The reduction in base fare is of course fantastic news, and frankly it's a bit surprising that the Conservatives followed through with the previous government's plan.
I decided to run some statistics on the new fare tables to see what the new system looks like (full spreadsheet
here).
Plotting distance against fares, it looks like the reduction in short trips was implemented in a sort of band-aid manner. Looking for example at the Lakeshore West line, you can see the new $3.70 short trips, and above about 30 km, it looks like the usual slight fare increase tacked onto the existing fare. But between about 15 and 30 km, there is a very steep increase in prices.
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The abrupt jump in prices means that trips around 20 km get screwed on a per-km basis, not only being more expensive per-km than longer trips, but also being more expensive per-km than shorter trips. See for example, Port Credit on the Lakeshore West line, or Malton on the Kitchener line:
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It's worth noting that this issue already existed in the previous fare system, but has been exacerbated by the new changes.
Here are also the charts for the other lines with sub-10km stations:
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Having entered all the data anyway, I decided to see how the lines compare to each other:
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The Kitchener line has the most expensive tickets across the board, while the Lakeshore East line tends to be cheapest for short trips, the Richmond Hill line is cheapest for medium-distance trips and the Barrie line is cheapest for long trips. For example, the 101 km trip to Barrie Allandale costs the same as the 80 km trip to Guelph Central. Kitchener is the same distance from Union as Barrie Allandale, but the ticket costs $3.02 more.
A particular anomaly is Weston station. Rather than the $3.90-ish fare you'd expect based on other stations a similar distance from Union, it has a $4.75 fare. Meanwhile on the opposite extreme, we have Eglinton station on the Lakeshore East line, which really should not have a $3.70 trip to Union given the 17 km distance. It really gets a sweet deal compared to Downsview Park, which is exactly the same distance but is receiving a fare increase rather than a $1.32 reduction.
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