Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffwhit
Vancouver charges a $5 surcharge to enter or leave the airport zone, making the fare between YVR and anywhere in Vancouver proper cost $8.75, and $10.00 to go to Surrey. Zoned fair pricing is being tossed around, but I would only support it if the base fare was lowed significantly, to $2 or lower.
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The $5 airport surcharge ended up only being applied to tickets purchased for trips departing the airport. The price of a trip to the airport is the same as any other two zone trip: $3.75. Originally the plan was going to require a $2.50 add-fare for trips to or from the airport zone. The mechanics of implementing this were daunting, especially when you consider that most transit trips begin on a bus and not in a train station with the ticket vending machines. Once we get our smart cards in a couple of years all bets are off when it comes to fare structures and they may well implement tap on/tap off distance based pricing and eliminate fare zones entirely. In the end Translink and the airport decided to instead automatically add $5 to any ticket puchased at the airport SkyTrain stations' ticket vending machines. It simplified the whole process but is a little bit underhanded too since the machines don't tell you why the fare is so high.
The last round of numbers had 15% of passengers flying in or out of YVR using SkyTrain, which is apparently among the highest percentages in North America and those numbers are about six months old. Plus that ridership was built despite abysmal signage inside the airport and honestly pretty poor frequencies late at night due to the level of service offered during the 'initial service plan' that will thankfully expire this summer. Right now the average wait is twelve minutes with a little as eight during rush hour, but late at night during the last few hours of service one may have to wait up to 20 minutes for a train to depart and that's just unacceptable. Fortunately the train is sitting at the platform for much of that time so you can at least take a seat inside a heated, well lit train instead of standing around on the platform.
The airport has already started to really leverage SkyTrain to change the way it organises space on Sea Island, home to airport. YVR has already moved all employee parking out to the furthest station on Sea Island and since all travel by train on the island is free employees now take a four minute SkyTrain ride to the main terminal as opposed to a fifteen minute-plus meandering shuttle trip from the old employee lots that were twice as close. Next up for the airport is the relocation of the long-term airport parking to the next furtherst airport station and repurposing the original long-term parking lots' valuable land close to the terminal into developable parcels for office, hotel, and commercial uses. Translink is also going to expand the existing Community Shuttle bus route on Sea Island to better service these new parcels of land, the south terminal private airline and air cargo hub, and the large new "north terminal" business hub that is proposed and has already had its main achor, Canada Post, go to tender for an absolutely giant new 30+ acre Metro Vancouver and South Coast central processing and handling facility. Ultimately the airport wants to move employee parking entirely off of Sea Island and build or lease parkades around the Bridgeport Station transit hub and have all their employees take the seven minute train ride from there, and in doing so free up dozens of acres of prime airport development land on Sea Island.
If all goes to plan a fourth station will be built on the airport island and this will connect directly with the proposed next expansion of the international terminal hall which will be dedicated exclusively to US departures. The SkyTrain guideway was brought down to grade for most of the trip on Sea Island and in one place in particular its geometry was dictated by the airport's contingency plan to build a taxiway over the SkyTrain and road corridor to link the north and south runways. The airport needed to ensure that all of its future plans were both facilitated and not encumbered by the Canada Line and that is the biggest reason why they put in $300 million into the project, so that they could have a seat at the table and essentially design their own leg of the system. Effectively the airport's next forty years of evolution are now tied inextricably with SkyTrain and thanks to the network effect any improvements to the SkyTrain network directly benefit the airport by making it even more accessible by rapid transit for its employees and passengers. It's a very exciting time.
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