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GTHA Transit Fare Integration

ssiguy2 said:
Wrong answer or at least partially.

Yes it will require QP opening their wallets but also {God Forbid} Torontonians opening theirs. Toronto cannot expect QP to foot the whole bill and yet not do the same for areas outside of the GGH and especially Ottawa and London where regional buses are beginning to be introduced.

You are quite correct that there is 'no free lunch' and the people of Toronto have to realise that they don't get a free lunch courtesy of everyone else in the province having to pay for theirs. If Toronto want QP to foot the bill for fare integration, QP should refuse unless it can provide a similar service for all the province's metropolitan areas.
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Pretty sure the province could roll fare integration into those other areas without having any meaningful impact on cost (the volume of interregional travel elsewhere is tiny).
 
TheTigerMaster said:
That may very well be true. If that is MX's plan, I wish they would come out and say so. It's impossible for the public to evaluate the effectiveness of these schemes if we have no idea what the fare structure will look like.
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Importantly, all the ridership assumptions being made, I would presume, don't include fare integration. This seems like an incredibly big problem if secretly MX expects to have it in place. That could really disrupt flows and drive faster ridership growth than currently modelling projects.
 
afransen said:
Importantly, all the ridership assumptions being made, I would presume, don't include fare integration. This seems like an incredibly big problem if secretly MX expects to have it in place. That could really disrupt flows and drive faster ridership growth than currently modelling projects.
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I absolutely cannot envision the OL having the capacity to handle both an extension north to Sheppard, and the demand induced by fare integration (all 416 transit services under one fare)
 
I liken the impact of fare integration and RER to the impact of the short blocks we see in historic neighborhoods. Short blocks give drivers and riders multiple route options, so if one segment becomes congested, there are always plenty of alternate routes. The Ontario Line, Yonge Line, and Bloor-Danforth lines won't become as congested because commuters from the north, east, and west will have more commute options on RER under something like TRBOT's zone plan. Ultimately traffic will become more dispersed, especially as the costs of travelling between border areas is reduced, e.g. Etobicoke to Mississauga City Centre or North York to Richmond Hill. It will create more commute options and reduce costs in neighbouring areas that just happen to be in different cities. It will also boost ridership overall as more commuters see that taking transit is actually convenient, fast, and affordable. Having more commuters with fewer choke points boosts fare box revenues and makes the system run more efficiently. The sooner we see fare integration across the region the better. TRBOT's zones are quite brilliant and worthy of implementation.
 
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gibsonm said:
I liken the impact of fare integration and RER to the impact of the short blocks we see in historic neighborhoods. Short blocks give drivers and riders multiple route options, so if one segment becomes congested, there are always plenty of alternate routes. The Ontario Line, Yonge Line, and Bloor-Danforth lines won't become as congested because commuters from the north, east, and west will have more commute options on RER under something like TRBOT's zone plan. Ultimately traffic will become more dispersed, especially as the costs of travelling between border areas is reduced, e.g. Etobicoke to Mississauga City Centre or North York to Richmond Hill. It will create more commute options and reduce costs in neighbouring areas that just happen to be in different cities. It will also boost ridership overall as more commuters see that taking transit is actually convenient, fast, and affordable. Having more commuters with fewer choke points boosts fare box revenues and makes the system run more efficiently. The sooner we see fare integration across the region the better. TRBOT's zones are quite brilliant and worthy of implementation.
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There are network effects to rapid transit lines. Yes, adding more lines will spread riders over multiple paths (and probably relieve specific problem areas like BY station) but integrating GO and TTC fully will make the combined network more appealing and potentially drive up mode share and ridership more than you might think. It isn't Line A competing against Line B for rides, it is the transit network against the car.

The bright side is that a RER-type system should be able to add a shocking amount of capacity. The challenge will be not overloading Union.

My concern is that if we ignore the impact of fare integration we might be too pessimistic in our BCRs (if ridership exceeds forecasts) and might make incorrect assumptions about how much capacity is needed on different corridors/stations (undersizing or oversizing different components).
 
TheTigerMaster said:
I absolutely cannot envision the OL having the capacity to handle both an extension north to Sheppard, and the demand induced by fare integration (all 416 transit services under one fare)
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Fare integration does not have to mean one fare. It can mean fare-by-distance or any of a number of things; could just be subsidized inter-system transfers. It's hard to model the impacts of "fare integration" on specific routes when no one knows what it means.

For example, I think we've all seen the mess cause by lack of fare integration at York University on the TYSSE. Well, unlike that corridor, there is contiguous development (and lots more coming) north of Steeles, on Yonge. If they don't fix fare integration, it'll be way worse than TYSSE because there are so many people getting on and off right at the border. It's something they just have to address sooner rather than later.
 
The TRBOT is exceptionally efficient, easy to understand for the travelling public, makes the best use of all infrastructure, and gets rid of these imaginary boundaries.

I think of the biggest issues with getting it off the ground is not the plan itself but the boundaries and primarily one............Toronto. The plan divides the City itself into 2 transit parts and the question is where do you draw that line and how that could effect routes that cross the city? Toronto is not like Montreal or Vancouver where there are clear divisions that can be easily recognizable such as waterways.
 
ssiguy2 said:
The TRBOT is exceptionally efficient, easy to understand for the travelling public, makes the best use of all infrastructure, and gets rid of these imaginary boundaries.

I think of the biggest issues with getting it off the ground is not the plan itself but the boundaries and primarily one............Toronto. The plan divides the City itself into 2 transit parts and the question is where do you draw that line and how that could effect routes that cross the city? Toronto is not like Montreal or Vancouver where there are clear divisions that can be easily recognizable such as waterways.
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TRBOT is actually pretty smart when it comes to this. First, remember that TRBOT is running a 2zone base fare system, so within the city of Toronto you have the same base fare, the separation between Zone A and B doesn't matter. The actual border is drawn At Eglinton, VP, and I want to say Etobicoke Creek. The important part is the northern border being Eglinton because under TRBOT, the Eglinton Line is included in Zone B, meaning that if you're theoretically going from Brampton to Scarborough, instead of going through Zone A on the GO train where you have to pay for an additional Zone, you can ride from Mt. Dennis to Kennedy (now what would be really nice is if Eglinton wasn't an At Grade LRT line so it would be really useful as a crosstown line, but I guess we're stuck with what we have). This does bring up the question though of if the existence Zone A contradicts the mission statement that TRBOT wants to make. TRBOT wants to make the system mode neutral, meaning that you shouldn't have to pay more to use one mode over another, or in other words you're not stuck with a worse service if you can't pay for something better. However the existence of Zone A means that if you're using a through running GO service, you have to pay more for sitting through downtown, and those who don't have the money might have to take a slower mode to get around Zone A (such as Line 5).
 
ARG1 said:
TRBOT is actually pretty smart when it comes to this. First, remember that TRBOT is running a 2zone base fare system, so within the city of Toronto you have the same base fare, the separation between Zone A and B doesn't matter. The actual border is drawn At Eglinton, VP, and I want to say Etobicoke Creek. The important part is the northern border being Eglinton because under TRBOT, the Eglinton Line is included in Zone B, meaning that if you're theoretically going from Brampton to Scarborough, instead of going through Zone A on the GO train where you have to pay for an additional Zone, you can ride from Mt. Dennis to Kennedy (now what would be really nice is if Eglinton wasn't an At Grade LRT line so it would be really useful as a crosstown line, but I guess we're stuck with what we have). This does bring up the question though of if the existence Zone A contradicts the mission statement that TRBOT wants to make. TRBOT wants to make the system mode neutral, meaning that you shouldn't have to pay more to use one mode over another, or in other words you're not stuck with a worse service if you can't pay for something better. However the existence of Zone A means that if you're using a through running GO service, you have to pay more for sitting through downtown, and those who don't have the money might have to take a slower mode to get around Zone A (such as Line 5).
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^ This. Plus I'd love to see other regions included in the fare zone map. For example Simcoe County, Barrie, Niagara, and Peterborough.
 

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ssiguy2 said:
No one in their right mind is going to use Eglinton as a crosstown route. It's too slow, an unreliable.

In the southern part of the city people {assuming FULL fare integration} will use lakeshore RER and hopefully, at some point, the Midtown line.
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Again assuming full fare integration, full service levels and through-running, you’re better off (in some cases) just using Kitchener + Stoufville to get from Mount Dennis to Kennedy, which is fine
 
sacred said:
Again assuming full fare integration, full service levels and through-running, you’re better off (in some cases) just using Kitchener + Stoufville to get from Mount Dennis to Kennedy, which is fine
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Agreed, but that brings up the question of Mode Neutrality. As I mentioned previously, under the TRBOT plan (and I personally asked JEnglish this question myself to verify) Just passing through Zone A is enough to count to increasing the fare cost. This means if you're travelling from say Port Credit to Kennedy, you have to pay the Zone A fare, meanwhile if you found a route that goes around Zone A and you stick to just Zone B, you don't. This means if you're travelling from Bramalea to Kennedy, staying on the train through Union Station will cost more than changing at Mt. Dennis and taking the long way down Line 5. This means that if you're low wage worker where every dollar spent on travel is an issue, you might be forced to take the slower route just to save money. Its really not a good situation to be in or to have, especially when the goal of the plan is to make everything mode neutral.
 
ARG1 said:
Agreed, but that brings up the question of Mode Neutrality. As I mentioned previously, under the TRBOT plan (and I personally asked JEnglish this question myself to verify) Just passing through Zone A is enough to count to increasing the fare cost. This means if you're travelling from say Port Credit to Kennedy, you have to pay the Zone A fare, meanwhile if you found a route that goes around Zone A and you stick to just Zone B, you don't. This means if you're travelling from Bramalea to Kennedy, staying on the train through Union Station will cost more than changing at Mt. Dennis and taking the long way down Line 5. This means that if you're low wage worker where every dollar spent on travel is an issue, you might be forced to take the slower route just to save money. Its really not a good situation to be in or to have, especially when the goal of the plan is to make everything mode neutral.
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I don't think that is a very logical choice. People should pay by origin/destination and not the path taken to get there.
 
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