Kansas City Considers Doing Away with Transit Fares Citywide

[brooklynite]

Next City

It costs only $3 a day to “RideKC” buses to and from work. A monthly pass good for riding anywhere in Kansas City, Mo., and its neighboring communities in Missouri and Kansas costs $50. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but residents of the city’s poorer East Side say that’s a large enough sum to affect their ability to apply for and hold jobs if they don’t own a car.

Meanwhile, Kansas City Area Transportation Authority buses are seldom packed. Even at rush hour, many are less than full, and some buses run almost completely empty in the middle of the day. But in downtown, thousands of residents and visitors each month gladly hop on and off the Kansas City Streetcar Authority’s Main Street streetcar line. Cost to ride the streetcar: zero.

Put these facts together and it seems like it might be a good idea if public transit everywhere in Kansas City became free to use.

According to an article in The Pitch, the city’s alt-weekly, both City Hall and the KCATA think so. And both are working on a way to implement fare-free transit citywide. Should they succeed, it would make Kansas City the first sizable city in the U.S. to make all public transit free.

A basic model for free mass transit already exists in the city. The costs of operating the streetcar are covered entirely by sales and property taxes levied in a special taxing district that extends for about a half-mile on either side of its route. A similar mechanism covering a much larger district will finance a planned southward extension of the streetcar to the Country Club Plaza and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Paying for the streetcar this way, it turned out, was more cost-effective than collecting fares from riders.

[customerserviceguy]

1. I lived in a city that did that once upon a time

Not sure if it's still the case, but the argument was that collecting and dealing with fares has costs that cut into revenue received, and fareless rides encourage greater use of a mass transit system, which even benefits people driving their own cars.

[Wounded Bear]

2. Seattle did that for a while, but discontinued it a couple of years ago...

It was good for the downtown areas, but not for rides out to the county.

[maxsolomon]

4. Yeah, it was weird.

A "ride free area" that stopped right at the edge of the CBD.

I used it a lot when buses ran in the tunnel; now I just walk.

[maxsolomon]

3. Here in Seattle, fares make up maybe 20% of Metro funding.

50% is sales taxes.

If they can afford it, it would be a worthy experiment to see if ridership goes up.

In Seattle, there's little room for ridership to increase. The buses are stuffed to the gills.

[marble falls]

5. Private cars should be paying for public transportation. Getting us off the road ...

makes their traffic less congested. Why shouldn't they pay for that benefit?

[NewDayOranges]

6. It won't hurt to go fare-free...

As I see it, if the busses are empty it's because they aren't going where people want to go when they want to go there...

And here in Kansas City area there are huge areas that aren't serviced by public transportation!