April 5th, 2021
Both RideOn in Montgomery County and Alexandria DASH are considering proposals right now that would make bus transit fare free. ATU has long supported initiatives like this because they can incentive increases in ridership. Most public transit systems have low farebox recovery rates, meaning that subsidies from local, state, and federal governments are necessary to keep the system running. Many anti-public transit, pro-highway politicians frame this as a bad thing, but it ignores the fact that every person driving a personal car is receiving MASSIVE subsidies to be able to do that. They just don't happen to see that. Every time you drive on a public road or highway built by the government, that was in part thanks to the massive subsidies provided by the government to incentivize car ownership and usage.
A fare free model, as those proposed in Alexandria and Montgomery County, could be good ways of incentivizing ridership to return to the system. But its not enough. Fare free proposals can't just be a one shot solution to the problem of getting people out of their cars and onto public transit. We need to not only invest enough to make up for the lack of fares, but enough to expand transit service offerings and reliability. Fare free transit is good, but this region really needs a new era of public transit funding to finally tip the scales in favor of public transit over personal automobiles.
WMATA experimented with fare free transit on the bus side during the heights of the pandemic as a way to allow for exclusively rear door boarding. To read more about the ongoing discussion in Montgomery County and Alexandria, listen to the piece at Fox 5 Washington. There is an additional news story from NBC Washington worth listening to.
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