I'm still struggling to understand your criticism, which you've already detailed in a previous post:
Apart from people who "
mine [train delays] for travel credits" ("
I have an unlimited semester pass so whenever I knew my train would be delayed I cancelled my original reservation and booked a separate segment for every stop the train made. I got 65 points per segment for a 1 hour+ delay and 130 for a 4 hour+ delay."), what share of previous student pass holders do you think would have been affected by this cap?
This is only partly correct: even though a credit no longer entitles to travel for free in "Economy" fare class, it
entitles to a 50% discount on "Economy" fare class:
View attachment 202786
I'm not sure why this change would make the product worse: why should a student commuting between London and Toronto pay the same as someone who travels across the entire corridor?
It's always sad to see customers leave (especially young ones which have yet to make the decision of whether they want to live a car-dependent or car-free lifestyle), but to me it just shows that it is impossible to design offers which are attractive to all customer groups. You seem to believe that VIA Rail is a corporation like our Nation's flagship airline, which aims to maximise ticket revenues in order to pay out dividends which will keep its shareholders happy, or a commuter rail agency, which can sell tickets even when there is no physical space to squeeze more passengers into its trains. In reality, however, VIA Rail is a company which depends on a 69-cents-subsidy for every dollar it charges and even on the Corridor it's not much less with 47 cents on every dollar, as its revenues only cover 59% of its operating expenses network-wide and 68% on the Corridor, and which is barred by Transport Canada regulations to transport more people than it has seats for. (Note: all cost/revenue figures mentioned in this and the following paragraph can be easily calculated with the information provided on page 9 of VIA's
2018 Annual Report)
So why do these 2 differences to other types of carrier matter? The first reason is that charging certain customer groups less than the average operating costs for that particular route is not cross-subsidised by the profits made on other routes, it's subsidised by the taxpayer. Even by "mining" the system, you were perfectly entitled to 182 segments travelled at an average cost to you of only $6.09 (
$1,109 divided by 182 segments), but you may want to be aware that VIA's average cost was $140.20 per passenger on its network, $99.03 on the Corridor and $69.23 on the Toronto-London-Windsor route, with the government paying $57.45, $31.65 and $20.19, respectively, for every passenger. This of course doesn't mean that the taxpayer would have saved $2,565.58 ($20.19*182-$1109) if you hadn't stepped a foot into a VIA train, as the additional costs you cause by using your pass to buy a ticket and taking a seat on board the train are of course negligible. However, the second reason is that the obligation to not "oversell" trains means that there is an opportunity cost to selling cheap tickets. Selling anyone tickets for as little as $6.09 or $9.18 ($459 divided by 50 travel credits) actually results in a revenue loss if your train sells out and someone would have been willing to pay $99 (i.e. the Economy Plus fare for Toronto-London) for a seat like the very one you are occupying.
By the way, the same goes if you use the approximately 7000 preference points you seem to have earned with late credits (9,239 points earned minus $1,109 spent times 2 points per dollar equals 7,021 preference points) for travel on trains which sell out before there departure: If you use 5500 of these points to redeem a Toronto-Winnipeg ticket in Sleeper Plus (Cabin for one) and VIA has to turn away a passenger willing to pay the full fare of $1,797 because the train is sold out, then that single "free" ticket you received will have cost VIA more than what you paid for your entire VIA travels in 12 months, but back to the unlimited Student Pass, maybe you see know why VIA tries to create incentives against having pass-holders with the lowest per-trip revenue use popular trains: because given that most students prefer to travel on weekends and thus on the same two peak afternoons (Friday and Sunday) which are among the busiest travel periods of the week, giving a 100% on Escape
and Economy (or even Economy Plus) doesn't provide any incentive to avoid the busy trains which are likely to sell out, whereas giving a 100% discount on Escape fares, 50% discount on Economy and 0% on Economy Plus provides a clear incentive to travel at times which don't displace customers which are willing to pay full price.
So why should you care about VIA's need to save seats on more popular trains for passengers with a higher willingness-to-pay? Because it's ultimately in your own interest: contrary to what you may believe and what I've already shown
in a recent post here to be wrong in the light of actual VIA revenue and travel data for the last 5 years, it's the timetable offerings (i.e. frequency and exact timings of the various departures), reliability (i.e. punctuality) and the quality on-board service which motivate passengers to travel by train rather than any alternative modes available (in most cases: the car). As I've pointed out in said post, a 11% increase in train-mileage between 2014 and 2018 resulted in a 25% increase in passenger volumes in the same period and a 40% increase in revenues (31%, if adjusted for inflation). However, further increases in frequency are highly unlikely given the resistance faced by the various host railways and the limited fleet size VIA is confined to operate with and neither will change unless HFR is approved and triggers the delivery of additional trainsets beyond the current fleet size. Unfortunately, this means that in order to justify the investments required for HFR, VIA has to demonstrate that an increase of the scheduled train mileage volume does not just increase ridership, but also decrease the operational deficit and this necessitates that the existing number of seats in its fleet have to transport more people each and that if there are more passengers than seats for a certain departure, passengers willing to pay more will have to be prioritised over those willing to pay less. The good news, however, is that once HFR is built and the fleet (including the 2nd batch required for HFR service) is delivered, there will be much more capacity and much more departures to choose from and this should naturally increase the scope to offer cheap tickets to certain highly price-sensitive customer groups...
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