North American Cities Join the Fare Zone Club: Finally Integrating Intermodal Fares

For most of the history of public transport, integrated tickets and fare zones were largely unheard of. Passengers would generally pay the ticket clerk or conductor a distance-based fare for each leg of their journey, or in the case of some urban rail systems, drop a coin or token in a turnstile.

Towards the late twentieth century, the ascendance of the motor car meant that public transport needed to be more user-friendly to compete. Meanwhile, rising prosperity meant labour became more costly; this called for more streamlined, and less labour-intensive ticketing.

With complex travel patterns being the norm, especially with a post-pandemic reduction in commute trips and an increase in leisure trips, urban regions which lag behind on simplified, integrated ticketing are increasingly recognising the need to modernise their fare structures. In this series of articles, we will explore how various regions integrate ticketing between modes, or don’t.

Europe Introduces Integration of Fares

In Germany, the need to reconsider fares and funding in light of declining patronage gave rise to the Verkehrsverbünde: Public transport federations which coordinate services and distribute fare revenue among local transport operators: The urban and suburban tram, metro and/or bus companies, and the main line trains organised at the regional level. The first was founded in Hamburg in 1967; over the subsequent decades these became the norm for German Metropolitan areas.

Taking public transit in the Paris region by the 1970s could require purchase of up to five separate tickets for different modes and legs. However, in 1975 the Carte Orange system-wide transportation card was introduced to simplify the system considerably. Within six months of introduction there were almost a million Cartes Orange in use. Within five years bus ridership had risen by nearly 50%. The Carte Orange was phased out in the 21st century in favour of the Navigo card which allows public-transport use in all zones and on all modes.

We had recently looked at the history of the Day Travelcard and its simplification of fares, initially to expedite fare payment and reduce bottlenecks in passenger flow at stations and boarding buses. The Travelcard was improved throughout the 1980s, and was expanded to include British Rail’s Network SouthEast rail services by merging with BR’s One Day Travelcard in 1989. Although fare levels were adjusted and reduced during this decade, the public-transport passenger mileage increased from 2,640 million miles in 1980 to 3,738 million miles annually by 1990, a 42% jump. Or 4.2% per year.

Single fares, on the other hand, remain only partially integrated. Main line trains charge somewhat higher fares, plus a transfer fee for changing onto the Tube in Central London. Buses, meanwhile, charge entirely separate single fares. In 2019 free bus-to-bus Day Hopper transfers within 70 minutes were introduced, but passengers continue to pay twice in order to change between bus and rail. Whilst daily, weekly, and monthly fare capping add some flexibility, these period fares are expensive for passengers in the outer fare zones. This leaves London’s fare integration in a decidedly partial state.

Many European regions retain some form of distance based fare, and integrated fare systems often use zones to do so. Whilst cities like London and Paris have adopted concentric zones, in parts of Germany and Switzerland where local transport federations cover broad areas, a more complex polymorphic zone system applies.

Whilst inter-city transport is mostly excluded, Switzerland has a full national integrated transport system. Under a “One Journey, One Ticket” policy, beyond the boundaries of regional zone systems, passengers pay a distance-based fare and revenue is distributed between local operators in the back office. The country found that fare integration is key to the country’s high public transport ridership. Becoming a member of Alliance SwissPass, the national fare structure association, is a mandatory condition of receiving public funding. In other words, fare integration is not optional.

North America’s Partial Fare Integration

Whilst fare zones are common in many large European cities, they are absent in almost all of North America. On one hand, this makes matters very simple. It is typical for a single municipal or metropolitan public transport agency to charge a flat fare regardless of distance or mode of transport. This will usually include at least one free transfer between routes. For example, the 50 miles from Malibu on the Pacific Coast to Azusa in the San Gabriel Mountains can be covered on Los Angeles Metro’s base fare of $1.75.

Flat fare policies do come with downsides. They present transit agencies with the choice of over-charging for short trips or under-charging for long trips. North American agencies pretty unanimously choose the latter, leading to a high reliance on government subsidy, and a struggle in many cities to fund service at decent frequencies.

Flat fares also create notable seams at their boundaries. When switching between different agencies, passengers often need to pay another fare, or navigate a complex system of discounted inter-agency transfers. Meanwhile commuter rail, as the main line rail services within metropolitan areas are known, tends to charge its own separate and much higher distance-based fares.

In the Los Angeles area example started above, the passenger heading to Covina, three miles south of Azusa but situated on LA’s Metrolink commuter railway (rather than on the Los Angeles Metro system), will need to fork out another $5.75 for the commuter train.

This lack of fare integration, almost ubiquitous in North America, creates many inequities and disincentives to taking transit. For most riders, urban and suburban public transport is inherently multimodal. As American public transport consultant Jarrett Walker puts it “Charging passengers extra for the inconvenience of connections is insanely self-destructive“. Yet this is the unfortunate reality for many North American passengers whose journeys involve multiple agencies and/or modes.

North America’s Commuter Rail Mindset

The cleavage between commuter rail and city transit is a North American tradition, dating back to the distinction between the main line railways and the electric tramways of prewar America.

At times these remain under separate operators; at other times it’s a cultural distinction that persists within a single public agency. MBTA operate both local transport around Boston and commuter trains across the surrounding region; their former General Manager Frank DePaola stated publicly in 2016 that:

“Commuter rail is commuter rail. It’s not transit. It’s designed to bring people into the city in the morning and take them home at night.”

Thanks to this widespread mindset, city transit (buses, streetcars/LRVs, and subways) and commuter rail often operate as separate, parallel networks, without timetable or fare integration. The former are slow but cheap, and the latter fast but expensive, aimed mostly at well-off commuters who drive to suburban rail stations with abundant free parking.

These attitudes about different modes of transport are difficult to change. Many large North American cities’ transit agencies have been around for a half to a full century, or even more, leading to long entrenched bureaucracies and attitudes. Organisational self-preservation behaviour tends to become stronger the longer an organisation exists. We look at agencies that have made, and are making, the transition.

Beachheads of Commuter Rail Integration

As many North American cities are nowadays becoming denser, oftentimes with the construction of many condominium buildings, with large increases in-city population, transport agencies are struggling to move the corresponding increasing passengers. Just as increases in population comes a lot more private vehicles and and many rideshare services vehicles like Uber and Lyft. all contributing to lower average bus speeds. In addition, many cities are also experiencing post-Covid booms of city activities and transit use.

The USA has three commuter rail systems fully fare-integrated with local transit. Uncoincidentally, these exist within relatively small metropolitan areas, where main line railroads ceased to operate local service decades before its modern incarnation. This meant that agencies needed to build ridership from scratch, and they lacked the organisational inertia of a legacy railway with its own budgets and operations to protect. Starting from a blank slate made fare integration the obvious choice.

RTD in Denver, UTA in Salt Lake City, and TriMet in Portland, Oregon all offer flat fares with 2.5–3 hours of free transfers, including bus, light rail, and their respective commuter rail systems. RTA’s excellent network of four electrified regional rail lines, UTA’s robust diesel-hauled FrontRunner which runs North–South through downtown Salt Lake, and TriMet’s odd peak-only DMUs on a suburb-to-suburb route known as Westside Express – WES for short.

Denver’s four electrified regional rail lines accept the same tickets as its six light rail lines and extensive bus network, with single fares offering three hours of free transfers. Until recently, Denver had three concentric fare zones, roughly corresponding with city, inner suburbs and outer suburbs respectively. The $3 base fare covered two zones, whilst $5.25 regional fare was required for three-zone trips, spanning nine miles or more. A separate premium fare was charged for airport trips. Fares were rationalised in 2024 to a flat $2.75.

Portland TriMet has a flat fare valid on all modes – five light rail lines, buses, one commuter rail line – for 2½ hours. The fare is capped at $5.60 daily, or $100 in a calendar month.

Salt Lake City charges a $2.50 flat fare which includes up to ten miles on the Frontrunner Line. Beyond that, an unusual system of a 60 cent increment per additional station applies.

Canada Pioneers North American Big City Fare Integration

Whilst widespread in Europe, only in the last two years has intermodal fare integration made a North American beachhead in Canada’s three big cities.

Montréal (STM/REM/ARTM/exo)

In late 2022, the region’s transit authority Agence régionale de transport a Montréal (ARTM) established a four zone system: Zone A for the Island of Montréal, B for the two neighbouring municipalities of Laval and Longueuil which make up the broader urbanised area, C for more distant suburbs, and Zone D for exurban regional buses. Fares for travel are the same within each zone no matter the mode: Métro, bus, and exo commuter trains. It even includes the city’s new Réseau express métropolitain (REM) automated light metro line which opened in 2023.

Given that there are four public transport agencies planning and/or operating services, this fare zone structure has greatly simplified transport trip and fare information. It has attracted criticism, however, for the sharp fare increase when crossing a zone boundary: From CA$3.50 to CA$5.25, even for a one-stop journey across municipal borders. This pushback led the ARTM to temporarily reduce the two-zone fare. Whilst easy to understand, applying a small number of zones across a large area does cause the problem of over-charging for short trips across a boundary. A more granular system, like the eight zones previously used for regional trains around Montreal, can prevent this by making the base fare valid for two zones.

Toronto (TTC/GO)

For over a decade, GO Transit passengers enjoyed free transfers to and from local buses in the municipalities surrounding Toronto, In February 2024, the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto implemented the OneFare program, which brought the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)’s buses, streetcars, and subways into the fold. Passengers pay one fare instead of two when transferring between TTC services and GO transit, and/or suburban transit agencies.

Part of the impetus has been the ongoing upgrade of the GO train system from traditional commuter rail, focused on taking 9-5 workers downtown, to a regional network with frequent, all-day service on five of its seven lines. This greatly increases the public transport connectivity with the surrounding municipalities. Public transport advocates, anti-poverty campaigners, and environmentalists have all been pushing governments to remove the previous double fares for transfers between certain modes and agencies.

Unfortunately, it isn’t complete fare integration. GO retains its distance based fares, but passengers transferring to or from the TTC will pay only the relevant GO fare. These fares can be relatively steep. For example, the CA$6.50 for the ten miles from Agincourt in northeast Toronto to Union Station compared to CA$3.35 on TTC. Those with limited means are still left taking a longer trip by bus and subway instead.

What’s more, the integrated fares exclude one of Toronto’s most useful rail suburban lines. The Union-Pearson Express (UPX) is heavily used by locals at the two suburban stations between downtown and the airport. Even so, the OneFare program is a big step towards intermodal fare levelling, with room to improve in future.

Vancouver BC (TransLink/West Coast Express)

Vancouver’s famous automated metro, SkyTrain, shares its three-zone system with TransLink’s buses, and the SeaBus ferry to North Vancouver. A one-zone fare is valid throughout the system on evenings and weekends. There is an additional fare to depart from the three Airport area stations.

West Coast Express (WCE) is an excruciatingly North American commuter train which runs five morning trains inbound and five evening trains outbound, and charges a premium fare for it. Transfers with other TransLink services are free, but three-zone trips cost $8.25, compared to $6.35 for other modes, and increase for the zones 4 and 5 that exist solely for longer WCE trips.

New York City’s Slow Uptake of Integrated Fares

Up to 1997, New York City actually placed a 25 cent surcharge for transfers between bus and subway. With introduction of free bus-subway transfers for passengers using the MetroCard fare card that year, New York state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) saw a weekday system ridership increase of over 1 million riders in the next twelve months.

The MTA was surprised that transit ridership increased, as they did not expect it to have an impact on ridership among those who rarely transfer between bus and subway, who were 91% of riders. MetroCard use increased to 74% of customers’ fares by the end of 1998, which greatly decreased cash sorting and handling costs.

The MTA’s 11 for 10 bonus ride program introduced in 1998 produced smaller ridership increases for both subway and bus than did free transfers. Free transfers were analysed in Lessons From MetroCard Fare Initiatives – the New York Transportation Journal and determined to be of key importance to riders – convenience, simplicity, and flexibility. They provide the flexibility to take transit spontaneously and allow riders to discover and explore new lines without financial penalty. And free transfers mean one less thing to worry about.

Correspondingly, subway and bus ridership rose 14% over the same period (although part of this was also due to fare discounts and a good economy). Most of the increase was in bus ridership, increasing 35% over the 2 year period. All these netted the MTA a $100 million surplus in its’ first fiscal year.

The MTA remains a particularly egregious example of commuter rail as a separate fiefdom. The agency operates the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) commuter rail networks as well as New York City Transit. However, these three rail networks that the MTA operates are not fare integrated with each other. Whilst a combination LIRR and Metro-North ticketing exists, its implementation is confusing. There are restrictions on when passengers can buy it and use it, and the pricing of the combo ticket for using both systems is not much cheaper – in fact it is sometimes cheaper to buy a single ticket for each leg of the journey.

There are also PATH subway between New Jersey and Manhattan, and the JFK Air Train. But there are no plans to fare integrate these systems with MTA subway or bus, Metro-North, or LIRR services.

Philadelphia: Squandering Good Infrastructure

Philadelphia is notable in North America for having an electrified regional rail network with a cross-city tunnel, allowing for a high quality train service that could be extremely useful to Philadelphians.

Unfortunately, the Regional Rail system has a system of separate and higher fares, leaving many passengers taking a longer bus-to-subway trip instead. Frequency of service is also poor, and these problems are interlinked: Trains are over-staffed with multiple conductors, partly so that conductors can sell these distance-based tickets.

With no current plan to solve these problems, the current bus network redesign is notable for doing little to feed bus routes into suburban railway stations, instead continuing to run a lot of overlapping service into subway terminals.

Philadelphia’s SEPTA transportation authority operates all of the networks in Philadelphia, except for PATCO, which also runs into New Jersey.

CityLab’s article on the commuting power of fast regional rail in London, Paris, and Seoul demonstrates the regional benefits of rapid, frequent, cross-city rail transport. But what it does not expand upon is the necessity of having a fare system integrated with other modes (such as metro/subway/Underground) for maximum passenger utility and mobility. 

Fare Cards are Not Intermodal Fare Integration

There is also the important distinction of fare card/fare system integration, which enable payment for a number of different public transport modes, but that does not provide a free transfers between municipal and extra-municipal transport.

The fare payment system can be cash, tokens (albeit increasingly rare), a magnetic stripe or contactless payment card, and increasingly including credit and debit cards, mobile phones, and smart watches. As the sophistication of the payment platform increases, generally so does the ability to pay on a number of different transport systems. Many regional integrated fare systems operate without an electronic fare card, especially in Germany cities and other jurisdictions which prefer a proof-of-payment model with very inexpensive period passes.

However, having a regional farecard system does not mean that they enable free intermodal transfers or that connections between modes and agencies are seamless for passengers. This article from SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association explains in more detail that a fare card used by different agencies is not necessarily fare integration. In particular, it enumerates the five problems that a multi-agency fare policy should solve:

1. Disparate fares make using transit confusing.
2. Separate fares for different agencies are [especially] a problem when one agency substitutes its service for another’s, as happens during disruptions.
3. There isn’t a single pass that employers can purchase for their staffs [who typically live in different cities].
4. The system penalizes trips that happen to require multiple operating agencies. Note that some US agencies still charge for connecting between services of the same agency [and includes the NYC MTA and Philadelphia examples above].

5. The system makes it hard to do coherent discounting for low-income persons.

North American urban rail should consider moving to tap in, tap out fare payment for two reasons:

• It discourages opportunistic fare evasion, because sneaking in doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be able to sneak out.
• It allows mode-neutral fare zones, in place of flat fares + premium regional rail fares.

Social Justice Issues

Implementing fare integration will ideally eliminate the common North American effect of having wealthy people taking faster commuter trains. Price-sensitive riders are often forced to ride slower, less convenient, and often less reliable modes like buses instead, which impacts their quality of life and sometimes employment options.

Furthermore, many North American cities see the suburbanization of poverty, whereby older neighbourhoods close to downtown have become gentrified. This results in much higher rents and property prices, pushing the original lower income residents to cheaper housing, typically a long way from job nodes like downtown.

Hence, implementing mode-agnostic fare zones allows many making longer transit trips the option, where available, to take higher speed commuter trains and buses, with no financial penalty. In most cases, fare integration reduces barriers to transit for the most vulnerable residents.

Commuter railroads are aware of the travel changes brought on by the COVID pandemic, that more flexible work arrangements are now required. Some are implementing or expanding bi-directional all-day service to better serve travellers. Unfortunately, many of these agencies have not yet taken the next conceptual step of realising that this mid-day and weekend service is pushing more use of city public transport modes. As a result, Commuter rail agencies need to better integrate with other modes to facilitate and simplify travel.

Intermodal Integration Implementation Issues

There are a few issues that have to be faced by every promoter of intermodal integration:

• Many economists, accountants, MBAs, and politicians argue that fares must reflect costs. As the cost of provision clearly differs between modes almost everywhere, this argument is levied against standard intermodal fares. The same argument applies, of course, to public transport generally where the marginal costs of the marginal passenger are low until the point where another train or bus is required.

• The pragmatic answer to this is that public transport services should be reorganised to avoid competing with each other, for example, with buses feeding into rail routes. But there are two issues here – one is the institutional silo mentality between modes, and the second is scale – medium sized and smaller conurbations should have less resistance to modal differentiation.

• Another force that has affected longer distance, intercity trains, and coaches is airline style “dynamic pricing”. Fortunately, local transport has resisted it to date. If anything, some cities increase mobility range or lower fares when there is excess capacity, such as weekday middays and weekends.

Organization before electronics before concrete

The German axiom Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton literally ‘management before electronics before concrete’, encourages transport planners and operators to prioritise organisational changes like fare policy and schedule changes over infrastructure like new lines or stations. Implementing this principle can greatly improve rider mobility through fare changes, as a first order quick win.

Basically, there are two kinds of fare and service integration (FSI) structures, and resulting problems, in North America:

• Too many separate agencies (for instance, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area) that are partially funded and operated by Balkanised suburban municipalities and counties, often at odds with the regional public transport authority.

• Some agencies that operate city rail and bus systems, as well as outer suburban commuter railways and bus networks, but that are needlessly siloed. Examples include Boston’s MBTA, New York City’s MTA, Chicago’s RTA which oversees CTA, Metra, and Pace), and Philadelphia’s SEPTA.

We shall look at public transport authority structures, the advantages and their disadvantages, in a future part of this new series on intermodal fare integration, as well as other fare issues.

Many thanks to Jack Tattersall, M.Sc. Candidate in the Transit Analytics Lab at the University of Toronto Mobility Network and Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering for his assistance and insight.