Project Summary
California’s transit agencies face mounting fiscal pressures while emerging mobility services remain poorly integrated with fixed-route transit. The Bay Area’s Clipper BayPass—a regional unlimited-ride integrated mobility pass—has demonstrated strong demand-side impacts in its pilot phases, but core design questions around pricing, revenue allocation, and equity remain unresolved as the program scales. This project develops a principled market-design framework for BayPass that determines how an integrated mobility pass should be priced and how revenue should be shared across participating operators. Working in partnership with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), the research team model rider behavior using logit choice over multimodal itineraries and formulate a mechanism design problem in which a regional coordinator maximizes total rider welfare subject to rider and operator participation constraints. The framework accommodates transit-only, transit-plus-micromobility, and full ride-hailing integration scenarios. Calibration draws on data from BayPass Phase 1 and Phase 2 pilot program, and original survey targeting BayPass participants including low-income groups. The project evaluates vertical and horizontal equity under uniform and group-differentiated pricing and compute subsidy–equity trade-off frontiers. Findings will be delivered as a policy brief and research report for SFCTA and MTC, directly informing the next phase of BayPass expansion.
