dcipjr wrote: ↑Fri Apr 14, 2023 2:42 pm
If they want to enforce that only fare-paying riders use the parking lots, the obvious move would be to tie parking to the fare reader—enter your spot number, tap to start your fare, and they know that a commuter's car is in that spot.
Since not tapping out eventually charges you a full fare, that'll keep people from tapping their cards and not riding.
Great idea, but it would be [/lame joke] derailed by SEPTA's opposition to TVMs at outlying stations. Not all discretionary riders have Keys or any other way to prepay before boarding and thus couldn't use the fare reader. Instead of being incentivized they'd get the double whammy of the on-board surcharge and paying for parking
It's possible some poor design issues with the Key would prevent them from doing this, of course. After all, many other things have been accidentally made free by the Key's lack of design. (Senior Fares, Child Fares, etc.)
I sat in on any number of early meetings about the then-"NPT" project. As early as the late '90s outside consultants, both professional and amateur, were warning that the design was flawed. But SEPTA was so fixated on reproducing its existing revenue streams instead of matching
aggregate revenue that they dropped several balls.*
Re Senior Fares - they were so focused on ensuring that users were actually over 65 (needed to get state reimbursement) that they didn't implement any kind of stored-value feature.
There was a similar "oops" with suburban transit zones. Granted it's arguable whether transit zone charges should exist at all, but what I heard from people inside SEPTA was that they originally wanted to capture zones via a tap-off requirement similar to RRD. They were partway through design when it dawned on them it would totally bog down exiting from buses and trolleys.
Plus of course there's still the ongoing issue of transfers. Things have improved for Key holders with implementation of a single free transfer (soon to become two, reportedly). However like the onboard RRD surcharge the elimination of paper transfers does a hit-job on people without Keys. That includes some (many?) of those discretionary riders SEPTA should be trying to attract.
(*) After one such meeting I spent over an hour talking off-line with a couple of SEPTA's planners. They both described an almost palpable case of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) at 1234. The concern was that ANY changes to the existing fare system would make it difficult or impossible to track revenue. That fear's why the initial layout was effectively a digital reproduction of the legacy system that was supposed to work identically, dime-for-dime. And as we all know they found out that re-creating the PRT/PTC/Red Arrow crazy quilt was a fool's task.
Requiem for it's/its, your/you're, than/then, less/fewer. They were once such nice words with such different meanings...