Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban_Sky
This is an interesting angle which actually resonates with demands other people have made in this forum and whereas I do believe that there should be national coach network which is organized and subsidized by the federal and provincial governments, the comparison of Germany (my country of birth and citizenship) with the United Kingdom (where I pursued my Bachelor degree) and Canada makes me believe that there should be strict separation between the operation (that is: the crewing and maintenance of trains and staffing of stations) and the organisation (that is: the funding, timetabling and ticketing) of publicly funded services. I used to work for a transit network authority in Germany and I can tell you that there is much more accountability of an operator towards the transit network authority than an individual passenger – not at last because the authority commands an infinitely higher share of the operator’s revenues and has the ability to withhold parts of it. As for the last two cities you are mentioning,
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I'm interested in this, could you expand? This sounds somewhat similar to the UK model with companies running the operations, but the government deciding most of the overall strategy.
I think I agree with you that there should be a national ticketing system, but that any buses etc would not necessarily have to be run by VIA, and indeed it may be best to have them separate. As long as someone can buy one ticket with the different legs clearly described with how long they will take (and the guarantee that if the train is late they won't get financially penalized for a late connection), that would be a huge improvement.