debit cards?

And buses too? Like I said in the previous thread, the stored-value metro/regional card has plenty going for it, especially if you can use the same card to pay for parking at a park-and-ride station, or buy a cup of coffee and a paper before you get on the train/bus.

A stored-value card also has potentially greater incentives to become established as a standard. (The Dutch ChipKnip is another example.)

Ultimately, you might see standardisation and interoperability because a limited number of companies have the experience and capability to deploy the technology.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 18, 2008 4:48 PM

Some highway toll collection systems (EZ Pass in New York, Fast Lane in Massachusetts) interoperate by agreement between the states involved, so federal involvement may not be necessary.

The MBTA system in the Boston area uses a RFID-based stored-value card like Hong Kong's Octopus. I assume various RFID-based systems could be made to operate.

Posted by alkali | July 18, 2008 5:00 PM

Matthew writes,

Cities that don't currently have rail systems but are building them could adopt the new standard, as could any city that for whatever reason is considering changes to its bus or rail network that would involve making the switch.

For all the reasons explained to you in the other thread, it just doesn't make sense. The benefits would be trivial and the costs would be large, regardless of the timescale over which the conversion would be implemented.

And any "new" rail systems are going to be very small. There'll never be another transit rail system in the United States remotely comparable in size or coverage to the existing ones in the large dense cities of the northeast, because new cities don't and never will have the population and infrastructure density to support them. Heavy rail transit in the U.S. is overwhelmingly dominated by just one rail system in one city--the New York subway. The next largest heavy rail transit system, the Washington Metro, has only about 12% as many riders. Chicago comes in third, with only about 7% as many riders as New York.

And the new light-rail systems that have been built over the past couple of decades in southern and western cities carry only tiny numbers of riders in comparison with any of these heavy rail systems in the northeast. Only a few of them have even 100,000 riders a day, while the NYC subway carries almost 8 million riders a day. Rail transit is now in an era of massively diminishing returns. It will cost more and more to provide less and less for fewer and fewer people, which is one reason why your transit-filled vision of the future is such a ridiculous fantasy.

Posted by Mixner | July 18, 2008 5:01 PM

Couldn't you just use a credit card? I pay for parking at the Detroit airport with one--no tickets or anything. Just stick the card in the machine on the way in and the way out. Seems pretty cheap and universal to me. Or is that too slow because of the need to verify the card?

Posted by TJon | July 18, 2008 5:03 PM

I suspect they did not want to learn a new system and think of each cities subway systems as something foreign to be avoided.

I would think that people who are used to public transit at home, would be comfortable using it in other cities. Besides the problem isn't paying, it's that it can be difficult to figure out in a new city what line to get on and where to get off. A cab is easy, just tell them the address. Figuring out how to pay has got to be one of the easiest parts of figuring out a new transit system.

Posted by JordanT | July 18, 2008 5:05 PM

I think the benefit to this wouldn't be as much for cities with existing systems (which, as Matt says, are unlikely to retrofit), but the impact it would have on developing new transit systems. It would a.) make them a bit cheaper to implement, as it would eliminate a certain amount of R&D, and b.) it would tend to make them oriented less towards residents (who have already organized their lives around whatever current infrastructure there is), and more towards tourists/business travelers, who have a more pressing need for mass transit (since they don't have their cars with them), and in this scenario would already feel comfortable with the system. That would in turn make the business case for transit systems more appealing, as not only are you collecting fares, but, in theory, attracting more travelers to the city who will not just pay fares, but then use that transit to eat out, go to bars, whatever.

Now of course, I am even less qualified than Matt to assess the total impact of all this, if that is possible, and it may well turn out to be negligible. But I think it's at least plausible to think that this could be a net positive.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 18, 2008 5:11 PM

I think some NY subway turnstiles now accept credit cards with the "PayPass" thing or whatever, the little chip where you don't have to swipe it.

Posted by tps12 | July 18, 2008 5:50 PM

Couldn't you just use a credit card? I pay for parking at the Detroit airport with one--no tickets or anything. Just stick the card in the machine on the way in and the way out. Seems pretty cheap and universal to me. Or is that too slow because of the need to verify the card?

I think it would be too slow. If they set up a machine where you could use your card to buy tickets, that would be more acceptable, but verification of a card at the turnstile is too long. Hell, most of the people in Chicago use the Chicago card because the previous tickets took all of four seconds to use, and that was part of the inconvenience. That's a practical reason.

The other reason you won't see cities give up their farecards, as was noted in the other thread, is that they're moneymakers with the float. My card must always have at least $10 on it. If it drops below $10, it automatically resets to $60 (you can set it lower if you want). So if 50,000 people have this card, that's $500,000 that does nothing but earn interest. That's not including all of the extra money on the card that sits there until I get down to $10. That's the political reason.

Posted by Seitz | July 18, 2008 6:02 PM

I have to agree with those who find this proposal costly with minimal benefits. Like Jake, when I've traveled to other cities, I've somehow found paying my fare not the biggest puzzle on earth. It bothers me that Matt doesn't seem either to have thought this out or to have addressed any specifics even here in his reply. But most of all, he doesn't seem to have a goal in mind that could point to a benefit. (OhioBoy's benefit is beside the point, as there's nothing stopping a city starting a new mass transit system from scratch, if you can imagine that, turning to technology from an older city. Would that Washington, DC, had.)

Clearly the only goal worth bearing in mind is to get more funding to infrastructure and to get more people out of their cars. This would actually take away from the first. And the second? Is there a large fraction of New York tourists specifically from cities like DC? Are they so befuddled by using the subway that they're going to rent a car to cross town?

Since Matt drew from the article talking about how unlimited MetroCards have increased ridership, it's ironic he concedes right off that this wouldn't cover such discounts. And since he makes the analogy to EZ Pass without exploring it, it's worth doing so. Why would highway systems share such things?

First, highways and rides don't stop at the end of a city, whereas subways do. Second, various systems were moving from straight tolls to passes at around the same time, where subways and buses have drastically different schemes (as others have mentioned, some distance based) that'd need whole-scale replacing at cost and inconvenience to all. Third, your using a pass doesn't just convenience you, since your slow pace in line slows others, whereas your having to ask the right bus fare in Philly mostly annoys you and the driver. Finally, passes allow restrictions on their use, such as passengers.

Matt's love of mass transit is welcome, but he has to start thinking things through. Maybe then he'd extend his support to serious needs related to building metro areas, not peripheral concerns like this, intercity rail, and biking. Is it fair to note that the biggest benefit here goes to those who flit back and forth constantly between NY and DC? He has to get over the yuppie beltwar perspective shared by the mass media as well. Isn't getting over that what the blogosphere once promised?

Posted by John Haber | July 18, 2008 6:12 PM

There may be some economies of scale advantages when replacing equipment and the software that makes the whole billing system work. I think it would have more impact to standardize the design of light rail cars (they cost more than $1,000,000 each) and heavy rail cars. No need to redesign the cars for each city.

Posted by captured shadow | July 18, 2008 6:16 PM

First, I'd just like to point out that Njorl wins the thread.

There's a barrier to learning a new system, and figuring out the fare card is maybe 5% of that learning.

That being said, last year my wife and I visited DC, staying in Arlington VA, and though we visited the District by Metro on the weekend, when parking at the Arlington station was free, on the weekday we attempted to park at a station in Arlington and eventually gave up after being unable to figure out how to pay for parking without first paying to get a fare card. The cost to park + the fare card + the fare for two people would have been more expensive than parking, even in the middle of the city, so we just drove into the District anyway. Moreover, there were conflicting information on whether or not there was any free parking at the station.

The system seemed set up well for visitors staying within the District (and thus not having to park at the stations) but in the suburbs it only looked cost-effective for regular commuters. The difference in the price of lodging in Arlington vs. the price of lodging in the District more than made up for the difference, however.

Posted by Adam Villani | July 18, 2008 7:04 PM

> There'll never be another transit rail system in
> the United States remotely comparable in size or
> coverage to the existing ones in the large dense
> cities of the northeast, because new cities don't
> and never will have the population and
> infrastructure density to support them. Heavy rail
> transit in the U.S. is overwhelmingly dominated
> by just one rail system in one city--the New York
> subway. The next largest heavy rail transit
> system, the Washington Metro, has only about 12%
> as many riders.

$8/gal gasoline anyone? $12? "Never" is a loooooong time.

Cranky

By the way, for your "heavy rail" stats you must be comparing the CTA alone to the Washington Metro and then counting each of Chicago Metra's heavy commuter lines as an individual system (as they were before the RTA and later Metra). What is still called the "Burlington Northern" line in Chicago must alone carry more people every day than work in Washington DC. When you combine the CTA, Metra, the Northern Indiana Transportation District, and the Amtrak commuter runs to Kenosha I think you will find that Chicago is closer to New York and London than to DC in number of passengers carried.

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 18, 2008 8:21 PM

Light rail systems use an existing common gauge, and back in the dark ages trolley systems often used a common car, the Presidential Commission Car.

There would be savings for every new transit system, existing system moving off turnstiles and fare boxes, that didn't have to roll their own fare card system.

There used to be a National Institute of Standards who researched and promoted standards for things. Is it still there?

Posted by Davis X. Machina | July 18, 2008 8:35 PM

Adam, wouldn't your experience point to a problem in managing parking rather than multiple payment methods between mass transit systems? It'd be great if you weren't rewarded for parking downtown. I fully approve of how difficult New York makes parking, as well as recent moves to curb free parking for civil employees. But it doesn't seem to have hide nor hair to do with whether New York throws its fare boxes, turnstiles, and payment structure in the East River to allow CharleyCard readers, or the reverse imposition on Boston. Besides, the former demands drivers fork over money on behalf of mass transit, while the latter demands governments fork over mass transit funds on behalf of, well, the blogosphere.

Posted by John Haber | July 18, 2008 8:59 PM

$8/gal gasoline anyone? $12? "Never" is a loooooong time.

Even now, transit rail is only moderately more energy-efficient than passenger cars, and is likely to be less energy-efficient than the typical cars of ten or twenty years from now, let alone those farther in the future. And as our population and employment centers increasingly resemble new-style cities like Los Angeles and Houston, rather than old-style cities like New York and Chicago, their transportation needs are going to be increasingly hard to serve with rail. As I said, the returns from expanding rail transit are diminishing massively. All the low-hanging fruit (New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, etc.) was picked long ago.

Matthew has apparently spent his whole life living in and around New York, Boston and Washington and doesn't seem to grasp just how atypical and unrepresentative those cities are. A number of other commenters here seem to suffer from the same blindness.

By the way, for your "heavy rail" stats you must be comparing the CTA alone to the Washington Metro and then counting each of Chicago Metra's heavy commuter lines as an individual system (as they were before the RTA and later Metra).

Metra has a daily ridership of about 290,000. Adding that to the CTA ridership means the combined system still has a ridership only about 10% that of the NYC subway. And of course it's not an apples-to-apples comparison anyway, since Metra is commuter/regional rail not urban heavy rail.

Posted by Mixner | July 18, 2008 9:05 PM

Based on this post, what I get the feeling Matt is thinking is this: why can't the fed just create a standard specification for stored-value farecards (size, reading/writing mechanisms, strip information) so that they can be read and written to from any card reader/dispenser adopting this standard. Then, any transit organization that's looking to move to farecards can just have their new cards made to follow this specification, and over time, you'd eventually get uniformity.

The problems are these: first, you're developing a standard in the abstract, which seems like a good way to get a very unusable standard. (I wonder just how many federal standards that were designed for things and never used exist out there. I bet it's a lot.) Second: the adoption rate would be so low (since so many systems already have designed their farecards), that there would be little to no benefit (even considering the low standards of the benefit involved), and certainly no incentive to even follow the standard, which it may be cheaper, easier, and if the standard is poorly designed, better to ignore. Thirdly, by the time major cities do seek to upgrade, the technology will have certainly changed, and they'll want keychain wands instead of farecards or something else, so the standard will be useless and will never get widespread adoption.

I would think you would have better luck having the fed approach 2-4 major cities, offer them subsidies to jointly develop an upgrade that could later be used as an interoperable standard, so then you have major adopters from the beginning and a real-world environment to work out the flaws. But I have no idea how close any of the major cities are to the next big fare-taking upgrade.

Posted by Royko | July 18, 2008 11:05 PM

While I think a national farecard is a dumb idea, it would be nice to use one card in the New York area for the subway, the PATH, and the airport train, likewise to go between the various systems used in the SF Bay area.

This also points to a quirk of the federal system: mass transit for New York city is a federal issue. Its currently handled by a NY state agency, the MTA, that operates in NJ and Connecticut as well, a joint NY-NJ agency, the PATH, with additional commuter lines run by New Jersey Transit, a New Jersey state agency most of whose lines feed into Penn Station in another state.

Even under the most limited reading of what should be federal power, it would be completely appropriate for the federal government to take charge of this mess, until we get smart and have one state cover the entire New York metropolitan area. And since the local governments are currently busy screwing up the MTA, there is a policy need to do this.

Likewise, if the state of California is going to insist on dividing the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area between seven or eight counties, they should be running the mass transit there.

Posted by Ed | July 19, 2008 2:54 AM

"until we get smart and have one state cover the entire New York metropolitan area."

You've got your agencies and their responsibilities a bit mixed up, but a key issue with public transit in the CT-NY-NJ metro area is that different systems are subsidized by separate state taxpayer pools. All of the mass transit systems run in the red, at current levels fares do not cover the full costs, so each additional rider actually means more state taxpayer subsidy is required. The only system that breaks even is PATH and that is due to the airport operations (EWR, JFK, LGA).
Given that taxpayers from these states already send more to the Federal govt than they receive in services (primarily due to the high taxable incomes), it might be nice to get some money back in the form of more transit support.

Another issue that has to be addressed is the continued growth in the suburban/exurban areas - as jobs moved to these areas, mass transit did not follow. It is often next to impossible to get from a home in one suburba to work in another suburb (even 10 miles away) in less than 60 minutes via public transportation. Most folks are still stuck in their cars - spewing fumes at $4/gal.

Posted by Anonymous | July 19, 2008 4:12 AM

Well, considering the almost total ignorance here about actual fare collection systems, and the almost total concentration about how it would benefit you, it seems obvious that it's time to move to Plan B- some plucky individual goes to the Supreme Court and argues that, as this bill is "legal tender for all debts, public and private", having proffered the bill, he can't be charged in any other way for riding if the transit agency won't accept it.

Not the surest road to the 21st century, but hey, it's not like we really need to make transit work well, right?

Posted by serial catowner | July 19, 2008 11:18 AM

Adam, wouldn't your experience point to a problem in managing parking rather than multiple payment methods between mass transit systems?

Yes. Essentially I was saying, "Yeah, I don't think fare card differences are all that important, so I'd like to talk about something else."

Posted by Adam Villani | July 19, 2008 6:47 PM