Area (i) · Peer benchmarking
VTA recovers a small share of its operating cost at the farebox, which is exactly why sales tax carries so much of the budget. Benchmarked against large US transit agencies in the FTA National Transit Database, this page shows where VTA actually ranks, what it spends to move each rider, and how its recovery has trended over the past decade.
Where VTA sits
Farebox recovery is the share of operating cost covered by passenger fares. Across this group of large US agencies, VTA is near the bottom, which means a larger share of its operating budget has to come from other sources, principally sales tax.
VTA highlighted in royal. Higher is better. Each bar is the agency's most recent reported farebox recovery ratio.
Cost to move a rider
Recovery is only half the picture. Operating expense per unlinked passenger trip shows what each agency spends to carry one rider. Read together, a low recovery ratio and a high cost per boarding point to the same place: a budget that leans hard on non-fare revenue.
VTA highlighted in royal. Lower is better. Cost in dollars per boarding.
The trend
VTA's recovery ratio was meaningfully higher a decade ago. It fell through the late 2010s, dropped sharply during the pandemic, and has only partly recovered. The result is a budget that depends more on sales tax now than it did in 2015.
Annual farebox recovery ratio.
What it means
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Ties directly to the Sales-Tax Forecast page: the lower the share of cost fares cover, the more of the operating budget rides on a single, economically sensitive revenue source.
Use this peer set to anchor multi-year targets for farebox recovery and cost per boarding in the long-range plan, so VTA is measuring itself against comparable large agencies rather than its own past alone.
Run this peer comparison as an automated pipeline off each annual National Transit Database release, so VTA's leadership sees an updated ranking on recovery and unit cost every year without manual data pulls, the predictive-and-analytics capability the scope calls for.
See the sales-tax revenue forecast, the long-range operating model, the SCIP funding engine, and the finance-transformation tools, each built on VTA's own public data.
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