[The “zero-fare” movement has garnered support during the
pandemic, which underscored the critical role public transit plays for
essential workers who don’t have the luxury of working from home.]
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THE ZERO-FARE PUBLIC TRANSIT MOVEMENT IS PICKING UP MOMENTUM  
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Rebecca Picciotto
January 14, 2023
CNBC
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_ The “zero-fare” movement has garnered support during the
pandemic, which underscored the critical role public transit plays for
essential workers who don’t have the luxury of working from home. _

Passengers board bus headed for Dulles International Airport,
Washington, DC, Ben Schumin (own work)

 

Washington, D.C., is on the verge of eliminating bus fares for city
residents, joining other U.S. cities that are working to make metro
bus and rail systems free to ride.

Already, Boston, San Francisco and Denver are experimenting with zero
fare. In late 2019, Kansas City, Missouri, became the first major U.S.
city to approve a fare-free public transit system.

The “zero-fare” movement has garnered support among business
groups, environmental advocates, Democratic leaders and others who say
that public transit boosts local economies, mitigates climate change
and is a basic necessity for many individuals. The idea gained
traction during the pandemic, which underscored the critical role
public transit plays for essential workers who don’t have the luxury
of working from home.

But despite the zero-fare movement’s growing popularity, it has
drawn political pushback in some areas where the policy doesn’t
easily fit in with budgets or local laws.

D.C.’s zero-fare bill was proposed in early 2020 about two weeks
before the Covid-19 pandemic
[[link removed]] triggered a downward budget
spiral for transit agencies nationwide.

“I don’t charge you when you need the fire department, but yet
we’re going to make sure there’s a fire department when you need
it. That’s how you need to think about this,” Charles Allen, one
of the D.C. city councilmembers who introduced the bill, said in an
interview with CNBC.

The D.C. measure aims to get rid of the $2 fare to ride the bus
starting in July. The city council unanimously approved the measure,
and it’s awaiting a formal response from Mayor Muriel Bowser, who
can either approve, veto or return the bill unsigned.

Bowser initially expressed reservations about financing a zero-fare
system that would also serve Maryland and Virginia without receiving
funding from those states. The mayor’s office did not respond to a
request for comment. In any case, the council’s unanimous support is
enough to override a mayoral veto.

The bill would allocate $43 million a year to make the D.C. Metrobus
free to all riders and to add a dozen 24-hour bus service lines. The
money will come from surplus tax revenue. The D.C. Council is still
considering whether to add a $10 million subsidy program, which would
provide every city resident with $100 of credit monthly to spend on
the D.C. Metrorail.  

The public transit crisis

In many cities, the coronavirus sent ridership on subways and buses to
historic lows, largely because white-collar workers were working from
home instead of commuting into the office. That left essential
workers, who are typically middle to low income, as the primary riders
of public transit.

As fare revenue plummeted and transit agencies watched their budgets
erode, state and local government subsidies along with federal Covid
relief funding became necessary to preserve transportation for
essential workers.

Zero-fare transit has since also become a cause among environmental
groups that want to get cars off the road, labor unions that want to
keep transit drivers socially distanced from riders and business
groups that want to draw more customers.

Alexandria and Richmond in Virginia have successfully integrated
fare-free transit into their annual budgets. Boston, Denver and others
have tested pilot programs. Boston’s zero-fare experiment will stick
around until 2024 for three of the city’s bus routes.

Meanwhile, Denver introduced temporary fare-free holidays like “Zero
Fare for Better Air” in August and “Zero Fare to Vote” on voting
days in November.

Zero-fare trendsetting

“It feels like much more of a community space and I think that’s
because it’s something you can freely enter and exit,” said Matt
Staub, a founding member of Kansas City’s fare-free streetcar and a
marketing business owner, who used to spend between $60 to $70 on
monthly bus passes.

Kansas City first experimented with zero-fare transit in 2016 with the
launch of its streetcar, a two-mile fixed rail line in the city’s
downtown where riders can hop on and off, free of charge. The city is
investing $400 million to expand the streetcar route to more than six
miles by 2025.

Since the streetcar began construction in 2014, $4 billion has been
invested into downtown development, including hotels and restaurants.
Downtown’s residential population has grown from roughly 21,000 in
2014 to about 32,000 in 2022.

“The streetcar, at least from our perspective, is more than a mode
of transportation. It’s more than just getting from point A to point
B. It’s an economic driver,” said Donna Mandelbaum, a spokesperson
for Kansas City’s Streetcar Authority.

The zero-fare bus started in December 2019 as a pilot program. Then
after Covid hit, the city’s bus authority kept it in place
permanently as a safety measure, since it reduced physical
interactions between bus drivers and riders.

How to go zero fare

Making a U.S. city zero fare takes a combination of funding and
political support.

Kansas City had both. Fares made up only 12%, or about $8 million, of
the buses’ operating budget, according to Richard Jarrold, vice
president of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. Meanwhile,
the city was spending $2 million to $3 million annually on fare
collection, according to Morgan Said, chief of staff to the mayor.

Similarly, D.C. fares are under 10% of the district’s transit
budget, according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
Authority
[[link removed]].
In Richmond, Virginia, where fare-free buses have been in place since
the start of the pandemic, fare revenue was just 8% of the overall
transit agency’s budget.

“For some smaller transit agencies that don’t really collect much
cash anyway … they’re almost spending more to collect the fare
than they’re actually receiving in revenue,” said Grant Sparks, a
director at the Virginia Department of Rail and Transportation.

That made the economic argument in those cities an easier sell. Still,
Allen, the D.C. councilmember, ultimately wants “to move towards a
fare-free system for all public transit.”

Why fare-free is not for all

In New York City, where a subway ride currently costs $2.75, officials
have piloted ways to make fares more affordable. The city started the
Fair Fares program in January 2020, which provides transit discounts
to eligible low-income residents who apply.

But the city’s transportation infrastructure relies on fares for
around 30% of its operational budget, a difficult sum to subsidize.

“Until a new plan emerges for funding public transportation in New
York that would allow the MTA to be less reliant on fare revenue,
there is no way to consider eliminating a vital revenue stream,”
said Meghan Keegan, an MTA spokesperson.

Even in places like Virginia, which has had zero-fare success in
individual cities, scaling the system to a statewide level has proven
difficult. Virginia law limits how much the state can pay to WMATA,
the transit agency that runs bus lines throughout Virginia, D.C. and
Maryland.

Denver also plans to stick with fares for the time being, even as it
deploys occasional fare holidays.

“In the absence of a significant new funding source, fares will
remain an important component of RTD operating revenue,” said Tina
Jaquez, a spokesperson for Denver’s Regional Transportation
District. Denver’s 2023 transit operating budget
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composed of 10% fares.

The conversation is happening at the federal level, too, although the
debate has been split along the aisle.

As part of its spring 2020 Covid relief package, the federal
government provided $25 billion in public transit funding. That
summer, Democrats tried to rally support to extend the federal
support. In June 2020, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Presley, both
Democrats of Massachusetts, introduced the Freedom to Move Act
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which would provide federal grants for states and cities to institute
free-to-ride public transit. It was referred to a Senate committee in
April 2021 and hasn’t advanced.

Republicans have not been as bullish on the idea of going zero fare.
A budget proposal
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Republican-heavy Utah that would make the state’s transit system
fare-free for a year met opposition from the state’s Republican
House Majority Leader Mike Schultz. He said that the transit system
was already subsidized enough and “nothing’s free,” according
to local station 
[[link removed]]KUTV.

Zero-fare transit has also drawn criticism from advocacy groups like
Transit Center, a New York City nonprofit. The organization found in a
survey of 1,700 public transit riders that people would rather
have better transit reliability and frequency rather than zero fare
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The split debate means that a federal zero-fare policy likely won’t
be established soon.

“There may be some European countries that are doing it at a
national level. I don’t think we’re going to do that in the U.S.,
with 50 states and many more local jurisdictions,” said Virginia
state Sen. George Barker, a Democrat. “We’ve got a long way to go
to get into that league.”

_Rebecca Picciotto [[link removed]] is a CNBC
News Associate_

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