Raise or Hold? Estimating the Whatcom Transportation Authority's Fare Elasticity

This paper utilizes an unbalanced panel data model with cross section fixed effects to estimate the short run transit fare elasticity that the Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA) could expect. This measure could be used to predict short run changes in ridership in response to potential changes in the WTA’s adult base fares. Ridership levels, fares, service levels, population, and regional gas prices are used to estimate this model, and then fare elasticities were calculated with the output from this estimated model. [The dataset for this project is included as a supplementary file.]