A Tale of Two Cities

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

This week, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority made good on their threat to charge a boatload of money for World Cup football fans to ride the T to Gillette Stadium in Foxboro -- temporarily renamed Boston Stadium -- but it was even worse than we originally thought: not $75 but $80.

And the traffic nightmare created by the recent Brazil-France friendly match in Foxboro scared everyone into buying the tickets anyway. MBTA reports that within mere minutes 17,000 people jumped at the chance to pay $80 for what is normally an $8 to $16 ride, though it's pretty clear they had very little choice and no good options. For what it's worth, that beat out the demand for a Taylor Swift concert when MBTA also ran special service.

Meanwhile, also this week but an entire two-and-a-half day train ride away in California, the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, working together with the Ventura County Transportation Commission (VCTC) and the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG), said they too are preparing to get fans to and from World Cup matches -- they’ll add another round-trip frequency beginning May 4th, and to ease the pain they’ll offer a 20 percent fare discount. A discount, from regular fares.

Here’s what the Surfliner folks say on their booking site: “Taking the train to Los Angeles soccer matches is a simple, stress-free alternative to driving. Ride the Pacific Surfliner to Los Angeles Union Station or other nearby stops, then connect to SoFi Stadium via shuttle, Metro, or rideshare. The train offers comfortable seating, onboard amenities, and scenic coastal views, making your match day experience part of the journey.”

Indeed.

The regular fares on this run range between $25 and $35 to cover 128 miles between LA and San Diego, or the 103 miles between LA and Santa Barbara. And instead of boosting the fares, they’re discounting them to make train travel a reasonable option and to fulfill the publicly funded agency’s mandate to deploy its resources to reduce congestion and improve mobility.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to respond to the huge travel demands that will be placed on our public infrastructure by six million football fans arriving from around the world to spend a month watching their nation’s teams duke it out for a spot in the history books. I said it last week and I’ll say it again here: gouging fans who really have no choice might help to pay, in the short run, for getting those extra trains over the road. MBTA just sold $1.4 million worth of tickets, so there’s a certain logic to it. But that kind of short-termism doesn’t do much for what should be our long-term objective of encouraging more rail travel.

Charging four times the typical fare for special express trains is a mistake. We want to encourage people to use trains, for lots of good reasons, like getting people out of cars, like reducing congestion, like improving emissions, or simply moving masses of people much more efficiently at a time when travel of all kinds will be crushed.

Bravo LOSSAN.