Zones vs Flat Fares: What’s the Better Transit Fare Scheme?
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- Опубліковано 4 гру 2023
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One of the biggest debates in the transit world is how transit fares should be organized, so let's talk about it - zone fares or flat fares?
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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
One big benefit of distance based fares (tap in and tap out) is that the transit agency gets granular ridership data for future planning.
Honorable mention to the German „Deutschlandticket“ where you can ride public transit across all of Germany for just 49€ per month. Absolutely brilliant to never have to think about fares. It’s also subscription based so companies can plan ahead.
London does have daily, weekly and monthly fare caps, so no matter how many journeys you make you'll never pay more than those amounts. You can also buy season tickets and travelcards for a day, week, month or year. Both the caps and season tickets are zone based, so the cap amount, and cost of a season ticket will depend on the zones used. The busses and trams are all flat fares, and with the busses you get a second bus free within 2 hours iirc, so journeys needing more than one bus cost the same as if you only took.
I know this is a controversial take. But you missed one other option. What if we , now hear me out, made it free. I know that this subverts the classical idea that public transit needs to pay for itself. I know that this would mean that we would have to reorganize how taxation works. How I see it is that transportation is weighed on three axis: speed, price and convenience. Transit almost always looses on speed to personal automobiles, so it has to over deliver on the other two. If we funded public transportation like this the it would automatically always win on convenience and price. I also know that a lot of places are feeling the global strain on economics at all levels of government. But if we stopped looking at transit as business and rather look at at is as a service of the commons we could invest in transit that would be built for the soul purpose of transporting people not with the caveat that it has to be revenue neutral.
I think simple fair system works best. I personally liked pragues time based fair, 30min, 90min, 24hrs and 72hrs for a single pass. Then locals can buy the 30, 90 or 365 day passes. Its very cheap which helps as well but even if the prices were higher it limits confusion and makes sense for someone new to the system.
As someone living in Singapore, I honestly love distance-based fares. I take a lot of short trips, so that helps to make sure I don’t pay a high flat fare just for a short bus ride. Additionally, our fares are quite cheap, at around 1.70 USD max for any ride (or 2.15 USD if the ride includes an express bus). The most convenient thing about our public transport is that all fares are standardised and use an integrated fare system, so we can reduce costs if we’re transferring to another bus or train service, and we don’t need to pay a new flat fare per transfer.
In Skåne, Sweden, we have a zone-based system that is ”customizeable”. You can pick out your start and end points and other stops as you wish and the system will adapt a circular zone of set sizes to it (and price). This allows unlimited travel on all modes provided by the agency within your own zone within the set amount of time it’s valid (also based one the size of the zone). I think this is a great system for it’s flexibility.
i personally like seoul's metro fare system where for the first 10km you pay ₩1,400 (around $1.07) and for every extra 5km you pay an additional ₩100 (around $0.7), making it both a fixed and zoned based fares, while not being overly expensive
I've been generally very grateful for flat fares. In my experience, a lot of low-income people have to live far out because that's where the housing is (relatively) affordable to them. You may not like having to travel so far, but for many of us, you have to take what you can get. I know I've eschewed express lines for a slower ride on local and limited stop lines to avoid the higher fares of the fast lines. It kind of sucked, but you gotta do what you gotta do. A flat fare makes travel easy to comprehend, easier to budget, and you can make more spontaneous trips. When you have to ration trips to save money, it can make you feel trapped and unfree. At everyone in my city pays the same amount for a monthly pass so we can all travel however much and wherever we like. I do avoid the regional system, though, because it's far more expensive. Where it might have been faster, I take slower, less frequent, but cheaper buses. :(
"Heathrow and THE OTHER STATION" killed me
Videos like this make me so thankful to live in Portland, Oregon where a single fare buys you 2 1/2 hours on the Max, Ctran (Vancouver, Washington) and Trimet buses, and the Portland Streetcar. If you buy another fare that same day, your fare becomes a Day Pass and it is good until 3:30am; if you buy 20 days of Day Passes in a calendar month, it becomes a Monthly Pass and you don't get charged beyond that. All this on your Hop card which is contactless.
Here in Santiago, Chile, as incredible as this sounds for most people, we don’t use ANY of the fare systems (flat and/or zones) described in the video. Instead, at least in the Metro, we use
I think the problem with flat fares is that short trips and side trips or trip interruptions get very expensive, which can be mitigated by setting a low daily/weekly cap making incremental trips free or cheap (eg. 2 trips = daily cap like in Chicago Ventra or Melbourne Myki). Distance-based systems these days can be solved by tap on/tap off systems that compute the fares for you and apply the appropriate caps. I think the Sydney Opal system is one of the best examples of a well-implemented distance-based pricing structure that is better than London Oyster in a number ways: 1. Single cap for everyone (not zone-based caps) for better equity, 2. Transfer discounts between modes, 3. Trip interruptions of <1 hour are priced as one journey without penalty for exiting the fare gates, 4. the same distance-based pricing in all directions, no discrimination against trips into the city centre. It's not perfect, but one of the best I've seen.
I live in Munich and here for example if a Station is near a border of 2 zones, it gets counted as being in both to make the fares for each individual cheaper or make it cost as much in any direction. I think it‘s a great solution to that issue with a station being next to a border to another zone.
There's actually at least two kinds of zone fare systems: concentric rings (Munich) and a honeycomb structure (often rural areas in Germany).
“Riding the Piccadilly line from Heathrow to… the other station”
The backbone of the fare system in Warsaw is the long term pass, which costs about 23 USD per month (single ride tickets are absolutely not worth it, unless you're just visiting or using the network very sporadically), combined with the unified ticket within city limits (i.e. you can ride suburban trains without buying another ticket). There are only two zones: inside the city and the outside. The great thing about this system is that although there is a fare, it feels as if it was free. these days I work from home so I don't really need a pass, but I still have it, simply because it means I never have to think about tickets and I just go wherever I want.
you can have BOTH zones and flat rates in the same system. Like zones, built up as rings around downtown, but you can also have e.g. day / week / monthly tickets either for the entire city, or just the downtown area. Public Transportation Authorities can also offer combined offers, like group day tickets for the entire network, or other discounts like job tickets, school kid and students tickets, weekend tickets, state tickets etc
Nice to see that Berlin really gets to shine in your videos :D To be fair, most people visiting are only ever going to see the two inner zones, though, which are covered by the "default" fare, so it basically feels like a flat fare. But as you said, anyone staying for more than a couple of days is going to get a pass anyway, which is a much better option. And the transition to the third zone for trips outside the city makes intuitive sense. Unfortunately, the non-metropolitan Germany is infamous for its stupidly complicated zone based fare systems, with illogical "jurisdiction" borders and non-transparent fares... which is why the new Deutschlandticket is a huge relief! Basically the first change in decades that has made at least some people drive less.