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Cities that have transit fare deals (capping) have fairer fares

August 22, 2019 / / 0 Comments

“Fare capping” is a jargon term for a fare policy that any transit agency can implement to save their riders money, make fares fairer, and potentially increase ridership. Another term is “deal”, as these policies net riders a break in the fares.

Fare capping ensures that riders who pay for rides with a transit card* will never pay more than the cost of one or more daily and multi-day passes that the transit agency includes in its fare capping policy.

Example 1: Consider a tourist or infrequent visitor to the city. The tourist will use transit to get around and when they arrive at a ticket vending machine, they’re given the option to get a smart card and load with “e-purse” (cash to pay as they ride) or get a smart card and load it with a pass for one or more days. In Chicago, there are 1-day, 3-day, 7-day, and 30-day options, for $10, $20, $28, and $105.

Just like anyone else, the tourist doesn’t want to pay more than they have to so they try to estimate the number of trips they’ll take today to see if the number of rides will cost more than $10 (the price of a 1-day pass). That sounds like a complicated thought exercise and one with a high likelihood of being wrong at the end of the day!

In a fare capping system, the tourist won’t have to choose! They obtain the transit smart card, load it with $5 cash, and perhaps connect it to an app or connect it to an auto-load functionality. The tourist rides buses and the ‘L’ and as soon as they ride $10 worth in the service day, their transit smart card automatically starts granting them free rides – their transit card has just been granted a 1-day pass!

By eliminating the need to choose between fare products, the tourist is more comfortable riding transit as much as they need to today because they know that they’ll never be charged more than $10.

Example 2: Consider someone who doesn’t earn very much and uses transit to get to work two times a day, five days a week, 20 days a month. At $2.50 per ride, that works out to $100, which is less than the cost of a 30-day pass in Chicago (which is $105, and an oddity, but I won’t address that). This person also sometimes takes additional rides after work and on the weekend to run errands, so their monthly rides will end up costing more than $105, the price of a 30-day pass.

It would make the most financial sense for this worker to get a 30-day pass. But when you don’t earn much, it’s hard to come up with or part with $105 at one time.

In a fare capping system, the person doesn’t have to worry about putting up $105 at this very moment. They would be able to ride transit as much as they want to in a 30-day period knowing that they will pay $2.50 per ride each day, but never more than $105 in a 30-day period. They don’t need to have $105 right now to be able to save money in the long run.

A Miami-Dade Transit Agency poster indicate fare capping (without calling it fare capping, because that’s a wonky phrase).

Cities with fare capping

12 cities, last updated May 13, 2023

  1. London is first in the list because they were first with fare capping – It was pretty cool back in 2014 when my Anglophile friend told me to borrow his Oyster card and just tap away and ride transit all day, because I would never pay more than the cost of a 1-day pass (in May 2023 the cost is £8.10).
    • London also has weekly capping, but this doesn’t include the Underground or Overground (buses and trams only). The week also starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.
  2. Miami is the most recent place to have fare capping, which @erik_griswold spotted on a poster. Daily capping only.
  3. St. Louis now has a transit smart card, and has daily capping.
  4. Sydney’s Opal card offers daily capping, weekly capping, and Sunday deal.
    • On Sundays, people can ride on metro, train, bus, ferry and light rail services all day Sunday for the price of one ride, $2.80 AUD (about $1.89 as of August 22, 2019).
    • Another deal the Opal card offers users: Ride 8 times in a week, and all subsequent rides are 50% off.
  5. Indianapolis’s IndyGo transit agency has daily capping, and weekly capping.
  6. San Jose-based transit agency Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has daily capping which they call “Day Pass Accumulator”.
  7. Oakland-East Bay’s AC Transit has daily capping, but they don’t use those words. The website says that a day pass is applied to the Clipper transit smart card when a third trip is taken in a day.
  8. Portland, Oregon: TriMet, C-TRAN, and Portland Streetcar seem to have the most flexible payment options for their fare capping policy: Riders with a Hop transit smart card get daily capping and monthly capping. People who pay with Google Pay and Apple Pay can also get daily and weekly capping; people who pay with Samsung Pay or a contactless credit card can get daily capping.
  9. Victoria (Australian state) has daily capping on metropolitan Melbourne routes and regional routes when using the myki card.
  10. Houston, Texas: METRO has daily capping that kicks in after “Q” fare card holder takes three trips.
  11. The Ride in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has daily, weekly, and monthly capping – this is the policy to beat.
  12. Lothian buses in Edinburgh, Scotland, has the “TapTapCap” fare capping scheme that’s £4.80 per day and £22 per week since August 2019.
  13. Los Angeles implemented daily and weekly fare capping on July 2, 2023.
  14. New York City’s MTA implemented a kind of weekly fare capping with the introduction of OMNY contactless payments in 2022: Spend $34 – 12 paid rides – in a 7-day period and subsequent rides in that 7-day period are free.
  15. San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) has “best fare” daily and monthly fare capping when people use a PRONTO plastic card or the PRONTO app.
  16. Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) has daily, weekly (Monday to Sunday), and monthly fare capping for users of the Umo app (which generates a QR code to be scanned by an on-board validator).
  17. The Allgobus system in Almere (Netherlands) has daily fare capping of €6.
  18. The STIB/MIVB transit authority in Brussels has daily fare capping of €7.50 (all trips after the fourth paid trip are free).

Similar fare benefit schemes

GO Transit in Toronto – a regional rail and bus network – offers a large discount to people who pay with PRESTO and repeat a trip 36 to 40 times a month, and it’s free for trips 41 and later. I think this is at first a bit confusing, but the chart below may clarify.

Chart showing the discounts for repeated rides on GO Transit.

How transit agencies advertise fare capping

St. Louis’s MyGatewayCard has daily capping.
bus stop sign in South Queensferry, Scotland, for Lothian buses
The Lothian company operates bus in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, and launched the TapTapCap in August 2019.

* Notes

A transit card is only necessary for transit systems that store the values and passes on a card. The Chicago Transit Authority and its vendor, Cubic, created Ventra, an account-based system that stores values and passes on an account in the cloud, and is expressed through the Ventra card, compatible smartphones, and compatible smartwatches. Fares to pay for rides Metra, a commuter rail company that participates in Ventra, can be purchased using the Ventra account’s stored value. Metra doesn’t accept taps from a Ventra card.

My idea for the Chicago prize: Build 1,000 ADUs collectively

July 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I probably won’t actually submit my idea to the Chicago Prize, a $10 million grant competition to revitalize neighborhoods, so I’m posting it here for everyone to read.

Basically, I want to use the $10 million as seed money to start a small organization that does design, construction administration, and property management to help homeowners build 1,000 accessory dwelling units in the form of new construction detached rear houses, attached rear houses, and renovated basement and attic units. $10 million won’t build that many, so there will be a small finance team to assemble additional grants as well as collect money through a crowdfunding initiative so anyone with $50 or more (up to $1,000) can invest in the program.

Read my full idea to crowdfund 1,000 ADUs (it’s about 5 pages long).

The Plús Hús, a backyard cottage, designed and made in Los Angeles.

Pick the lowest and highest numbers in an array of numbers in PostgreSQL

June 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I thought solving this problem took longer than it should have. I thought there would have been an integrated function in PostgreSQL to pick the lowest (smallest or minimum) and highest (largest or maximum) numbers in an ARRAY of numbers.

LEAST and GREATEST didn’t work, since those work on expressions, not arrays.

MIN and MAX don’t work because they are aggregating functions, and I didn’t want that.

Of course I found the solution on StackOverflow, but not after a lot of searching and trying other potential solutions.

Here it is!

Given an array of numbers, pick the lowest and highest ones using two custom functions.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)

 RETURNS anyelement AS $$

  SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]

 $$ LANGUAGE sql;

The second argument in this function is to extract the Nth smallest number. In my case I want the smallest number so I set “1” for the second argument.

Example array in PostgreSQL:

{45.04,124.90,45.04,124.90}

Example query:

SELECT small(‘{45.04,124.90,45.04,124.90}’::numeric[], 1)

Output: 45.04

You can rewrite the query to select the Nth largest number by changing the “ORDER BY 1 asc” to “ORDER BY 1 desc” (reversing the order of the array’s unnesting.)

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)

RETURNS anyelement AS $$

SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]

$$ LANGUAGE sql;

Example array in PostgreSQL:

{45.04,124.90,45.04,124.90}

Example query:

SELECT large(‘{45.04,124.90,45.04,124.90}’::numeric[], 1)

Output: 124.9

This possible condo with lockoff apartment has a 464 square foot apartment adjacent to an 870 square foot 2-bedroom condo. Drawn by Jacob Peters.

Lock off apartments: Does zoning allow them?

September 29, 2018 / / 1 Comment

These are also known as Junior Accessory Dwelling Units (JADU) in the California ADU laws. Many bungalows in Chicago were built with basement ADUs that have an exterior entrance as well as an interior entrance that can be locked off. 

At the YIMBYtown conference in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, I heard from a panel comprising a developer, an architect, and a manager of special housing projects at the City of Boston. I forget who described this novel (sort of) multi-family housing configuration, but I noted it because it has benefits similar to Chicago’s coach & rear houses.

Here’s how it works.

There would be a residential building full of condos. Each condo would have a few bedrooms. One of the bedrooms would have its own kitchen or kitchenette, bathroom, and direct entry to the building’s corridor. The bedroom would be “locked off” from the rest of the condo. 

The condo owner would rent the bedroom to a tenant, providing them housing that would most likely be less costly than an equivalent (new construction) apartment.

As the condo owner’s household changes – perhaps the family has another child – the tenant can move out and the owner can remove the kitchen to create another bedroom or closet. 

Lock offs are heavily also present in time shares. 

The zoning question is whether this condo is treated as one unit or two.

If you’re trying to increase affordable housing in your municipality, it’s necessary to classify this condo configuration as a single unit. Anything more and it wouldn’t be possible to build any of these, as the building developer would run into minimum lot area per unit and FAR limitations. 

My friend Jacob Peters quickly drew a floor plan for what a lockoff condo would look like.  

According to the speaker, the project didn’t get off the ground because the developer couldn’t get lending because of lenders who don’t understand the model. Said the speaker, “We need spaces that can evolve as our lives change. And we don’t have that flexibility in our housing stock.”

Benefits of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) like coach & rear houses

  1. Increase the supply of affordable housing
  2. Increase income for homeowners
  3. Support aging in place – ADUs give families flexibility to share property and living spaces with extended family members
  4. Increase work for small and local architects and contractors
  5. Boost local business support by restoring a neighborhood’s historical density

Update: I’m happy to see that Lennar, one of the most prolific home builders in the United States, has included the lock-off apartment in their “Next Gen” house design. A sample floor plan is below. 

Sample floor plans of Lennar’s Next Gen suburban single-family house with lock-off apartment.

#Space4Cycling: Chicago needs intuitive bike lanes and other street markings

December 24, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Two bicyclists take different routes around this driver blocking the bike lane with their car

In this case at Milwaukee and Green, space was made and well-marked for cycling but no space was outlined for driving. The driver of the black car must pull up this far to see beyond the parked silver car. In the Netherlands they’ve come up with a solution that would work here: shift the green bike lane toward the crosswalk so that the motorist crosses the crosswalk and bike lane at the same time and has space to wait to turn left between the bike lane and the travel lane.

What does an intuitive bike lane or other street marking mean?

It means that the street user can reasonably (yeah) guess, and guess right, what they’re supposed to do.

For bicyclists in Chicago, the lack of bike lane markings that continue to the edge of an intersection (often demarcated at the stop bar) creates an unintuitive bike lane design.

At intersections, an intuitive bike lane design would mean that the bicyclist and the motorist know where and how to position their vehicles in respect to the other, even if there isn’t a car there yet, or there’s not a bike there yet. Many intersections in Chicago that have protected bike lanes do this; especially the ones with separate signal phases. And these intersections work really well for bicyclists: they stand safely away from motorists, and motorists don’t attempt to occupy these spaces.

Inverted sharrow

The “sharrow before and after the intersection because the city dropped the bike lane” is the most common “didn’t make space for cycling” problem. There was plenty of space to make for cycling here, and nearly every other “sharrow…” situation: it’s along the curb and it’s subsidized, curbside parking for drivers.

But currently at dozens, if not hundreds, of Chicago intersections where the bike lane drops before the intersection, you’ll see bicyclists behave and maneuver in several ways, none of which are accommodated by the street’s design.

Some people will bike between two lanes of cars to the front of the line, and when they get there, lacking a bike box or advanced stop line, they’ll stand with their bike in the area between the crosswalk and the stop bar. If the first car is over the stop bar, then people will usually stand with their bike on the crosswalk.

Riding north on Damen towards Fullerton-Elston

The sharrow painted on the pavement, and an accompanying sign saying, “shared lane – yield to bikes” are unintuitive because no one can occupy the same space at the same time, and the symbols don’t communicate who gets first right to a specific part of the road space. In the end, though, in a situation like this, I’ve never seen someone wait back this far on their bike, and many will consider riding on the sidewalk to get to the front. When they get there, though, they won’t find any #space4cycling.

Others will bike between a lane of cars and the curb to get to the front of the line.

New buffered bike lane on Halsted just ends

This is another version of the “sharrow before and after the intersection because the city dropped the bike lane”. Why’d they drop it in this instance? To make space for Halsted Street drivers turning right, and to push more drivers northward through its intersection with Clybourn Avenue.

Others will wait to the side of drivers, and other still will wait behind a line of cars, putting themselves at a major time disadvantage as the people who biked up to the front. Not to mention they’ll choke on more fumes.

Then, when the light turns green, motorists behave differently. Some will follow behind the first bicyclist, while others will try to pass but closely because they’re essentially sharing a lane side-by-side – this exerts a lot of mental stress on the bicyclist.

Where the city has built space that’s absolutely not to be shared (meaning it’s for the exclusive use by people bicycling), then the designs are substandard because they still allow or seem open to driving. Otherwise, though, space for cycling that’s “part time” is only usable space for those holding the most power and not for the people riding bikes who need it.

frankling at washington bike lane (composite image)

In this new design that built a “protected intersection” for bicyclists going north on Franklin and east on Washington Street, the bike space is still a drivable area. (Top photo by Kevin Zolkiewicz; bottom photo by Skip Montanaro)

These deficiencies in Chicago’s bike lane network are often the result of failing to make, or make well, space for cycling from space used for parking or turn lanes.

Bicycling on the Dearborn Street bike lane

Three years after the City of Chicago built the novel and well-used two-way cycle track on one-way Dearborn, this situation north of the track still exists. And somehow they expect drivers on a 4-lane road to travel at 20 MPH.

This is 2015 and we continue to “not make space for cycling” despite every policy that calls for making bicycling in Chicago safe and convenient so that more people will do it. It’s just that in the unwritten policies it says that you can implement that policy if it doesn’t impede driving*.

* The City of Chicago has built many road diets (a reduction in the number of travel lanes) in the last four years, and some before that. A few of these have worked well for bicyclists, like on 55th and Vincennes where they built protected and buffered bike lanes, respectively (and Dearborn through the Loop).

I put road diets in a note after “impede driving” because they’re only done where they also won’t make local traffic more congested on that street or an intersecting streets.

On the face of it, that’s exactly what many people believe they’ll do because a road diet removes or converts lanes and that’s seen as the same as reducing car capacity which will shift that car traffic to other streets. That pretty much doesn’t happen and the city only implements road diets on streets that have MORE capacity than is used.