Clipper BayPass Launch: Updates and Developments for New All-Access Pass
On Monday, August 15, the brand new Clipper BayPass pilot was launched at four Bay Area community colleges and universities: UC Berkeley, San Jose State, San Francisco State, and Santa Rosa Junior College.
These new passes will provide students at these institutions with unlimited travel on every transit operator that uses the Clipper fare system, allowing unprecedented mobility and helping the region to take its first large step towards integrated fares. Students at these schools pay for passes through their student fees, but standard passes have historically only given students access to one transit agency - for example, UC Berkeley students have received passes for AC Transit, and San Jose State students have received passes for VTA.
In addition to announcing the launch of the pilot program, BART and MTC - who are jointly managing the region’s fare integration efforts - also shared updates about plans to expand public access to BayPass, including no-cost/reduced-cost transfers. These developments spell a bright future for BayPass, equitable public transportation, and fare integration in the Bay Area as a whole.
BayPass Launch
The two-year BayPass pilot, launched on Monday, will ultimately give some 50,000 Bay Area residents access to all bus, rail, and ferry services in the region. Initially the pass will be distributed to all of Santa Rosa Junior College’s students, and around 25% of students at UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, and San Francisco State University via random assignment.
The program will be expanded next month to include residents of select MidPen affordable housing communities in San Mateo and additional MidPen properties in Alameda, Santa Clara, and Solano counties will be added in the following months, giving residents in these communities unlimited access to all modes of transit, replacing the single-agency passes they currently have access to, and providing much greater mobility throughout the region
The announcement of the BayPass pilot was accompanied by online promotional materials and press releases designed to educate the public (especially those at participating institutions) on the pilot and the near-term future of the program. A consultant team has been hired for program evaluation, which will assess personal savings and benefits, ridership recovery, and budget shortcomings throughout the pilot’s two-year duration. This evaluation will allow policymakers to collect data and make informed choices on the future of the pilot through a lens that centers social benefits, not just transit agency budgets.
The Future of BayPass
There is no doubt that the BayPass is an important step in the right direction for public transport in the Bay Area. These sentiments were reiterated by multiple members of the task force and the public during the BayPass update at the Clipper Fare Integration Task Force meeting on the day of the launch, with Vice Chair Denis Mulligan, General Manger of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, commending the project staff and commenting “I think it’s a very thoughtful proposal… it’s a proposal that recognizes the financial challenges we have, but also the desire to remove financial friction and transaction to help grow transit ridership.” Member Jeffrey Tumlin, Executive Director of SFMTA, added, “I think this effort exemplifies what our region can do when we’re collaborative among all the different transit agencies… we are not forced to make the tough call between cutting service versus ensuring fare equity across the region’s riders.”
There are already plans to expand the program. During phase 2 of the pilot, which will launch in 2023, BayPass access will be expanded to a limited number of major employers across the region who purchase transit passes in bulk for their employees. This change will expand unlimited access to public transport in the Bay Area to a much wider array of riders, providing further economic and mobility benefits to individuals while assisting in increasing post-covid ridership.
No-cost/Reduced Cost Transfers
Monday’s update to the Fare Integration Task Force also included exciting new details about the next phase of fare integration; no-cost and reduced cost transfers across agencies starting in 2023, coinciding with the rollout of the brand-new Clipper 2.0 system.
The proposed policy, as of now, operates on the vision that riders should not be penalized simply for transferring agencies - and that multi-agency trips should be equivalent in price to single-agency trips of the same length. To accomplish this, discounts would be awarded depending on the type of transfer one is making while using Clipper:
Local to Local Transfers: discount amount is the minimum of the transfer pair’s fare
Local to Regional Transfers: discount is equivalent to the local fare
Regional to Regional Transfers: discount is equal to the minimum BART fare ($2.15)
BART and MTC staff explained the anticipated effects of these free and reduced transfers on individual riders, individual agencies, and Bay Area public transportation as a whole. For individual riders, example trips with one transfer showed an average savings of $2-3, which in some cases (such as transferring Muni to Samtrans) would reduce the fare by nearly half. In other cases, the impacts are not as noticeable, but it is clear that across the board these changes would provide critical transportation savings for riders.
Even though ridership increases are expected, the program is projected to leave participating transit agencies with lower overall fare revenue. Under current conditions and with current ridership, this is estimated to amount to a total of $11,843,200 in forgone annual revenue in the region ($25,119,100 at pre-covid levels). In order to cover this forgone revenue, $22 million in funding has been identified by MTC through the Blue Ribbon Transit Transformation Action Plan. This initial funding is estimated to last the pilot a minimum of 18 months before funding must be reevaluated. MTC predicts that some additional structure such as a “settlement model” for redistributing revenue within the Clipper system, or a new and entirely separate funding allocation model may be needed as these changes become more permanent.
The Fare Coordination and Integration Study project management team will be preparing a “No-Cost and Reduced Cost Policy Proposal” for review next month. If the task force endorses the policy proposal, it is slated to be fully implemented by the end of 2023.
For the long term success of both of these programs - making free transfers permanent, and ensuring the expansion of the BayPass program to the general public - new permanent sources of additional funding are needed, as well as more resilient regional decision-making structures that don’t require 27 transit agencies to voluntarily agree on all details of a program to move it forward. MTC’s recent commitment to advancing legislation in 2023 for a regional funding measure, and identifying an effective long term governance structure for the Bay Area transit system (currently being studied through the region’s Network Management Business Case), are both critical steps to ensuring we continue this positive momentum of rolling out fare integration across the Bay Area.