Fare Hike Cuts RTD Ridership Less Than 10%

Less than 10% of Southern California Rapid Transit District bus riders stopped taking the bus two weeks ago when faced with higher fares, RTD officials said Thursday. The drop-off was less than had been predicted.

In his first report since bus fares climbed from 50 cents to 85 cents, RTD General Manager John A. Dyer told district board members that overall ridership during the first few days after the July 1 fare change dropped somewhere between 5% and 9%.

Although Dyer cautioned that “the findings are only tentative,” he said the actual drop from last month’s 1.7 million daily boardings is far below the 17% that had been predicted earlier by the RTD.

“On balance, what it tells us is that the demand for transit in this urban area is greater than we expected,” Dyer said.

While stressing that the figures are preliminary, Dyer warned that if those numbers hold up, the RTD could encounter “severe overcrowding” in September when children who are on summer vacation begin riding buses to school.

When the RTD returned to a base fare of 85 cents on July 1--after three years of 50-cent fares, the transit district forecast a sharp drop-off in ridership.

In anticipation of the drop-off, the RTD cut service and removed 193 buses from approximately 90 lines. Most of those changes were targeted for morning and afternoon rush hours where the heaviest ridership losses were expected.

If ridership remains higher than expected, Dyer said, he may have to juggle some bus schedules and put some more buses back on the street.

The discount fare lapsed after the district’s share of a transit subsidy from a half-cent sales tax was redirected from buses to rail projects such as the Long Beach-Los Angeles light rail line and the proposed Metro Rail subway.

To evaluate the change in ridership, Dyer said, a more thorough study will be completed next month. He said the initial study was based on just the first three days of the fare increase--a period that also was marked by a stifling heat wave that sidelined some buses, knocked out their air-conditioning systems and may have discouraged riders from taking public transit.

In addition, Dyer said the July 4th holiday could also have skewed the results of the RTD study.

In his report, Dyer said monthly bus passes were off only 3% from the June figures although the price of a monthly pass went from $20 to $32. However, sales of passes to express riders declined by 17%. Costs of these kinds of passes have risen steeply. Park-and-Ride commuters, for example, now pay $92 instead of $55 for a monthly pass.

Although fares for the elderly, handicapped and students also have risen, Dyer said a number of cities and Los Angeles County supervisorial districts have started “buy-down” programs aimed at helping to subsidize discount fares for some of those riders.

Dyer said Los Angeles, for example, is maintaining a $4 monthly fare for more than 42,000 senior citizens and 5,800 handicapped residents.