Intentional movement from one location to another has characterized human history irrespective of time and spatial scales. The globally-connected society that we live in would be impossible without the dynamic transport of people and objects between places. Whether via air, water, land, or even space, transportation systems provide the spatial networks that enable us to experience the world outside of our own backyards.
In particular, public transit reflects the truth that, although we may have unique ultimate origins and destinations, there are shared patterns in our movements that allow us to go from point A to point B together. Public transit has existed for much of recorded human history: for example, Greek mythology features one of the earliest tales of public transit in the story of the ferryman Charon, who required payment in the form of coins from travelers that needed to cross the river Styx.
The issue of payment for public transit has grown as transit networks have become more complicated. Where once single ferries or trains would connect regions adequately, now there are multiple routes serviced by multiple modes of transit operated by multiple different agencies within a singular region. As technology has enabled our society to become increasingly cashless, transit systems have followed. Understandably, for regions with multiple transit agencies, developing a unified system to allow seamless cashless payments between modes of transit and across agencies was necessary. Thus, the inception of the Puget Sound regional ORCA (One Regional Card for All) system was long awaited.
The Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC) has spent several years helping area agencies develop a platform to process ORCA fare card transaction data for dashboarding and visualization purposes. These data can now be analyzed to consider many additional research questions, especially related to the equity of transit services being provided. Because resources for these types of analytical efforts have been limited due to other priorities (e.g., responding to pandemic related changes in travel and funding), the historical use of ORCA data has historically been modest, in part because the ongoing implementation of the next generation of ORCA fare card hardware and backend systems has resulted in many changes to the base ORCA analytical capabilities. This year’s ORCA project provides an opportunity to significantly enhance the types of analyses that can be done with ORCA data as well as perform many of those analyses, in order to shed light on the effectiveness of recent changes in transit service levels as agencies work to address their core interest in equitable access to public services in an era of reduced bus transit funding.