Calgary Public Transit II

[DizzyEdge]

Let's say the city was given enough funding not only for the green line, but one or two more LRT lines. Are there any bus routes which currently have enough ridership to warrant spending even 'free' money to convert to LRT?

[DizzyEdge]

Originally Posted by joe498

The largest concern is the idea that Airdrie, Cochrane, Chestermere & Okotoks don't pay property taxes to Calgary but make daily use of Calgary infrastructure, notably the LRT. An expansion of the green line north or south will likely only increase the use by Airdrie/Okotoks.

Ideally the best way to accomplish this would be toll roads but this won't likely fly.

Originally Posted by fusili

Fixed

[ByeByeBaby]

Originally Posted by CrossedTheTracks

I don't suppose anyone has anything crazy, like, uh, data, to quantify this concern?

Non-Calgary residents are paying $0 right now in property taxes. So by definition, if anyone from outside the city has ever parked n' ridden, then they're getting this for free.

My guess is that this is probably at least 10% of park and ride usage, maybe a little more, but concentrated in a few lots.

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Pretty hard to measure for Park and Ride unless you were to run everyone's plates in the lots for a week. Easy to measure for connecting buses.

The city benefits from not having people on the roads just the same however. The CRP might be willing to tap into the regional collaboration MSI pot (if it still exists) to avoid this equity argument though. The LRT will save Airdrie and Crossfield operating costs of running all the way downtown.

I guess that's one way of talking about it - it's a 'benefit' that region residents are efficiently using city subsidized transit instead of inefficiently using city subsidized roads. Like it's a 'benefit' that the burglar took your laptop instead of your car.

I've heard Rollin Stanley talk payroll taxes as a way of getting at this market - it's region residents going to work in the city.

That said, I don't think this is necessarily a huge issue, but there's nothing a politician likes more than getting tax money from someone who doesn't vote in their election.

[DizzyEdge]

Originally Posted by ByeByeBaby

Non-Calgary residents are paying $0 right now in property taxes. So by definition, if anyone from outside the city has ever parked n' ridden, then they're getting this for free.

Well and ~50% of their transit ride is also being subsidized

[sim]

Originally Posted by ByeByeBaby

I guess that's one way of talking about it - it's a 'benefit' that region residents are efficiently using city subsidized transit instead of inefficiently using city subsidized roads. Like it's a 'benefit' that the burglar took your laptop instead of your car.

A pretty good way of putting it.

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Well, since the city is raising taxes on property to cover 1/3rd of the capital costs, I can see a case. That being said, people transferring onto a city LRT from a suburb bus are almost pure profit to the transit agency. Perhaps a 'special fare' for regional bus transfers that only allows LRT travel that is a little bit lower? Would mean no operating subsidy going to out of towners and a way to measure out of town transfers so as to transfer an appropriate amount of revenue to the capital account.

I have to say, this also requires some clarification. It seems like you're blending and applying marginal cost and average cost inconsistently.

When you say 'suburb bus', do you mean something from outside of the CT network?

If yes (which I think is the case) then that's a very slippery slope. You might as well extend that to any and all transit riders. The infrastructure is there and the service is being provided. Sunk Cost. Each additional rider, starting from 1 is then "pure profit". Not quite what you're saying, but the general logic can easily be extended. As well, considering that these are generally work commute trips, they contribute highly to create spikier peaks, and/or more crowded trains, or CT requiring additional service (more TUs) that are then more poorly utilized throughout the day (notwithstanding all the PnR issues).

The solution really, isn't necessarily to increase taxes or even user fees, which would discourage transit use, but to integrate faring (as has already been said). This would increase regional communities' service provision (all else equal), removing service overlap, and if done right, entail little to no increase to transit travel times and definitely a more useful service.

[CrossedTheTracks]

Originally Posted by ByeByeBaby

Non-Calgary residents are paying $0 right now in property taxes. So by definition, if anyone from outside the city has ever parked n' ridden, then they're getting this for free.

Of course! I only ask (rhetorically) for data, because either:
- it's "not much" and we really have better things to worry about, especially if it unnecessarily pits Calgary against surrounding towns, or
- it's "a lot", and the data would objectively justify Calgary asking for some kind of compensation

Or somewhere in the squishy middle between those

[fusili]

Originally Posted by DizzyEdge

Fixed

Thanks.

[fusili]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Pretty hard to measure for Park and Ride unless you were to run everyone's plates in the lots for a week. Easy to measure for connecting buses.

The city benefits from not having people on the roads just the same however. The CRP might be willing to tap into the regional collaboration MSI pot (if it still exists) to avoid this equity argument though. The LRT will save Airdrie and Crossfield operating costs of running all the way downtown.

This is a great point. Those living outside Calgary use the city's infrastructure whether they are driving or taking the bus.

[joe498]

Originally Posted by CrossedTheTracks

I don't suppose anyone has anything crazy, like, uh, data, to quantify this concern?

Reality is fares alone hardly recover the cost of multi-billion dollar projects relative to property taxes. In addition, Calgary riders are paying transit fares on top of property taxes. The $52M over 30 years green line funding has zero money coming from Airdrie, Okotoks, Chestermere and Cochrane.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by joe498

Reality is fares alone hardly recover the cost of multi-billion dollar projects relative to property taxes. In addition, Calgary riders are paying transit fares on top of property taxes. The $52M over 30 years green line funding has zero money coming from Airdrie, Okotoks, Chestermere and Cochrane.

If lets say 10,000 people (which would be a lot) commute on connecting buses and via park and ride from beyond the city limits, if they are paying normal fares and connecting to other routes at the same rate as other Calgary Transit customers their average fare is $1.59 / trip.

I doubt they are transferring at anywhere near the same rate though. Taking a straight shot to downtown would hike the revenue per user. Being on the LRT lowers the operating costs per user dramatically (except for park and ride to LRT users).

Inter-Bus transfers to LRT are pure profit except for on the south line where the line can't handle incremental users right now (though this will be changing as the new LRT cars roll out).

I think equity would be totally handled by the CRP kicking in a few bucks. It wouldn't need to be much.

[sim]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

If lets say 10,000 people (which would be a lot) commute on connecting buses and via park and ride from beyond the city limits, if they are paying normal fares and connecting to other routes at the same rate as other Calgary Transit customers their average fare is $1.59 / trip.

I doubt they are transferring at anywhere near the same rate though. Taking a straight shot to downtown would hike the revenue per user. Being on the LRT lowers the operating costs per user dramatically (except for park and ride to LRT users).

Inter-Bus transfers to LRT are pure profit except for on the south line where the line can't handle incremental users right now (though this will be changing as the new LRT cars roll out).

I think equity would be totally handled by the CRP kicking in a few bucks. It wouldn't need to be much.

You keep saying this, and it keeps being only very loosely true. You can extend the exact same logic to any user, not just those outside the City.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by sim

You keep saying this, and it keeps being only very loosely true. You can extend the exact same logic to any user, not just those outside the City.

Walk up LRT users are pure profit too, and have almost no marginal cost unless the line is at capacity, or there are enough to require an incremental LRV on a train, or an incremental frequency.

[fusili]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Walk up LRT users are pure profit too, and have almost no marginal cost unless the line is at capacity, or there are enough to require an incremental LRV on a train, or an incremental frequency.

Every user has a marginal cost.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by fusili

Every user has a marginal cost.

A very very low marginal cost in the case of LRT. It would be different if Calgary were operating the system and had contiguous suburbs that were a higher portion of the regional population. But we don't, so it isn't.

It seems we import fights other jurisdictions have without taking into account our great fortune of being an outlier in terms of governance for a metro of 1 million + on this continent.

[sim]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Walk up LRT users are pure profit too, and have almost no marginal cost unless the line is at capacity, or there are enough to require an incremental LRV on a train, or an incremental frequency.

Indeed, but as I stated earlier, if you regard marginal costs only under the premise that you've sunk costs into building and operating the system, then yes, every rider - those on feeder buses as well, is what you term "pure profit".

I'm not trying to disregard marginal cost pricing, as it can be used to increase revenue, but I do believe framing it in terms of this idea that it is pure profit confuses things - least of which, remembering that the system as a whole is not directly turning a profit in pure monetary terms.

At the end of the day, before implementing a new transit service, the average user cost has to (or should) be given at least some thought. Well, it usually is especially at an aggregate level - that is Capital Cost. You can't just spend 3-4 billion to implement a line and start running transit vehicles to then deem the first fare purchase as profit because the money for the line has already been spent. A purely marginal cost perspective would actually dictate that the fare in this case should be effectively zero; a large part of the economic basis for 'free' transit.

Indeed, charging fares at all basically speaks to the fact that it is acknowledged that a user imposes an average cost onto the system, whether they access by walking, PnR, or feeder bus. This average cost does then vary, and starts to build a rationale for why distance-based faring (or other faring structures based on time of day, user willingness to pay, etc) is ultimately a better blend of both worlds.

[MalcolmTucker]

Until the 2012 education property tax return to the city and used as capital funding Calgary Transit has a capital cost of near zero.

A decade ago the LRT cost around 27 cents a user to run. When you're already providing service, and don't intend to change the service in response to extra users as you have slack capacity the economically efficient thing to do is to treat the extra users as an airline treats people transferring through a hub. In fact Calgary Transit already does this through fare integration. Walk up passengers alone cover the LRT operating costs. Every other transfer onto the LRT beyond a marginal transfer is effectively free (adding an extra car to a train cost about $50 per service hour in 2006 in maintenance and operating - unless I am mistaken we've never seen numbers released after that).

When I think about fares I think about how do you need to think about a system to get an economically optimal outcome. It is obvious you think about fairness, with your concentration on distance based fares amongst other things. When we are more multi nodal It might make sense to make fares way more complicated to induce people to avoid taking a trip through downtown if they don't need to during times of congestion.

The easy solution to the fairness problem is to direct funding the CRP already has a bit of sign off on towards transit extensions, as already happens this already happens: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=w...K7JURSPSMh4A&sig2=OFykS98L-lLznh9gCXFGFQ . Direct contributions can happen a bit more with contributions towards additional bus bays and the like.

I'd caution that the number of people doing this type of transfer is low. We don't need to apply lessons from jurisdictions where it is high to our system. Unfortunately it is logistically hard to price discriminate based of address in park and ride lots, the only place where this matters economically. Even harder because of our stupid way of pricing the lots.

The city of Calgary is not in conflict with most of our suburbs. Most have signed off on and are increasing their density in exchange for continued and expanded access to Calgary's water and sewage systems.

Let us treat this in proportion to how important it is to the system: not worth having much of a fight over, but something to raise so it is considered.

[sim]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Until the 2012 education property tax return to the city and used as capital funding Calgary Transit has a capital cost of near zero.

A decade ago the LRT cost around 27 cents a user to run. When you're already providing service, and don't intend to change the service in response to extra users as you have slack capacity the economically efficient thing to do is to treat the extra users as an airline treats people transferring through a hub. In fact Calgary Transit already does this through fare integration. Walk up passengers alone cover the LRT operating costs. Every other transfer onto the LRT beyond a marginal transfer is effectively free (adding an extra car to a train cost about $50 per service hour in 2006 in maintenance and operating - unless I am mistaken we've never seen numbers released after that).

When I think about fares I think about how do you need to think about a system to get an economically optimal outcome. It is obvious you think about fairness, with your concentration on distance based fares amongst other things. When we are more multi nodal It might make sense to make fares way more complicated to induce people to avoid taking a trip through downtown if they don't need to during times of congestion.

The easy solution to the fairness problem is to direct funding the CRP already has a bit of sign off on towards transit extensions, as already happens this already happens: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=w...K7JURSPSMh4A&sig2=OFykS98L-lLznh9gCXFGFQ . Direct contributions can happen a bit more with contributions towards additional bus bays and the like.

I'd caution that the number of people doing this type of transfer is low. We don't need to apply lessons from jurisdictions where it is high to our system. Unfortunately it is logistically hard to price discriminate based of address in park and ride lots, the only place where this matters economically. Even harder because of our stupid way of pricing the lots.

The city of Calgary is not in conflict with most of our suburbs. Most have signed off on and are increasing their density in exchange for continued and expanded access to Calgary's water and sewage systems.

Let us treat this in proportion to how important it is to the system: not worth having much of a fight over, but something to raise so it is considered.

Agreed to the last point, but I will say that you can't treat the LRT discretely from the rest of the system and accounting =/= economics.

[UofC.engineer]

New Calgary Transit map.

Primary Transit Network, LRT and BRT Network:

http://www.calgary.ca/Transportation/TI/...ects/Primary-Transit-Network-Mar2016.pdf

[Govertical]

Forgot to ask this way earlier, but does anyone know if they're replacing the platform roof or something at Brentwood station? It's had telescopic posts up for like 2 months now.

[People.talking]

Originally Posted by Govertical

Forgot to ask this way earlier, but does anyone know if they're replacing the platform roof or something at Brentwood station? It's had telescopic posts up for like 2 months now.

I think its because they had a problem with structural support