Discounted fare program for low-income riders poised for extension
In a bid to make transit more affordable for low-income individuals, MTC staff recommended extending the means-based fare discount Clipper START program for an additional two years till June 2025. MTC is working on ways to expand adoption of the program, which currently serves a tiny share of people who are eligible.
Staff presented the proposed program changes at an MTC Policy Advisory Council Transit Transformation Action Plan meeting in early May. Clipper START provides 20% to 50% discounted transit fares to people ages 19 to 64 making at or below 200% of the federal poverty level. The program originally began with only 4 participating agencies, but has since grown to encompass 21 of the Bay Area’s 27 transit agencies.
Discounts offered by the Clipper START Program by transit agency.
The program is benefiting very low-income people - 57% of Clipper START riders have household incomes less than $20,000 per year, with approximately 40% of trips being taken on BART and 38% on MUNI.
However, only about 19,000 people have enrolled in the program between its launch in July 2020 and March 2023, providing some 1.8 million trips. This is a tiny fraction of the roughly 1.6 million people in the Bay Area who qualify for the program, according to MTC and ABAG assistant director and equity officer Judis Santos. Santos also noted that application rates have been particularly low in San Mateo County and MTC “Equity Priority Areas” such as Santa Rosa, Fairfield, and Vallejo.
As a comparison, SFMTA reports that the Muni Lifeline program, a monthly pass offering a 50% discount for low-income users, reaches over 40% of the target low-income population. SFMTA distributes the passes through a variety of social service and retail outlets.
And Caltrain reports that they are seeing much less usage of Clipper Start than the Go Pass Donation Program. The GoPass Donation program collects unused Go Passes from companies, educational institutions, and residential complexes that give people unlimited access to Caltrain over the course of a calendar year. Targeted towards low-income individuals, 60% of participants have an annual household income under $50,000 and roughly 2,000 passes have been distributed between 2021 and 2023.
Caltrain has a robust outreach effort to distribute the GoPass Donation Program passes. Caltrain works with community-servicing organizations tasking them with identifying users to receive the discounted fares, then administering Clipper Card activation and distribution.
Future of the program - increasing participation
With an uptake rate of only 1% of the eligible population, Santos emphasized the need to increase program participation through enhanced advertising and outreach efforts, and upping the fare discount rate to 50% for more systems.
An example of a Clipper START advertisements.
MTC staff are exploring further changes that could expand participation in the program. These include an auto-enroll system so that people who are eligible through other more widely used programs, such as CalFresh food benefits and CalWORKS public assistance for families, automatically receive the benefit rather than having to manually opt-in to the program; increasing the income eligibility; and adding a fare cap whereby riders travel for free after paying a certain fixed dollar amount in fares.
Policy Advisory Council members supported these various measures as “customer-focused” approaches that will increase ridership and make transit accessible for more people.
According to MTC staff member Melanie Choy, many agencies have expressed interest in raising their discount levels to 50%, but these changes would require approval by each agency.
Under the current reimbursement system, agencies have no direct financial incentive to offer 50% discounts because MTC only reimburses a flat 10% in either case. To better compensate agencies, the proposed fare subsidy increases MTC’s fair reimbursements rate up to 20%. Transit agencies that were early adopters of the 50% discount will also receive a one-time back payment. Future “buffer” funds will also be made available to help agencies offset any lost fare revenue resulting from higher-than-anticipated usage of the program.
Takeaways
Providing deeper discounts, in addition to auto-enrollment, increased income eligibility, and fare cap systems to the Clipper START program would greatly benefit riders. Reaching universal consensus to implement these changes amongst all Bay Area transit operators, however, remains a perennial challenge.
The decentralized nature of the Bay Area’s transit network makes implementing changes unnecessarily cumbersome. Mustering the support of 27 transit agencies and their various boards to opt-in to programs and reforms makes it more difficult to change the status quo.