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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

If it matters, here is the full report on station locations that was the last roughly non-partisan, fact based look at the topic.

- Paul

Did the study take into consideration the service levels with electrified trains of 5-15 minutes, and the possibility of fare integration on ridership at those stations?

Because if they just looked at the current system then its a fail and should be ignored like many other studies that don't input the necessary dataset for a realistic result.

The fact that the outer stations are recommended above the inner ones tells me that they did not.
 
^ It's clear from their writeup on Concord that their methodology punished stops which were closer to the center of the network, on the premise that the more people who have already boarded, the more painful adding a stop and delaying those folks would be.
This is good economics but not necessarily good city/region building. It assumes that seats fill only once on a trip, gradually filling the train until it reaches the terminal. In this model, the optimum train is one that fills completely at the outermost stop, and takes every passenger all the way to the other end of the line. That amounts to 100% seat utilization and revenue at 100% of potential. Anything that harms the marketability of a seat at the outermost stop is rated negatively.
On an urban transit network, as opposed to a regional commuter network, seats may empty and refill en route, and the marketability of intermediate points matters because one wants to refill seats as they empty. In that kind of a system, the inner stations matter more.
I have a feeling that RER sits with a foot in each camp. Certainly at peak, there need to be fast-running trains that fill in the hinterland and skip most intermediate stops. The original GO model was built on this, so it's not surprising that this continues to have weight in such studies. If I were a commuter from a bedroom community (ie anywhere north of about King City), that's what I would demand.
The wisdom in Smarttrack (yes there was some) was that there needs to be a second stopping service that addresses the innerland traffic.The issue is whether that service can be run on the same line as the regional service. If that isn't doable, I can understand why one would serve Concord by running a bus to Line 1 at the VMC, rather than adding a GO stop at Concord.

- Paul
 
Did the scheduled ending of the TTC co-fare on March 31st take effect? I can't find any info that says it did.

Metrolinx sent out Tweets on 3/31 noting that it was ending that day.
 
GO service being chopped again April 8th.

Notable: No more trains to West Harbour.

All 'branch lines' (which I take to mean non-Lakeshore) reduced to 6 coach trains.

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Revised Schedules are up here:

 
Our local GO parking lot is a ghost town. Normally you don't get a parking spot after 7:30 am
 
Our local GO parking lot is a ghost town. Normally you don't get a parking spot after 7:30 am
Oshawa's overflow lot at the GO Station has been leased out temporally to a car rental company to store some of their vehicles as no one is renting cars right now.
 
Speaking of ridership...

Reached by phone, Metrolinx spokesperson Matt Llewellyn said one passenger was on the train at the time, but no one was injured. He noted that the passenger politely declined Metrolinx's offer to send him home on the bus.

Driver got their car stuck on the tracks. They got out in time to flag down another driver. GO train then hit it.

 

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