With ferry ridership down, Caltrain officials say time is right to adjust fares, plans
Price cuts, expanded service hours and more East Bay trips among the proposals
San Francisco Bay Ferry is considering a plan to slash ticket prices and run more boats between the city and the East Bay to attract more riders beyond traditional commuter hours.
It’s following the lead of Caltrain, which announced a 20% price cut for monthly passes Monday, and where leaders over the past year have rejected a planned fare hike, increased a discount for low-income riders and beefed up service during the mid-day and late-night hours.
These moves are more than minor tweaks and promotions. They’re steps toward a coronavirus-forced reinvention for two transit agencies that have traditionally catered to white collar office workers who will likely be slow to return to their daily commutes in the post-pandemic world.
After losing more than 90% of riders over the past year, leaders from both systems say they are moving to get new customers on board — namely essential workers, people in jobs such as food service that don’t have traditional shifts, riders taking recreational trips and Bay Area residents who don’t own
“Once I’m vaccinated, I’m going to be right back on Caltrain. But I have no idea when that’s going to be.”
— Adem Rudin of Santa Clara
cars.
“We don’t think we can just sit back and wait for ridership to return,” said Seamus Murphy, the executive director of the Water Emergency Transportation Authority, which oversees San Francisco Bay Ferry. “This is the time to try new things.”
For years, the primary appeal of Caltrain, the ferries and other commutercentric services like them nationwide came in providing rush-hour passengers with an alternative to driving that was faster, more enjoyable or cheaper than slogging through traffic and paying for gas, tolls and parking.
The systems ran as many trains and boats as possible during the weekday rush. But they typically had sparse or even non-existent schedules the rest of the time, unlike BART or local buses, which carried large numbers of commuters but also offered relatively frequent service all day.
These days, though, lots of regular riders who once crowded the aisles of rush-hour Caltrain trips through Silicon Valley, or stood in long lines for boats at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, are working from home.
“Once I’m vaccinated, I’m going to be right back on Caltrain,” said Adem Rudin of Santa Clara, who took the train to work every weekday before the pandemic. “But I have no idea when that’s going to be.”
And not every rider will be like Rudin, who expects to go back to work five days a week because his job as a mechanical engineer at an aviation tech firm involves lots of hands-on lab work. Many Bay Area employers are expected to keep letting people do their jobs remotely at least a few days a week.
Passenger surveys over the past year show Caltrain riders these days are more diverse, less wealthy and less likely to own a car compared to before COVID. Mid-day trips have seen smaller ridership declines than those at rush hour.
“The 9-to-5 crowd is not our bread and butter at this point,” Caltrain spokesman Dan Liebermansaid.
With that in mind, Caltrain changed its schedule in December to run two trains per hour nearly all day on weekdays, and hourly on weekends, to provide more dependable service for people whose jobs don’t line up with typical commute hours.
The railroad’s board also last year cut fares in half for participants in Clipper START, a program providing low-income Bay Area residents with special Clipper cards giving them discounted public transit fares.
The ferries’ recovery plan goes even further: It would cut ticket prices for all riders starting in July to $4.50 each way for trips from Oakland, Alameda and Richmond to San Francisco.
That would knock $5 off the round-trip cost for the Richmond ferry, while saving most Oakland and Alameda riders 90 cents each way. Trips from Vallejo to San Francisco would drop to $9, a savings of $2.30 each way. On top of that, it’s offering a 50% discount to Clipper START participants.
And rather than putting all their resources toward adding more boats at rush hour as riders return, the plan calls for increasing service during the middle of the day by 75% systemwide, and more than doubling late-night service levels.
The number of trips between San Francisco and Richmond would double and the system would increase the number of boats serving Vallejo from two to three.
The ferry system is asking the public to share their thoughts on the service changes, which are expected to go before the agency’s board next month.
Ticket sales are the primary way both Caltrain and the ferry system pay their bills, so the stakes of these new efforts are high. Fares account for nearly 70% of Caltrain’s revenue and about half of the ferries’, with most of the rest coming from bridge tolls that have been dented during the pandemic as well.
The systems averted disaster over the past year thanks to aid for transit agencies in the federal COVID relief packages.
“There are a lot of folks we’ve been sort of leaving behind at the dock,” said Jim Wunderman, the chair of the ferry authority’s board and president of the Bay Area Council. “We’re going to need people to come back on these boats to make the system viable.”