MARTA's Secret Fare Increase

Here's something that has been sliding under the radar for a while but it's sure to create a stir later this summer. Last year I blogged about MARTA's new Breeze Ticket system. Starting May 1, 2007, MARTA will begin charging a .50 fee for issuing Breeze Tickets. Allegedly this is to recoup the cost of the tickets, but it's really just a revenue generator.

Now you can repeatedly reload the tickets but these things are flimsy and are lucky to last one week much less the 90 days they're good for. When MARTA adopted the Breeze system the rational was to make it harder for fare cheats but now it seems clear that the real motivation was to provide a new revenue source for a transit system that can't increase their fares.