Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
If CTA trains are overcrowded and yet the agency is losing money, that means it’s time for a fare increase. Demand outstrips supply and the price they’re charging doesn’t cover their cost base. Raise the fare, some people will choose other modes of transportation, but trains will remain full with more revenue per passenger.
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I think the issue is a fair bit more complicated than the simplest maxim of economics which is, itself, not entirely accurate.
For one, from a historical standpoint, fares haven't covered agency expenses. Mass transit is a subsidized mode of transit precisely because it efficiently delivers large quantities of passengers to heavily trafficked portions of the city using a compact footprint obviating expensive, difficult (technically, financially, politically), and frankly anti-urban upgrades to the roadway infrastructure. However, and most importantly, the transit budget is a very visible way in which to measure the cost of mass transit both in terms of what is born by users directly and what is contributed by both users and non-users indirectly. The same cannot be said for the cost of maintaining roadways and highways which is, with few exceptions, supported by subsidies indirectly by users and non-users alike. So your contention that it's time to raise fares simply because the transit system isn't self supporting fails immediately from a policy standpoint since roadways also aren't self-supporting.
Additionally, if you want to take this to Economics 102 we would need to talk about demand elasticity or in the case of mass transit, the lack thereof. Our built environment is centered on the current transit in terms of where living and work areas are located (or concentrated) and the connections between. You can make large adjustments to fares and people will, for the most part, be hard pressed to find alternatives simply because those alternatives are significantly more expensive, more difficult or less direct, or just less efficient.
However by moving the price of transit drastically you will greatly burden people who need to use mass transit the most. In which case you're going to be forcing people to make choices between going to work/school, paying rent, seeing the doctor or not (recently a woman injured by a T train in Boston implored witnesses to not call an ambulance because she can't afford the transport fee) buying lousy food instead of fresh food, etc. Particularly because you seem to think that the only people riding the train during arbitrary "peak" hours are white collar workers. There are huge numbers of people in the service sector that would be captured in that peak hours net.
I'm honestly not sure who you're shielding by this aspect of your proposal.
Your zonal model will also fail since poor residents aren't concentrated and there are significant numbers of vulnerable residents mixed into wealthier neighborhoods which is likely to be an increasing trend given the growing desire to require developers to build affordable housing either on-site or in close proximity.
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