This story was originally published in the Nov. 21 2024 issue of the Provincetown Independent, and is reprinted here with permission.
Public transportation will be free in the new year for hundreds of thousands of riders statewide who rely on their regional transit authorities to get around. But not on Cape Cod.
Fifteen regional agencies oversee transportation beyond the MBTA’s greater Boston service area. Among them, the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority (CCRTA) is one of just two that have opted out of the $30-million state grant paying for fare-free rides in 2025. The other is in the neighboring greater Attleboro-Taunton region.
The 13 participating RTAs crafted a single joint application to share the $30 million earmarked in the fiscal 2025 budget to “implement year-round systemwide fare-free service.” The grants will reimburse the agencies for the revenue lost by not collecting fares.
“It’s always interesting to me that popular announcements such as ‘free fares for everyone’ obviously resonate with many citizens,” CCRTA administrator Thomas Cahir said in an email to the Independent.
Cahir wrote that his agency did not apply for the Fare Free grant “because it was abundantly clear that implementation as mandated per the budget language would be highly disruptive to the CCRTA’s transit operations.”
One possible disruption, Cahir said, had to do with his agency being in the middle of replacing one fare collection system with another. Going fare-free would ignore “sunk costs” in that change, he wrote.
Another worry was that the funding would cease after 2025. “We didn’t want to stop collecting fares and then tell riders that they have to start paying again a year from now,” Cahir told StreetsblogMASS in October.
But a possible shift in riders’ expectations was Cahir’s top concern. He told the Independent in an email that the Cape’s high proportion of on-demand trips was a main reason his office opted not to apply for the grant. Free fares, Cahir predicted, would result in a substantial shift of ridership from fixed routes to more individualized on-demand ones.
Roughly a quarter of CCRTA rides are on-demand. According to data released by MassDOT, CCRTA’s total ridership in fiscal 2023 was 723,890. Of those trips, 556,199 were on fixed routes, such as the FLEX bus from Harwich to Provincetown, while the remaining 167,691 were on-demand rides using Dial-a-Ride (DART) service.
The recent SmartDART “microtransit” program, which offers short rides at a flat rate of $3 through an app, was not represented in these numbers.
In their joint application, the 13 participating RTAs proposed an allocation of the $30 million that considered annual ridership percentages in each service area. An analysis by the Independent suggests that if CCRTA had joined the grant application, it would have likely received just over $1 million from the pot.
Other RTAs see higher ridership, lower costs
Using a mix of federal relief funds and state money, other Mass. RTAs have already implemented full fare-free service since the start of the pandemic.
“Since going fare free, our fixed route bus ridership has quadrupled and now exceeds pre-pandemic levels by over 60 percent while passenger complaints are down a third,” Merrimack Valley RTA administrator Noah Berger said in a press release from the governor’s office.
Policy experts who support fare-free transit systems have extolled the economic benefits of increased ridership, citing reductions in traffic, automobile fatalities, and environmental impacts, and a safer work environment for bus drivers who do not have to deal with altercations over fare evasion.
“If you have 20 people on a bus, it pollutes a lot less and creates a lot less traffic congestion than 20 cars,” said Phineas Baxandall, a director of the Mass. Budget and Policy Center. “Moving people from driving to public transit reduces a lot of the public costs from our transportation system, whether it’s climate or collisions or pollution or congestion.”
Free transit service is also a question of revenue equity, Baxandall said. “Progressive versus regressive from an economist point of view just means: does this fee structure make inequalities wider or mitigate those inequalities?” he said. “From that point of view, transit fares are probably the most regressive form of revenue in the state, both because transit riders tend to be poorer than average and because fares represent a much more significant portion of somebody’s income if they’re poor.”
Gaps in service are a bigger concern
The fare for a single fixed-route trip on a CCRTA bus is $2; a one-day unlimited pass costs $6; and a 31-day unlimited is $60. A one-way ride on the DART service costs $3. All fixed-route trips are fare-free for riders with disabilities or who are 60 and over or five or younger with an adult. Rides on Fridays are free for everyone.
Gwynne Guzzeau, executive director of Helping Our Women, said that going fare-free “is not the issue” for local transit service in the four towns. “Removing a barrier to accessing services of any kind is really important,” she said. “But I’m not sure that free fare here on the Outer Cape would make a tremendous difference.”
Instead, Guzzeau highlighted the gaps in Dial-A-Ride coverage that make it difficult for residents of Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and even Eastham to get anywhere up Cape, including for medical appointments. HOW provides transportation to women with chronic health conditions to ameliorate this problem.
“The fact is that on the Outer Cape, you can get a DART ride, but you can only get a DART ride as far as Orleans,” she said. “The challenge is that while there are some fixed route services, the most important alternative doesn’t work for the Outer Cape in the same way it works for the rest of Barnstable County.”
The CCRTA, Guzzeau said, is “an agency that’s asked to do a lot in a geographic area that’s challenging.”
Guzzeau said that “one of the big concerns for rural communities is letting people know about what is available to them.” For example, she said, the CCRTA offers a door-to-door ADA paratransit service and a Boston hospital transport that is reliable but underused.
Ultimately, access to transportation is “a social determinant of health,” Guzzeau said, as it underlies access to housing, food, and employment. And in light of the U.S. surgeon general’s recent report on the national loneliness epidemic, Guzzeau said, “the response is building infrastructure that supports social connection. And that would include transportation.”
Cahir told the Independent that his agency and the Cape’s councils on aging have applied for a state grant to fund a designated phone operator tasked with helping older adults who are struggling to use the SmartDART app technology required to book those rides.
