Proof-of-Payment (POP) vs. Traditional Ticket Collection

Demand is actually a lot more elastic than one would think. Commuter railroads can get more ridership by offering better service. In order to make it financially viable, they have to deal with the unions and the east coast commuter lines needs to get rid of their archaic ticket systems and move to proof of payment in order to be able to move to OPTO on smaller trains and reduce the number of assistant conductors needed on larger trains. Widespread electrification would also help.

I would love to hear of a single POP system in the US that has a fare box recovery ratio above 30%.

Well, Metra and CTA were at 47% for 2019. By statue, they're required to be at 50%, which was waived during Covid and hasn't been enforced since. AFAIK the legislature hasn't revoked that provision.

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Yeah sounds like a terrible idea.

Having experienced public transit systems that allow NFC payment off a credit card or phone wallet, I'm beginning to lean towards thinking that any public transit that requires an app on a phone or an online account or special agency-specific card to use if you are not carrying exact change in the correct currency is being hostile to any casual use (I am ambivalent about using tap to pay to get a paper ticket--I'd prefer to use turnstiles with a tap to pay, but can see how there are stations where turnstiles won't work).

Put another way, the built in map applications on phones make it easy to determine which public transit routes to use to get to any destination, and when those run, but it's still frustratingly difficult to figure how to use the d***ed public transit system in most cities such that if you are just there for 2-3 days, its easier to just use the built in map app to open your preferred ride sharing app.

eolesen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 7:56 pm Well, Metra and CTA were at 47% for 2019. By statue, they're required to be at 50%, which was waived during Covid and hasn't been enforced since. AFAIK the legislature hasn't revoked that provision.

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By STATUE? WHAT STATUE?

Please edit

lensovet wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 7:00 pmI would love to hear of a single POP system in the US that has a fare box recovery ratio above 30%.

POP is the standard across most of the US... except for the dinosaurs in the Northeast. Patrick O'Hara has written extensively about it in The LIRR Today.

But the highlights are:

1. MTA could save $200M+ dollars per year on excessive conductors currently collecting tickets even after accounting for fare enforcement.
2. MTA could further save an unknown amount of money due to tickets that aren't current collected, as POP requires a new ticket for each ride, you can't "save" uncollected tickets.
3. If you set the fines for nonpayment high enough, say 10x the fare, then if you catch more than 10% of the fare evaders, you end up coming out ahead.
4. POP would allow for smaller crews, possibly even OPTO, allowing more service to be added more economically, creating more incremental ridership and thus revenue with little marginal cost.

RandallW Brings up a great point about the absurdly stupid ticketing systems in many metro areas. The various fares in NYC are another issue that impedes ridership growth.

Last time I was on a POP system, in 2023, three different police officers checked my ticket on a single ride. Not sure how that is a savings over one conductor who stays on the train.

Absent using turnstiles, POP replaces a conductor with a random number of "fare inspectors" and/or police officers, so I don't see how POP reduces costs and improves farebox recovery ratios, since it merely shifts the collection of fares from one person per train checking fares to a random number of persons per train checking fares.

RandallW wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 6:49 pmLast time I was on a POP system, in 2023, three different police officers checked my ticket on a single ride. Not sure how that is a savings over one conductor who stays on the train.

You have to get the right amount of checking, and make it random enough and the penalties harsh enough that people don't cheat it. The current system costs a lot in uncollected tickets and conductor costs, so POP would have to have a lot of fare cheaters just to get down to the current level of losses.

Absent using turnstiles, POP replaces a conductor with a random number of "fare inspectors" and/or police officers, so I don't see how POP reduces costs and improves farebox recovery ratios, since it merely shifts the collection of fares from one person per train checking fares to a random number of persons per train checking fares.

They can randomly get on and off different trains. In the numbers Patrick O'Hara crunched out, it was something like $200M of the $250M could be saved. And remember if you have a 10x penalty, a maximum of 10% of fare evaders have to be found, probably more like 5% due to all the other cost savings.

John_Perkowski wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 9:47 am

eolesen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 7:56 pm Well, Metra and CTA were at 47% for 2019. By statue, they're required to be at 50%, which was waived during Covid and hasn't been enforced since. AFAIK the legislature hasn't revoked that provision.

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By STATUE? WHAT STATUE?

Please edit

Sheesh. The context should have been clear even though auto-correct appears to have struck there.

We peons without moderator privileges can't edit a post beyond a couple hours. Feel free to correct it if you wish.

Illinois Statute specifies the farebox recovery for RTA which includes Metra and CTA.

https://www.rtachicago.org/blog/2023/01 ... e-reformed

The Annual Budget and Two-Year Financial Plan must show:
(i) that the level of fares and charges for mass transportation provided by, or under grant or purchase of service contracts of, the Service Boards is sufficient to cause the aggregate of all projected fare revenues from such fares and charges received in each fiscal year to equal at least 50% of the aggregate costs of providing such public transportation in such fiscal year.

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/i ... d=12900000

Roaming bands of ticket inspectors simply cannot replace the Conductor. It's a FRA requirement to have the Conductor, presumably it's required to be in the passenger cabin.

What do you POP proponents think is a fair staffing level for trainmen/conductors? One person for every 3 cars? One person for every 8 cars?.... Should it be a formula based on passenger seats (flight attendants are mandated at 1 per 50 seats or fraction therefore of)????

Trainmen and Assistant Conductors are there for operational and safety purposes first and foremost -- to operate door traps and to assist in the event of an emergency.

Ticket collection/inspection is simply something they're able to do with their downtime.

Good lord, we are so off-topic I don't even know, but whatever, I'll bite.

ElectricTraction wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 1:29 pm

lensovet wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 7:00 pmI would love to hear of a single POP system in the US that has a fare box recovery ratio above 30%.

POP is the standard across most of the US... except for the dinosaurs in the Northeast. Patrick O'Hara has written extensively about it in The LIRR Today.

The standard across the US was 5% of people commuting to work pre-pandemic (it's 3.5% today). The standard in the NYC metro today, without a full recovery, is 24%. But yeah, we're dinosaurs over here who have no idea how to get people using trains and paying for it.

The NYC metro's transit commuter transit ridership accounts for 46% of the country's entire transit riding population. So I don't know that we care much about what the "standard" across "most" of the US is. When you don't have any riders, you also don't care about whether you're collecting any revenue from them.

Metra collected $4.25 per passenger in 2023. LIRR alone collects double that (don't forget to add MNRR, NJT, and Amtrak to get an even better sense of scale). Not sure how Metra counts their riders if no one is checking tickets, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that LIRR doesn't feel like losing 290M to save 200M. Just a guess.

But the highlights are:

1. MTA could save $200M+ dollars per year on excessive conductors currently collecting tickets even after accounting for fare enforcement.

…and have people not bother buying tickets because they know they won't be checked. How much revenue is lost to offset that gain? We have a sense from the numbers I provided above. Plus how much money do you have to spend to now do fare enforcement?

2. MTA could further save an unknown amount of money due to tickets that aren't current collected, as POP requires a new ticket for each ride, you can't "save" uncollected tickets.

Hold up, #1 claimed that we have this excess of conductors that we could eliminate by going to POP. Now we're saying that apparently there's not enough of them that people are managing to save paper tickets to reuse them multiple times? Which is it?
Also, is anyone actually buying paper tickets in 2024?

3. If you set the fines for nonpayment high enough, say 10x the fare, then if you catch more than 10% of the fare evaders, you end up coming out ahead.
4. POP would allow for smaller crews, possibly even OPTO, allowing more service to be added more economically, creating more incremental ridership and thus revenue with little marginal cost.

Revenue from people who aren't paying anymore? Sure thing.

RandallW Brings up a great point about the absurdly stupid ticketing systems in many metro areas. The various fares in NYC are another issue that impedes ridership growth.

Randall brings up a great point for occasional riders and tourists. That's not where the majority of LIRR's revenue is coming from.

My point is not about supporting regular riders -- the complexity of existing fare payment systems is all in support of regular users (as are the discounting and subsidy schemes for certain groups of riders), and my point is equally valid about systems that use POP as it is about any other fare payment system.

Split topic from "Will they return".

lensovet wrote: ↑Mon Oct 07, 2024 12:47 am Metra collected $4.25 per passenger in 2023. LIRR alone collects double that (don't forget to add MNRR, NJT, and Amtrak to get an even better sense of scale). Not sure how Metra counts their riders if no one is checking tickets

First of all.... Metra is really good at checking tickets. "Trainhumans" walk thru, and ask everyone to "tap the app" which causes the screen to change colors (that's how they know it's not just a screenshot). Takes them about two minutes per half of the car thanks to the gallery, and outbound, it's done immediately leaving downtown so there's not much of a chance for short-riders to hop off before being checked. Inbound, they get it done prior to arriving downtown.

With one human for every two or three cars, it's usually complete within the first ten to twelve minutes. Sure, someone riding between stops in the outer zones might get away with evasion, but the TrainHumans aren't stupid. They know the regulars and will catch you eventually.

Beyond that, Metra measures ridership in a couple ways.... They force use of the app (even by first-time riders), and thus are able to get a pretty good real-time count of who is enabling tickets on the app. Having that data on the app probably more than makes up for whatever "shrink" they experience from fare evasion.

They also do recurring surveys at outstations to physically count boarding, and I'm told they have some camera-based crowd counting being done at the downtown stations. Granted those two methods will all have varying degrees of noise baked into them, but averaging out probably gets them within 5% either way of the actuals.

As for that $4.25 per rider.... Metra cannibalized their own ticketing by offering a $6 Day Pass within the heaviest traveled zones, and a $10 pass everywhere else. People would use those $3/$5 one-way instead of monthly or Ten Rides. Those discounted day passes were discontinued when a new fare policy kicked in for 2024.

Truth is, if the one-time tourists or riders aren't ticketed, it's not going to break the budget. They make up a rounding error when it comes to ridership. You shouldn't spend $2 to collect $1.