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1.50 adults and .50 for kids, good for several hours, enough to go somewhere and come back. No special "rush hour" fares, no differences for trains or buses or levels of service. Of course I am not talking about Metro Transit of Minneapolis and St. Paul where the fare scheme is used as a choke point on the number of people that take transit but San Francisco that crazy liberal town where the transit is almost as free as the crazy morals and libertines that live there and run the place. As a result the SF Muni rail transit is packed. People hop on and off all over the place and zoom back and forth, what are they thinking?
Then, of course, there is Tucson, AZ. One conservative Air Force Base with a small conservative city built next to it and it is the only thing standing between us and the godless Commies from Venezuela. But because of the proximity of the SF Muni and maybe psychotropic desert cactus squeezin's the transit fare is $1! And the result I am sure is just as bad as SF. Why in God's name don't these places have pay zones, rush hour fare increases and levels of service add on fees like the God fearing real Americans in my city? What are they doing, trying to actually have people use transit?
Not too much. It does seem that simple fare schemes set at a reasonable rate help transit usability. Fare schemes that are not simple and are costly seem to be used as a tool and a choke point to control transit use. Metro Transit Minneapolis - St. Paul with its $2.75 rush hour fare and various schemes that are again rising in price are a demonstration project of the choke point theory. I am sure an academic could study this somehow and show the obvious conclusions. But I do not think they bother, there is no money for transit and with the current economy and the ferocious competition from the flailing auto-highway industry for government funding there will be no money for a "study" of the obvious.