Grand River Transit

[Viewfromthe42]

For many in the system, it is indeed a transfer from one route to another to aid in a single destination trip.

But we want transit to accommodate different lifestyles. How ridiculous would it be for a parent to pay one fare in the morning to get from home to a child's daycare drop-off, a second fare to get from that daycare to a school drop-off, a third fare to get from the school drop-off to a prescription pick-up or drop-off at a pharmacy, and a fourth fare to get from there to work. That entire journey could very easily play out on a route starting at Cedar in Kitchener and ending at WLU in Waterloo, four fares for that journey, but only one fare for someone going from Elmira to Ainslie. That very quickly disqualifies transit from being a practical use, and is against the idea that at least I hold, that transit should enable people to not need to own or use a car.

[goggolor]

It would be "unethical" for GRT to charge $3.25 for someone taking a 5 minute bus ride and *not* let them turn around and use that ticket for their return trip.

Back in the olden times when the 7 and 200 stopped in Uptown Waterloo, I would regularly get off my iXpress from work, do my shopping at ValuMart, and get on a 7 to take my groceries home. When that stopped being an option, I switched to getting grocery deliveries from WalMart. The economy benefits when you allow brief stops - I know there are plenty of times I've been on a streetcar in Toronto and seen an interesting shop that I'd never disembark to check out because of the strict transfer requirement. Unfortunately what's good for the city economy isn't necessarily good for the bottom line of the transit agency.

[bpoland]

With the ticket machines on the ION platforms, I wonder if some people will wait until the last minute before the train arrives to pay their fare

Hopefully the process will be pretty quick (particularly if you have an EasyGo card).

[Canard]

For your fare, you get one entry to the system. One use. One ride. Period. Anything beyond that is abuse of the system and is stealing, in my mind.

...UNLESS they say your fare is good for "90 minutes of system use", then sure, I could agree with you.

I got my wrist slapped in Kobe for riding the Portliner in a circle. The faregate wouldn't let me exit when I tried to tap my Suica out at the same station I entered at for my ~40 minute ride. I had to go to the counter and she got all apologetic (Japan!), and then charged me an additional fare (ie, round trip). I smiled.

[ijmorlan]

Says who? One of the advertised benefits of the timed transfer, at least in some place, is precisely that one can do a number of small trips on one fare. Also it’s just sensible — in Toronto you have the ridiculous situation where technically I’m in violation if I pop into the corner store at my transfer point.

A transfer is just that - a transfer.

Using it to stop and doddle and do all your errands and get a free ride home is unethical and totally against the concept of the system.

That would be what we are discussing. In at least some jurisdictions, a fare is good for unlimited travel for 90 or 120 or whatever minutes, and part of the purpose of that is precisely and explicitly to allow short round or multi-stage trips to be taken on one fare. I took a quick look around the GRT site just now and while it doesn’t explicitly give this as a feature of the system, it also says absolutely nothing about which trips are legitimate and which are not. So it may be against your concept of the system, but I have not found any evidence that it is against GRT’s concept. I would be interested if you were able to find any.

Also it’s inappropriate to characterize other people’s travel needs as “doddle”.

I should expand a bit on what I said about Toronto: I have heard rumours of drivers denying transfers because they see people come out of a store at the bus stop, when the people were just using the store as a place out of the rain. In other words they didn’t even stop over; they just waited at a convenient place immediately next to the bus stop. I for one would refuse to de-board in such a situation. If the driver really wants to call the transit police I’d be happy to explain the situation to them.

[KevinL]

For your fare, you get one entry to the system. One use. Period. Anything beyond that is abuse of the system and is stealing, in my mind.

Only if that is your system's fare policy, which on GRT has not been the case for some time. Many other GTA systems are the same.

[robdrimmie]

If transfers were intended as one-time use, both the old system and the new system have ways of enforcing it.

In the old system, bus drivers could require passengers to discard their transfers.

In the new system, multiple uses of the transfer could be rejected. If you try to use the same transfer card multiple times on the same bus within a 5-minute window, they are rejected.

Using one transfer for multiple fares at the same stop is clearly a violation of the system. I don't have an old paper transfer around to check the conditions on the back, but the only condition on the new transfers is the expiry time, and according to the GRT's site, as long as a transfer is within its timeframe, using it is valid. There are no exceptions posted in any of the pages I can find on the GRT site.

http://www.grt.ca/en/fares-passes/paying-your-fare.aspx
http://www.grt.ca/en/fares-passes/learn-...rebox.aspx

I appreciate what you're saying, that the "spirit" of the transfer is to start a trip and reach a destination. I just don't see any indication that the GRT issues transfers with that spirit. Until I do, I'll continue to think that multiple uses are ethical. In my mind, the spirit of public transit is to enable people to live and function without personal vehicles, and this use of transfers supports that very nicely.

[Canard]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hi Iain, we don't guarantee a return trip, but if you're able to complete a round trip within 90 minutes, that's fine.</p>&mdash; Grand River Transit (@GRT_ROW) <a href="https://twitter.com/GRT_ROW/status/892040400986411008">July 31, 2017</a></blockquote>

There you have it - official policy.

That's great - good on them!

[robdrimmie]

Heh. I just had a similar conversation. Poor GRT Twitter person.

[Viewfromthe42]

For your fare, you get one entry to the system. One use. One ride. Period. Anything beyond that is abuse of the system and is stealing, in my mind.

...UNLESS they say your fare is good for "90 minutes of system use", then sure, I could agree with you.

I got my wrist slapped in Kobe for riding the Portliner in a circle. The faregate wouldn't let me exit when I tried to tap my Suica out at the same station I entered at for my ~40 minute ride. I had to go to the counter and she got all apologetic (Japan!), and then charged me an additional fare (ie, round trip). I smiled.

In some systems, this is indeed how it is spelled out. Here, it is not. Like a carshare/bikeshare or large pre-planned route multi-high-capacity-vehicle system share (e.g. GRT), we have spelled out a valid time for a fare to be valid. I have definitely had short trips where I'll use just one ticket (e.g. going to run a quick pickup, or a quick workout at a gym) and stay within every letter of system policy.

Your Japanese example sounds more akin to how GO operates, where it is fare by distance. It would be against the rules, say, to have a delivery business where riders picked up and dropped off at GO stations, but only ever tapped on and off at two adjacent stations, once per day, while riding the system to its fullest extents.

We could move towards a system where we considered boardings a per-use cost (punishing those who don't live on direct routes based on their transportation needs), on a distance cost (punishing those who live farther from their destinations), on a time cost (punishing those who aren't able to use express buses and have to take milk run routes), on a space constraint use (punishing those who weight more, who do use the bus to grocery shop and put a bag of groceries under their seat, or who go to school on the bus and put a backpack on their lap, or the mother whose child is too big to ride her lap rather than the mother whose child is small enough to share one seat). Inevitably, the system will create weird incentives based on its fare system. Similar, in a way, to how some have put forth the idea on this forum that gas taxes fund road use, even as we build the road system to accommodate peak commuting patterns but expect to see very different gas tax revenues from the parent only able to afford a less-fuel-efficient van for their family, compared to the individual able to afford a hybrid or even electric car, like a wealthy friend of mine in their no-gas-tax-paying Tesla.

In the end, I think most societies discover that a system with less friction (in this case, rules being friction) is the more effective system, and so we get very simple rules, even seeing some systems avoid heavy policing of fare evasion due to benefits often being negative.


To get back to an earlier point about whether people will jam the ticket machine at the last moment as ION arrives, to avoid wasting transfer time waiting on a platform, you could have ION ticket dispensers dispense transfer times at 90 minutes AFTER the next scheduled ION train arrival, so that we don't have a mad dash as the train pulls in. You could even have the transfer barcode indicate where the transfer originated, so that you couldn't print a transfer at an ION station right after a train departs during a 30-minute headway time, only to hop onto a bus with ~120 minutes of transfer time. Or, for the direction vs time transfer rules people, you could have a transfer invalidate if an individual tried to use it twice on the same route, or twice in opposite directions on the same route. But once you start making the system this complicated, its use will go down.

[Elmira Guy]

As it's been for years and years with GRT

[Markster]

Back in ye olde Kitchener Transit days, you can see that they did TTC-style "no stopovers or returns":
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/GRT_ROW">@GRT_ROW</a> Grand River Transit, you may find this interesting: a circa 1981 (?) bus transfer I used as a bookmark. <a href="https://t.co/hfs7jDqKDH">pic.twitter.com/hfs7jDqKDH</a></p>&mdash; James Davis Nicoll (@jamesdnicoll) <a href="https://twitter.com/jamesdnicoll/status/854030247930548225">April 17, 2017</a></blockquote>

But thankfully that hasn't been the law of the land for a long time.  I moved to town in 2003, and the policy has been unlimited travel within the timed window for the entire time I've lived here.

A "transfer" has exactly the rules that the operator sets for it.  No more, no less.

[tomh009]

We could move towards a system where we considered boardings a per-use cost (punishing those who don't live on direct routes based on their transportation needs), on a distance cost (punishing those who live farther from their destinations), on a time cost (punishing those who aren't able to use express buses and have to take milk run routes), (...)

Punishing?  Based on this argument, the current system punishes those who live on direct routes, and those who don't make stopovers, and those who only take the bus (or LRT) for a short distance.

Seriously, in my mind a distance-based cost is the most fair (you are effectively paying by distance when you drive (gas/wear and tear), bicycle (effort/wear and tear) or walk (effort/shoes).

Or make the entire system free of charge.  But I don't think there is much support for that.

[Markster]

Agreed.  In addition to the loss of revenue, it makes ridership numbers look lower as that return trip is not counted as a new passenger.

All boardings are counted. GRT has data for every boarding, and what kind of fare (or transfer) was used. The drivers are punching buttons for everyone who gets on the bus. I believe they also have per-stop granularity of this information, though they don't share that publicly.

A few years ago, GRT published "per boarding" cost recovery rates for each of their fare types. I really wish I had saved that document. I do recall that the university U-Passes were so heavily used that the per-boarding average revenue was somewhere around 35¢.

[KevinT]

Only if you let its name inform its purpose. If you look at it as a 'ticket for unfettered travel, 90 minute limit' then it works fine. We only still call it a 'transfer' because we always have.

When you look at speed limit signs as a painting on a pole then it's much easier to save time on your travels.