The Benefits of Transit Fare Capping

Steven Vance writes to illustrate a simple way, made much easier with current smart phone technology, to incentivize transit ridership: fare capping. Vance defines fare capping as a method for ensuring riders who pay their far using a "trackable" medium like a transit smart card of a mobile app, "will never pay more than the cost of one or more daily and multi-day passes that the transit agency includes in its fare capping policy."

Vance is able to enumerate two scenarios that could benefit from fare capping (i.e., tourists and low-income transit commuters), a number of cities famous for high quality transit services that already have fare capping policies in place (e.g., London and Portland), and a number of cities with aspirations for higher quality transit service and high ridership numbers (e.g., Houston and San Jose).