tsm1072
Active Member
Most times VIA has empty seats, but peak times at the beginning and end of university semesters + reading week and thanksgiving fill up early.
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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)
- Thread starter drum118
- Start date
ARG1
Senior Member
Try booking the sunday reading week ends, or the weekend reading week starts, and have fun.
crs1026
Superstar
Is this a surprise? Try booking an airline seat for the Friday of spring break.
All modes of travel will face peak periods. It’s not economical to maintain a fleet big enough for those peaks, if the seats sit idle the rest of the year.
There was a time in the 70’s and early 80’s when CN/VIA had a secondary fleet of coaches dating from the 1930’s that were mostly used on Friday and Sunday. That was a long time ago, and there’s no way VIA can afford to do that today.
Bus llines of that era had to resort to the charter operators to find enough buses and drivers for their peaks.
- Paul
lenaitch
Senior Member
afransen
Senior Member
CapitalSeven
Senior Member
Believe it or not, back in the 80s and possibly later taking the bus or train from Manitoba to Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal was quite normal for young people on limited budgets.
Nomad_87
Active Member
Tbh I think Barrie-Collingwood would be better than Barrie-Wasaga Beach. More people, better justification for year round service, same general area, could maybe lay the ground for a rail extension to Collingwood via the Meaford sub. Plus Linx already serves the Barrie-Wasaga Beach route anyway. You’d just be duplicating an already existing service
Northern Light
Superstar
No Linx service on weekends is an issue; but that could certainly be resolved by them.
Though for travelers from Toronto, a single-fare service, seemless travel experience is also worthwhile. (I could stand to be corrected, by I don't recall Linx taking Presto)
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Nomad_87
Active Member
No, they don’t accept Presto, they use their own system. I could maybe see them making the jump if Barrie Transit adopts it though. And the lack of weekend service is a problem. Though that should be on Linx to improve service
anb
Active Member
Does anyone know why the 407 GO bus services are so abysmal and unreliable right now? There used to be a priority frequency between Trafalgar/407 to the 407 station, and then from there to RHC and Unionville. Buses were coming every 10-15 mins combined but now its a complete hit or miss. I think the 41 (47) and 56 (46) inclusion messed with having a consistent combined frequent schedule, and it feels like they just depart buses whenever they feel like, but even when the pandemic started there was a 10 minute gap, and then a long 40-60 minute gap for the next bus.
smallspy
Senior Member
I've booked on a Sunday for the following Monday during spring Reading Week. I wasn't happy about the ticket price, but it wasn't my choice and ultimately I wasn't paying.
Dan
dowlingm
Senior Member
I don’t understand the notion on here and in Twitter that Metrolinx is the hammer and every outside-GTA transit gap is a nail. GO is optimized for GTA and near-GTA travel and should continue to be so. ONTC should be required by their MTO masters to institute an Ottawa-Toronto Highway 7 public service route to replace Greyhound forthwith.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
Because GO is far more accessible of a service than traditional coach lines. It’s generally more affordable, has a flat fare structure, accepts presto, and has clearly posted and easily accessible schedules.
reaperexpress
Senior Member
While the "All service must be GO" mentality is indeed an overreaction, I think it arises from several valid concerns.
Fare System
GO has a fixed-fare system without reserved seating. This means that you can show up at the station at any random time, tap your card and board any bus/train. There is no need to plan trips in advance in order to get a cheap ticket, which is a massive benefit for day trips (<200 km or so). When I go see a friend in another city, I don't plan the trip weeks in advance down to the exact minute. The downside of unreserved seating is that there is no guarantee that there will be a free seat, and you might need to stand for part of the journey. So this system wouldn't be well-suited for long-distance trips (>200 km).
GO also has a zone-based fare system which allows you to travel on any service at the same price. This avoids the weird prices you often get when a trip includes segments on different companies without any fare integration. The fact that GO also uses a fairly universal fare card (Presto) also helps to make tranfers seamless.
Ticket Prices
GO has relatively low ticket prices for individual trips. That said, they're typically about the same price as cheap tickets on Greyhound or Megabus, so the perception of being "cheaper" is probably more due to the unpredictability of those companies' prices. This perception is also presumably based on the single-ride prices, given that VIA has fixed prices for frequent travellers which are about the same as GO's, it's just their single-ride prices which are variable and much more expensive.
Punctuality, Good Scheduling, Customer Service
GO generally has good service reliability (91.5% within 5 minutes in 2019), and consistently friendly and helpful staff. The same cannot be said about some of the private operators such as Greyhound. I sometimes wonder if Greyhound schedulers ever even looked at the bus performance given how unrealistic some of the schedules were. GO's schedules are incredibly well-tailored to the passenger demand, such that during busy periods buses and trains are consistently full but not overcrowded. This really helps to minimize the downsides of unreserved seats. In contrast, I've heard a lot of horror stories about Greyhound leaving people behind because the bus was already full (Greyhound also had unreserved seating).
GO also has much better customer service, and more intuitive trip planning than any of the private operators, with clearly legible timetables, and open-acces schedule and vehicle position data for applications such as Google Maps. In contrast, it was extremely difficult to figure out when or where Greyhound operated, since the website didn't include any system map or timetables, and there was no open-access scheduling data. Greyhound basically expected everyone to just type in an origin and destination into their trip planner, but that only works if the potential customer already assumes that Greyhound operates a service where they're going (which was less and less true as Greyhound cut back service).
As a side note, its interesting to see that in this case the push is to nationalize (provincialize?) bus operations to improve service and reduce costs, whereas at a municipal level, the calls to privatize the TTC are also aiming for reduced costs and improved service. It turns out that what matters most is not whether a company is publicly- or privately-owned, what matters is whether it is well-managed.
Comparison with the Netherlands, and proposed changes
I have been living in the Netherlands for the past couple years, and I think this country has a very good setup for different service types. All local and regional trains, regardless of operator, use a national distance-based fare system and a national smart card (OV Chipkaart), with set prices and unreserved seats. To better tailor prices to demand without introducing variable pricing, Dutch residents can get a 40% discount outside the predefined peak periods. There is also a €2.60 surcharge for domestic trips on the NS Intercity Direct or the DB ICE. If you travel outside of the Netherlands on either service (to Belgium or Germany, respectively) there is a totally separate "NS International" ticketing system which is presumably due to agreements with NMBS and DB.
For long-distance trips (i.e. Thalys and Eurostar), there is a totally separate airline-style fare system with reserved seats.
This setup is actually pretty much the same as Ontario, with our Presto-based GO trains and airline-style fares on VIA. The main difference is the cutoff between the two regimes. In the Netherlands, that cutoff happens around 250 km, with nearly all domestic train trips falling under the national fixed-fare system. Even when I'm going to a city 250 km away, I just look at the schedule, go to the station and tap my Chipkaart. In Canada, however, GO is only really competitive up to about 100 km, with VIA, ONTC and private bus companies providing nearly all the service for longer trips. This is a problem because trips around 150 km are still nearby enough that people really don't want to deal with the hassle of booking tickets in advance.
For this reason I agree with several others here that it GO should expand the amount of fast services such as the Route 16 bus, Route 40 bus and GO Niagara Weekend Express train. This would only be a very marginal change from their current plans, which already include hourly service to places such as Kitchener, Barrie and possibly Niagara Falls. Rather than their planned stopping pattern running all-stops from Kitchener to Woodbine (Pearson Junction) then non-stop to Union, a "regional" service pattern would operate limited-stop the entire time it overlaps with other services (east of Mount Pleasant). So the trains originating in Kitchener should not be stopping at Mount Pleasant or Malton, since those stops are not popular destinations for trips originating west of Georgetown. Conversely, regional trains should stop at Mount Dennis since that opens up a huge area of the City for trips coming in from the west. Meanwhile VIA can focus more on long-distance trips, eliminating stops such as Georgetown, Malton, Grimsby or St Marys.
Here's how a faster "regional" grade of GO routes would fit in to the service offerings, and how it would compare to the current setup here in the Netherlands.
At the same time, there should also be better fare integration with other regional operators, such as Simcoe Lynx and Niagara Region Transit. Routes such as Barrie - Midland/Penetanguishene or Niagara Falls - Welland don't need to literally be operated by GO, but they should at least be part of the GO fare system.
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Northern Light
Superstar
Like the direction noted above.
Would add though; I feel like GO should not be only hub and spoke to Toronto-Union.
I think it should be hub-and spoke anywhere in Ontario where the type of service described above (150km or less, regional train/bus travel) makes sense.
So, GO should be hubbed out of Hamilton (service to Niagara/Brantford/Toronto, and ideally, K-W or Guelph); hubbed out of London (service to Windsor, K-W, Sarnia, St. Thomas); hubbed out of K-W (London, Toronto, ideally Hamilton; and buses north to Owen Sound); Oshawa (Toronto, Belleville, Ptbo) etc.
The portions that overlap the corridor can and should still be served by VIA for express, long-distance/luxury service