Many years of commuting on the T has made it clear that one of the biggest impediments to a more efficient and reliable system is our insistence on collecting fares. When I was younger, the Green Line above ground simply did not collect fares. It did seem a bit silly the T would let us hop on for free while a mile away others had to pay for the privilege but without ways to purchase tokens at every station the T really had no choice. Sadly, the T spent funds modernizing the fare collection system which included machines on buses and green line trolleys that would accept cash right at the front door. Eventually this modernization led to a massive slowdown in service as a front door only boarding policy was implemented above ground forcing all commuters to use one single door to board the train.
Sometimes we really do stumble upon a better system without realizing it. Rather than being silly, the no-fare above ground policy was a brilliant way to encourage usage and make boarding as easy and quick as possible. We should return to a no-fare policy but extend it to the entirety of the MBTA system!
Remove fares without costing the MBTA a penny!
In 2017, the MBTA reported fare revenue totaling $659 million. The census recorded the Mass population as 6,859,819 with 67.4% of the population in the workforce. That comes to about 4,623,518 people. Now, far as I can tell, figuring out the number of taxpayers isn’t an exact science. If you have better sources please do let me know! The range of people who actually have a tax liability seems to range from 25% to 47%. Let’s be extremely conservative and consider that Massachusetts has only one million tax payers.
If we charged everyone in the top million income earners a $659 yearly tax we could replace revenue collected from fares.
For comparison, a year of Linkpass is $1080. Meaning if any of those million people buy a monthly Link Pass year-round they’re now saving money. Commuter rail pass buyers in the top million come out like bandits, saving potentially thousands of dollars.
But we’re ignoring tons of positive impacts from a fare-free system, not just on the bottom line but performance and efficiency system-wide. Not to mention environmental impacts if a fare-free system encourages car drivers to take the T instead.
Most critically, we’re ignoring immediate and long-term cost savings from not paying for the infrastructure and labor needed to collect fairs. Capital costs go down, including no longer needing the nearly billion dollars AFC 2.0 project.
Things we no longer need to pay for without fares:
- Fare machines
- Fare machine maintenance
- Protected exits
- Cash accounting & protection
- Fare enforcement
- Fare machine attendants at tourist heavy stations
- AFC 2.0
- Fuel/energy/time spent waiting for payment on buses/green line
But the biggest savings comes from staff across the entire MBTA no longer need to spend time assisting commuters with broken machines, directing them on how to purchase fares, considering how to implement fair gates at new stations/on new vehicles, no longer needing to account for the impact of fair gates on boarding time and able to focus on the MBTA’s primary goal of moving people across the state as best as physically possible.
Every second and penny spent on collecting fares is a waste of time and money for every tax paying member of the commonwealth.
We now have 2,311,759 taxpayers living in Massachusetts. If we decided to remove fares from the MBTA and replace every penny of fare revenue with a tax, we would need to tax every taxpayer in Massachusetts $285.07 in 2018 in order to equal the revenue generated from fares last year by the MBTA.
In other words, if we taxed every taxpayer in Massachusetts an additional $286 we could stop collecting fares across the entire MBTA without cutting the MBTA budget one penny!
