SAN ANTONIO – Don’t tear up your bus pass.
The VIA Metropolitan Transit trustees present for a Tuesday night meeting voted unanimously to stop any further pursuit of “fare-free” programs.
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The vote amounts to a direct rejection of Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ request for VIA to create a plan to try a six-month pilot program on its five most popular routes. At least four council members have also shown support for fare-free or “zero fare” programs, including District 6 Councilman Ric Galvan.
Supporters say getting rid of fares would make it easier for cash-strapped riders to get around and could even make bus routes more efficient.
“I say with all due respect to them, that that’s what their proposal is: it’s a solution looking for (a) problem. A problem that we do not have,” board Vice-Chairman Leo Gomez said before the vote. “Affordability is not an issue regarding our fares at VIA.”
A standard fare is $1.30 per ride and $38 for a 31-day pass. However, the agency says 40% of their riders also pay reduced fares and that riders are more concerned with bus frequency than fares.
>> Can a proposal for free VIA rides get enough supporters on board?
Fares make up less than five percent of the transit agency’s total revenue, but VIA officials say getting rid of them would also increase operating costs and could place federal funding for its green and silver “advanced rapid transit” (ART) lines at risk.
“Staff recommends maintaining focus on VIA’s adopted strategy to build a transit system people choose to use by continuing to invest (in) frequency, reliability, safety and long-term stability,” CEO Jon Gary Herrera told trustees.
Employees also slammed the idea, some of them holding signs during the meeting with slogans like “Fares=Safety” and “Buses are for TRANSIT NOT loitering.”
“This is a rare occasion where labor and management are 100% on the same page," Robert Garza, a driver and president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 694, told trustees on Tuesday.
Garza previously told KSAT that drivers had seen how the idea played out when VIA suspended fares during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That didn’t work. You get too many undesirables. You get people with no destinations riding. They don’t want to get off,” he said in an interview last week.
“They interrupt service, delay service. The buses are dirtier,” he said. “You have more passenger-customer confrontations. You have a more operator-customer confrontations every time we ask them to follow the rules. You have people that don’t want to follow the rules get on the bus. You wind up having a rolling shelter.”
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) has been a proponent of scrapping fares. In a statement through a spokeswoman Wednesday morning, he refused to admit defeat for the idea.
“When there’s a bump in the road, whether a tentative ‘no,’ a reluctance to cooperate, or conflicts that make a policy or initiative seem ‘dead,’ we’ve been excellent at finding a path forward (I.e. our insulin cost share program, pet deposit assistance program, office of integrated community safety, a new D2 senior center, etc.)
“The anti-homeless sentiment and resistance expressed by the opposition, including the board, will only get so far. We look forward to achieving zero fare, regardless of whether it’s tomorrow or years from now.”
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2)
Requests for comment through the mayor’s office was not immediately returned Wednesday morning.
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