Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Positive Fare Changes

Youth fares are going down! That means, fares are going down!

The Adult and Honored Citizen fares are staying the same (i.e. they're not going up), but Youth fares are going down. And not just a few pennies. Two-hour ticket prices are being reduced by 40 cents, day passes by 80 cents, and monthly passes by $2.

Now, we would all like to see that all fares go down. But the Youth fares are probably the least used of the three types, which means the fare price can be lowered more with less financial impact on TriMet's bottom line. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some unspoken and mildly controversial reason for this change, but I'm choosing to take the high road and simply celebrate the first TriMet fare reduction in at least the last twenty years.

It will be interesting to see how the completion of the PMLR project in FY2016 affects TriMet's budget. The construction is a huge chunk of the current expenditures. Maybe when that big give-out is cleared off the books and filed to a less expensive operations budget, there may be even more fare relief then.

But I'm not keeping my hopes up. Further fare decreases are more of a pipe dream than anything, which is an even greater reason to celebrate this one now.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please keep it clean! Thank you.