Distance-based fares are for champions

I just read this article in the Salt Lake Tribune talking about UTA's potential future fare-collection system.  Riders would pay according to how far they traveled, as tracked by GPS using a card with an embedded smart chip.  All monthly passes allowing unlimited rides for a flat fee would likely end, as would special discounted pricing for organizations like the University of Utah who purchase passes for employees/students.

The OV-chipkaart system in the Netherlands requires cards to
 be pre-loaded with funds, which the system debits from based
on distance traveled. 

I'm all for it.  Someone commuting from the suburbs has no business paying the same fare as someone using transit for short inner-city trips.  We accept this with private vehicles, so why not public?  Further supporting such a system is the demographics of those who take shorter vs. longer trips (generally poorer vs. generally wealthier, generally more minorities vs. generally whiteheads) due to residential patterns in cities.  But selling such a Marxist agenda has little luck in places like Utah.  Instead they better emphasize fairness in a more libertarian, less redistributive way.

A couple foreseeable challenges to implementation:

1. High costs in the beginning to "train" the public on how to pay their fare, especially those who are least capable of understanding the system.

2. Good old-fashioned American Brand privacy concerns.

3. The end of the world.

If UTA can address these, they have my highly coveted endorsement to move forward

Crazy money for crazy projects

BIG NEWS!  Construction of Utah's FrontRunner commuter rail expansion is complete.  The tracks now run from Provo (45 miles south of Salt Lake) to just past Ogden (45 miles north of Salt Lake), for a total of--you guessed it--90 miles!  The southern segment took about four years to build and cost $890 million, including new vehicles purchased.  But hey, it takes large investments like this if you want high-class public transportation systems, especially when projections say that by 2015 a total of...8,000 PASSENGERS PER DAY will ride FrontRunner South (according to this Salt Lake Tribune article).  

Map of the FrontRunner South route

No, I must have misread that.  Surely I missed a zero in there somewhere.  Or perhaps the 8,000 is per hour of operation?  


Unfortunately, that's the figure. Along the entire 90-mile route, they expect a total of 14,000 passengers per day in 2015.  So before we even start talking about operating costs, this thing has a ridiculously long way to go before it pays off.  I mean, 8,000 riders per day would mean a cost of $4,450 per rider per year for 25 years just to cover expenses to this point.  Add in those operating costs (labor, maintenance, diesel fuel, etc etc) and it's pretty clear that FrontRunner South is an economist's nightmare.  


The question, then, is how in the hell was this thing approved?  Making things even crazier is the fact that Utah County residents (who are more likely to burn an Obama effigy than recycle) voted to increase their sales tax to fund this as well as some LRT projects that are completely within Salt Lake County.  So on the plus side, this means that capital costs were financed by 80% local money and only 20% federal.  At least they're wasting primarily their own money.  


More than anything else, I think this stands as a perfect example of just how much of a "bright and shiny object" rail projects are in the U.S. (Europe isn't completely immune, case in point: Edinburgh).  We're seeing it with expensive streetcar lines (Washington DC, Portland, Charlotte)  and light rail projects (Portland again, Salt Lake again, Seattle) as well.  So I don't think the voters in Utah are particularly stupid; in fact, I was one of them. But the appeal of sexy projects like FrontRunner often outweigh their practicality by far.  I'm definitely not the first person to state this (read Jarrett Walker's blog and book for a much more eloquent and informed analysis of this type of thing), but this has to be a passing phase, right?...Right?