Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

A significantly lower fare would increase ridership and affordability both significantly. But it's not realistic with GRT, unfortunately, as they don't seem to place a lot of priority on those goals.

I'm not convinced it would increase ridership significantly. We had a 10 day long experiment in this when ION launched, and all GRT services were free to celebrate. The ION was packed with people trying it out because it was brand new, but the free buses didn't really change ridership. In Waterloo Region GRT is largely competing against private automobiles, which are already far more expensive than GRT. People pay the premium for the convenience, not because it's better value than transit.

For instance, GRT levies the full adult fare for children, which is very rare in Ontario (I've looked around a bit, and in fact can't find another large transit system nearby that does it), and are resistant to changing that for reasons that are unclear to me. They seem to have a lot of antipathy to the idea of senior discounts, even on particular days, when that conversation has come up.

The reasons relate to use of fare discount budget. GRT used to do what other systems did, with discount for children/teens and seniors, and a very limited number of low income passes available (with a multi-year waiting list to get one). The fare discount "budget" was basically the amount of forgone revenue that GRT was accepting to offer those discounts, and an analysis of it showed that the vast majority was going to high school students from middle/upper class families, who had their parents paying for their GRT usage. Is using our limited fare discount budget to subsidize middle/upper class students, while those most in need face a multi-year waiting list, really the best use of a finite fare discount budget? GRT didn't think so, so they changed to a 50% across-the-board discount for low income riders (including children/teens from low income families), with no waiting period. It was a revenue-neutral change, keeping the fare discount budget flat.

I understand that people are annoyed by the lack of discounts for children/teens from higher income families, but I don't see how you can justify making those with low incomes wait years for an affordable transit pass to keep it going. It was a pretty clear re-targeting of limited funds to the area of greatest need.

I'd support increasing the fare discount budget, but the right way to do it would be to increase the income cut-offs for the discount program, not bring back across-the-board teen discounts. Offering discount by household income really seems to me like the fairest way to do it.

Subsidizing low income households is a very specific subsidy for a very specific reason. It also plays into the unfortunately prevalent idea that transit is for "the poors".

Subsidizing students specifically has other reasons (it's easier to get riders earlier when they are not yet owning and maintaining a car for example) and is an example of forward thinking.

Subsidizing children is about making it accessible to families (I would not even come close to qualifying for subsidized housing, but it would be cheaper for me to take a taxi for many destinations than for me to go on GRT with even my single child family).

Framing it as "wealthy teens getting cheap rides" is a value framing. I would argue that getting young people on transit--including wealthy ones--is valuable is equally valid framing.



MidTowner already addressed the first point about 10 days being two short, but I also disagree that GRT is competing with "owning and operating a very expensive car". For most people owning a car is a mandatory sunk cost. And hence they perceive driving it to be very nearly free. People in general underestimate the cost of driving, but especially the incremental marginal cost of a single trip, I suspect the vast majority of drivers in the city would believe that driving their car for a single trip costs less than 3.75. The crazy thing, many are probably right about that. A cheap, efficient car on a short-ish trip (e.g., downtown to uptown) probably does cost less even accounting for all costs (depreciation, insurance, gas).

So no, GRT isn't really cost competitive.

Of course, fortunately we don't have the same weird culture I see in the Netherlands where there are people who insistently argue that buying, insuring, and operating a car is cheaper than buying an NS pass. And yeah, NS isn't cheap, but cars are even more expensive by any rational measure.