The Metrolinx board will meet on Monday, January 9 to formally approve new, higher fares across the system effective February 18, 2012. Unlike the previous fare hike of March 20, 2010 which was a flat $0.25 bump in all fares, this round uses tiered increases so that short-distance fares are not as disproportionately penalized.
- Fares which are now between $4.20 and $5.50 would rise by $0.30 (5.5 to 7.1%)
- Fares which are now between $5.51 and $7.00 would rise by $0.35 (5.0 to 6.4%)
- Fares which are now at $7.01 or more would rise by $0.40 (at most 5.7%)
Considering that many GO fares are well above $7 (a one way from Kitchener-Waterloo to Union costs $14.60), that maximum increase amounts to only 2.7%. Oddly enough, the presentation on the agenda notes that:
A flat increase disproportionately impacts shorter trips and will make any potential future fare integration arrangement with the TTC more difficult to achieve.
The 2012 increase is still disproportionately high for those who might make short journeys. The idea that this somehow supports future fare integration with the TTC is hard to swallow.
The average GO fare is $6.55 and the average increase, allowing for the effects of discounts, will be about $0.31 (4.7%) . If this were applied to the KW-Union fare, the increase would be about $0.70.
A chart of page 3 of the presentation makes interesting reading. It shows various GO cost factors and their rates of increase over the past decade. By far the highest are diesel fuel and electric power.
Concurrent with the fare increase, GO will change the discount plan for adults and students to encourage their shift from paper passes to Presto. The discounts of 17.5% and 35% now offered to adult and student passholders respectively will stay in place for Presto fares, but the discounts for a paper pass will drop to 15% and 30%.
Like the TTC, GO faces the dilemma that adding service, even if they carry more riders, drives up costs because on average all services recover only about 80% from the farebox. Stronger ridership with little service improvement is financially beneficial, but service improvements add to the operating costs.
With constraints on funding from Queen’s Park, passengers will have to dig a little deeper. This is a major issue for future GO planning as they move to services that will not have as robust a cost recovery rate (two way, all day rail service). The farebox cannot pay for GO’s evolution from a system that cherry-picks the cheapest of riders to one that provides service as a basic policy for the GTAH.
Steve Munro 
Hopefully some year both TTC riders and GO riders will figure out that they are being oh so responsible in paying for so much of the charges of their trips compared to what does and doesn’t get included with the private competitor, the car. There are some good studies indicating a lot of money each year should be collected from the mobile furnaces but getting direct user pay for the roads is uphill, given who, where, and how many of the votorists there are eg. privilege doesn’t recede easily.
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I am glad that GO has abandoned its recent policy of flat fare increases but I wish that they were more transparent in their cost structures. There are two factors that they need to explain better:
1 What are the fixed costs per passenger? These include items that are not distant dependent such as station and ticketing costs. Electrical costs are also mainly independent of distance travelled for now.
2 What are the distance variable costs per passenger? This would include maintenance on vehicles, fuel cost, crew costs etc.
Steve: Both of these questions came up at the Board meeting, and the staff danced around providing a coherent answer. I am awaiting feedback on some clarifications and will update the main article when I get the “official” responses.
It could be argued that those that travel the farthest should pay more for these as there are fewer passengers at the outer ends of most lines to spread the cost over. The new service to Guelph and Kitchener carries, if newspaper reports are correct, only about 70 to 150 passengers per train but the travel time from Kitchener to Georgetown is half of this total trip. Should the rest of GO’s passengers be required to pay part of the cost of providing this service?
This service was started before the stations were ready for it and before the line had the extra capacity to carry it. Kitchener and Guelph stations have only part of a platform built and no Presto machines. The speed limit on the line is low because the Goderich and Exeter does not want to pay the maintenance costs required for higher speed trackage. The two trains that run get in a little early, 7:53 or too late, 9:08 for most passengers, but these are the only times when there was room on the trains for more passengers. It would be nice if they could add a train in between that would become an express from Bramalea to Union but the 7:06 from Georgetown is standing room only when it leaves Bramalea. To make it the 7:43 would mean that there would need to be a new Bramalea local just after it but there is no way to get the train out to Bramalea until the line is totally double/triple tracked and re-signalled. The province, in order to score Brownie points, is pushing Metrolinx to add service before the system is ready for it.
Expanding all trains to 12 cars will give a capacity increase of 20% but with an annual growth rate of 9% that will be eaten up in two years. Why didn’t they make the platforms 15 cars long? (Just kidding, sort of.) It will be interesting to see what happens to all of the plans for expansion with the Province’s deficit cutting budgets. Forget about electrification within my lifetime.
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With the provincial government’s $16 billion budget deficit, a fare increase is unfortunately pretty much unavoidable. I wish that the province were willing to bite the bullet on road tolls, and implement them on all provincially owned 400-series highways in the GTA, DVP, Gardiner, and Allen. A road toll of even 10 cents per km (significantly less than the 407) would reduce the need to raise fares a lot, and wouldn’t be terribly expensive for most drivers.
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I expected fare increases because GO Transit is the LEAST subsidized urban transit agency in North America, followed in second place by the TTC. Canada is the only federal western government NOT to formally subsidize the operational expenses of its urban transit agencies. Yet there are those who would want no subsidies at all, most likely automobile drivers who drive on subsidized roads and expressways.
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W. K. Lis says:
January 10, 2012 at 10:29 am
Unfortunately with the recent supreme court decision against a federal securities board because it infringes on provincial rights, the opposition of many provinces, especially Alberta and Quebec to these federal initiatives and the Harper Government’s desire to scale down the size of government I feel that federal subsidies will be only memories.
R. Wightman
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I put up something on Spacing, but it belongs better here.
I was a GO commuter for two years. There are a few tensions in the setting of fares:
– do you instead get the needed revenue from making the lots paid-parking, at a moderate cost, or do you worry about losing driving customers?
– if you keep the lots free, how do you justify charging the non-driving customers the same fee for less service, much less increase the fares for them?
– is GO about getting cars off the road, or is it about moving people?
– is it about moving people where they need to go, or is it only about shunting suburban commuters into downtown?
– does GO in fact support ‘multi-modal’ travel, or will that remain a ‘Potemkin Village’*
What they should do with fares or parking fees should only be decided once these fundamental issues are answered.
*-Suburban bus connections are poor, and often ill-timed for transfers. Some municipalities (e.g. Mississauga) give a discounted fare connecting with GO, but I doubt all do, or do so for a similar cost.
-Bike parking is limited, poorly weather protected, and unmonitored. Provision for taking bikes on train is also limited, and often inconvenient.
Steve: The discounted fares in Mississauga and elsewhere are paid for by GO on the premise that it’s cheaper to give their riders a cheap local fare than to build parking capacity for them. This approach will not scale up looking at projections of future GO ridership, moves to two-way all-day service, and an eventual end of room for more parking. GO is stuck in a service, fare and funding model that does not suit its planned role described in “The Big Move”.
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You can not charge drivers to park at GO stations until local transit takes up the challenge of providing vastly better service than it does now.
For example: With YRT planning to go to 80 minute service on many routes, how do you expect people to rely on something like that to get to a train station?
Many systems do charge for parking such as some stations in Boston, and in Washington D.C. And the ridership on these systems is lower, because it ends up being cheaper or the same cost to just drive downtown and pay for parking.
Build good transit connections to trains stations and people will use it.
Steve: This is a big issue which Metrolinx is only beginning to address. If they are going to substantially increase service and provide all-day, two-way operations on their major routes, then they must also fund massive increases in local transit to provide an equivalent function to the one they get “free” now from the TTC at Union Station. The lack of such a provision was a gaping hole in The Big Move brought on by the condescending attitude that the “regional” authority doesn’t have a responsibility for “local” transit. It’s one network, but Queen’s Park likes to pretend otherwise.
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Those are very good questions. I don’t like the thought of me paying a quarter or more for parking every trip on the GO train as I walk to and from the station (up stream from the car traffic exhaust), it adds up over time.
Also I often feel GO trains are primarily for highway relief at rush hour (not really a public transit) which means the subsidy should come from the highway department. But if THEY would decide exactly what Metrolinx is then WE could decide weather to support it or not.
Steve: Yes, Metrolinx has a challenge moving from a “commuter” and highway relief service to an all-day provider for riders who don’t necessarily drive for part of their trip.
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Steve: on your comment about Metrolinx and local transit.
It seems our transit leaders need to learn about Toronto’s transit history or we are never going to get proper transit in the 905.
Paul Mees in his book “Transport for Suburbia” mentions that our transit leaders are using excuses like density and neighbourhood layout to discredit improving bus services in the 905. This despite the fact that the TTC provided frequent service levels in the 416 suburbs, and it paid off big.
So the local transit systems really do need to be called out to task on this. Until the buses are coming at least every 15 minutes, I don’t think we can blame people for driving.
And within Toronto, the TTC needs to feed GO in the outlying areas.
My family for example, often drives to the GO Train, because I am the only one that will put up with taking two or three buses to get from my house to the GO Train, when the station is only 5 minutes away.
Add to that, the fact that the TTC has buses leave the GO Station in Scarborough about a minute before the GO Train arrives, and then people would have to wait another 15-20 minutes (these are not frequent TTC routes) for the next bus.
So the TTC does not make it easy for Toronto GO Train riders to use both systems. And it is a shame, because parking issues at Rouge Hill could probably be handled by people taking the TTC, as the TTC routes in that area provide a one seat ride to most areas in the Rouge Hill area. Yet a handful of people use the bus, because they for one have to pay another fare, and the bus is not timed with the GO Train.
Contrast that to the DRT bus that also serves Rouge Hill, and often leaves with a healthy load of passengers, because it does not cost them a full fare.
Steve: The problem here is a combination of a dismissive attitude to transit funding in parts of the 905 (some municipalities actually cut back for 2012), Metrolinx’ attitude that it won’t subsidize GO/TTC trips the way it does for GO/905 trips, and the TTC’s totally ignoring the possibility of transfer traffic at GO stations. Another problem lies in “connections” that are timed only in the peak direction with inbound buses in the am leaving before a train arrives. This makes it just about impossible to make an outbound through trip for a counterpeak commuter. This will become a big issue as this market grows but services remain comparatively infrequent.
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@ Michael:
A parking charge could be much more palatable if Metrolinx offset it by an equivalent fare reduction. Decouple the cost of parking from the cost of the train trip. That way, it can be presented as a “carrot” to reward riders that arrive via local transit, K&R etc. Once in place, it can also be adjusted to direct passengers to preferred lots (e.g., if the lot at Oakville GO is jam-packed but there is capacity at Appleby GO, then price them accordingly to encourage more use of the underused lot — Donald Shoup style).
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Michael wrote,
While I suspect that the vast majority of people parking at Rouge Hill and taking GO downtown probably work within a 10 minute walk of Union station, I wonder how many of them actually pay a TTC fare at Union to get a little further north on the subway without realizing that they could pay on the bus to get to Rouge Hill and their transfer was good to board at Union. There are probably even some who usually walk, but will hop on the subway when the weather is a little ugly.
It seems that not only does the TTC often not make it easy, but when they do, they don’t go out of the way to promote it. Sure, the TTC has the TTC Times Two with GO Transit page on their website (it hasn’t been changed since March 30, 2006 according to the page!), but it isn’t very obvious to find. In fact, I have never met someone who knew of this when I told them about it.
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Calvin Henry-Cotnam wrote:
I have never successfully taken advantage of TTCX2. TTC drivers and collectors are unaware of this program. Every attempt I made to transfer to TTC after a GO trip resulted in a fare dispute. I have given up and pay the second TTC fare.
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What would improve the cost profile and the farebox recovery on GO?…
…electrification. Both Lakeshore lines and Georgetown have the demand for it; reduced fuel costs combined with shorter runtimes would definitely make a difference. How many times has this been studied without anything being done?
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