State looks to make it easier for riders to take transit

The California Integrated Travel Project streamlines fares, transfers, schedules

When people choose public transportation over driving a personal vehicle, they make a positive difference in terms of traffic congestion and our environment. Traveling by bus, light-rail or other forms of public transit, however, requires one to navigate a sometimes-intimidating thicket of ticket prices, agency-specific fare cards and schedules that are sometimes still only on paper.

When public transportation systems impose conditions such as exact change and transfer tickets or separate fees, and planning your trip requires cumbersome research – as well as the possibility of delays – it’s easy to see how would-be riders throw up their hands and grab the car keys, for those who have cars.

The state of California is addressing these obstacles and improving the current mobility system with the California Integrated Travel Project (Cal-ITP). Caltrans and the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) are working with public transportation agencies to implement a system that makes paying for a transit ride as easy as buying a cup of coffee. CalSTA has allocated more than $27 million to the project since pre-planning began in 2018.

As is pointed out on the Cal-ITP webpage, California residents and visitors currently face a fragmented public transportation network that is often not user-friendly, costly to operate and faces new competition for ridership in many places. The burdens associated with taking transit often are concentrated in lower-income communities whose residents are especially dependent on public transportation.

According to Mobility Payments, a Reno, Nevada-based website that chronicles the issue, “the 300-plus transit agencies in California in 2019 recorded over 1.2 billion unlinked passenger trips and collected around $1.8 billion in fare revenue across transportation modes.”

The burdens associated with taking transit often are concentrated in lower-income communities whose residents are especially dependent on public transportation.

The goal of Cal-ITP is to move public transit payments to the retail system (payment by bank cards) in which riders can easily pay for transit just like they pay for everything else. And Cal-ITP provides technical assistance to transit agencies so they can more easily make the transition.

More broadly, Cal-ITP aims to:

• Ensure access to reliable and accurate transit information in real time.
• Reduce and eventually eliminate hassles in payments.
• Create a statewide eligibility verification program for customers who receive discounts on their travel so they don’t have to register with each and every transit or paratransit service they use.
• Ideally be able to provide users with one receipt at the end of the day for all transit transactions that occurred that day.
• Use the California Eligibility Verification program as a national model that could scale through partnerships with GSA and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

Demonstrations of Cal-ITP were completed by Monterey-Salinas Transit, Sacramento Regional Transit, Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit, the Santa Barbara County-funded Clean Air Express and FACT (Facilitating Coordinated Access to Coordinated Transportation) in San Diego County.

In recent years, Caltrans and the other Cal-ITP coordinating agencies conducted four “Market Soundings,” which gather input from private, local and regional public agencies regarding their capabilities and interest in addressing the inadequacies of paying for government services and related digital aspects of getting around. The soundings, whose findings are linked to on Cal-ITP's and CDT’s Digital Identity Project webpages, are being used to help Cal-ITP and CDT reach their objectives.

Cal-ITP’s webpage lists a sampling of what the project is intended to do, and cites success stories from transit providers around the world. For example, Cal-ITP seeks to:

• Improve the customer experience, pointing out that contactless payments begun a few years go in New York City have been tried by people from 130 countries.
• Increase the use of contactless payment in transit, which according to Cal-ITP demonstration partner Visa increased by 187 percent from April to June 2020.
• Lower costs for transit providers and riders, reporting that the principal Washington, D.C., transit agency spends 10 cents per dollar collecting cash fares but only 4 cents per dollar on fares collected through credit/debit card.

Another component of Cal-ITP is helping transit providers remove the guesswork for riders wondering when the next bus or train will arrive or if they will make their connection. By coaxing transit agencies to comply with the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), the global standard for publishing transit information, transit agencies can get their services “on” Google Maps and Apple Maps for free. Caltrans developed minimum GTFS guidelines to help transit agencies achieve compliance.

Widespread acceptance of GTFS vastly improves trip-planning services, and allows transit and other modes to be represented on Google maps and Apple maps as real alternatives to planning a car trip. Standardized trip information is not only useful for customers, but also for operations planning and infrastructure investment by Caltrans, CalSTA, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and California Environmental Council (CEC), as well as compliance reporting. For instance, CARB included Cal-ITP in its budget to align CARB’s incentives to outcomes. The California Transportation Commission (CTC) included GTFS data as a performance measure in its Trade Corridor Enhancement Program.

Finally, Cal-ITP helps transit agencies access the goods and services they need to modernize to standards by putting up a mobility store, camobilitymarketplace.org, where transit agencies nationwide can find FTA-compliant contracts negotiated by the California Department of General Services (DGS).

For example, transit agencies can find point of sale terminals for transit, inexpensive data connectivity plans and software that runs point of sale terminals for transit. DGS opened these contracts nationwide, so any local agency in the country can use the contracts without further competitive bidding. These contracts are already in use in South Carolina, at CoastRTA, and with other agencies in other states working their way through the process.

Sources: Gillian Gillett, Program Manager, California Integrated Mobility; Cal-ITP; CDT Digital Identity Project; CTC Cycle 3 guidelines