(11-14-2014, 01:13 PM)nms Wrote:Quote:What it most resembles, actually, is the Bob Moses vision of city-building: the use of state power and private capital to transform “blighted” places. While this plan plausibly serves a place called “Finch”, it almost certainly wouldn’t serve anyone currently living there. Indeed, in most places the plan explicitly requires people to be moved out, by selling their homes or other properties to our hypothetical subway-development corporation.
This is what putting the technological cart before the city-building horse gets you: instead of building transit to serve the city we have, you’re effectively rebuilding the city to serve the transit you’ve decided you want, ex ante and for no technical reason.
This is a good observation by McGrath, but he's describing a mature metropolis building transit to meet its currently underserved need. We have an additional level of feedback to consider in WR. As a region where our population is growing very quickly on a relative basis (about 40% growth over the last 20 years, about 40% growth over the next 20) we can also build transit to shape the city we want. A mode shift to transit and to denser development over the next two decades can create permanent structural savings in infrastructure costs.
Quote:The fact is that any public service that is not cost-neutral, or makes more money than it spends, will be a drain on funds for other parts of the public purse. I agree that our public services should not turn a profit, that's what taxes are for. Provided the Region continues towards its goal of bringing transit to every area of the region, personally, I don't mind continuing to subsidize it.
Indeed. And if you want to grow ridership, you need to invest heavily in service improvement. Not just ION, but route additions and service frequency enhancement, and better and more welcoming vehicles and infrastructure. The impact of all of these things on ridership takes time to show up, so any period of service roll-out is one where the farebox recovery ratio is going to lag.
So if you simultaneously attempt to make progress towards a much higher farebox recovery ratio, something is going to suffer. New service rollout that might drive much higher ridership in two years is not affordable because farebox recovery ratio. Or fares must grow at a rate much higher than inflation because farebox recovery ratio. Or, in Waterloo region's case, both.
If your goal is to drastically increase transit mode share in order to save buckets of money in future road and sprawl costs, working to hit a 50/50 farebox recovery ratio means you're fighting a huge headwind.
Higher farebox recovery ratios are the product of fully-grown, mature transit networks. At best, ours is still going through an awkward puberty: gangly, not filled out, and still needing a lot of nurturing to reach its full potential. (And with more than a few pimples.)