Our multi-year study on automated transit fare collection offers a key finding that won't surprise you: despite the convenience, the rush toward cashless fare systems has created barriers for lower-income riders seeking to use transit. Results from focus groups, surveys, and a review of current transit agency practices suggest that continuing to accept cash is a crucial way to keep transit accessible. However, dealing with cash has drawbacks: it’s time intensive and expensive. Using a detailed cost-benefit model, the research team, lead by PSU's Aaron Golub, explored the costs for agencies to maintain some cash options and found that some simple approaches can be quite effective. The best bang for the agency's buck? Cash collection on board buses.

"Around the same time as this study, we were in the middle of purchasing and implementing our first electronic fare collection system. We had already decided to take a more customer-centric approach: instead of going completely cash-free, we determined that we were going to take on the costs of making sure our service remained accessible to all riders. It was good to see, in the research, a lot of the things that we were intuitively feeling turned out to be true. The cost-benefit analysis shows that the cost isn't as great as you think; by doing the equity mitigations, you might end up with higher ridership and offset the revenue loss. When you're looking at 10 different systems and you need to justify to the board, the general manager, the community, why you're spending money a certain way – it's really helpful to have research like this that shows that the costs are not some huge amount. When equity is cheap to obtain, it's really easy to justify doing that."
-Andrew Martin, Lane Transit District

Learn more about Applying an Equity Lens to Automated Payment Solutions for Public Transportation, led by Aaron Golub of Portland State University.