Posted Feb 9, 2016, 6:34 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2008
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Three and a half years after Union Pearson Coalition called for more stops and sane fares, Metrolinx and the MTO are starting to reevaluate their resistance to those proposals — though it has taken abysmal ridership levels and the attendant cash bleed and political liability yo make it so.
Metrolinx reconsidering Union Pearson Express fares as ridership sinks
(Toronto Star, Tess Kalinowski, Feb 5 2016)
Toronto’s new airport train is struggling to attract riders amid continuing criticism that the $456 million Union Pearson Express is simply too expensive.
On Friday, Metrolinx, the provincial agency that runs the train, said it will consider price adjustments among other options for building ridership.
The standard one-way adult fare on UPX is $27.50 but riders paying with a Presto card can board for $19.
Six months after it launched, Union Pearson Express (UPX) ridership levels were down significantly from the summer, hitting a low of 65,593 riders in November, 13,000 fewer passengers than the October high of 79,000.
…Councillor Josh Matlow, who prompted the city to call on Metrolinx to lower UPX fares, said the business model has never made sense and it’s time Metrolinx took another look at the fares.
While he applauded some changes introduced in Jan., including a policy that allows children 12 and under to ride free, it won’t be enough to attract the 5,000 riders a day UPX is targeting,” he said.
“It still doesn’t make it economical for the average family. If it’s an adult couple it actually costs virtually the same price to take a cab from the comfort of your own home.
“If not a regular public transit fare, at least a fare that is far more accessible to the average Toronto resident,” he said.
“To invest half a billion dollars into a boutique train for business travellers when the average Toronto resident has been waiting decades for public rapid transit access to our airport is shameful,” said Matlow.
Earlier this year UPX numbers showed it was attracting only about half its targeted ridership.
Read it in full here.
Finally, signs that UPX pricing may get another look
(Toronto Star, Edward Keenan Columnist, Feb 08 2016)
Well, it’s about time.
The premier of Ontario said Monday that Metrolinx “has to look at” the possibility of pricing the Union-Pearson Express (UPX) train to serve local commuters. This comes after the provincial agency that built and runs the train reported Friday that ridership has actually dropped in the months since its September peak. That peak was, itself, so dispiritingly low that I wrote then that Metrolinx should open the service up to lowly commuters while it was waiting for the business travellers it so desires to return its affections.
It’s nice to see that, after another two months in which it averaged fewer passengers than the Burnhamthorpe bus, the idea is finally getting some high-profile play.
(Just think: somehow the Burnhamthorpe bus manages to attract all those passengers without even having its own website and custom-produced magazine and uniformed attendants. It has but one thing to recommend it: the cash fare is $3.25, and the bus driver will give you a transfer to get you on the subway for free, too.)
Now, as I’ve made clear before, I’m not exactly an impartial observer here. I am one of those who live and work near enough to UPX stops that using it to commute could actually save me more than a half an hour a day. So perhaps seeing those trains run past my house every 15 minutes has given me more frequent occasion than most people have to shake my fist at the fact they are 90 per cent empty.
From the outset, I had a bit of a philosophical objection to the thought that —with all the much-discussed transit and traffic problems Toronto faces — we spent $456 million in public money on a line explicitly intended for the near-exclusive use of business travellers, rather than for regular Torontonians. Now, if the thing was bringing in sweet business traveller cash by the trainload, enough to pay for itself and subsidize other transit for the hoi polloi, then those philosophical reservations would be overwhelmed by practical use. But instead, we continue to subsidize the comfortable (if lonely) ride of these business people.
The plan, frustratingly, always called for us to do so until the service could attract enough riders to break even (sometime perhaps in 2020, it was thought). But it seems attracting riders is a bigger trick than the plan called for.
Read it in full here.
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"Where architectural imagination is absent, the case is hopeless." - Louis Sullivan
Last edited by thistleclub; Feb 11, 2016 at 4:34 PM.
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