Starting in 2020, Metro's Commute Card for Business will be capped every month at the cost of the regular Unlimited Ride Pass. What is a Commute Card for Business and why is it capped?
The Commute Card for Business
The Commute Card for Business is a special annual unlimited ride pass that is only available through area organizations and businesses. A generic Commute Card program started about
fifteen years ago as a mutually beneficial way to support and increase bus
ridership, worker benefits and/or lessen transportation costs and the demand
for parking in land-locked areas. It involved such large educational and health
organizations as the UW-Madison's Associated Students of Madison (ASM) and the
UW Hospitals and Clinics a well as some businesses.
The original organizations still have special pass programs, but the
Commute Card for Business is now its own program. It is designed to enable employees, employers or both to benefit from the pre-tax
payroll deduction available for commuters under the federal
"CommuterChoice" law. Other fare
options -- a base cash fare, 10-ride card, or 31-day unlimited ride pass – are
still available but may not be as preferable.
Metro's own administration of the program is minimal. After providing information to help
an organization or business use the program, its activities are limited to
delivering the cards to the business or organization, keeping track of the
number of times a card is swiped through a fare box (via its serial number) and
then once a month issuing an invoice to the organization based on that
information. The business or organization does the rest.
Capping the Commute Card for Business
The reason the Commute Card for Business is capped at the
cost of a regular 31-day Unlimited Ride Pass has to do with how the special Card handles transfers given that Metro wants to encourage bus use. Capping helps reduce the potential financial penalty associated with having to transfer when using the Commute Card.
Metro uses terms such as "trip" one way when referring to its
base fares, but tallies its monthly statistics and Commute
Card use according to a different way. Following the Federal Transit
Administration, Metro considers a
Commute Card "trip" to be a bus
ride without a transfer ("unlinked passenger trip"). Every time someone uses a transfer, they are taking a
separate "trip." Thus if you travel from your home to a transfer point
and then change buses to complete your journey, you have taken two
"trips." If your home is outside one transfer point and your workplace is outside another, you are taking
three "trips."
Metro's base fares include the cost of those
transfers. The Commute Card ride does not. Rather, if a transfer is involved,
the cost of a journey with the Commute Card is $1.40 times the number of legs
of the journey, whether two legs at $2.80, three legs at $4.20 or even more.
This definitional nicety is not something Metro is proud of, causes a
misinterpretation of its reporting of "ridership," and is one cause
of Madison's transportation inequity, but it is a rule imposed by the Federal
Transit Administration.
The
result is that the Commute Card can be a good deal for a bus rider or his/her
employer if he/she rides only one bus to work since the cost of that ride is
less than the base fare. But it is not a good deal if someone has
to transfer one or more times to get to work. Capping Commute Card use in any
month at the cost of a 31-day unlimited ride pass can make it comparable to the
best of the other options available when the Card is used maximally, thus
encouraging bus use and being more aligned with "transportation
equity."
A
Step in the Right Direction, is Capping the Commute Card for Business Best?
One
has to wonder how long capping the charge for using the Commute Card will hold
however. While every year, Metro makes routing changes that require more
transferring, the financial implications of such change for using the Commute
Card largely go unnoticed. That will not be the case in the future if Bus Rapid
Transit does indeed come to Madison however. At that point, there could be a
lot of transferring between local and rapid lines, and much more attention paid
to the differential treatment of the word "trip" for special passes
and individual fares. Will the pre-tax benefit associated with the Commute Card
program then be worth it? Perhaps or perhaps not.
