While premium transit modes such as commuter rail can improve access to opportunities, the higher fares that accompany these services create barriers to their use. Fare-sensitive access measures require accurate estimation of fare costs between origins and destinations. They are not often included in public transit access analyses because of data limitations and modeling complexity. In this paper, we introduce a flexible and scalable fare calculator that encodes complex fare structures as permissions or “rules” and is able to estimate an origin-destination fare cost from a transit itinerary produced separately. We leverage this fare calculator to examine how access and equity are impacted by fares across seven major urban areas in the United States. We find that fares can act as a substantial barrier to job access, this barrier is not equitably distributed across sociodemographic groups within and between cities, and changes in transit service due to the Covid-19 pandemic has affected access disparities.

虽然通勤铁路等优质交通方式可以改善获得机会的机会，但伴随这些服务的更高票价对其使用造成障碍。票价敏感的访问措施需要准确估计出发地和目的地之间的票价成本。由于数据限制和建模复杂性，它们通常不包括在公共交通访问分析中。在本文中，我们介绍了一种灵活且可扩展的票价计算器，该计算器将复杂的票价结构编码为许可或“规则”，并能够根据单独生成的过境路线估算起点-目的地票价成本。我们利用这个票价计算器来研究美国七个主要城市地区的票价如何影响访问和公平性。我们发现票价可以成为就业机会的重大障碍，