JeffK wrote:I've been told by several SEPTA officials that they are so concerned that ANY adjustment to fare policies will result in a revenue decrease (whether that fear is justified or not) that they are effectively paralyzed regarding any substantial change to the Kafakesque nightmare that characterizes the existing fare structure.
I've seen that too. I think it's more fear of the unknown than any realistic expectation of what will result if we change the fare structure or fare technology. Sometimes it's driven by anecdotal reports--they assume that anything bad that's happened in other cities is gonna happen here.
Of course if everybody subscribed to that logic, nobody would be using ticket vending machines for commuter rail, since SEPTA [fouled] up theirs so badly.
The proper answer of course is to manage and solve the problems rather than hold up any progress in order to prevent them.
Also, because many SEPTA routes are not point-to-point but of necessity force riders to transfer during their journey, the extra cost functions as a kind of surrogate zone charge. This is especially true in the city where for any number of reasons (mostly political) neither SEPTA nor its predecessors has been able to institute a formal zone structure on the longer routes such as already exists on the other transit and RRD divisions.
Yep. But there's also a management disincentive to zone fares since they require more work to implement (both on the part of operating personnel and of managers). I think that at this point that this latter obstacle may be even more significant than the political one, and it certainly has been holding sway in the actual fare changes SEPTA has implemented the last decade (fare zones were reduced or eliminated on many routes).
BTW, I wrote a series on the pros and cons of zoned fares for the DVARP newsletter several years ago.
Interestingly enough, at the same time I also understand they have internal studies showing that the current transfer cost (one of the highest in the country, among systems that use transfers) causes a measureable shift in rider behavior towards inefficient use of the system.
Indeed. And the problem is that it is affecting the trips where you could gain the most, efficiency-wise, by getting passengers onto rail.
And the cost difference weighs even worse on commuter rail, which is one reason the in-city lines don't perform well enough on ridership.
For one example, interviews with C bus riders cited two major reasons for not transferring to the faster and higher-capacity BSS:
(1) they didn't care for the "ambience" 
of the subway
(2) at the income levels of many riders, paying an extra $1.20 per day was a signifcant enough hit on their budgets that they opted to waste extra time sitting on a bus to avoid paying for a transfer.
My anecdotal experience (people I've worked with, etc.) is the same. I think fear of the subway outweighed the cost issue in most cases, and it was like this even when transfers were only 40c.
So, instead of acting as a feeder route to a faster and more efficient rail line, the C bus continues as a completely parallel and duplicative service that is immune to any attempts at reduction or restructuring.
Indeed. But there is a legitimate market need served by the C as opposed to the subway, specifically short trips and elderly and other passengers who will have trouble with the stairs to and from the subway.
SEPTA of course managed to miss this fact when it threatened to shut down the C during last year's budget crisis. Seems like there's no middle ground for them--either they run a heavy and expensive service, serving a lot of trips that ought to be on the subway instead because SEPTA management has chosen to bleed the transfer riders and save 5 cents off the more visible fare increase, or they want to run nothing at all. Typical.
[snip]
One negative I can think of with a free transfer is that it might encourage people to obtain them whether needed or not, and the extras might "leak" to other riders for their base fares, which would cause a revenue hit.
Translated: fare evasion, which is the all-purpose excuse managers trot out any time somebody proposes a fare instrument or policy they don't like.(*) They tried to kill the DayPass that way, but the CAC was adamant in its support of the DayPass, and eventually an uneasy truce was reached, where SEPTA sells a DayPass but doesn't market it much.
That said, there really was a problem with fare evasion via transfers sold on the street for the San Francisco Muni. However, that was merely a symptom of the broader disorder that characterized the city and the lax management of Muni a decade or so ago.
An alternative scheme might be some nominal charge, or a limited-scope free transfer such as that used on WAMTA specifically to allow people to exchange between bus and Metro lines.
Actually, the best alternative is the stored-value card (e.g. Metrocard), where the passenger can't give away the transfer without giving away the rest of the value of the card. That's one of the primary arguments in favor of implementing a card here.
But yeah, the bottom line is that the real answer is to scrap the current crazy-quilt system and come up with something for the 21st century that doesn't require Algebra I to understand and isn't "serious about change". Given the four failed fare studies already undertaken in the last decade, any real reform is gonna be years, maybe decades, in the future unless they pink-slip a major part of the population at 1234.
Once again, you've nailed it.
*--why can I call this an excuse? Because when I called management attention to another fare evasion risk: cashiers not doing their jobs properly (I did a little experiment where I'd show an outdated pass to the cashier [this was prior to the pass-reading turnstiles], I was let through something like 60 percent of the time), they didn't do anything about it.
