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Originally Posted by someone123
Another abstract argument would be that the places with low ridership might have more low-hanging fruit; projects that would generate more benefit for little money. This is not far-fetched when you consider what infrastructure costs can be like in bigger cities or what basic transit infrastructure is missing in the smaller cities.
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My observation is that small towns don't need more capital infrastructure, they need better transit planning and administration. Most mid-sized towns have a fleet of new buses with operators often driving two or three passengers around on a half hour schedule. Simple things like moving to a grid-based system, rather than all routes terminating at a central terminal at the same time, or subsidizing private van operators to pick up passengers would do a lot more than buying more buses. Unfortunately, the quality of municipal transit and land use planning is not something the Federal government has any recourse over.
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This probably doesn't include capital costs but to give you one example I know of, Halifax's transit farebox recovery rate is about 70 percent, higher than Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. It is one of the least-subsidized transit systems in Canada, at least in terms of operating costs. In general, I think that city is actually more starved of new infrastructure than the Vancouver area is. Not all of that is the fault of the federal government of course, but some of it is.
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I'm not sure farebox recovery is indicative of "need". Often it just signals that an agency wants to run transit like a profit-making (or loss-averting) business, rather than as a value-adding but necessarily unprofitable service.
To give you an example, 12 years ago GO transit had one of - if not the - highest farebox recoveries of any agency in North America, somewhere north of 90%. Of course, most of its service consisted of running trains only at rush hours to serve middle class suburban commuters making the last mile of their trip using their private cars. Not surprisingly, most of their trains were at capacity.
The management of GO transit at the time (and still, to some extent) did not really want to change this operating culture, so when they received money, they used it to buy more cars to lengthen existing trainsets from 10 to 12 cars and expand parking lots. But they still ran the same number of trains in the same patterns and catered to the same customer base. It wasn't until recently that they began to draw up big plans to turn GO from a rush-hour-only, downtown-only commuter service to something more akin to a transit system, providing round-the-clock mobility throughout the region.
It could be that Halifax Metro Transit is in a similar situation. Are they running a lot of rush hour-only buses in from the suburbs, and generally neglecting less lucrative service which is still needed? That might give them a high farebox recovery, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're a "good" transit system with an operational culture that should be rewarded.
Ideally, the Federal government would have a transit czar that would scrutinize each agency's operations before plying them with cash. In the absence of that, though, I think giving systems money based on their per capita ridership is probably the simplest way to allocate money effectively. Generally when transit agencies prioritize service levels and network coverage and run buses on tight frequencies, ridership follows, so ridership is a pretty good proxy for effectiveness.
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But I am not really talking about places like Charlottetown, or at least I don't know enough about the transit situation there to comment. I am thinking of cities like Winnipeg and Halifax versus cities like Kitchener-Waterloo, which falls under Ontario's per capita ridership apportionment. Kitchener's light rail project received a funding commitment of $300M from the federal government back in 2010 for a project that is expected to start out with about 30,000 daily riders (I'm not sure how many of those are new riders). Maybe it's a great project, but it's hard to find anything analogous in other provinces, and it's hard to imagine that that project was the absolute best bang for the buck available nationally.
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This has nothing to do with preferential treatment of KW, and everything to do with the fact that KW has a shovel-ready plan, and Halifax doesn't. If Halifax had completed an environmental assessment on an LRT line I'm sure they would have been given the cash.
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