Pass Sales Outlets

Quick quiz- if you needed a bus pass right this minute, where's the nearest place to your house to buy one? How about your work? Do you know?

Bus pass distribution in the majority of the RTA service area, as in many suburban areas, is disproportionately concentrated at two sorts of establishments: liquor/convenience stores and check cashing shops. You can also purchase them at RTA's two offices in Riverside and Hemet, and at a few senior centers, city halls, and community service agencies, but those first two are the most prevalent. What does that say about how we think about transit?

Well, none of these establishments exactly screams upper-class, and check-cashing stores are explicitly targeted at the working poor, so there's a bit of classism for you. Furthermore, they're not the sort of places that many people would ordinarily find themselves at during the course of their day-to-day errands. Compare this with, for example, San Francisco, where you can reload your Clipper card at any Wallgreens (and a great many other grocery stores besides), or even Orange County, where you can pick up your bus pass at Ralph's when buying groceries.

Now, if you live in Riverside, you really should be buying your pass at the Public Works Department at City Hall, where you can get substantial discounts (and sign up for a pass by mail). But even then, why is this program limited to only one location in the City, only during normal business hours? How many people would find getting down to enroll in this program difficult, and why can't we handle enrollment via mail, and distribution via other outlets?

Obviously, I have a suggestion: automated pass machines at major transit centers. If you ride transit around here, odds are you'll probably end up passing through Moreno Valley Mall, Downtown Terminal, or Tyler Mall transit center at some point during your travels. How much easier would life be on the transit-dependent if, while waiting for their next bus, they could walk over to a machine and purchase their next pass? SunLine Transit in the Coachella Valley has one of these machines at their major transfer point, and they utilize a similar ticketing system to RTA. People seem to be able to figure out automated ticketing machines at the Metrolink station, and RTA's fare system is much less complicated. So how about it?

The Beauty of Transfers

So the wife and I were up in San Francisco over the last weekend, and that meant spending time riding the ever-excellent Muni and BART systems. One thing that struck me about Muni is the freedom that the free transfer system allows riders. Here's an example. My wife and I were walking along Divisadero from Haight to McAllister. It's a longish walk, and one we would have preferred to ride the bus on- but we had no idea how long the wait for the bus would be. We started walking, and I kept looking over my shoulder for a bus coming. About halfway there, a bus appeared, and we boarded it and rode the rest of the way.

In Riverside, without an unlimited pass, there's probably no way we would have done that. Paying $1.50 on the first bus, and then another $1.50 on the next, would have been far too expensive- especially if there were a third vehicle beyond that. On Muni, the same $2 fare gets you 90 minutes of transit, no matter how many transit vehicles that involves. It means the freedom to hop on any bus or streetcar, in any direction, in order to arrive at your destination- or even turn around and come back. It is this freedom which I argued every transit rider should have in a very early post- and San Francisco's system (along with many others, including New York) affords it to every rider, from the occasional to the frequent.

I know that the reason our fare structure is what it is in Southern California is due to a formula that provides subsidies using base fare as a proxy for ridership- but we have much better measures of ridership now. RTA has automated passenger counters on every bus. Smart cards, such as Clipper, Compass and TAP, have the potential to provide even better data for subsidy purposes. Isn't it time to re-evaluate the no-transfer transit model?