RandomWalk
Senior Member
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- Feb 2, 2014
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Revenue Anticipation Bonds probably have covenants that would make it untenable to zero out fare box revenue.
Since they first announced AFC 2.0 what seems like 25 years ago, a common sticker-shock retort was "at this point, couldn't they save money by just eliminating fares?" - if that math didn't check out then, it's on track to by the time this goes live.I agree. This whole process of a transition system with both active seems to be a HUGE waste of money. Is fare evasion that widespread to be losing the millions of dollars spent on this system?
Buses are easier, there's a spreadsheet that has averaged data for every stop of every scheduled bus (And Silver Line) trip for a typical week between 2016-2022. It's 6 million rows which is too big for Excel, so here's a version I've already split into just 2022 and cleaned up. Rapid transit is harder, but you might be able to compare gated entries each half hour with boardings by time period to get some insights on how many people enter Park St and then ride to Harvard, for example. To deal with bus transfers you could potentially look at connecting the bus data with gated entries, but that might get tricky because you would either need to estimate bus travel times or look into this absolutely insane dataset of about 30 million bus arrival/departure times.I'm mulling on a potential fare reform proposal and I've come to an interesting problem: I'm trying to figure out how many transit-using commuters conduct their entire commute on a 1-seat-ride within the "Core", which I'm defining roughly as Sullivan - Harvard - Kenmore - Ruggles - Andrew - Airport - Sullivan (excluding everything north of the Mystic), compared to the number of people who commute across that boundary.
I've looked at the BNRD's travel demand data but it unfortunately looks at commutes of all modes, and I don't think it really can give me the answers I'm looking for. I'm playing around with OnTheMap, but I don't love how many assumptions I'm having to make.
I think in particular this question boils down to how many make the following commutes:
The bus routes are a little bit more tractable due to the Better Bus Profiles (and because the idea I'm toying with can potentially be less reliant on answering this question for buses). But the Red Line stations seem vexing -- the ridership figures the T provides are, AFAIK, unlinked trips, so don't distinguish between riders who walk to the Red Line vs transfer from buses.
- Harvard <> Downtown
- Central <> Downtown
- Kendall <> Downtown
- South End <> Downtown (SL4 + SL5)
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 43
- 55
Any ideas?
This is a quicker response than I would have loved, but:I'm mulling on a potential fare reform proposal and I've come to an interesting problem: I'm trying to figure out how many transit-using commuters conduct their entire commute on a 1-seat-ride within the "Core", which I'm defining roughly as Sullivan - Harvard - Kenmore - Ruggles - Andrew - Airport - Sullivan (excluding everything north of the Mystic), compared to the number of people who commute across that boundary.
I've looked at the BNRD's travel demand data but it unfortunately looks at commutes of all modes, and I don't think it really can give me the answers I'm looking for. I'm playing around with OnTheMap, but I don't love how many assumptions I'm having to make.
I think in particular this question boils down to how many make the following commutes:
The bus routes are a little bit more tractable due to the Better Bus Profiles (and because the idea I'm toying with can potentially be less reliant on answering this question for buses). But the Red Line stations seem vexing -- the ridership figures the T provides are, AFAIK, unlinked trips, so don't distinguish between riders who walk to the Red Line vs transfer from buses.
- Harvard <> Downtown
- Central <> Downtown
- Kendall <> Downtown
- South End <> Downtown (SL4 + SL5)
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 43
- 55
Any ideas?