TO: AC Transit Board of Directors
FROM: Michael A. Hursh, General Manager/Chief Executive Officer
SUBJECT: All-Door Boarding Pilot
BRIEFING ITEM
AGENDA PLANNING REQUEST: ☐
RECOMMENDED ACTION(S):
Title
Consider receiving a report on the performance of the District’s All-door Boarding Pilot.
Staff Contact:
Ramakrishna Pochiraju, Executive Director of Planning & Engineering
Body
STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE:
Goal - Convenient and Reliable Service
Initiative - Service Quality
This pilot program was launched to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks associated with all-door boarding. At other agencies, all-door boarding has led to reduced interactions with the operator, faster boarding, and more reliable service albeit with an increase in fare evasion. Staff has been gathering data and this report includes an assessment of the program since its inception, including effects on fare evasion. In addition, the District is set to implement the next generation of Clipper in the next year and this Pilot informs the District’s approach to boarding policies associated with it.
BUDGETARY/FISCAL IMPACT:
There is no budgetary impact associated with this report. It is an update on the performance of the pilot program and doesn’t recommend any policy changes that would result in costs. In the event the Board elects to expand the pilot to the system as a whole, there will be some loss of fare revenue but it is difficult to quantify.
BACKGROUND/RATIONALE:
AC Transit launched its All-door Boarding Pilot on March 1, 2021, on lines 6 and 51B. Numerous agencies have piloted or implemented all-door boarding on some or all their fleet including San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). All-door boarding on AC Transit service allows customers with Clipper Cards to board through the rear door and tag a Clipper Card reader to pay their fare. The pilot required the installation of readers on the rear doors of all 25 vehicles participating in the pilot. It should be noted that SFMTA has struggled with significant fare evasion.
All-door boarding can be beneficial in several ways. This pilot project allows the District to reduce the number of customer interactions with operators as well as reduce dwell time at the individual passenger level. This reduction in dwell time leads to quantifiable improvements in speed and reliability for lines and stops where all-door boarding is in place. Finally, these improvements in operational performance translate directly to tangible improvements in the customer experience. Customers can board more quickly, and the buses will get them to their destinations faster and more reliably.
As a result of AC Transit Staff negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) Clipper 2 project team, additional funding has been approved for rear-door Clipper Card Readers equipment and installation services. The Clipper 2 project funding will enable the AC Transit fleet to be fully equipped, all-doors, with the next generation devices, improving data security, processing, and transmission time.
This staff report attachment features more than two years of the program’s performance. Staff collected data from March 2021 to May 2023 to gauge compliance with the District’s own Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for the program as well as the performance of the lines with respect to dwell, reliability, and ridership. In addition, for the first time, the report includes analysis of fare evasion on the lines in the pilot.
Attachment 1 includes detailed analysis of the program’s performance across the following metrics:
1) Compliance with Procedures
2) Ridership and Revenue
3) Reliability and Dwell
4) Fare Evasion
Overall, the pilot is performing well, with dwell time per passenger reduced by nearly 2.5 seconds on Line 51B and about 1.5 seconds on Line 6. This amounts to a more than 30-percent decrease in dwell and means less time spent at each stop and fast travel through the corridor for customers and operators.
The fare evasion was calculated by comparing boardings with Clipper tags and farebox events and showed no change in fare evasion occurring through the front door and an increase of several percentage points at the rear-door. This means the pilot does result in an increase in fare evasion at the rear door. There are benefits to the policy, including reduced interactions with the operator at the front door and improved dwell; however, staff is concerned that expanding this policy beyond these two lines would result in an increase in fare evasion because these lines have much higher Clipper penetration than the system as a whole and have high numbers of UC Berkeley students who have access to a heavily discounted institutional pass called Class Pass.
Staff recommends that the Board maintain the all-door boarding policy on Lines 6 and 51B but does not recommend its expansion at this time to the system as a whole given the concerns about a potential increase in fare evasion. In the interim, Clipper 2 installations will occur on non-pilot lines but will be bagged as inactive on rear-doors.
ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES:
The primary advantage of the staff recommendation to continue the all-door boarding policy on lines 6 and 51B while maintaining front-door only boarding on the rest of the system is to limit fare evasion. Staff is concerned that expanding the system beyond those two lines will increase fare evasion. Staff will further study and attempt to better quantify fare evasion occurring as a result of rear-door boarding.
The primary disadvantage associated with staff’s recommendation is that the benefits on reliability and dwell associated with all-door boarding will be limited to just lines 6 and 51B.
ALTERNATIVES ANALYSIS:
Staff considered several alternatives: 1) Expanding all-door boarding system-wide; 2) piloting off-board fare payment and all-door boarding at select high-volume stops; and 3) returning the entire system, including lines 6 and 51B to front-door boarding only.
The evidence for expanding all-door boarding system-wide is strong; the pilot revealed that dwell times could be reduced significantly, and fare evasion was minimal through the rear door. However, staff is concerned that the two lines chosen for the pilot cater to specific populations - college students with high Clipper penetration - and the expansion of the policy system-wide may yield much higher levels of fare evasion.
Staff also evaluated an additional pilot wherein the Tempo fare ambassadors would be repurposed to create a “fare paid zone” at high-volume stops that would allow riders to pay with Clipper before the bus arrives and be allowed through the rear door when it arrived. This approach is an intriguing combination of off-board fare payment and rear-door boarding but requires one staffer per stop with minimal benefit (the dwell reductions would only occur at a handful of stops) and the opportunity cost of having these employees do this in lieu of other key Transportation roles would be high.
Finally, staff evaluated whether the two pilot lines would revert to front-door boarding only. Staff determined that forcing all passengers through the front door would add to dwell and runtime on lines that already struggle with on-time performance and layovers. In addition, riders have grown accustomed to using the rear door and it may cause confusion or fare evasion to eliminate the policy.
PRIOR RELEVANT BOARD ACTION/POLICIES:
SR 20-320 All Door Boarding Pilot
SR 21-462 All Door Boarding Update
SR 22-225 All Door Boarding Update
ATTACHMENTS:
1. All Door Boarding Performance
Prepared by:
Michael Eshleman, Service Planning Manager
Approved/Reviewed by:
Robert del Rosario, Director of Service Development and Planning
Salvador Llamas, Chief Operating Officer
Ramakrishna Pochiraju, Executive Director of Planning & Engineering
Ahsan Baig, Chief Information Officer
Chris Andrichak, Chief Financial Officer