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In the Tribune: Ventra, transit, and the homeless

In the Tribune: Ventra, transit, and the homeless

Last updated on: August 30, 2016 at 8:44 am by Jane the Actuary

In the Tribune: Ventra, transit, and the homeless 2016-08-30T08:44:51-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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A headline in today’s paper: “Social service agencies, homeless feel pinch of Ventra single-ride pass surcharge.”

The story: several years ago by now, the CTA implemented a new payment system, Ventra, a reloadable card that costs $5 to purchase, with that $5 only converted into transit value if the card is registered online, a process that requires and address, phone number, and e-mail. It is still possible to travel without purchasing a Ventra card, but a single-use ticket has a 50 cent surcharge.

The complaint: ever since the new system’s implementation, homeless shelters and other social service agencies which are accustomed to providing their clients with transit tickets to get about town, to travel to attend school or look for work, face a strain on their budget, as the extra 50 cents, client after client, adds up.

Why can’t they just provide the funds for clients to load their own Ventra cards? With respect to the homeless, reportedly because they don’t have the necessary address, phone, and e-mail — though I had always had the understanding that one of the objectives of social service agencies working with the homeless was to provide them with those items, even if it meant using the agency’s address and phone number, and internet accessed at an agency.

Beyond that, they report,

If the cards are registered to the agencies, clients can run up negative balances — one agency got stuck with $500 in debt on just 25 cards, said Eric Halvorson, policy and communications director for the Jobs Council.

Social service recipients also lose the cards or walk off with them, providers say.

“With the population I’m serving, there is a challenge to do their due diligence with everything in life,” Hardwick said. “That’s why we call them clients.”

But here’s something else to consider:

Chase said the agency already provides $100 million annually in free and reduced rides to the elderly, students, military members and the disabled. Because of Illinois budget problems — the same problems hurting the service agencies — the CTA gets back only about $28 million of that from the state.

Specifically, the disabled and individuals over age 65 receive reduced fares, and those who meet income limits ($27,610 or less for individuals, $36,635 for two-person households, $45,657 for households of 3 or more), receive free rides.

Now, on the one hand, it is I suppose just a part of what people mean when they use the label “pathology” to speak of the poor, that they can’t manage a reloadable card and require single tickets instead. (Though we never fret that they can’t handle EBT cards, and need to be given daily food rations instead.)

But, at the same time — why do we give free rides to poor seniors, and reduced rides to everyone who’s attained the age of 65, but cannot make any provision to provide transit (free or reduced) for the poor?

That’s all, folks!

UPDATE:

OK, a few more thoughts.

First, I asked myself, is it standard practice that transit systems give half-price for seniors and the disabled, but nothing for the poor? And I checked various systems:

D.C.: bus fares $1.75 basic fare, $0.85 seniors and the disabled, subway fares by distance but with the same reductions available.

Boston: $2.25 basic fare, $1.10 for seniors/the disabled.

New York: $2.75 basic fare, $1.35 reduced for seniors/disabled.

Detroit: $1.50 basic fare, $0.50 senior/disabled.

Now, the consistency of the reduction for seniors and the disabled is dictated by federal requirements, as a condition of receiving federal funds. Offering a reduction for low-income folk is purely a local initiative — and one that exists in a small number of places, among them Seattle, Tuscon, and San Francisco. Another approach is that of Portland, which offers grants to community organizations with which they can purchase transit fares for their clients.

So one could easily make the case that it’s even more important for the poor, especially the unemployed, job-hunting, cashless poor, to receive subsidies for mass transit — they’re the ones that need to go places every day, to pound the pavement looking for work.

But at the same time, you could make a different case.

Look at Detroit’s fare: it’s only $1.50. Now, digging out the degree to which this cheaper cost is the result of a greater subsidy vs. simply a cheaper system (no trains, running routes only when they collect relatively more passengers than in other systems that would be content with buses trundling along with one or two passengers). But in a city like Detroit, it’s a given that nearly all bus system users are poor. You might, in fact, consider the fare to already be a subsidized-for-the-poor fare, given the existing norm (so far as I know) that only 50% of operating costs are paid for from the farebox. Middle-class riders, accordingly, are essentially “marginal riders” — who pay their marginal costs, as secondary users of the system, whose use is valuable to the degree that it keeps the system healthy, and who receive the “pre-subsidized” fare as a sort of incentive to use the system.

Oh, and by the way, implementing reduced fare programs always have a bit of unfairness to them. In the ideal case, in the same way as Food Stamp benefits phase out (imperfect, but better than nothing), such a subsidy would likewise phase out, rather than being a hard and fast cut-off that again feeds into the “marginal tax” issue of subsidy programs, when a pay raise or increase in work hours can make a person worse, rather than better off.

So what do you think?

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACTA_red_line_rerouted.jpg; By Daniel Schwen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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