Pay-as-you-go fares that stop adding up once a rider has paid what a day, week or month pass would have cost.
🤖 This definition was generated with AI from the sources linked throughout. It has not had a complete human review — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources. How this works.
Fare capping charges every trip individually and then stops charging. Once a rider's taps in a day — or a week, or a month — reach the price of the equivalent pass, the rest of the period is free. Nobody has to predict their travel or find the money for a monthly ticket up front, which is the whole point: the cheapest fare becomes the default rather than a reward for planning.
It is distinct from open-loop payment, which is what you tap with; capping is what you are charged. Los Angeles scrapped day, week and month passes outright in 2023 for automatic caps of $5 a day and $18 over seven days. Dallas caps daily and monthly, but only for riders with a registered card or account.
Two limits recur. A cap can only count taps, so riders paying cash are outside it by design — in Los Angeles that was more than two in five riders when the policy began. And a partial cap is easily overstated: Miami caps the day at the price of a 1-Day Pass and keeps selling weekly and monthly passes, so it should not be described simply as a city with fare capping.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary