C-Tran fare hike to take effect
Bus riders will start paying an extra nickel Wednesday
A C-Tran bus leaves a bus stop in Felida.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
C-Tran bus riders will have to pay an extra nickel beginning Wednesday, and they should expect similar fare increases in the years to come.
“The working assumption right now is that each year we would be doing a fare increase,” C-Tran spokesman Scott Patterson said.
The current base fare will rise from $1.50 to $1.55 on the first day of September. C-Tran’s nine-member board of directors enacted the fare hike earlier this year, making it the third basic-bus fare increase in as many years.
The transit agency expects to net about $330,000 annually from the rate hike, while ensuring that riders pick up a steady share of the costs.
Fare box receipts account for about 21 percent of the cost of operating C-Tran’s fixed routes in Clark County and its Express service to Portland. (Sales tax revenues account for the bulk of C-Tran’s budget). Patterson described the fare-box share as similar to other transit agencies nationwide, and significantly higher than the single-digit percentages more than a decade ago.
“Fare-box recovery has been one of the top goals that the agency’s board of directors has had dating back to 2001,” he said.
Ridership decline
When the motor vehicle excise tax was repealed in 2000, C- Tran and other transit agencies around the state lost out on a source of revenue that directly matched the money raised by the local sales tax. The C-Tran board began shifting a greater share of the funding burden onto riders.
Express riders will pay an extra quarter beginning Wednesday. The cost for Express rides to Portland, which doubled to $3 five years ago, will increase to $3.25.
Ridership on C-Tran dropped from 6.9 million individual passenger trips in 2008 to 6.2 million last year. High gas prices had fueled a big jump in C-Tran ridership in 2007, when the agency recorded roughly 5.5 million boardings.
Patterson said the primary reason for last year’s ridership decline was the cratering economy.
“The No. 1 reason was unemployment,” he said.
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