To start off their last study session, city officials came to the mayor and council’s table and offered a menu of unappetizing options to pay for fare-free bus rides.
A new tax on rental cars would require a change in state law for this purpose. So would the formation of a special taxing district, as would other options.
Probably not gonna happen.
We could raise the hotel/motel surcharge, or the tax on public utilities, but those are already among the highest rates in the state.
We can beg the University of Arizona, Pima Community College and the school districts, but they’re under no obligation to help out, even though they do benefit heavily from free transit.
The mayor and some members of the council considered the whole topic at the Nov. 19 meeting to be premature and, it seemed to my ear, annoying.
“I agree that we shouldn’t even be having the discussion about fares at this moment,” Council Member Lane Santa Cruz said, supporting Mayor Regina Romero’s earlier comments. “This mayor and council has stated time and time again their support of it. We should be talking about the financing of transit more holistically.”
The review of options left the impression that there is no easy way for covering the estimated $10 million-per-year cost of not charging fares for bus and streetcar rides. But that’s not really the case — there are more appetizing alternatives.
Bus riders at the Ronstadt Transit Center in downtown Tucson.
Next year, there are two tax elections, one for Tucson voters, and one for all Pima County voters that could absorb this cost. That way, too, voters could have a chance to weigh in on whether we want to pay for the idea.
It’s something Tucsonans talk about, perhaps because they think fares used to cover most or all of the cost of transit before the city went fare-free in 2020. That’s not true: Fares only covered a small portion of the cost of the transit system in the times before pandemic funding from the federal government allowed the city to go fare-free.
Fares covered around 10% of the cost of the entire transit system when Tucson decided to start covering the cost itself in 2023. At that time, the cost of not having fares was about $9.1 million, the city estimated.
Last week, City Manager Tim Thomure estimated the cost of not charging fares at $10 million to $13 million per year. This is much higher than what some transit advocates think, because, among other things, charging fares anew is likely to depress ridership considerably, and it costs money to reinstall and operate a fare system.
Ridership underwhelmin
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City Council Member Paul Cunningham told me he thinks the cost of not charging fares could be as low as $5 million per year, depending on factors such as how high fares would be set if they ever came back. But he acknowledged he hears about the issue a lot from people who think the program costs more than it does, or that it is responsible for the spread of homeless camps around the city.
“I don’t think we need to do any of those things,” Cunningham said. “The general fund has absorbed significantly the fare-free transit.”
It’s true as noted in the study session, that the cost of fare-free transit is accounted for this fiscal year and, probably, next year, going through June 2026.
I’m with Romero and others on the council in liking fare-free transit, overall. It’s incredibly simple — the key — and usually safe and reliable, though it’s true that a lot of street people, some of them on drugs, use the system. That probably makes some car-drivers uncomfortable, though they should consider the threat of a serious car crash in their risk assessments.
What I’ve found disappointing is that not as many people use the bus as I would expect, considering that it’s free. Although Romero has said at the council and in an email that “we have seen record numbers of riders,” that’s not the case with the bus.
Ridership topped 19 million for four consecutive years between fiscal year 2012 and fiscal 2015. Last year, ridership didn’t even top 16 million rides, winding up at about 15.8 million according to preliminary figures. I want to see ridership return to the numbers of a decade ago.
To pay for free fares beyond 2026, and drive ridership, though, we could have a source for the extra millions if the mayor and council will simply put it in packages that voters are already considering.
Prop. 414 and RTA
The first vote on a half-cent sales tax is scheduled for March. The details of Prop. 414 haven’t been finalized, but council members are pretty committed to the priorities it’s funding and are likely to approve something close to what’s already being proposed.
That means most of the estimated $80 million-per-year the tax would produce will go to Tucson police and fire, and related services, if the proposition passes. For example, $2.7 million per year would go to non-patrol vehicles for the Tucson Police Department. A million dollars per year would go to “community based violence intervention” programs.
In the housing arena, $4 million per year would go to housing “resiliency” to help low-income homeowners and renters, as well as add new stock to city-owned housing. Another $3.45 million per year would go to expanding low-barrier shelters and extending the city’s Housing First program.
You may think these are higher priority items than fare-free transit, but as Romero said, “We’ve got to see free transit as part of a safe and vibrant city.” There’s no reason city officials couldn’t scratch out, say, $5 million of the $80 million per year they’re dreaming of to help pay for fare-free transit over the next 10 years.
Alternatively, the RTA Next program, the continuation of an existing half-cent sales tax, will be voted on by all county voters in November. It includes $610 million over 20 years, or an average of $30.5 million per year, for mass transit. Hard to believe a few million of that couldn’t go to ensuring fare-free transit.
“I want to get to the point where we brag about our public transportation system being free and encouraging more people to use it,” Santa Cruz said.
I agree, and if we could put $5 million to $10 million per year into those tax elections for fare-free transit, we wouldn’t have to think again about fares for 10-20 years. Then we could stop talking about it, as much of the mayor and council seem to want, and focus on maximizing the number of people who ride the bus.
