New Orleans youth ages 16 to 24 will soon be able to ride the city’s buses, streetcars and ferries at no cost to them, through a year-long pilot program paid for with federal COVID-19 relief money. 

Starting on Sept. 3, eligible teens and young adults can visit any New Orleans Public Library location to enroll in the program, called Opportunity Pass. After the initial enrollment, they’ll be able to open the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority’s LePass app on their smartphones whenever they want to use the public transit system and download free day passes.

Courtney Jackson, executive director of transit advocacy group Ride New Orleans, which is managing the pilot for the RTA, said administering the passes through the LePass app – instead of ,handing out physical passes – is the best way to measure the program’s impact. 

“We need to be able to go back and say ‘hey look at how many people this is affecting,’” she said. “We’re going to have data that is going to help us show people that this is a program that is being used.”

Jackson anticipates the program — paid for with a $2.5 million New Orleans City Council allocation drawn from federal American Rescue Plan Act funds — will increase RTA ridership.

Who gets to ride?

Ride pitched the idea for free fares in a 2022 report that pointed out inequities in access to reliable transportation between high and low-income and Black and white households in New Orleans. Jackson said when Ride advocates met with local youths to discuss access to transportation, affordability was a top concern. 

“I need to get places to make the money to be able to even just live in general,” Lola Reynard, a 22-year-old youth ambassador at Ride, said. 

Reynard said she uses public transportation to access her two jobs, at Ride and at the World War II Museum, to pick up books or meet with her professors at Delgado Community College and to go to doctor’s appointments. She said the cost of travel can add up quickly. 

School-aged transit riders already get reduced fares – a one day Jazzy Pass for youngsters from kindergarten through high school is $1, compared to $3 for adults, and a one month pass is $18, compared to $45 for adults. But once a teen turns 19, they’re required to pay the full fares. 

“Forty-five dollars – that’s a bill,” Reynard said. “That’s a phone bill for some people. It’s like my water bill sometimes.”

Fellow youth ambassador, Béla Harmatiuk-Trujillo, 19, broke down the numbers. Their wages for their part-time job at Ride come to just under $800 every two weeks.  At the beginning of the month, $650 goes to renting a room in a shared apartment. Then they’re left with less than $150 to split between groceries, household essentials and public transit until payday comes around again. When  Trujillo receives their second paycheck in the middle of the month, a big chunk goes to paying bills and buying groceries. 

“It’s been difficult for me to scrape up funds for bus fare,” Trujillo said. “There have been times where I haven’t been able to get to events or something because I can’t find the [extra] 50 cents or whatever it takes to get on the bus.” 

Instead of searching through couch cushions for loose change, when youth sign up for the Opportunity Pass program, the RTA will bill the City of New Orleans $1 for each youth Jazzy Pass that 16 to 19 year olds download and $3 for each adult Jazzy Pass that 19 to 24-year-olds download. 

Starting to see benefits

The program comes as the RTA is working to make good on its promises to improve service. When the pilot was announced last year, the agency was dealing with frequent breakdowns of buses that were being used well beyond their normal 12-year lifespans.  A nationwide diesel mechanic shortage exacerbated the problem, causing major delays for riders. The agency responded earlier this year by reducing its fleet by 15% — shedding some of the older, less reliable buses — and rewriting its bus schedules with longer intervals between stops. In recent months, the RTA has gotten 21 new buses. Most of them are already in operation. 

“We’re starting to see the benefits of those painstaking decisions we had to make earlier to improve reliability,” RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins said in an interview. 

Jackson said Opportunity Pass organizers were “strategic” in deciding to wait to roll out the program until the agency began making moves to address the service problems.

“This would ensure the folks that were going to be on transit for perhaps the first time would have access to a transit system that was at least a little better than where it was a few months ago,” Jackson said. 

Opportunity Pass will require a permanent funding source for the program to continue beyond August 2025. 

Hankins said being able to prove the program’s viability is a top priority, as she’d like to continue supporting the city’s young people.

“Our youth are one good or bad decision away from changing the rest of their lives,” Hankins said. “Their thought process is not fully developed. They still need wrap-around services even though they’re young adults.”

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