Abstract
When Public Transport Administrations propose changes in fare schemes or increased fares, they are often met with concerns regarding the proposed fare schemes fairness. Implicit in these concerns is an understanding of relations governing land use and public transport, impacting equity. In this paper, we use socio-economic statistics of census areas in conjunction with public transport travel data from a transport forecast model to assess the geographical and distributional fairness of alternative fare schemes: flat, zone-based and distance-based. We discuss our result in relation to both the scientific literature and the known “truths” in the public debate. The method is applied to the Case study of Stockholm public transport. We find that high-income travelers benefit from all three fare schemes considered but, in contrast to much of the literature, least by flat fares. A strong distance-dependent fare could be horizontally equitable but has poor vertical equity.
Highlights
The fairness of public transport fare changes is a topic of public debate
We focus in our presentation on the potential transferability of our findings by discussing the link between land use, distribution of income groups and distributional effects of fare schemes
We apply three different measures to capture different aspects of equity, in section 3.2.1 we define a measure of the average fare per trip given the passengers place of residence, in section 3.2.2 we describe a distributional measure of fare expenses per capita, and, in section 3.2.3 we show a distributional measure of fare expenses for different income groups
Summary
The fairness of public transport fare changes is a topic of public debate. When flat fares are proposed, commonly arguments of simplification and uniformity are posed, and ease-of-use and ease-ofcontrol are stressed. Proposed differentiations are commonly peak, and off-peak fares and various forms of differentiations by distance traveled (Farber et al, 2014; Cervero, 1981; Translink, 2016; IPART, 2016). Differentiation is usually proposed to achieve a fare scheme more similar to how production costs are distributed, lowering demand for trips with high production costs and increasing demand for trips with low production cost and increasing revenues. Opposition to proposed differentiations tends to center around the fairness of the proposed changes since differentiation will advantage some groups of travelers and disadvantage others (e.g. groups living far from the CBD, and, in the case of zone fare schemes: passengers making short trips across zone boundaries.)
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