But fares discourage people from riding — which *can* be a good thing. This is a strong argument for having fares on *crowded* routes at *crowded* times and no fares on *uncrowded* routes or at *uncrowded* times. New Mexico’s RailRunner had introductory fare-free days, and they ended up being overcrowded. Which was nice as an advertising gimmick, but a bad idea in general.

Practically speaking it’s easier to get farebox revenue than tax revenue. If your buses are overcrowded, raising fares — until the buses are full but not overfull — is eminently sensible. Same with trains.

With something like ORCA, a much more fine-grained fare system can be installed. For instance, one which charges a nominal amount most of the time, and a larger amount only during peak hours on commuter routes. You don’t want it to be too complicated for anyone to remember, but something other than a flat fare does make sense.

Actually, a good way to get people to use ORCA would be “With ORCA off-peak trips are free!” (with cash they still cost money). Fill the wasted space on off-peak trips while getting people to switch to the smartcard — why not?

I think Sound Transit is trying to get mile-based fares into people’s heads with their Link proposal — and that’s a good idea. If you start with a flat fare it’s *very* hard to convert to a more rational fare system later (look at poor old New York City). If you start with different prices for each trip, you can change your fare system quite a lot, to optimize ridership or reflect costs, without people complaining too much.

I don’t think the Grand Coulee Dam, or BART have increased the divide between rich an poor, if anything infrastructure investments have leveled the playing field. Countries with a large divide between rich and poor tend to have a fairly low investment in capital projects.

As for busway type projects they tend to have similar up-front costs to rail projects providing similar capacity, travel times, and reliability. Rail projects have the further advantage of lower operating and maintenance costs and the fact that rail vehicles last much longer than buses.

BRT advocates have a bad habit of citing the low-investment case of BRT when comparing costs to rail but claiming all the benefits of the high-investment case while glossing over the differences in operating costs or changes in land use patterns vs. rail.

Furthermore rail built to international standards is no more tied to a single vendor than busways and buses are. There many manufacturers of transit rail vehicles located in many countries. Don’t confuse rail technology with PRT or monorail technology which is tied to a single vendor.

Free Ride Area: subsidy for the very well off and also for the undesirables.

Your claims about the benefits of a busway are flawed, but if the primary benefit that you espouse is that no jobs are ever created to eventually be “lost,” well, I guess I’d rather have people earning income from ST for a while than earning nothing ever. And to wrap all of this in the very serious issue of poverty is laughable. No, by supporting transit we aren’t increasing the divide at all. No one gets “rich” from transit projects besides the construction agencies that employ everyone. But there are hundreds of construction companies. How many oil companies are there that don’t collude?

Finally, the benefit of the high capital investment isn’t solely that of a low operating cost. It’s also that you can move many, many more people much faster on a mode that most prefer. To make a crude analogy, it’s the difference between a highway and 1st Ave.

There is a flip side to this though, and it is called jobs. That capital expenditure is money that leaves the economy just as much as a company shifting manufacturing to China does.

This is a crucial consideration of transit side effects. By supporting transit are we actually supporting the increasing divide between the rich and poor in America?

FWIW, this is a big reason why I support busway type transit solutions using existing rights of way. Another big benefit of a busway type priority is that it doesn’t tie you into a single monopolistic corporate provider for the tech, something else that goes very much to the question of rich vs. poor.

Funny thing though, the free ride zone is mostly a subsidy for the very well off, call it corporate welfare and may actually discourage transit useage. The ‘problem’ person is the one that drives and parks downtown, paying for both who then pays nothing to use the downtown circulatory transit system. If that person had to pay for it, they might well be more inclined to try riding transit from home once in awhile.

Trivia fact – the developer Martin Selig (Columbia Center, Canned Ham, etc) who got METRO to expand the ride free zone into Belltown – by offering 60k a year, I think early 80’s. He never paid a dime.

Lastly, the ride free zone does allow undesirables onto the bus. This might strike some as harsh, but it is a reality that effects public perceptions of the desirability of bus useage.

Sure people with passes won’t care about these reasons for having the RFA, but they are important which is why the merchants and city pay Metro for the RFA.

Getting rid of the RFA would hurt downtown businesses and lead to more traffic on downtown streets in the middle of the day and on weekends.

Sure a free shuttle can mitigate some of the impact but it is nowhere near as convenient as hopping on the next bus headed in the direction I want to go or using the tunnel to bypass congestion.