Angry Transit Nerd

I heard through the Twitterverse last week that Metro was running an experiment to test the feasibility of eliminating the Ride Free Area.  As you might imagine if you have read my Metro and Efficiency post, I find this an exciting development.

But as illustrated by this forum thread on TripAdvisor, there's something that needs examination all the more if the Ride Free Area is eliminated, and that's the subject of visitor passes.  The Ride Free Area is often defended as being friendly for tourists. After all, the Ride Free Area is home to Pike Place Market, the Waterfront, the Seattle Art Museum and several high-rise hotels. But if it was eliminated without the introduction of any sort of visitor pass, then those tourists could very well be paying cash fares on buses in the CBD, which would run contrary to the goal of moving buses through the CBD as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Tourism is an important part of Seattle's economy.  According to the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau, in 2009 visitors to King County spent $6.9 billion. Tourism is the fourth largest industry in Washington.  Last year, the American Society of Travel Agents released the results of their annual survey on the top 10 summer tourism destinations in the US, and as they state "several changes occurred this year, most notably Seattle's return to the top 10, displacing Chicago for ninth place."  Hear that, Chicago? You can have an NFC Championship bid, we'll take tourism.

The other 9 cities on the list were Orlando, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, New York City, San Diego, Honolulu, and Washington, DC. You know what else these cities all have in common? All of their transit systems have a pass available that is valid for 7 days or less. Every one.

Here in Seattle, on the other hand, the last pass that could have any utility for visitors vanished on January 1st with Metro's elimination of the Weekend Day Pass. As part of efforts to coordinate fares across the region, the ORCA participating agencies agreed that agency-specific passes should be eliminated. But the only regional passes currently available are monthly.  I believe that a 7-day pass, properly marketed, would not only make Seattle more tourist-friendly, but could produce a net gain in income for the transit agencies.

The MTA in New York released some data on how their 7-day passes were used. Amazingly, almost 35 percent of these passes are not used enough times to be a deal over paying per-ride (13 rides). They didn't release any statistics on how many people who buy these passes are visitors vs. New Yorkers with bad math skills, but I know that when I visited New York a few months ago I bought a 7-day pass even though I was only staying for a weekend. But I'm a transit nerd and half the reason I went to New York was to explore the subway, so I'm pretty sure I got my money's worth. It's easy to imagine many other visitors do not.

Notice that I said "properly marketed" earlier.  According to the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau, more than half of visitors to King County arrive by air.  But while we have a fancy new train to whisk them to downtown, observe how we tell them about it (photo by Oran Viriyincy):

Link Light Rail? What the hell does that mean? The people to whom "Link Light Rail" means anything likely don't need directions to the station. There are some large banners around the airport asking "Why Ride Light Rail?" but none that I have seen saying what it is or where it goes. The other night I met an Australian tourist in a Belltown bar. He was staying at the City Hostel in Belltown, and we had this conversation:

"Seattle is a big city."
"Hardly. It's only 600,000 people. We're only the 15th largest metro area in the US."
"But it cost me $40 to take a cab here from the airport."
"Dude, you could have taken the train for $2.50."
His face falls. "There's a train?"

Yes, there's a train. A few months ago I had a layover at the Philadelphia airport, and something that struck me was that every wayfinding sign in the airport, even the ones behind security, had directions for the "Train to Central Philadelphia" very prominently placed at the bottom of the sign. Signs directing you to the CTA Blue Line at Chicago's O'Hare Airport simply read "Trains to City." A visitor to your city doesn't need to know what the marketing name of the train service is, or the name of the agency that runs it, or what their governance structure is, or how they're funded. They just need to know there's a train that they can take downtown.

Once you've gotten them hooked into taking Link from the airport, you try to sell them on the pass instead of one-way fare. The monthly regional pass has a break-even point of 36 rides, so you could set the break-even point at 9 for a 7-day pass. A $3 pass would be sufficient for any ride within King County, so you get a pass price of $27. You could even decide to bump the break-even point to 10 rides for an even $30. After all, if their plan was to take a cab to downtown, you've just saved them at least $35, and assuming they plan to return to the airport within 7 days, you've saved them the return cab fare as well. You're on par with the Gray Line Downtown Airporter which still claims to be "the least expensive transportation between the downtown Seattle hotels and the Seattle-Tacoma (SeaTac) International Airport."

If you need to sweeten the deal even more, you can do what cities like Paris do and combine your transit pass with an discount card for lesser-known museums and attractions. They get business they might not otherwise see, and you add to the value proposition for your pass.

Now of course the devil is in the details - what form would this pass take? Flash passes are more vulnerable to fraud, and don't operate within the ORCA framework. Asking visitors to pay $5 on top of the pass cost for a card they'll never use again isn't a great way to sell it. A disposable paper ORCA card would do the trick, but I have heard rumors that there are concerns over the cryptographic security of the disposable media that are compatible with ORCA. I don't have an answer to this question. But I think that it is important we find one. The owner of a Belltown pub once told me that he instructed his bartenders to "take good care of the regulars, and scam money off the tourists." Our transit agencies could afford to adopt this philosophy.