Zones vs Flat Fares: What’s the Better Transit Fare Scheme?

One of the biggest debates in the transit world is how transit fares should be organized, so let's talk about it - zone fares or flat fares?

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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!

Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.

[MartinHoeckerMartinez]

One big benefit of distance based fares (tap in and tap out) is that the transit agency gets granular ridership data for future planning.

[creepermk]

Honorable mention to the German „Deutschlandticket“ where you can ride public transit across all of Germany for just 49€ per month. Absolutely brilliant to never have to think about fares. It’s also subscription based so companies can plan ahead.

[zaphod]

London does have daily, weekly and monthly fare caps, so no matter how many journeys you make you'll never pay more than those amounts. You can also buy season tickets and travelcards for a day, week, month or year. Both the caps and season tickets are zone based, so the cap amount, and cost of a season ticket will depend on the zones used. The busses and trams are all flat fares, and with the busses you get a second bus free within 2 hours iirc, so journeys needing more than one bus cost the same as if you only took.

When competing with the car, the most important type of fare is the availability of subscription-based weekly or monthly passes covering as wide an area as possible. Most drivers don't think too much about the price of driving, because they have already payed a sizeable sum to buy a car. Long-term passes achieve a similar mindset in passengers, encouraging the use of public transportation even for trips in the evening or on weekends when a car might actually be faster.

[zehan]

"Heathrow and THE OTHER STATION" killed me

[bomber]

As someone living in Singapore, I honestly love distance-based fares. I take a lot of short trips, so that helps to make sure I don’t pay a high flat fare just for a short bus ride. Additionally, our fares are quite cheap, at around 1.70 USD max for any ride (or 2.15 USD if the ride includes an express bus). The most convenient thing about our public transport is that all fares are standardised and use an integrated fare system, so we can reduce costs if we’re transferring to another bus or train service, and we don’t need to pay a new flat fare per transfer.

[andrewslejska]

I think simple fair system works best. I personally liked pragues time based fair, 30min, 90min, 24hrs and 72hrs for a single pass. Then locals can buy the 30, 90 or 365 day passes. Its very cheap which helps as well but even if the prices were higher it limits confusion and makes sense for someone new to the system.

[Sean-cvtt]

i personally like seoul's metro fare system where for the first 10km you pay ₩1, 400 (around $1.07) and for every extra 5km you pay an additional ₩100 (around $0.7), making it both a fixed and zoned based fares, while not being overly expensive

[matildaeak]

In Skåne, Sweden, we have a zone-based system that is ”customizeable”. You can pick out your start and end points and other stops as you wish and the system will adapt a circular zone of set sizes to it (and price). This allows unlimited travel on all modes provided by the agency within your own zone within the set amount of time it’s valid (also based one the size of the zone). I think this is a great system for it’s flexibility.

[fritzit]

A flat fare like the Deutschlandticket is an absolute game changer. Not just because it makes transit very cheap, but even for people who don't really care about the price: You won't have to know about pricing schemes etc. – you can just literally get on and off as you want, without having to think.

This is especially helpful when visiting other cities. OK, but tourists aren't really the core target market – OR ARE THEY? Aside from the fact that major cities get millions of tourists a year, every car-person is essentially a foreigner to the public transit and fare system. And those are the people who need to be converted to public transit.

I remember a trip to Dublin I took recently. Figuring out the transit system was bad enough, with multiple operators for buses, trains, trams… – and then buying the damn RFID card I needed was made needlessly hard as well. Talk about barriers to entry! People don't care about the inner workings of transit (watchers of this channel excluded), and we shouldn't make them have to care.

[the_cheese]

Videos like this make me so thankful to live in Portland, Oregon where a single fare buys you 2 1/2 hours on the Max, Ctran (Vancouver, Washington) and Trimet buses, and the Portland Streetcar. If you buy another fare that same day, your fare becomes a Day Pass and it is good until 3:30am; if you buy 20 days of Day Passes in a calendar month, it becomes a Monthly Pass and you don't get charged beyond that. All this on your Hop card which is contactless.
Thanks for another informative video, Reece!

[LEGOGamesYT]

Here in Santiago, Chile, as incredible as this sounds for most people, we don’t use ANY of the fare systems (flat and/or zones) described in the video. Instead, at least in the Metro, we use *time-based* fares, that is, how much you pay depends on what time it is at the time of tapping in. At day beginning/ends (super off-peak), the fare currently costs 650 Chilean pesos; at off-peak hours it is 730 pesos, and during rush/peak hours it costs 810 pesos (those fairs, respectively, would be around 0.74, 0.83 and 0.92 US dollars). And similar to NYC’s flat fares, once you pay, it doesn’t matter how long you travel, you’ll pay the same as other people at a certain time of day. Unfortunately, you don’t get refunds if you start a trip during rush-hour and end it at an off-peak time (as an example). And Santiago’s fare system gets more confusing since prices vary depending if you take just the Metro, buses or Suburban Train (in singular; as of me writing this we only have 1 suburban train line) or if you combine those transportation methods. I don’t know if time-based fares are exclusive to Santiago or if another Metro system uses them; in the latter case, please comment.

[snowless]

“Riding the Piccadilly line from Heathrow to… the other station”

I immediately went to maps to check what it was and I wasn’t disappointed💀

[NekoZephy]

I live in Munich and here for example if a Station is near a border of 2 zones, it gets counted as being in both to make the fares for each individual cheaper or make it cost as much in any direction. I think it‘s a great solution to that issue with a station being next to a border to another zone.

[marksonofnel]

I think the best fare system is that used in the Saint Denis trolley network in Red Dead Redemption 2.







No fare mechanic was put into the game for it, so you can just hop on and off as suits your convenience.

[Rahshu]

I've been generally very grateful for flat fares. In my experience, a lot of low-income people have to live far out because that's where the housing is (relatively) affordable to them. You may not like having to travel so far, but for many of us, you have to take what you can get. I know I've eschewed express lines for a slower ride on local and limited stop lines to avoid the higher fares of the fast lines. It kind of sucked, but you gotta do what you gotta do. A flat fare makes travel easy to comprehend, easier to budget, and you can make more spontaneous trips. When you have to ration trips to save money, it can make you feel trapped and unfree. At everyone in my city pays the same amount for a monthly pass so we can all travel however much and wherever we like. I do avoid the regional system, though, because it's far more expensive. Where it might have been faster, I take slower, less frequent, but cheaper buses. :(

[WilliamChan]

Helsinki's zones were good overall. The zones seemed too small at first, but giving you 2 zones for one price made it a non-issue.

[jkzmuqs]

There's actually at least two kinds of zone fare systems: concentric rings (Munich) and a honeycomb structure (often rural areas in Germany).

Both are distance based but one (honeycomb structure) punishes you for going across town (from suburb to suburb). However some transit systems additionally offer a "distance as the crow flies" fare system, so you don't pay extra if transit takes the long way 'round whereas the competition (=car) goes directly.

[DeeZedEx]

Since we have one nationally integrated ticketing system, transport providers in the Netherlands use a base rate+distance based rate for almost all public transport. The base rate is also nationally standardized.

[wangkevinde]

I think the problem with flat fares is that short trips and side trips or trip interruptions get very expensive, which can be mitigated by setting a low daily/weekly cap making incremental trips free or cheap (eg. 2 trips = daily cap like in Chicago Ventra or Melbourne Myki). Distance-based systems these days can be solved by tap on/tap off systems that compute the fares for you and apply the appropriate caps. I think the Sydney Opal system is one of the best examples of a well-implemented distance-based pricing structure that is better than London Oyster in a number ways: 1. Single cap for everyone (not zone-based caps) for better equity, 2. Transfer discounts between modes, 3. Trip interruptions of <1 hour are priced as one journey without penalty for exiting the fare gates, 4. the same distance-based pricing in all directions, no discrimination against trips into the city centre. It's not perfect, but one of the best I've seen.