Alameda TMA joins the second phase Clipper BayPass pilot
The Alameda Transportation Management Association has joined the second phase of the Clipper Bay Pass pilot, which is serving employers and transportation management associations.
Alameda’s TMAs serve 900 residents and 600 employees in the City of Alameda. Before the Bay Pass was available, ATMA provided EZPasses giving access to AC Transit. Now, residents and workers also have access to BART, ferries, and other Bay Area transit services.
The ferry access was particularly welcome for AMTA participants, given the waterfront location. Alameda’s TMAs also offer free water shuttles between Alameda and Jack London Square, and between 12th street BART and the Alameda Target.
Alameda’s TMA programs were started five years ago, funded by developer fees in the City of Alameda, to serve new developments at Alameda Point, along the Northern Waterfront, and in-fill development in West Alameda (there are actually two separate TMAs serving the infill development areas, run by the same team).
In the Bay Area, transportation demand management programs have been most common at large employers providing transportation benefits to employees, often required by development agreements when new offices are built, with a goal of reducing vehicle traffic and parking demand.
Transportation Management Associations provide transportation benefits to a collection of smaller businesses and residential developments. They are typically nonprofit organizations with a board composed of representatives of organizations served by the TMA. The employers served by Alameda TMA include advanced-tech startups such as Astra, which designs satellite delivery rockets, Kairos Power, which is developing a molten salt nuclear reactor system, Saildrone, which makes autonomous data-gathering sailboats, and local beverage makers Almanac Brewery and St George Spirits.
TMAs can provide transportation services and benefits to smaller companies, lower-income service workers and residents who have historically not been served by transportation demand programs.
An autonomous data-gathering sailboat by Saildrone, one of the advanced-tech startups served by the Alameda TMA.
Also participating in the second phase of the pilot, University of California San Francisco is providing about 6,000 employees access to the Clipper BayPass and the City of Menlo Park is providing the pass to several hundred city workers.
Interestingly, the City of Menlo Park had purchased Caltrain’s Go Pass for employees before the pandemic, and was facing a difficult decision about whether to re-subscribe, since city workers live in a variety of locations served by a range of transit agencies. The availability of BayPass helped the City decide to resubscribe to transit passes for its workers.
The goal of the second phase of the pilot is to serve up to 10 institutions serving up to 20,000 people. According to staff at the MTC Network Management Customer Advisory Group on February 23, there is a strong pipeline of additional employers and TMAs that are seeking to participate. As to why the program isn’t yet at its full subscription of 10 institutions with up to 20,000 people, staff mentioned the timeline for organizations to make purchasing decisions. One benefit of the pilot is to better understand the organizational purchasing process.
The main outcome goal of the program is to increase transit ridership by providing a more attractive product to organizations that previously had to choose among single-agency passes (not including BART, which didn’t offer passes). Implementation goals include developing pricing and revenue sharing models that can allow the program to scale up to many more organizations and individuals.
If your organization is interested, you can sign up here for more information about the program. And if your organization is interested in encouraging MTC and agencies to use this pilot to develop the pricing, revenue sharing, and administration to enable it to scale up, you can add your organization to this joint letter.
