Reading the SL Trib today, the news article was on free fares, suggested as a way to bolster transit ridership. UTA has tried a couple of 'free fare days' as a pilot program, which boosted ridership by about 16%. Article said fares make up 11% of UTAs budget. The usual rhetorical questions about the cost of collecting fares were offered (with no quantification of how much fare actually actually costs--my bet being minimal). Fundamentally, UTA can't do away with the fare collection infrastructure in SLC without doing away with it system wide. And that's not happening.
More and more, my mind turns to SLC needing it's own transit agency (on top of UTA). No one in UTA is happy when that gets brought up--if SLC breaks off, I imagine their budget goes to bits. UTA allocates service to cities in proportion to how much sales tax revenue the city contributes to UTA. If SLC ceased contributing, UTA would lose...perhaps a quarter of it's sales tax funding? And all the transit-service feasible destinations are in SLC, so without those destinations, none of the existing UTA routes would be feasible. Leave SLC out, UTA's ridership collapses, and so does the agency.
But there is a conflict: SLC wants a kind of service that UTA is not providing: Urban shuttle. Short trips on fast, frequent and reliable transit. Can't blame UTA--that's a very expensive type of service to provide. But if you are traveling within SLC, it's the only kind of service you care about: hop-on, hop-off trips, for (otherwise) walkable distances: 20 minute walks. SLC effectively wants another 400 S. Trax corridor....rather it wants several of them.
SLC's future is in being composed of 'Transit Oriented Corridors' (TOC). TOD is for suburbia: dense, mixed use, walkable nodes set amidst the suburban sprawl. TOC is for urban locations where station areas overlap: where both walking and riding between station are feasible. Portland gets it--at this point, Portland's CBD is so saturated with fixed guideway transit stations (LRT and streetcar) that like 90% of the whole thing is within walking distance of transit. (Paris does even better--98% within the Periphique, IIRC).
Not that I suggest the urbanization of all of SLC--I like the bungalow neighborhoods, and I'd like them to stay. But I recognize that SLC is growing, and growth means a need for more space, and more spacing needs building. But I'd like to see that building take the form of high-density (elevators required) next to transit stations, rather than scattered about in 'missing middle' penny-packets.
To circle back: SLC wants transit capable of supporting car-free living. (Any central city that tries out out-suburb suburbia is playing a mugs game.) UTA doesn't want to provide it. There is an essential conflict there, and one that is not going away. One way for SLC to achieve its desires (at great expense) is to build a geographically limited streetcar network, and make those streetcars free. The other way is to build a free-fare bus network.
Why fare-free? Because most of the bus trips made within SLC are short. Walkable distances. Distances where it's not worth paying the $2.50 for a ticket, but too far to walk. Electronic passes solve a lot of the issues of fare-free transit. I recall the weird rigamarole of 'pay when board' vs 'pay when exit', depending on where you boarded, and the complications of entry/exit from bus doors. With electronic passes, you tap on, and you go. SLC is already partially fare-free, through various pass systems: U students, high school students, city employees, things like the Hive pass. It might be possible to just go one step further, and make it free to all residents. Then transit becomes a utility, a fee for service: Each parcel gets assessed on the basis of use (# of units), and then every address is mailed a transit pass.
Given that half of SLC's density is employment (actual pop is only 165k or so, IIRC), might also extend the pass program to employees, through an employer-parking cashout program.
More and more, my mind turns to SLC needing it's own transit agency (on top of UTA). No one in UTA is happy when that gets brought up--if SLC breaks off, I imagine their budget goes to bits. UTA allocates service to cities in proportion to how much sales tax revenue the city contributes to UTA. If SLC ceased contributing, UTA would lose...perhaps a quarter of it's sales tax funding? And all the transit-service feasible destinations are in SLC, so without those destinations, none of the existing UTA routes would be feasible. Leave SLC out, UTA's ridership collapses, and so does the agency.
But there is a conflict: SLC wants a kind of service that UTA is not providing: Urban shuttle. Short trips on fast, frequent and reliable transit. Can't blame UTA--that's a very expensive type of service to provide. But if you are traveling within SLC, it's the only kind of service you care about: hop-on, hop-off trips, for (otherwise) walkable distances: 20 minute walks. SLC effectively wants another 400 S. Trax corridor....rather it wants several of them.
SLC's future is in being composed of 'Transit Oriented Corridors' (TOC). TOD is for suburbia: dense, mixed use, walkable nodes set amidst the suburban sprawl. TOC is for urban locations where station areas overlap: where both walking and riding between station are feasible. Portland gets it--at this point, Portland's CBD is so saturated with fixed guideway transit stations (LRT and streetcar) that like 90% of the whole thing is within walking distance of transit. (Paris does even better--98% within the Periphique, IIRC).
Not that I suggest the urbanization of all of SLC--I like the bungalow neighborhoods, and I'd like them to stay. But I recognize that SLC is growing, and growth means a need for more space, and more spacing needs building. But I'd like to see that building take the form of high-density (elevators required) next to transit stations, rather than scattered about in 'missing middle' penny-packets.
To circle back: SLC wants transit capable of supporting car-free living. (Any central city that tries out out-suburb suburbia is playing a mugs game.) UTA doesn't want to provide it. There is an essential conflict there, and one that is not going away. One way for SLC to achieve its desires (at great expense) is to build a geographically limited streetcar network, and make those streetcars free. The other way is to build a free-fare bus network.
Why fare-free? Because most of the bus trips made within SLC are short. Walkable distances. Distances where it's not worth paying the $2.50 for a ticket, but too far to walk. Electronic passes solve a lot of the issues of fare-free transit. I recall the weird rigamarole of 'pay when board' vs 'pay when exit', depending on where you boarded, and the complications of entry/exit from bus doors. With electronic passes, you tap on, and you go. SLC is already partially fare-free, through various pass systems: U students, high school students, city employees, things like the Hive pass. It might be possible to just go one step further, and make it free to all residents. Then transit becomes a utility, a fee for service: Each parcel gets assessed on the basis of use (# of units), and then every address is mailed a transit pass.
Given that half of SLC's density is employment (actual pop is only 165k or so, IIRC), might also extend the pass program to employees, through an employer-parking cashout program.
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