All-agency transit pass pilot to rollout in August

The region’s first big step toward integrated fares - a $6 million two-year all-agency transit pass pilot for organizations - is being prepared for rollout in August 2022 in time for the school year.  The first participants will be public colleges and universities and affordable housing developments that already provide more limited passes to students and residents.  The pilot will provide passes to a subset of the population and measure the difference in transit use. To get started, the pilot requires approval by all 27 transit agency boards by June. 

The second phase of the pilot starting in early 2023 will include up to 10 employers, especially in transit rich locations like downtown San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland. The program will consider equity as a criterion. Equity is important especially since some transit pass programs in the region such as Caltrain’s Go Pass historically focused on high-income workers; Caltrain has since made changes to the program with the goal to improve equitable access.

At the initial presentation to the Fare Integration Task Force, MidPen Housing was identified as the affordable housing partner for the program. There are other affordable housing developers including First Community Housing in Santa Clara County and Eden Housing in the East Bay that also fit the eligibility criterion of offering local transit passes to residents.

At the Fare Integration Task Force meeting, several students and trustees from East Bay Community Colleges requested to participate in the pilot.  These colleges don’t qualify for the first phase of the pilot because they do not currently provide passes to students. They could potentially join the pilot after the initial phase by starting a pass program with the local transit agency. There is a bootstrapping challenge for these non-affluent institutions serving non-affluent students - hopefully there are sources of funding that can be found.

The budget for the pilot is $6 million (see chart, and the slides), which will come from $28 million allocated by Metropolitan Transportation Commission for fare integration programs that are part of the approved Transformation Action Plan. In the long run, staff is expecting that the pass program may be revenue neutral, which has been the case with the Seattle metropolitan area’s widely used institutional pass program. The TAP has 27 recommendations to recover Bay Area transit from the impacts of Covid by making the system more rider-friendly, and funding has been identified for top TAP priorities.

In order to get started the pilot program will need to be approved by the boards of all 27 transit agencies in May and June. The transit General Managers who serve on the Fare Integration Task Force were enthusiastically supportive of the pilot; hopefully they will encourage their boards to support. 

Additional follow-on steps, such as creating a permanent program, creating a pass for individuals, and implementing free and reduced price transfers, as already approved in the region’s Fare Policy Vision, would also require separate approval by all 27 transit agencies. As Seamless Bay Area we think this is a cumbersome and likely fragile process that should be streamlined and strengthened to be able to clearly and nimbly manage a coordinated system.