L.A. Just Ran the U.S.'s Biggest Free-Transit Experiment

[discocrisco01]

Source: Curbed

In March 2020, Los Angeles' public-transit agency, Metro, stopped collecting fares on its buses as a COVID-19 safety precaution.

Fare collection restarted last week after two unprecedented years in which transit agencies learned a lot about how people moved around their cities, and now Metro is using some of this information to game out improvements and pilot other free- and reduced-fare programs.

L.A.'s Metro is unique among large U.S. transit agencies in that its budget doesn't rely heavily on the fare box, which made the decision to temporarily waive fares a bit easier in the first place

Read more at https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/los-angeles-metro-free-transit-buses.html

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[Celerity]

1. huge reduction in miles driven!

Link to tweet

[brooklynite]

2. Correlation is not causation...

As a Transportation professional (who monitored ridership during COVID for the Federal Transit Administration) there's no data that points to a reduction in driving BECAUSE of free fares; more likely is just a reduction in driving because of lockdowns and work from home.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. Precisely

We need to know how many people used mass transit in both periods.

[brooklynite]

4. Just checked the database

Metro ridership (largely bus) dropped to 30% of pre-COVID levels in March 2020, slowly rose to 50% and has remained fairly static.

https://transitapp.com/APTA