Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[danbrotherston]

AC routing the bus to the airport is just an incredibly obviously bad decision that only arises because it's an airline and is "airplane brained" in the same way most people are car brained.

It may be a bad decision from a public good point of view, but AC is an airline, and is providing the bus service to YKF for its own business benefit (and, yes, the benefit of its YYZ-bound pax).

A public organization (such as GRT or GO) or even a bus-focused business would make different decisions, but that's not what AC is. As it is, it gives us one more option for getting to the airport, which works for some people and not for others. That's still not a bad thing.

(GO does now enable all-train travel from DTK to YYZ, which is better than the bus connections, but it's still not super quick. Last time I considered it I still ended up taking a taxi to YYZ.)

So, there's nothing saying that the bus can't ALSO go to YKF if they want to enable connections. But as I pointed out, there are no routes into or out of YKF that aren't ALSO available at YYZ and connecting at YYZ will be 6-10 hours faster than flying to YKF getting the bus connection to YYZ and catching another flight. So right now, there are zero passengers making that connection, it _only_ serves passengers going to/from KW and catching a flight at YYZ, and it does so badly.

I guess it's a bad decision from public good, but only barely--in the way that any private company offering a product is a "public good". It's a private service available only to airline passengers. It's mainly a bad decision from a business point of view. The service would be better (and thus more valuable to passengers) if it was to the city and not the airport, and for broadly similar costs. They're not optimizing their value/cost metric that's a business metric for AC, not for the public.

And yes, AC is an airline. They're in the business of providing a transportation service. By the same argument they shouldn't be chartering a bus at all because they do airplanes, since they've chosen to provide a bus service for this connection there's no reason that they couldn't provide a better service by going to the city itself. There is no rule saying that Air Canada cannot charter a bus to downtown Kitchener, they are choosing the worse option of going to the airport, for what reasons, I do not know, I'm sure it's not malice.

As for GO, it is possibly an option now, but it's still something that isn't really a good option on weekends, and still takes far too long and far too much thinking (especially at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight) for me to consider anymore. Last time we took a taxi, and for 120 bucks for a family of 3, we're going to do the same thing next time.