Except that the TTC carries more than 3 times more riders than all of the other transit systems in the GTHA COMBINED - and that includes GO. There is no incentive for the TTC to change anything until such a time that the ridership coming to them from York Region, Durham Region, Brampton, Mississauga and GO actually becomes a relatively meaningful number.
Dan
Toronto, Ont.
The fallacy here is so stunningly obvious, it's perfect 44North would miss it.
Yes, it's true TTC carries something like 85% of all the GTA's transit riders. But you seem to assume all those riders are Torontonians. I doubt TTC even has a break down but it's fair to say that MANY of those riders are coming to them from York Region, Durham Region, Brampton, Mississauga and GO. Whatever the actual number is, it is most definitely MEANINGFUL. Their "incentive" is to SERVE riders and while I understand they are funded (barely) by Toronto taxpayers, suggesting how people commute is not their problem is a weird way to look at transit.
The problem is that the borders (and not just the TTC; but mostly the TTC because of their obvious centrality) distort ridership patterns so (pertinent to this thread and discussed a zillion times) south York Region residents will do what they can to avoid the double fare. But a York Region resident who drives to Finch will count towards that massive TTC ridership, be a net loss to YRT and put an extra car on the road to boot. It's impossible to know precisely how things would look if all the fares were somehow pooled and distributed fairly but the point muller877 is extremely valid.
The TTC should be treated as the most important system in the network but it's still not the ONLY system in the network. Just look at the Scarborough/SmartTrack stuff going on now; SmartTrack goes up into Markham, which is great, but has anyone thought about what that means in terms of network planning or double fares or anything else?
The key mental challenge for anyone on this board or elsewhere is to go on Googlemaps and look at the GTA without borders and then ponder what the transit system make sense because we've outgrown the piecemeal system now in place. Just like little isolated towns grew towards each other and then became a single, larger municipality, so too are we at the point where the system has outgrown its borders.
Steeles is most relevant to this thread and probably the best example anyway, but public transit is not serving its customers - particularly those who have a choice because they own a car - if it is throwing up institutional obstacles between where they're coming from and where they're going. That's the point.
I don't even understand AoD's points....firstly, unless riders at Finch worry about people getting on at Eglinton, I don't see what difference there is if the line goes to Highway 7; especially since many of those "foreign" riders are already getting on at Finch now (and probably not worrying about crowding out other riders; why should they?). Then there's a straw man about whether YR would contribute funding when they've vociferously said they would; they're certainly not shy about taking on more debt if that's what it takes!
People seem unable to conceive of transit on that basic level: where are riders coming from; where are they trying to go; how can we make it easier? Instead of everyone gets tied into knots comparing Scarborough to Yonge or (once again) debating whether the extension will bring too little ridership (draining operating funding) or too much (causing downstream capacity). Either way, it's a PROBLEM. The Yonge extension, in nearly every respect, trumps the Scarborough extension - whether it's the obvious routing, the development potential, ridership benefits and on and on. I've said before and I truly believe in my heart that if the municipal border was at Highway 7 the complaints about the extension would drop to almost nil but people hear that it's going to "Richmond Hill" and lose all sense of logic.
