San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Test of unlimited transit pass expanding
Theo Wyss-Flamm is among the lucky few who possess a digital card that’s long been a dream of Bay Area transit riders: a pass that allows unlimited free rides on BART and most of the region’s 27 transit operators.
“It completely opened up the Bay Area for me,” said WyssFlamm, a UC Berkeley student from Philadelphia who, along with the tens of thousands of college students, can access what’s known as a BayPass.
The pass is an experiment by transit agencies to test how people might use an all-in-one card if it were to be sold to the masses. The pilot program entered its next phase Friday with its expansion to 6,000 UC San Francisco employees.
Under an agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the university will reimburse the commission up to $4.8 million to allow thousands of its employees unlimited use of the region’s transit through the end of 2024. Up to 20,000 employees across 10 employers will participate in the pilot’s second phase, which runs through 2026. The MTC is accepting applications.
The pilot, so far, has yielded obvious results: People will ride trains, buses and ferries more often with passes that allow for unlimited rides across transit systems.
According to MTC data from the project’s first year, BayPass users on average logged 74% more transfers between multiple operators per trip than ordinary Clipper card users. Agencies like AC Transit, which accounted for 38% of the 2 million trips logged by BayPass riders, and BART (26% of trips) have benefited from increased ridership.
It’s unclear when such a pass would be made available to the public, as well as how much it would cost to buy. MTC and BART funded the pilot’s first phase, which doled out 50,000 BayPasses to college students and low-income residents.
Currently, some operators like Muni ($81) and AC Transit ($85 for local rides) that charge flat fares for trips already offer monthly passes allowing unlimited use of their transit. An upgraded Clipper system will technically allow BART to offer daily or monthly passes, as well targeted discounts such as lower fares during certain parts of the day. When the new Clipper launches next summer, people will be able to use credit cards to pay for transit and it will cost less to transfer to other systems on trips.
Riders have long awaited some of those perks, though fare payment options in the Bay Area lag regions like Seattle, where riders can already buy all-in-one transit passes. While the concept seems like a no-brainer for Bay Area transit, especially as it struggles to recuperate its pre-pandemic ridership, transit operators’ varying fare structures make it difficult to offer an all-encompassing pass in which all agencies don’t lose out on fare revenue.
“The objective of the BayPass pilot is quite simple, and that is, ‘Can we find a win-win so it’s a good deal for customers and it’s a good deal for the transit agencies?’ ” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin said. “Working out the money (question) is probably going to prove every bit as much a challenge as any technological challenge we might face.”
The answer is clear for WyssFlamm.
“I don’t have to worry about reloading my Clipper card,” he said. “It’s all in one unit for me — I just tap it and go.”
That, he said, gave him the freedom to take more leisure trips to San Francisco and visit family in the East Bay. WyssFlamm doesn’t own a car and said he wouldn’t have been able to complete a summer internship in Marin without the BayPass, which saved him about $30 per day in fares.
But the greater exposure to the region’s transit offerings also
Photos by Brontë Wittpenn/ The Chronicle
opened his eyes to the “completely unintegrated” scheduling between transit agencies. Commutes to and from the internship via transit took about four hours each day.
“The more you take transit, the more you realize that there’s so much work that still needs to happen,” Wyss-Flamm said.
Still, demand exceeded supply when UC Berkeley began randomly distributing its allotted 12,000 BayPasses to students in fall 2022, according to David Sorrell, principal mobility planner at the university’s parking and transportation department. Some students who weren’t selected, he said, took to Reddit in search of BayPasses for sale.
Not all students who got the BayPass use them, Sorrell said, but those who are making use of the pass are riding transit more often. “Folks are going to take transit if you give them an affordable, competitive opportunity compared to driving to campus.”