Hampton Roads Transit is the largest public transportation system in Virginia, with more than a million monthly riders before the pandemic. However, during the last four years, the public transportation system serving six of the region’s seven cities has yet to recover its ridership, serving roughly half the people it once did.
While all transit agencies lost riders at the beginning of COVID, many systems, such as the Greater Richmond Transit Company and DASH in Alexandria, have been able to fully regain their ridership and even grow it beyond pre-pandemic levels partially thanks to going fare-free. HRT has recently started to take steps in the right direction, launching a fare-free pass for high school students, but the agency could do so much more to entice riders back.
Going fare-free has repeatedly proven to be an effective way to increase ridership. Over the past several years, more than a fourth of bus systems in Virginia have eliminated their fares, allowing riders across large swaths of Southwest, Central and Northern Virginia unrestricted access to public transportation.
One of these agencies is GRTC, which was recently ranked the fourth best in the nation largely due to its success at winning back riders with fare-free service. GRTC is also one of only five large transit agencies in the U.S. with higher ridership than in 2019, all of which have fare-free programs or are fare-free system-wide.
New York City has seen similar success in the nine months since it launched a year-long fare-free pilot program on five bus routes across the city, with the routes recording an average 30% increase in ridership on weekdays and 38% on the weekends.
Increasing bus ridership reduces total vehicle miles traveled and is essential for Virginia to meet its climate goals. With the transportation sector generating about half of all carbon emissions in the commonwealth, increasing transit ridership is a key way to fight climate change.
Buses already prevent large amounts of greenhouse gasses from being emitted. Even with its lowered ridership during the pandemic, Hampton Roads Transit saved the region 975,000 gallons of fuel, diverting 8,600 metric tons of carbon pollution.
Fare-free transit is also more equitable transit. Bus fares disproportionately burden low-income riders. HRT’s $2 single-trip fare puts a financial strain on the approximately 50% of HRT bus riders who live below the federal poverty line in households with incomes less than $25,000 per year.
This burden of unaffordable fares restricts people’s mobility, making it harder for Hampton Roads residents to land better-paying jobs, further their education, access health care or see family and friends.
Ditching fares may sound like an expensive pipe dream, but HRT actually doesn’t bring in much money via fares. What passengers pay only accounts for 7% of the agency’s annual budget, and that 7% doesn’t account for all the savings that could be accrued if HRT no longer had to expend its limited resources on the equipment and personnel required to enforce fares.
The Transit Ridership Incentive Program (TRIP) from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation offers funding each year to help transit systems and the localities they serve try out reduced and free fares on certain routes, specific populations or entire transit systems. HRT has already received TRIP grants to extend transit accessibility to the naval base in Norfolk and pilot a micro-transit service program, but the agency has yet to apply for any funding to go fare-free.
That means that HRT is essentially leaving state money on the table that could instead go to help provide affordable transportation to the region’s nearly 2 million residents.
Finn Pollard recently completed work as an environmental advocacy fellow at the Virginia Conservation Network in Richmond.