Meeting_Body
REGULAR BOARD MEETING
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
Preamble
Motion by:
DIRECTORS BUTTS AND BARGER
Related to Item 31: Fare Capping
Metro staff is examining simultaneously for Board consideration of two policies: a Fareless System Initiative Policy and Fare Capping Program that could, if not coordinated, be mutually exclusive or become synergistic enabling policies.
The Fareless System program may eliminate fares in some or all cash and pass fare categories (cash, senior pass, student passes, low income passes, disabled passes, regular daily pass, regular weekly pass, regular monthly pass, etc.). The policy could be implemented incrementally or for all categories in a single board action. The action would also affect interagency transfers with the 26 municipal operators and Metrolink transfer reimbursements. If fares were eliminated for any or all fare categories, there may be no need to implement a fare capping strategy for that fare category. In contrast fare capping would create a technology to reduce fares incrementally with a potential result of a free fare for fare types that most need the reduced or free fare within Metro's annual budgetary constraints.
The Fare Capping proposal would create a "fair" fare in which Metro fare payments would be incrementally capped by TAP software to not exceed the cost of an applicable pass type for the incremental period of travel (daily, weekly, monthly). Fare capping would require a new TAP Card capability that would track boardings and automatically deduct an appropriate fare (regular, senior, disabled, student, low income, etc.) until the cumulative fare deductions reached the appropriate pass cost for the incremental travel period (end of the day, end of the week, end of the month), after which no fare would be deducted for the duration of the incremental travel period.
The software would calculate aggregate TAP deductions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis for the fare type embedded in each TAP card...
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