The High Cost of Cheap Bus Fares
By Frank Gruber
Recently an uncle of mine visited from Texas. Since his flight did
not arrive at any of the few remaining hours of any given week that
I will consider driving to LAX to pick up a visitor, he had to get to
Santa Monica on his own.
My uncle is a retired lawyer with a healthy portfolio of investments.
You might think he would take a cab. But my uncle is also about to turn
80, which means that he grew up when people didn't willy nilly throw
$30 away on taxis.
I told him how to take the Big Blue Bus's Rapid 3 from Lot C.
When my uncle boarded the bus, he asked how much the fare was. Twenty-five
cents, the driver told him -- the senior citizen fare. An amusing thing
happened. My uncle had a quarter, but another senior citizen insisted
on paying for him with her magnetic fare card. I'm figuring that she
knew by his Texas drawl that he was a tourist, and in a manner that
typifies the best of Southern California hospitality, she wanted to
treat him to the bus fare.
Or maybe she was flirting with him. In any case the fare was so cheap
she could afford to be generous.
Which brings me to the point of this column. It's great to encourage
generosity, but it's absurd to charge my uncle only 25 cents to take
a bus from LAX to Santa Monica.
For that matter, when I, not yet a senior, take the Big Blue Bus, it's
ridiculous to charge me only 75 cents. Or to charge me only $1.25 when
I take, as I often do, the Wilshire Boulevard Metro Rapid to Westwood
or to Beverly Hills, or only $1.75 when I take the BBB 10 Express to
downtown L.A.
These prices are ridiculous, because both my uncle and I and most other
potential customers for the bus can afford to pay more, and the service
is worth more than the price. More to the point, we would willingly
pay more, as would many others, if we got more for our money -- i.e.,
if the service were better.
Transit fares are in the news lately. The Santa Monica Big Blue Bus
is considering raising some special fares and adding a transfer charge.
(see
story) Now that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro)
is free from the restrictions of the Bus Riders Union consent decree,
Metro is proposing to raise its fares substantially. (see
story)
Not surprisingly, low-income people and students who rely on public
transportation and their representatives have protested. It's a bitter
pill to swallow, obviously, for a poor person to see the cost of an
essential like transportation double or triple or even, in the case
of Metro's bus passes for seniors, quintuple (as might happen).
But just as the hidden (or not so hidden) cost of giving away free
access to roads is traffic congestion, the cost of cheap bus fares is
poor service, which is not only the bane of the impoverished, but also
the barrier to increasing transit use by the affluent. It's noteworthy,
and unfortunate, that neither the BBB nor Metro expects to improve service
with the revenues from these higher fares; the purpose of the increases
is to maintain current service levels or stave off cuts.
Historical digression. One of the better books I have read about cities
is Tunneling to the Future: the Story of the Great Subway Expansion
that Saved New York, by Peter Derrick. The book tells the story of the
decade-long struggle in the early years of the 20th century to plan
and finance the expansion of the New York subway and elevated system
out into the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.
It was a huge undertaking. In today's dollars, the capital costs were
about $22 billion, raised in a public-private partnership. The expansion
was a huge success, especially in its major purpose, which was to disperse
the working poor of New York out from the slums of the Lower East Side
(500,000 people in two square miles) and into solid working and middle-class
neighborhoods.
There was one miscalculation, however. In response to populist agitation
(led, oddly, by William Randolph Hearst), the nickel fare was written
into the financing documents as sacred. At the time, a century ago,
no one foresaw this as a problem because -- get this -- there hadn't
been inflation for decades.
But then came World War I, which caused worldwide inflation. By the
time the system was operating, in the 20s and 30s, and notwithstanding
that the system achieved its expectations for ridership, the nickel
fare was not sufficient to pay for operating costs, debt service, and
maintenance.
You can guess what was shortchanged -- maintenance. The nickel fare
was not increased until the late 40s. By then the system was in decline.
Even as fares increased over the years, always playing catch up to costs,
the pattern could not be reversed. Fares and subsidies kept up with
operating costs, but not maintenance and the need for reinvestment.
What was intended to be a public transportation system for everyone
-- with beautiful stations and excellent service -- became a system
primarily for the poor, and one that increasingly failed them.
Welfare on wheels.
Fortunately New York began reinvesting heavily in the system again
in the 80s and the subway has revived some of its allure. Service is
better and ridership is up among all economic classes.
Back to my uncle on the Rapid 3. Santa Monica has the lowest transit
fares in the region, which is consistent with our progressive politics.
Aren't we virtuous for charging a senior citizen only a quarter, or
a "regular" passenger 75 cents, for what would be a $30 cab
ride?
Cheap fares may be part of a generous social system, but they make
for a bad transportation system.
The system is not necessarily bad because the bus takes longer than
driving, or, to use the LAX example, longer than a cab. Buses do take
longer, but riders expect that, and in fact it doesn't take as much
longer as people think. I've made the trip, door in Ocean Park to terminal,
in 35 minutes, including the shuttle from Lot C, which is only 10-15
minutes longer than a cab.
No, it's a bad transportation system because those Rapid 3 buses only
run every fifteen minutes. Who, with the alternative of driving, wants
to risk waiting that long for a bus? Personally, I'd pay -- let's say
-- three dollars if the Rapid 3 ran every five minutes. The Metro Rapids
on Wilshire run that frequently and I take them whenever I have the
chance -- instead of driving.
I'd pay even more -- do I hear five dollars? -- for buses that cut
through traffic congestion on bus only lanes. I'd even pay a little
more if every bus stop had a nice shelter that made me feel like a customer
rather than a piece of meat.
Who knows what I'd be willing pay to ride a subway, but you can get
an idea of that by looking at what commuters are willing to pay to ride
MetroLink. In the L.A. region public transportation has been designed,
built and operated not to move as many people around as quickly and
efficiently and as happily as possible, but instead to provide transportation
of last resort for poor people. The result is that we have a system
that is overwhelmed by private car traffic, and at the same time provides
desultory service to the poor.
We have a lot of poor people, and they need transportation. But the
solution to that problem is not to starve the transit system to throw
the poor some crumbs. The solution is to provide an excellent system,
charge whatever you can get from riders who can pay, and then aim your
farebox subsidies, which should come from social service budgets, not
from transit, directly at those who need them -- not at affluent people
like me and my uncle.
This is common practice in Europe, where fares are high; in Berlin
recently I struck up a conversation with a U-Bahn rider who told me
that because he was unemployed, he had a free pass. It shouldn't be
that difficult to sell discounted passes to low-income people.
Metro and the Big Blue Bus -- and the governments that support them
-- should take a page from American higher education. The top colleges
and universities charge high tuitions, but then give aid to those students
who need it.
But investment bankers, lawyers and doctors, who don't qualify for
financial aid, are falling over themselves for the privilege of forking
over $40,000 a year for their kids' educations. They're willing to pay
for excellence.
We should look at transit the same way. Of course, there is still going
to be subsidy of transit even if the fare is $3, just as even $40,000
tuition is subsidized: the typical cost to the college or university
is about $70,000 per student per year.
But if we make the system excellent, people who can afford higher fares
will get out of their cars and use it -- helping to solve other problems
along the way. Then when we subsidize the fares of poor people, they
will have a system worth using, not a system they want to graduate from
as soon as they can buy a car. |
