On August 10th, 2023, BART announced a plan to allow riders to pay for trips using direct credit card payments. Starting sometime in 2024, riders will be able to tap their cards directly at a station fare gate to pay for a trip, rather than needing to interact with a ticket vending machine.
This is undoubtedly a positive development for the service. Reduced waits for buying tickets will spare riders the pain of just barely missing their train because they were fiddling with the ticket machine. Direct card payment will also cut down on plastic waste and the $3 charge forced on tourists who want to ride BART but didn't have a chance to install the Clipper App or set up BART on mobile pay. It also puts BART in line with other agencies that allow payment by credit card at point of use like The London Underground, New York Subway, and DC Metro, while putting it ahead of its fellow Bay Area transit agencies like Muni, Caltrain, and VTA, none of which let riders simply tap their cards, phones, or smartwatches to access services.
Direct fare payment by credit card should be embraced by the rest of the Bay's transit agencies. But it's a small and timid step that should be followed by a much more ambitious plan by California to integrate all of Bay Area transit under a single unified fare payment system.
Ideally, one should be able to transfer between different transit systems without setting up multiple accounts or paying fares for each service used. The Bay needs a single fare system that everyone can use to get from Gilroy to Fairfield, from Berkeley to Belmont, and everywhere in between. State legislators have tried and failed to do this in the last few sessions. But the benefits are worth fighting for.
But what are those benefits? Start with cost. At present, each service has to manage levying fares, on their own, in-house. Consider what that means. Each transit agency needs to maintain its own IT and financial systems for handling fares and coordinating with banks to turn rides into revenue.
Much of this work is likely redundant. Every one of those agencies is independently running their own servers, authenticating users, responding to technical issues, protecting data, and maintaining their tech stack. But as any Bay Area Tech Bro™ can tell you, two services performing the same tasks are inherently more costly than a single service handling an equivalent workload.
There are likely to be significant cost savings to be found from deduplicating things like server costs, hardware maintenance, quality assurance, and feature development. The exact savings would require a detailed look at all the agencies' budgets. But the SFMTA is slated to spend $122 million on IT this year, while AC Transit will spend $21 million, and VTA will shell out about $15 million. Obviously, not all that money is dedicated solely to running the services' fare management systems. But judging by those numbers, there are likely millions of dollars to be saved by consolidating server hosting, authentication, engineering, quality assurance, and tech support.
Beyond the technical aspect of fare management, there is also a financial component to transit fares that could stand to benefit from consolidation. In the existing regime, every agency has to maintain a system of financial rails to actually get money into their coffers from riders' credit cards. Maintaining relationships with credit card companies and banks is not free.
Considering that each agency has budget line items dedicated to paying for credit card charges, running all the Bay Area's fare-related finances out of a single entity would cut down on labor costs by reducing the total number of accounts that need to be managed. This agency may also benefit from reduced credit card fees and improved deposit interest rates due to its control over a larger pool of funds.
These savings from economies of scale can hopefully be passed on to the riders in the form of reduced fares, or at the very least lower fare increases given the poor fiscal situation of BART, CalTrain, and SFMTA.
But money isn't everything. Integrating fares in Bay Area transit can also help create better, more reliable transit services by giving agencies and the public more insight into inter-service transfers.
Consider a bus like SamTrans Route 130/130B. This route makes stops at a Caltrain Station, several BART stations, and bus stops used by other SamTrans routes. People doubtlessly use bus lines like these for first- and last-mile connections. Making sure that transit routes have schedules that are properly timed such that transfers work smoothly would make the system more appealing to use for riders. After all, no one likes missing their connection by the skin of their teeth and being forced to wait for 15+ minutes for the next one.
But getting data on where and when transfers are made under the current regime of separate fare systems that charge and track riders independently is monstrously difficult. You could survey riders on their transfer habits. But that process would be expensive and incomplete, given the sheer number of possible transfers that are possible between the Bay's 27 transit agencies. Alternatively, one could try to extract ride data from multiple agencies' servers and merge them to get insight into what transfers riders are making. But this would be arduous labor that would fluster even Hercules.
But what if all those agencies' riders were tracked by a single entity? Say, one that's already capturing when and where riders are getting on and off in order to figure out what fare to charge them?
Now you have a treasure trove of data that can grant unheard-of insight into which transfers are popular and which ones aren't. This sort of data could help agencies work out optimized route scheduling. If integrated fare data could be used to show that hundreds of SamTrans 130 riders transfer at the route's CalTrain stop, but almost no one transfers at any of the BART stations, SamTrans could reconfigure the 130 schedule to prioritize arriving at CalTrain in time for riders to easily make their transfer, even if it means sacrificing a timely transfer at a BART stop that no one is trying to make anyway.
These service improvements, paired with the savings from consolidating the IT and financial costs of fare servicing would hopefully improve transit ridership in the Bay Area. Cost savings among transit agencies can help forestall fare hikes, while improvements to service quality can help improve ridership by making transit a more appealing alternative to driving.
Unfortunately, it appears that California politics are not currently conducive to such comprehensive fare integration. In the last legislative session, Peninsula Senator Josh Becker authored SB917, which would have set up a state plan to create an integrated fare system. Unfortunately, it failed, despite the transit agencies and other stakeholders supporting it, at least in public.
Whether it failed for arcane political reasons or due to lack of interest, the failure of SB917 is a loss for the Bay Area. Transit fare integration has the potential to save millions of dollars at a time when transit agencies are struggling financially while improving the quality of service for the millions of people who use transit every day.