When you say you want to give someone transport fare, you are not only giving the person money for transportation, but you are also giving him or her an error.
That is a grammatical error called tautology, a concept you should by now be able to define, based on how regularly we discuss it. It means the saying of the same thing twice over in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style, according to Oxford Dictionary. This is the problem with ‘transport fare’.
People readily demand or give TF. They also indicate such in budgets, just as they use the acronym in other financial transactions.
This means they are also indirectly using the expression ‘transport fare’ even if in a coded way, since TF means Transport Fare. So, TF too is tautological.
‘Fare’ means ‘the money you pay for a journey in a vehicle such as a bus or train’. Put differently, it means money you pay for transportation.
As a result, it does not require the support of ‘transport’. Or do you pay accommodation fare or entertainment fare? So, when referring to the amount you pay to the taxi guy, just call it ‘fare’ and move on.
Air fare
Yet, it is possible to qualify the word in other ways. When we need to be specific in terms of the type of transportation being paid for, the adjective will no more be unwanted.
If you are going by air, you can have ‘air fare’.
If by rail, it can be ‘rail fare’. This is how ‘taxi fare’ is also grammatically okay:
The guy has sent transport fare to me but I won’t go. (Wrong)
The guy has sent TF to me but I won’t go. (Wrong)
The guy has sent fare to me but I won’t go. (Correct)
The guy has sent taxi fare to me but I won’t go. (Correct)
The guy has sent rail fare to me but I won’t go. (Correct)
The guy has sent air fare to me but I won’t go. (Correct)
Fare or fair?
You should also be careful not to mix up fare and fair.
It is easy to refer to the fare needed for a particular trip and it is correct to say someone is not fair to one. Besides, a person can be fair (not light) in complexion. But the following can be tricky:
I hope the woman is … well. Faring or fairing?
The correct term here is still ‘faring’ because another meaning of ‘fare’ is ‘perform in a specified way in a particular situation or over a particular period’. In other words, it is now a verb unlike the noun it is in ‘taxi fare’.
Here are two examples from Cambridge Dictionary:
How did you fare in your exam?
Low-paid workers will fare badly/well under this government.
