SacRT’s Director Planning Anthony Adams announced at the March SACOG Transportation Committee meeting that SacRT would be implementing a program to provide Uber and Lyft rides to and from light rail stations. He did not provide any detail, so it is unknown whether these would be subsidized rides or free rides.

SacRT had a cooperative program called Station Link with Uber, Lyft and Yellow Cab at some point in the past. All mention of this program has disappeared from the SacRT website, so the span of this program is not known, but it was in operation in 2017 and 2018. The program was dropped for unknown reasons, but likely because it was unsustainable. As is true of much of what SacRT implements, it was called a pilot program, but at the end of the program no report was made to the SacRT Board or the public about what was learned from the pilot. From the fact that the program was terminated, it might be assumed that what was learned was ‘don’t do that again’.

Yet SacRT is planning on starting the program again. The board received a presentation on February 26, 2024 from Henry Li on the SacRT Strategic Priorities and 2024 Outlook. This was run through at a breakneck pace, and will be subject additional posts, but for now the phrase on page 8 of the presentation related to this new program is “First/Last Mile Program Connecting to SacRT Light Rail Stations”.

So far as STAR knows, nothing on this program has been presented to the SacRT Board.

Transit everywhere, and particularly for an underfunded agency like SacRT, is a zero-sum game. If a new service is provided, something else must be cut. That does not mean that new services should not be implemented, rather that they should be looked at closely to see if the benefits provided are greater than the benefits lost elsewhere. STAR almost always supports programs which increase ridership, but since ridership fare recovery is a small part of the overall operations budget, a new program must show significant ridership increase to have a beneficial impact on the budget. SacRT often implements new programs, particularly ‘pilot’ programs, without addressing this issue of trade-offs. Of course in the long run STAR supports an increase in the operations budget for SacRT, but there is nothing on the horizon before 2026, at best, that would accomplish that.

Will this Uber/Lyft program be of overall benefit compared to the service it replaces, and will it increase ridership? We don’t know.

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