Equity in Transit Requires More Than a Piecemeal Approach

Over the last twelve months, the transportation industry has had to reckon with the many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Agencies worldwide were forced to adapt seemingly overnight to changes in ridership and new expectations regarding hygiene and sanitation. Through it all, essential workers counted on public transportation to deliver them reliably to and from their jobs and homes.

During the early days of the pandemic, our industry had to take a reactive approach to the situation, doing everything possible to ensure that public transit would remain a safe and efficient way for customers to get to their destination. Now that we have adjusted to the unique aspects of the current situation, some agencies are taking the current period as an opportunity to reevaluate existing policies and consider how they can better serve their communities.

One topic that has drawn particular attention is equity in fare pricing. By definition, public transportation is designed to be a public service, providing accessible mobility to all citizens regardless of race, gender, ability, or income status. In reality, this hasn’t always been the case: transport poverty, which describes the correlation between low income and lack of access to reliable transportation, is a prevalent issue in many major cities worldwide.

The complexities of big-city mobility

Delivering equitable mobility is a complicated task regardless of a transportation agency's size or scope, requiring detailed research and planning to meet the community and agency stakeholders' needs. The level of difficulty increases significantly when dealing with a major metropolitan area. In smaller cities, residents may be served by a single transit service, but in sprawling cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, a journey could require three or more different modes from start to finish. If even one link in the chain isn’t accessible to low-income riders, it renders the entire system inequitable.

While delivering equity across a transportation ecosystem would seem to be as easy as applying means-based rates and fare reductions across the entire network, the reality isn’t as simple. Agencies in major cities are often autonomous organizations with their own fare policies and payment systems. Beyond the fact that these different services often require different payment types, they are also difficult to connect on the back end with disparate and incompatible software and technologies.

Clipper START in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area has long served as an example for innovation in how customers plan and pay for their journeys. Nearly thirty years ago, the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) became one of the first in the country to allow passengers to use a single fare card on more than one system. This innovation grew into what is today called the Clipper card, a contactless smart card that allows passengers to pay for journeys on any of the 23 transit services overseen by the MTC.

In the mid-2010s, the MTC began studying the issue of equity in its transportation systems, culminating in a 2017 report on means-based transit fare pricing. This research led to the creation of the Clipper START program, which supports lower-income adults between the ages of 19 and 64 with fare discounts ranging from 20 to 50 percent.

Even for a well-integrated network like the Bay Area, Clipper START was a serious logistical challenge. To implement these system-wide policy changes, the MTC chose Cubic Transportation Systems to oversee the deployment of Clipper START from design to implementation, a comprehensive service offering that could be easily replicated in similar large transit networks.

Facilitating new policy objectives

The success of Clipper START, which grew from an initial four agencies to 21 transportation agencies throughout the Bay Area, demonstrates the potential for equitable fare policies to be expedited through an integrated fare collection system. At the service’s core, it allows agencies to manage fare collection across several different modes, but this is a tool that can be put to use in pursuing other key policy objectives.

Beyond delivering discounts to low-income passengers, Cubic’s back-office solution can also be applied to other transportation industry areas, including tolling and congestion pricing. When a new strategy is developed, rather than determining how to apply that policy individually with each of ten or more operators or modes, account-based back office solutions can make the relevant changes a reality instantly across all services. Implementation of and adjustments to payment policies are now a matter of minutes instead of months.

As our industry emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, we should take the opportunity to ensure that our services are genuinely safe and equitable for all our riders. Cubic is providing the technology to help our transportation customers make that happen.