Funded By
- VREF the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations
Produced With
- C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40)
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436
Apr 2012
Quality of the transit experience. A convenient, attractive and comfortable transit experience is key to helping transit agencies grow and diversity their customer base, thereby increasing modeshare and farebox revenue.
Participants identified several components to a high-quality experience:
Fares must be set effectively and equitably; but how? Raising fares is always sensitive politically; a structured formula set by an independent governmental body can help to ensure that fares keep up with inflation and increases in labor costs. Fares should be set high enough for the agency to provide quality service and amenities, but also be designed to accommodate those customers for whom transit costs are a significant portion of their income. New fare collection technologies can help facilitate this segmentation of the market. Transit agencies seeking to adopt a merchant-based fare system should work together with other agencies for a unified fare payment standard to reduce costs with banks.
Transit investments are expensive, and government funding is difficult to come by in these tough times. Transit agencies can diversify their funding sources:
Public transportation is too often taken for granted. But many of the most significant challenges that cities face today – stagnating economies, congestion, long commutes, carbon emissions, etc. – are best addressed by building a strong public transportation system. Building the environmental and economic case for public transportation is critical to ensuring that the government continues to fund transit at appropriate levels. New metrics for measuring the benefits of transit on greenhouse gas emissions, or on the economic climate, would be effective.
A civic organization independent from the government can be the most effective advocate for public transportation. The organization can make the economic and environmental case for transit to the public institutions that fund it, as well as to the public, helping to forestall any potential NIMBY opposition to projects.
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