A handy guide to bus passes

I'm looking at what type of pass to get for next month, a bus pass for $40 or a linkpass (which is a bus pass, plus subway) for $59. Basically, I take the subway a couple times per month, but not in any set amount. So let's bust out the maths and see what my cheapest option is.

First, a bus trip is $1.25, plus a free transfer to one other bus or a $0.45 transfer to a subway, within two hours. A subway trip, without a transfer, is $1.70 plus one free bus transfer. So you would expect this to be a simple problem: a $40 bus pass would require $19 of subway transfers to justify upgrading to the linkpass. Except apparently you can't get a transfer discount to the subway if you're using a bus pass.

Now let's think about this. Taking the bus twice a day for work means 40 trips, or $50 without a pass. But does the cheaper subway transfer discount that? Let's start with the bus pass: it's another $19 until a linkpass is the better option, and divided by $1.70, that's about 12 trips. If we'd skipped the bus pass, then we'd only have another $9 before the linkpass pays off -- but at $0.45 a trip, we get 20 rides on the subway. So... 40 trips on the bus and 20 on the subway costs you $74 with a bus pass and $59 without.

So what are my best options here? Doing the math, "bus pass" and "no bus pass" balance out at 8 subway trips. If I don't plan on taking the subway more than seven times in the month, a bus pass is the best choice. Eight times means it doesn't matter if I get a bus pass. Nine through twenty means I'm better off not buying a pass. If I plan on taking the subway twenty or more times, plus the bus every day, I may as well buy a linkpass.

But my situation, temping, means I don't know where in Boston I'll be working from one week to the next, and I don't have a lot of money to burn. Is this what the MBTA had in mind? Because saving $180/year by not buying a bus pass seems backwards to me.

I think they should just drop the monthly pass system all together, and just put caps on how much money you can spend on a single card. Calculate it so once you spend $40 on the bus, you get free bus rides the rest of the month. Once you hit $59 in the local transit, free bus and subway. At the same time, stop spending money on advertising and all the overhead that comes with having these programs. So you'll stop making income from people who haven't figured it out the cheapest option for them; they will at some point anyway.