dbperry wrote:The only thing I'll add to the discussion is that I think it was going to be grossly unfair for a worker at Boston Landing to get a huge discount vs. those of us working at Yawkey, BB, or SS.
Example:
monthly passes:
Zone 5 to Zone 1A (SS, BB, Yawkey): $291.50
Zone 5 to Zone 1: (BL): $148
Or how about this comparison:
Single ride:
Zone 8 (Worcester) to Zone 1 (BL): $6.00
Zone 1 (BL) to Zone 1A: $6.25
None of that makes any sense. I'm much more comfortable with Boston Landing as Zone 1A.
It makes perfect sense in a number of dimensions.
First, for the marginal commuter rail rider (remember: it's what happens at the margins that matters...), who could choose to drive in, the largest part of the value is from not sitting in traffic: the fares on the Framingham/Worcester line therefore should roughly be set such that the fare per mile roughly increases as Pike congestion increases. The same reasoning ultimately leads to the conclusion that the off-peak fares should be generally cut dramatically.
Second, there's basically $0.00 difference in cost between a seat that's occupied from BOS to Worcester and a seat that's occupied from BOS to Newtonville and vacant the rest of the way. The revenue maximizing approach then is to charge a large proportion of the end-to-end fare in the segment where the trains are most crowded (i.e. for inbounds the point after which the number of passengers getting off exceeds the number getting on) and make travel that doesn't cross that segment dramatically "discounted". Every dollar collected on trips that don't cross that point of maximum crowding is basically pure profit for the T (because it's selling something that's already been or will be paid for).
The zone map crudely embodies this. It's almost certainly suboptimal and in general 1A should be extended outward as "downtown" Boston extends further out (and there should be more integration with the bus and subway/light rail network to move more of that ridership to a mode which can better handle moving thousands of people downtown per hour) into areas that were suburbs (in the sense that more people commuted from there than to there) decades ago. Maybe Pike traffic justifies moving the 1A boundary to Auburndale while keeping the Wellesleys in Zone 3. Maybe there will be more people boarding inbound/deboarding outbound than boarding outbound/deboarding inbound at Boston Landing (which would make a strong case for moving Boston Landing to zone 1).