Cap Metro to add hours, free rides
Young students pay no fare; MetroRail weekend service extended.
Capital Metro, looking to build ridership and community goodwill after four years of falling ridership, will make fares free for all primary and secondary school students this summer, officials announced Wednesday.
The Austin transit agency’s combined bus-and-rail ridership is now 12.4 percent below the 2013 level. So, in another effort to boost boardings, the agency also will extend the hours of MetroRail weekend service from June to August.
“The team feels that we will see an increase in ridership by operating these trips,” Capital Metro President and CEO Randy Clarke said in a May 1 memo to the agency’s board of directors. “It will also reaffirm Capital Metro’s commitment to the city of Austin’s Vision Zero initiative by keeping distraught, fatigued and impaired drivers off Central Texas roads.”
Clarke said his staff will analyze the results from the free service for children and added train runs, and then make a report to the board of directors sometime in the fall so the agency can consider further steps. Asked about the idea of building usage by, in one case, giving the product away, Clarke said that transit providers in some places increasingly are
looking at free service.
“A lot of transit, in Germany for instance, is moving toward free transit,” he said. Clarke left a vice president job at the American Public Transportation Association to take over Capital Metro in March.
Capital Metro, which this year has a $262.4 million operating budget, will be able to easily absorb the additional $100,000 or so in added costs and lost revenue, Clarke said. Overall, Capital Metro this fiscal year expects about $25.2 million in fare revenue, or about 9.6 percent of its operating budget.
In 1989, just four years into the agency’s existence, Capital Metro’s board decided to eliminate fares on all of its bus service. Ridership skyrock- eted 70 percent to 31.2 million boardings — more than a far larger Austin popula- tion has yielded for Capital Metro in 2016 and 2017 — but the agency reinstituted fares a year later after widespread complaints that homeless people were camping out in the climate-controlled buses.
Ridership fell only about 12 percent the next year, result- ing in much higher ridership than had existed before the free-rides period.
Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk, who joined Clarke and Austin school Super- intendent Paul Cruz for Wednesday’s downtown announcement of the pilot programs, said the late-night MetroRail runs will be a particular boon in a city known for an uneasy mix of music, drinking and driving. “Sometimes, these music
concerts don’t end at mid- night,” Cronk said. “So it’s important that we provide safe ways to get home.”
The last weekend trains from the downtown station now leave at 12:30 a.m. Saturday and 12:03 a.m. Sunday. Under the extended hours, they will depart at 1:45 a.m. Saturday and at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, well after the bars close.
The extended weekend runs will last from June 8 through the last weekend of August.
In addition, Saturday MetroRail service, which nor- mally restarts at 4 p.m., will instead begin at 10 a.m. for three Saturdays this summer: June 9, July 7 and Aug. 4.
Clarke noted that community members during the past few years have urged Capi- tal Metro to have Saturday service start much earlier in the day. The agency pays its rail
contractor, Herzog Transit Services, on a per-hour basis, and expects added MetroRail costs of about $52,500
and added ridership of about 7,700 trips total during the 25 days involved, according to Clarke’s memo.
The free fares for students cover those now in kindergar- ten through 11th grade, not seniors graduating in May. The free rides will run June 10 to Sept. 1 and should cost the agency about $45,000, Clarke told his board. Fares are already free for children younger than 6. The agency could not estimate the added ridership coming from the student fare pilot program, Clarke said in the memo.
Clarke said that older students may be asked to provide student identification cards for boarding in some cases.
“This pilot (program) essentially creates a family pass for the summer, which should encourage families to use Capital Metro more now that their children can ride for free,” Clarke said. “This pilot is an investment in the young people of Central Texas.”
C a pital Me tro al ready had announced that fares throughout the transit system will be waived June 3-9, the first week of a system overhaul — dubbed Cap ReMap — that will eliminate or change about half of the agency’s 80 or so bus routes.
Clarke said Wednesday the programs are an initial sign of his bias for action and experimentation, and he said the agency should be “embracing the idea of succeed or fail fast.”