Transit notebook: Bloomington heads towards more cashless fares, year-end housekeeping
Bloomington Transit (BT) is looking to switch to a fare collection system where almost all passengers who pay to board the bus will do it with an electronic transaction.
At its meeting last Tuesday, the BT board authorized general manager John Connell to negotiate an agreement with Cubic Transportation Systems for the purchase of electronic fare collection system software.
The amount of the agreement with Cubic, which is headquartered in San Diego, is not supposed to be more than $1.5 million.
BT currently has an agreement with Token Transit, to provide one way of paying for rides with a smartphone. And Token Transit was one of the companies that responded to BT’s request for proposals, along with Masabi. But Cubic wound up as the preferred vendor.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Connell said that to make a choice among vendors for a new, electronic fare collection system, BT got help from Left Turn Right Turn, which is a transit consulting firm that BT uses to assist with software and technology decisions.
The software platform provided by Cubic is supposed to allow for electronic payments, fare capping, and integration with BT’s new CAD/AVL (computer-aided dispatch/automatic vehicle location) system from ETA Transit.
Fare capping is a different approach to monthly passes. BT currently charges $30 for a 30-day pass, which is good for an unlimited number of rides. Based on the standard $1 fare, that would reflect a cost savings for high-frequency riders. But it requires paying $30 up front.
With a fare capping approach, a passenger pays the standard fare for the first 30 rides in a 30-day period, but after paying for 30 rides, the passenger does not have to pay for additional rides through the end of the 30-day period.
What Connell liked about Cubic’s approach to fare capping was the fact that the fare validator will notify passengers that they have paid their limit for the time period, and tell them that their rides will be free for the remainder of the time.
The final dollar amount in BT’s agreement with Cubic will include installation of non-mechanical “drop boxes” for any cash that passengers might still use to pay their fares when they get on the bus, Connell said.
Most BT passengers are already on a no-cash boarding system. Around 70 percent of passengers are affiliated with Indiana University—students, faculty or staff—and can board BT buses by showing their ID to the driver. Their fares are paid under a separate agreement between IU and BT.
City of Bloomington employees ride the bus under a similar arrangement.
November’s fixed-route ridership report, which was presented to the board on Tuesday, showed the continued trend of better ridership in 2023 compared to 2022. But this November still showed just about 80 percent of the ridership for November of 2019, which is the most recent pre-pandemic data.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the final one of the year, the five-member BT board wrapped up several year-end housekeeping items.
Among the housekeeping items for the board was the election of officers for next year. The board is sticking with its current slate of officers: James McLary (chair), Kent McDaniel (vice chair), Doug Horn, (treasurer) and Nancy Obermeyer (secretary).
But the board added an assistant secretary position to cover situations where the secretary might be unavailable to sign documents. Don Griffin agreed to serve as assistant secretary.
In the coming year, at the end of July, two board members will see their current appointed terms expire—Doug Horn and James McLary. McLary’s seat is appointed by Bloomington’s mayor. Horn’s seat is appointed by the city council.
The BT board is required under state statute to be partisan balanced. Both Horn and McClary are Republicans. Horn was appointed to the BT board in 2020 by then-chair of the Monroe County Republican Party, William Ellis—but only because Bloomington’s city council failed to make the appointment in a timely way.
In 2024, BT board members will be paid $1,200, or $100 a month.
