Public transit regulars in Fort Worth will pay less to get around this fall.
Trinity Metro unanimously approved an overhaul of its fare system Monday afternoon, capping how much commuters have to shell out for trips on a given day or week and slicing prices for some of its services. The transit authority’s leaders believe the reforms will expand its rider pool and offer some financial relief to its existing customers.
One-way journeys on Trinity Metro’s express bus or train lines (currently $2.50) will be $2 starting in September. A trip on the agency’s rideshare program Zipzone (now $3) will be also reduced to $2.
Riders will be able to buy day passes for $4 instead of $5, and week passes for $18 instead of $25. These services’ reduced fares — discounted tickets for children, seniors, and veterans — will decrease too.
Trinity Metro will discontinue its 31-day and annual passes altogether. Fares for standard bus trips and rides with Access, the authority’s paratransit program, won’t budge.
How riders pay will also evolve. The action item passed Monday kick started a pivot to “account based ticketing.” The system links a rider’s personal and financial information to an account managed by Trinity Metro. Customers would be able to purchase rides at stations or on vehicles with their payment method of choice.
Account based ticketing would, agency officials say, lay the groundwork another policy designed to improve affordability: fare capping. The practice, already in full swing in cities across the country, limits how much a rider can be charged for trips in a given time frame.
Under Trinity Metro’s plan, commuters that pay for two trips on any service will be able to ride free for the rest of the day. Those who pay the equivalent price of a 7-day pass over the course of a week won’t have to pay for more rides during that time frame.
Researchers credit fare capping with boosting ridership and lowering transportation barriers to low-income commuters.
Chad Edwards, Trinity Metro’s vice president of planning and development, suspects the thousands of new riders generated by the new system will, over time, more than offset the 8.4% decline in fare revenue expected to immediately follow its implementation.
Riders, for their part, will save an average of 48 cents per trip under the new pricing scheme, according to Trinity Metro’s estimates. Low-income and minority commuters will see the largest increase in savings.
The new fare caps won’t kick in until account based ticketing is up and running; the timeline, and funding, for the the payment system isn’t clear.
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