The Regional Transportation District’s board of directors needs to work overtime to find ways to avoid a fare increase at a time when soaring gasoline prices and expanded light rail service are prompting many commuters to leave their cars home and take the bus or light rail to work.
RTD staff Monday recommended that the board increase local fares by a quarter next Jan. 1. Prices also would rise on express and regional service, as well as 10-ride ticket books, monthly passes and such programs as TeenPass, Eco Pass and College Pass.
The local fare increase would translate into a 16.7 percent increase just two years after the transit agency last hiked its prices. Originally, RTD had planned to keep the existing fares until 2009.
RTD General Manager Cal Marsella cites two main reasons to justify raising prices earlier than planned:
Sharply higher costs for the diesel fuel that drives most of the agency’s bus fleet. This requires no further explanation to any citizen who has filled up at a gas station in the last year.
Vigorous growth in the access-a- Ride service that RTD is required to provide by federal law to disabled riders.
In May of this year, access-a-Ride trips jumped 13.1 percent compared to May 2006. Such expanded services are commendable, but they have to be paid for. Likewise, rising fuel bills have to be paid. But before just reflexively raising fares to offset these cost increases, RTD should look for offsetting economies in other areas.
Practically every citizen has seen RTD buses rolling near empty along various routes, sometimes during key commuting hours. Such tales are often discounted by professional transit managers as merely “anecdotal,” but they come from disinterested citizens with no ax to grind. In contrast, RTD’s elected board faces strong political pressure every time it tries to cut back or eliminate an under-utilized route.
The Post believes RTD should make extraordinary efforts to hold the line on fares until 2009, including reducing under-utilized routes, because rising gasoline prices have created a golden opportunity to sell citizens on the benefits of going to and from work on public transit.
RTD’s own numbers show ridership began jumping sharply, about 7 percent, last summer after gasoline leaped above $3 a gallon. Now, with a spanking new light rail line in the southeast metro area freeing up buses for express services elsewhere, RTD ought to be going hammer and tongs to recruit new riders.
In the long run, people rarely ride trains or buses just to save money, although those savings can be considerable. Light rail lines speeding on their own rights-of-way are much faster ways of getting to work than such traffic-clogged arteries as Santa Fe Drive. More important, a bus or train is a chance to relax or catch up on work instead of exchanging horn blasts and insulting gestures in harried rush-hour traffic.
But before commuters can be sold on the benefits of transit, they first have to try it – and rising gasoline prices have clearly prompted many to do so. RTD should do whatever it takes to keep that trend going for the next year before raising fares as originally scheduled in 2009.
