This article appears in the December 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
How serious are American cities about free fares? On Tuesday, the District of Columbia City Council plans to vote on eliminating fares for all bus routes that originate within the city limits. If the proposal advances, Washington would be the largest city in the country to support free fares for everyone.
That is a very big “if.” The reality is that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is a regional system and the District is just one jurisdiction among three stakeholders. Mayor Muriel Bowser reminded free-fare supporters that Maryland and Virginia need to come along for the ride and WMATA’s board of directors also gets a say. And Congress can step in anywhere along the line.
Free fare requires bold strokes and big bucks. The estimated cost of a free-for-all program is more than $40 million in city funds, and the mayor has already hinted that competing demands may force free-fare advocates to temper their expectations. The council has also proposed another program, a $100-per-month subsidy for Washington residents who use WMATA.
There is little disagreement on the value of free bus fares. The question is, as always—who pays?
One of the problematic by-products of the mass transit social norms that COVID-19 chewed up and spit out is fare evasion. The ensuing enforcement crackdown has reignited a long-simmering debate—if mass transit is a public good, why not let it be free?
The pandemic drove home the unassailable importance of transit. Ponder what would have happened if bus and rail networks had melted down like so many supply chains. Aside from service pauses at the height of the pandemic, most transit systems continued to run and move the millions of workers employed at hospitals and clinics, grocery and hardware stores, pharmacies and other vital establishments. Transporting essential humans to their jobs stood between COVID and social collapse. And to protect drivers, system operators dispensed with fare collection on buses and then restarted it as the pandemic subsided, sometimes at reduced rates.
But the lessons that more than a few people took away from the early pandemic experience is that the system managed fine without their dime. Others ruminated that if libraries and Smithsonian museums are free to anyone who walks in the door, why not transit?
The hunger for fare-free transit shunts aside some sticky multimillion-dollar realities—namely, if riding without opening your wallet is the answer to ending fare evasion, who, then, foots the bill? Transit systems are already vexed at fare-jumpers, since they drain dollars from their overall fare revenues. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, for instance, is on track to forfeit an estimated $40 million this year, more than 20 percent of its $185 million budget gap in fiscal 2024 at a time when the system has only recovered a little more than half of its passengers. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the largest system in the country, stands to say goodbye to even more mega-millions of dollars.
Americans often fail to appreciate the enormous government subsidies that go into building and maintaining transportation assets. Drivers do not pay the real costs of monitoring and maintaining the roads they use, and transit riders do not bear the actual costs of taking rail or bus trips. A Washington Policy Center analysis of Seattle’s Sound Transit light-rail operations and capital funding costs came up with a per-trip cost of $14; factor in expansion costs and the price tag rises to $179. (One-way fares on the area’s light rail range from temporarily free to less than $6.)
The pandemic changed work and commuting habits formed over decades, accelerating working from home in urban and suburban locales, leading to steep ridership declines in the associated transit systems. The system operators responded by cutting back service, leaving riders to cope with changes or suss out alternatives. While the transit authorities cannot do anything about the work-from-home transformation, they cannot afford more bad press from riders taking to social media to carp and share videos of people executing Olympic-worthy vaults over turnstiles, which only adds to the growing cacophony over filthy stations, rowdy riders, and unhoused people they encounter.
Enter fines, badges, and dogs. WMATA instituted new fines for fare-dodgers in the District of Columbia ($50) and in Maryland and Virginia ($100). The MTA in New York hired private security guards to patrol subway fare-evading hot spots; the Chicago Transit Authority deployed K-9 teams of unarmed guards and dogs to back up its existing unarmed units and Chicago Police Department patrols. Seattle’s Sound Transit opted for diplomacy with “fare ambassadors” to persuade evaders to pay up.
Race and income inequality intersect at fare enforcement. Will transit police target the young white woman squeezing through fare gates swinging multiple luxury-logo branded shopping bags, or will they confront the tall, empty-handed African American man instead? Black people are so frequently cited that Washington, like a number of major cities, finally decriminalized fare evasion, making it a civil infraction subject to a fine. (The Maryland and Virginia suburbs also levy fines, but skipping a fare remains a criminal offense in those states.)
Joshua Schank, a Mineta Transportation Institute research associate, points out that some security experts argue that fares help control access to the system and make policing easier. But he adds that “there are others who would argue that if you don’t have to worry about fares as being the metric by which you’re policing the system, you can actually focus on the other elements of security, such as making sure that there’s a presence of deterrence and making sure that crimes are quickly reported and dealt with.”
Americans often fail to appreciate the enormous government subsidies that go into building and maintaining transportation assets.
Reduced-fare programs can serve those low-income adults who cannot afford to pay. The MTA’s Fair Fares program, which offers a 50 percent discount on the New York subway and selected buses, requires applicants to provide age, residency, and income verification proofs. Expenditures on the three-year-old city-run program, however, have withered from $106 million in 2019, its inaugural year, to $53 million this year. By contrast, WMATA, which is an expensive, distance-based system, currently has no low-income fare program for metro Washington residents. (The system discontinued a low-income fare pilot during the pandemic; today, seniors and students pay reduced rates.)
The District of Columbia City Council has proposed giving most Washington residents who choose to enroll $100 a month on a WMATA fare card. The passes would allow travel throughout the system and on suburban bus systems that accept WMATA passes. The cards would not be available, however, to Maryland and Virginia suburbanites who use the system.
Ron Thompson, former policy director of the DC Transportation Equity Network, sees the proposal as a model for large urban systems that want to test-drive a transition between the current fare-paying framework and a possible future fareless system. He believes that it also sends racial signals about controlling fare evasion. “It gives the appearance that people are still paying,” he says. “People have to believe that there aren’t any cheats, and, in particular, what they have to believe is that Black people are being made to pay.”
Subsidized fare programs carry administrative costs that can be prohibitive. Income verification administrative cost estimates persuaded the city council member who introduced the $100 WMATA fare card proposal to abandon the option of narrowly tailoring the program to low-income residents. But enforcement programs also are costly. Chicago’s 18-month K-9 team CTA contract costs nearly $31 million. WMATA paid $70 million for new fare gates, but the furor over fare evasion now has system officials mulling over whether to shop around again for fare gates that are more difficult to vault over or squeeze through. All of which raises the question of how long an agency is willing to underwrite additional enforcement and deterrence costs that could exceed the lost fare revenues.
That said, eliminating fares requires a massive rethink of transit funding. There are only about 30 fare-free systems nationwide, according to American Public Transportation Association data. And many of those are bus-only systems that are cheaper to run fare-free. For the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, a free-transit showcase, going fareless translated into healthy ridership numbers, satisfied riders, and significant decreases in altercations. The cost for going free in Kansas City has been $8 to $10 million annually, an expense backstopped by COVID-19 operating funds that transit systems could use for operations. Boston used its COVID funding to make three bus routes fare-free; the price tag there was $8 million. Los Angeles Metro made its buses and rail lines free in early October, but for one day only, to mark a statewide Clean Air Day.
Whether larger systems will go all in on free fares is huge question mark, although Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority is studying that possibility. “Of the systems that have adopted free fares, none of them so far have been transit systems with rapid rail and a bus system,” says Thompson.
Right now, the missing link for Kansas City, Boston, and other communities that want to preserve existing fare-free programs or implement new ones once the COVID relief funds run out in 2024 is some systemic funding mechanism or, that failing, funding from the feds, states, or localities.
Congress is the quintessential crapshoot for transit funding regardless of who wields the gavel. Republicans are hostile to cities and mass transit; Democrats are poorly positioned for new programmatic asks with COVID waning and inflationary pressures on spending. Amid transit’s ongoing pandemic-era fiscal crises, what federal lawmakers could do is re-evaluate how existing funding is spent, and shift dollars to direct operating subsidies. “The federal government pays lots of money to public transportation agencies for capital projects, but almost nothing to operate them,” says Brian Kane, executive director of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Advisory Board.
Despite an anti-tax climate, voters have been surprisingly willing to pass transit funding ballot questions. This year, voters nationwide have passed 29 of nearly 40 transit ballot questions. In past years, transit advocates in Los Angeles and Kansas City have persuaded voters to fork over a few cents on the dollar in targeted sales taxes to fund transit expansion projects. Whether the public would also be willing to pay a tax to finance free transit, perhaps in perpetuity, remains debatable.
Whether the cost of making transit free could be shifted to motorists is another question without a good answer. Suburbanites, who can be and frequently are whiter and wealthier than urban transit riders, are generally perceived as obstacles to such cost-shifting. “This is where it really gets interesting from an equity standpoint,” says Schank, “because a lot of the same people who say that they care about equity, low-income people, and racial disparities will also be the people who will fight against any kind of road-user charge.”
Fare-free programs are heavy political lifts—particularly so now, as mass transit leaders, like school administrators and teachers, are expected to confront and solve deeply ingrained problems of race, income, safety, and policing in their discrete environments, when those issues should be handled by the society at large. Putting those larger difficulties aside, the immediate challenge before transit leaders is to decide what they can reasonably accomplish on the social justice front through limited fare policy tools—and what they must do to ensure their systems’ viability.
“If you want to provide greater accessibility to jobs and other activities for low-income people, then free fares are actually a really easy and beneficial way to do that,” says Schank. “If your goal is to increase ridership, yes, free fares will do that, but it may not necessarily be the best method,” he says. “Increasing frequency of service is probably going to be more effective in getting back riders than getting rid of fares.”
