Caltrain's pricing is terrible and does nothing to help its situation.

The Zones are a nuisance. If you cross a zone boundary from one station to the next it works out much more expensive than remaining in your own zone for several stations. That is totally unfair.

There are no off-peak fares to encourage people to ride off peak. There should be some cheap day rates for those who start their trip after 10.00 a.m.

There are no family tickets. A family say using Caltrain to go to Giants game at ATT gets no special fare. A once off family ticket rate should be available to make it convenient for family outings.

Trying to encourage more casual weekend and offpeak rides on trains that are already scheduled but have less ridership could be done by innovative pricing structures.

The article did mention piloting "discounted fares during the evenings and weekends".

I'd pay $190 or maybe even $285 for a Go-Pass. Unfortunately as a single eligible user, Caltrain wants $15,960 from me annually. I could get 12 full-route monthly passes for $4200. Oh well, might not be a space available on my driver license for the sticker anyway.

If Caltrain wants to try varying their fares by time or day of week, they will probably have to do that in conjunction with Clipper Card. Just so happens that Clipper is designing features for the next version of their card right now. I suggest you submit your ideas to them: Web Link

Whatever Caltrain does, Palo Alto's absurdly business-friendly TDM better not try to stick us with the Caltrain fare for all the commuters over-running the city like it's already announced, along with having us pay for them to carpool and to take Lyft.

If @musical above is right that a single person's Caltrain fare would be close to $16,000 and we have 100,000+ commuters coming into Palo Alto every day and 66,000 residents, that's $16,000,000 the city's asking US to subsidize because it would be oh-so-wrong to ask businesses to pay their fair share. At the same time, they threaten the RESIDENTS with other tax increases and fees!

Actually the annual Caltrain Go-Pass minimum will be increased to $24,000. But if your company has two people, that's $12,000 each. 50 people is $480 each. After 84 people, it becomes a flat $285 per person, no matter how many people. The gotcha (as I understand it) is that you must pay for every person in your organization, whether they use Caltrain or not.

$285 is an extreme bargain compared to a regular Caltrain commuter paying one's own way. I've wondered what Stanford's bulk purchase costs them in total, and what percentage actually use it. "The Go Pass is available to graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and university and hospital employees residing off Stanford property and within typical commuting distances."

I guess that's a reasonable form of leverage to get cars off the road, but it seems pretty discriminatory to those of us freelancers.

VTA's Eco Pass works on the same concept. As little as $18 per employee per year, for bus service that would cost an unaffiliated individual $1540.

I think CalTrain should it improve its service before asking riders to pay more!

"Caltrain's member agencies (the City and County of San Francisco, SamTrans and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority) contributes to system operations"

Palo Alto Weekly Staff needs to learn proper English.

The zone system dates back to Southern Pacific days when conductors sold tickets on board the train. They had belt-worn change machines which dispensed coins. The zone system meant conductors had fewer fares to calculate. Nowadays, with machines handling ticket sales, you should be able to buy a ticket from point of sale to any destination in the system.

S.P. also had a multi-ride ticket but it was 20 rides back in the day, not the current eight.