Abstract

Transit agencies are interested in integrating microtransit service with fixed-route transit (FRT) service to leverage the benefits of each mode. In an integrated FRT and microtransit system, fare structures for both FRT and microtransit services play an important role in influencing travelers’ behavior. This paper studies 10 different fare structures and their impacts on travelers’ behavior in the presence of an integrated FRT and microtransit system. We use a flexible agent-based FRT and microtransit modeling framework recently proposed by the authors to study fare structures. We analyze the impacts of fare structures on synthetic travelers in downtown San Diego and Lemon Grove, a small city in San Diego County. The results show that the intermodal transfer discount policy — where a traveler can use FRT freely when transferring from microtransit to FRT or receives a 50% discount on microtransit when transferring from FRT to microtransit — is the most promising. Under this fare structure, the subsidy per transit rider ($8.20 in downtown San Diego and $13.5 in Lemon Grove), transit user out-of-pocket costs ($1.27 in downtown San Diego and $1.71 in Lemon Grove), and auto mode share (80.6% in downtown San Diego and 86.5% in Lemon Grove) are the lowest of any fare structure.