Guest passes for monthly pass owners

I like this idea as a first notion, but I do have some cautionary concerns. Caltrain is facing a budget deficit for the coming year, its fourth or fifth in a row, and we would be concerned about anything that would result in a drop in revenue, even a slight one. All of which means this idea would have to be shown to pay revenue benefits over the long-haul -- for example, showing that those who use the guest pass would otherwise not be riding at all, and that the experience would entice them to begin using the train, expanding the customer base without cutting into the revenue base.

Thanks for your efforts and for following up. Don't neglect your other responsibilities. We'll see if we can't take it from here.

ACE has had big on-time performance problems (no thanks to Union Pacific) and lost a lot of riders since the dot-com peak in 2000. They also (for reasons too complicated to explain here) have very limited service that isn't all that attractive to most in the first place, so they need to work to fill their trains.

Caltrain, on the other hand, is pretty packed on some rush hour trains, and ridership has consistently been growing at about 7% from the previous year. it's not riders that Caltrain needs per se, it's money and political will to electrify the system so that it can ultimately run a lot more trains at less cost to accommodate projected demand.

Caltrain has ordered some extra cars to ease the peak-time crowding. But, these will fill up. The buddy pass program might help Caltrain if it's designed to get people to start riding trains that are normally not as crowded -- say on the weekend or during off-peak hours. Though some of those trains can fill up too depending on whether there's a Giants game or other big event happening on the peninsula.

Adding more people and non-revenue paying riders to the peak-time crush will ultimately drive people away from Caltrain (because people don't like riding really crowded trains) and result in the agency losing revenue.

Already Caltrain allows people with monthly passes to ride the whole length of the line at no additional charge on weekends. Most people don't know that however. Maybe some kind of promotion like "bring a buddy for 1/2 price" on weekend trains and adding a 9:30 am northbound semi-express (as I recall the 9 and 10 am trains are the most popular on weekends) would allow Caltrain to recoup enough revenue to offset the increasing costs of diesel, labor,insurance, etc. relative to ridership.

If we can get a whole lot more people riding Caltrain on the weekend I imagine it'd be possible for Caltrain to start offering a weekend baby bullet or semi-express service. That would give it a lot of community visibility and introduce a whole new market segment/political constituency to Caltrain, which it needs to get the other improvements.

Mountain View would probably have to move its Sunday farmer's market though because then there will be great demand for parking at the station, or VTA would have to ramp up its connecting bus service, yet another politically touchy subject but one that I'm all for tackling.

Margaret

Not sure it's a foregone conclusion that guest passes would hurt revenues. It depends on whether the riders who use them would have taken Caltrain anyway - and chances are, if they are commuters who use Caltrain to get to work, and now they are going on an outing with a friend, the wouldn't have. Certainly though it is a proposal to promote ridership, not generate revenue.

No transit agency survives on revenue from ridership. So the question becomes - what sort of ridership will bring more funding from government? I don't know what MTA's funding formula is, but I am sure they have one that looks something like this: http://www.metro.net/about_us/library...

But even with all of that taken into account, I think that a guest pass policy for off-peak travel (which I purposely define more broadly than just weekend) couldn't hurt. I predict it would generally be used for additional Caltrain trips since what most people primarily use Caltrain for - commuting to work - is done SOLO and on a schedule, and is therefore not flexible enough to make guest passes useful.

San Mateo County offers a transit test-drive program as well: http://www.commute.org.