by GERALD NEILY

Some lawmakers are complaining about the MTA’s fares, saying the amount charged for Baltimore area buses and light rail is too low.

The real problem? The fares are too weird.

You can, for instance, ride light rail all the way from Hunt Valley to the airport, almost thirty miles, for a mere $1.60. But it costs the same amount to ride a bus a half mile from downtown Baltimore to Fells Point. This anomaly, and several others, have profound implications.

One of those other anomalies is this: If you board a bus in Park Heights, you must transfer at the nearby Mondawmin Metro Station to take another short subway ride to get Downtown, thus paying two full fares for a total of $3.20.

The Mondawmin transfer terminal creates convenient connections for thousands of daily riders between bus lines and rail, allowing the MTA to minimize bus route lengths which greatly improves reliability, reduces operating costs, and allows bus routes to be tailored to local community needs. But in the MTA perversely makes its riders pay dearly for something that really only exists for the agency’s own benefit.

All bus routes that end at the Metro or light rail require riders to pay a second fare. The MTA got rid of all transfers many years ago. They thought having a day pass would be enough.

Because of the MTA’s odd fare structure, bus riders and transit planners are forced to adapt themselves to the MTA’s quirks. Instead of the system serving the people’s needs, the people must adapt to the MTA, or avoid the system altogether. So people go to great lengths to avoid transfers and avoid short impulse trips altogether
Decisions to buy a daily or monthly pass have become exercises in detailed long-range personal planning. Am I going to use transit enough today (or this month) to warrant buying a pass? When the MTA discovered how much some monthly pass users saved over individual fares, they hiked the cost of the monthly pass to make the decision even more difficult, especially in 28-day February

The mentality has gotten so ingrained that the City has set up its own budget-busting local bus system (the free Charm City Circulator) even though the MTA serves the same places. College campuses throughout the region have done the same.

Transfers have become so alien that the MTA has found it expedient to propose a new $1.6 Billion Red Line that doesn’t even connect to the existing subway, while the existing subway doesn’t even have a transfer terminal at its east end.

Meanwhile, the MTA’s recovery of costs from the farebox has plummeted from over 50% to less than 30% in less than two decades, as the correlation between costs and revenue has become more and more tenuous. The fact that this has been tied to legal legislative mandates is only partially relevant. It’s almost the only thread of accountability the legislature has.

Economics and Marketing 101 tell us that prices are a huge part of the way almost any product or service is produced and sold, but the MTA’s “one fare fits all” structure totally squanders this important tool. We live in a world where the price of a gallon of gas or a hotel room varies almost constantly to adjust to market conditions. This is even more crucial in a business like transit, where every empty seat is money lost or wasted. Yet the MTA can only change its fares on a system-wide basis and only after years of debate and front page headlines.

One response to the MTA fare hikes is: “I’d be willing to pay more if the service was any good.”

More pointedly, the response should be for the MTA to tailor both service and fares to an efficient system structure that optimizes both. This would require maximum interconnectivity between a hierarchy of local bus routes and faster high capacity “trunk” service.

That debate has been almost completely lost. The MTA’s “one fare fits all” must go.