Data Sharing to Drive the City of Philadelphia’s Zero Fare Program: A FormFest 2025 Profile

After two decades of sharing data across city departments, pinpointing Philadelphia residents who qualify for an auto-enrollment transit benefit program was relatively straightforward. The tricky part was letting them know about it.

“For other benefits, you can auto-enroll someone from a list, make an administrative change on the back end, and then just lower their bill,” said Nicola Coakley, research and policy manager in the office of the city’s managing director. “But with transit, we can’t get around the fact that we need to get them the physical fare pass. And before we can do that, we have to reach them, get them information about the program, and build trust that it’s real.”

It was a novel challenge. While auto-enrollment is not new, it is unusual in the transportation sector, where benefits are traditionally managed by individual transit agencies that require residents to apply for reduced fares rather than automatically providing unlimited rides to qualified residents. But “unusual” is the point of Zero Fare, which reframes transit as a social safety net benefit administered by the city through a dedicated data-focused office using a wealth of information.

“There was a body of evidence at the city showing that application-based delivery of traditional public benefits has a number of significant barriers that can limit people’s access and the reach of those programs,” Coakley said. “With Zero Fare, we had a new program and an opportunity to do things differently.”

It has already seen early success. Two-thirds of residents who received transit cards in the first year of the program remained enrolled through 2024, averaging approximately 100,000 trips per week, according to initial data. More detailed analysis is coming next year, once the evaluation team has sorted through the data compiled in the project’s two-year pilot period. That assessment—and Zero Fare itself—is rooted in the City’s broader commitment to data-sharing, though you could replicate a version of the program without that foundation, according to Casey Henderson, director of research, analytics, and evaluation for Philadelphia’s Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action. But it will always require breaking down those information silos.

“Any program wanting to utilize Zero Fare’s auto-enrollment model, where we identify someone’s eligibility for one benefit by leveraging existing information from other sources —I don’t think that’s possible without a cross-systems data infrastructure,” she said. “So much of what we were able to do relied on our built capacity to bring data from disparate systems together on a routine basis.”

Casey Henderson: Behind the Scenes

By the tenth grade, Henderson knew she was passionately motivated by issues of justice and equity. Naturally, that meant a career in film.

“What I had always wanted to be was a documentary filmmaker,” she said. “I saw the response you could elicit from documentaries, and I saw that as such an amazing agent for social change and social good.”

Still, Henderson had not seen the less-than-glamorous day-to-day reality of the documentary filmmaker lifestyle. 

“I found out that documentarians have really difficult lives,” she said. “You’re on the road a lot, it’s hard to make money, it’s difficult to have a family.”

As a result, she left film for the nonprofit sector, landing at an organization that aimed to reduce social isolation for students in special education programs by matching them with kids in general education to promote authentic friendships. Working in classrooms across Connecticut, Henderson was struck by the disparities between schools just a few miles apart.

“You’d have neighborhoods with vast wealth and neighborhoods in poverty smashed up against each other, so I’d go to a gorgeous public school that looked almost like an elite private school and then, two miles away, there’d be a completely under-resourced school with crumbling infrastructure,” she said. “And I thought, ‘I need to go back to grad school to understand how we can allow these inequalities to persist.’”

One Ph.D in education policy later, Henderson began working with the City of Philadelphia on ways to use integrated data to understand and address some of these inequities . The topic was more universal than it initially seemed,  she said.

“What I saw was that many of the gaps exist upon entry, and schools are just maintaining them. Education information alone is not enough to solve that,” she said. “This is a place where I see enormous opportunity for impact. There are problems in this world, and I want to help be a part of solving them.”

Nicola Coakley: Designing Improvements

As a research and policy manager, Coakley analyzes public benefit delivery through the lens of data and applied research. She’s motivated to change the way government works for people, in part due to an awareness that systems can, and do, work differently in other places

“I grew up between Ireland and the U.S. as a kid, and I’ve lived chunks of time outside of the U.S. since” she said. “Things work so differently in other places, in terms of the idea of a social safety net and how that works for people. It’s refreshing to remember that systems work the way they do by design – it doesn’t have to work like this.”

Working under the city’s Managing Director, Coakley uses data and research to evaluate—and improve—public services and benefits. Outside of work, her interests are less analytical.

“I’m very analog in my hobbies at home,” she said. “I like to make art—drawing, painting, pastels—and I also really like film photography.”

Still, those interests are not entirely separate from her job, where policy changes often depend on transforming complex information into clear and visually compelling stories. The key word here is “compelling.” 

“I don’t think people are particularly moved by 3D pie charts in terrible colorways,” she said. “Much of what I enjoy in my job is making visualizations for people, and working to make sure they make sense but also look pretty. I think it makes a difference. Good design helps you hone in on what you’re trying to get across.”