An understanding that I've reached - in order to help me not go crazy - is to recognize that people believe whatever they want and try to justify it afterwards. We come up with all these terms for it - ignorance, fake news, post-truth- and act like its a new thing that's going to destroy us all; in fact, it is just human nature, it's as old as we are, and its something we've just got to work around instead of fight.
Enough people in Provo are pro-BRT to see the project through, and once it opens I'm confident that once it is open and people actually see what it is, that everyone will want one too.
I attended an engineering conference yesterday where some interesting ideas were thrown around by the speakers to address the capacity issues of the I-15 corridor. Double-decking I-15 so that there could be 15 lanes in each direction was mentioned, but only once. Double-tracking and electrifying FrontRunner was also brought up. UDOT officials present discussed how 'we are all in this together' and that UTA is seen as a partner, not a competitor - easing my fears that UDOT would get in the way of expanding FrontRunner service.
One of the most interesting ideas, imo, and brought up by the
Wasatch Front Central Corridor Study no less, was this:
Why not eliminate transit fares and let everyone ride for free? Fares amount to just less than 15% of UTA's income, and that could be made up for with other means.
Compare this to UDOT, which gets between 1/3 and 1/4 of its budget from the gas tax, which is seen as a sort of 'fare' to use public roads.
I have very mixed feelings about this. One the pro-fare side, I feel like if I want quality service I should need to pay something for it. You don't get something for nothing, and I like that the users pay for the service they get. There is a sense of ownership once you've paid for something, and it helps us not take the thing for granted. Also, There is the homeless problem - vagrants would be able to treat the whole UTA system like they currently treat the free-fare zone.
On the 'anti-fare' side, I know that there are 4 public transit systems in Utah, and only two of them require fares. (UTA and
SUNTRAN in St George).
Cache County and
Summit County do not charge fares, and their systems are pretty good. Park City's is actually pretty amazing. Granted, they're not working with nearly as large of ridership or population area as UTA, but if they can offer totally free service, why can't UTA? Also, collecting and
enforcing fares is not free. Besides paying for fare inspectors (in addition to the basic Transit Police), UTA needs to pay for the upkeep of all the card readers and ticket machines. This year alone UTA is spending
$3.7 million to replace all its card readers with new ones. They only have a $10 million budget for capital improvements this year, meaning 37% of this year's improvements budget will be just to make sure they can more accurately collect fares which amount to ~15% of their total income.
Long and short of this argument: Transit fares are a disincentive to ride transit and many people don't take transit because of the relatively high fares - especially for local trips. In return for dramatically lowering ridership, fares only provide UTA with a small amount of the money it needs to operate. So very little is gained while much is lost.
Now, if this won't spark a debate/discussion, I don't know what will.