Friday’s Headlines

9 comments

1. An interesting reference to the Sun in an article the Montreal Gazette ran in advance of yesterday’s Leafs/Habs game. I raise it since it seems to go along with the “damn the facts, I know what I know” approach of some mayoral candidates:

   “On Tuesday, the Toronto Sun featured Leafs prospect Nazem Kadri with a pacifier in his mouth in full-page, photo-manipulated reaction to his being farmed to the American Hockey League’s Toronto Marlies. It seemed not to matter to the tabloid that the demotion was taken well by Kadri, who turned 20 yesterday and skates in as bright a spotlight here as Louis Leblanc does in Montreal.

   “In a Sportsnet interview Tuesday, a deadpan Burke considered the Kadri page and said: ‘The Toronto Sun has great value if you own a puppy or a parakeet.'”

2. This is a New York headline but relevant to Toronto.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/nyregion/08fares.html

   The transit authority here just approved an increase in the monthly pass to $104 US, a whopping 17% increase. This makes New York the most expensive transit city in US based on monthly passes.

   Of course, this is still a good 10-15% less than Toronto, the most expensive transit city in North America. (Funny how no one seems to talk about THAT in the election campaigns.) But the trend is bad for a different reason, one that could affect other transit systems like the TTC.

   Someone who actually knows what they are talking about could correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the past pattern over the last couple decades was to increase ridership by adding more and more passes that took away the per-ride psychology and encouraged frequent use. Passes helped encourage urban living where a car lease/insurance monthly bill was traded in for a transit pass, and short trips became “free” because your daily commute essentially paid for the pass. New York didn’t even have any kind of pass until 1998, and look at what happened to the city’s livability since.

   However, in this new fare hike New York has eliminated the one-day pass and the 14-day pass completely and changed the math on the monthly pass. The typical per-ride rate will become effectively $2.09 ($2.25 with 7% discount when buying Metrocards). This means that to make a monthly pass worthwhile, one must take 50 or more trips a month. Given that there are only 22 workdays a month, that means commuters will now switch to per-ride cards instead of unlimited cards unless they use the subway on nights, weekends or other times to make up the extra 6 trips a month. I don’t think any transit system has ever pushed beyond the 2-a-day gold standard before for the cost of a pass.

   In Toronto, the cheapest monthly pass under MDP is $111. At the cheapest token price, that means 44 trips a month is the breakeven, which makes sense since it essentially lines up with what a subway-commuter would use at a minimum. But if New York now sets a pattern to push commuters to pay per ride this may spread to Toronto. Are riders “abusing” a system if they have passes and ride frequently? Or is that in fact supposed to be the point, to get them out of their cars? After all, North Americans hate user fees and love all-you-can-eat buffets; can you imagine a ski resort that charged per chairlift ride?

   From now on, I’ll probably stand on the street corner and say “well, I can spend $2.10 on the subway or $5 on that cab over there or drive and park for $10” and maybe not take transit as a result, instead of “I have this unlimited card burning a hole in my pocket, let’s get some more rides off it.” Maybe that is good for bikes and walking, but I don’t think this is a positive policy trend overall.

3. Further to my last paragraph, a couple might say “hey, for both of us to go to dinner by cab or parking garage it is $10. If we take the subway there and back it is $9. Forget taking the subway.”

   As expensive as it is, pray Toronto stays on the 44-trip breakeven.

4. iSkyscraper,

   you are absolutely right. TTC pass are way too expensive. In Europe (at least the few cities I have been to) there is a huge price difference between passes and pay-per-ride tickets, which make passes a no-brainer. Of course I think part of the problem is that, since TTC is running at around capacity at rush hour anyway, it does not see any benefit in attracting more commuters by giving them cheap passes.

   I think smart card has big potential here as it can allow much more flexible pricing model, either zone-based pricing, or discounted price off-peak hours, and so on. All these can help boost ridership for local and off-peak trips and make better use of TTC’s spare capacity.

5. Does NY state or the US have any tax breaks for monthly passes?  If not then the NY would take the title of the most expensive monthly pass on the continent.

6. iSkyscraper:
   When I lived in Victoria BC as a university student (early 2000’s) our student cards were bus passes (each student paid about $40 a semester for it – cheap considering cash fare was about $2.25). I then came to Toronto for an MA and I still remember the moment when I was told how much a monthly pass was with the ‘student discount’!

   Anyway, I understand what you mean by calculating a monthly pass being ‘worth it’ by figuring daily commutes but I think you’ve missed something important: stop overs. A person coming home from work with a monthly pass can stop on their way for a number of reasons, one of which is to stop at a store. When I had the monthly pass, I would often do this on the way home from school – for “free” I could stop at a shop or restaurant, then get another bus to go home. More often than not, I wouldn’t have made the stop over if I had to pay a fare again. I know a lot of people with monthly passes enjoy this ‘freedom,’ and my point is that it is very good for local businesses. However, this freedom to have stop overs is difficult to calculate and probably doesn’t fit into people’s pro/con list when deciding whether to get a monthly pass or not. And there are other ‘externalities’ from the freedom of movement associated with a monthly pass that benefit both individual citizens and the community as a whole that are hard to quantify to make getting a monthly pass ‘worth it.’

7. re: http://www.thestar.com/news/transportation/article/872670 The subway: daily cattle call

   Now the assumption seems always to be: public transit should reach every corner of the city and allow people to travel quickly and easily from anywhere to anywhere (or at least from anywhere to downtown).

   I would seriously question the wisdom of such idea. With that goal in mind, you will inevitably get an inefficient system which is expensive and mediocre. It also promotes sprawling as it does not make much difference to live anywhere in the city, why not settle for somewhere you can cheaply buy a 3000sqft house on a 40×150 lot?

   Transit should serve as a catalyst to promote more compact city form and attracts people to live closer to work and attract business to locate closer to where people live. Then forget about the sprawling suburbs. If people still want to live in 3000sqft house on a 40×150 lot, fine, just make sure that they pay the proper price for it (be it road price, parking fee, gas price, or just time wasted sitting in grid lock) while others can zoom along on cheap and fast transit.

   I think the city should focus on increasing density along existing transit corridor and improve transit service of these important corridors, so that people will have affordable options to live along them and enjoy quality transit. It is far more effective than trying to improve transit service all over the city.

8. Mark,

   agree with the freedom you described with pass. However, first, for most suburb commuters, that freedom does not count. They almost use transit for commute exclusively, cars are the way to go for all other travels. Second, the freedom seldom affect the decision to purchase the pass. From my observation, people make decision about buying the pass based on how many necessary trips will be made. The freedom comes after the fact as a bonus, but it has little effect on the calculation before hand.

9. NY passes are typically paid for using pretax dollars through one’s workplace via a registered program (google TransitChek), so yes, the final cost is quite a bit lower in the big tax picture.

   It’s not that I’m missing the point – there are lots of reasons why one might like a pass such as stopovers, short hops on the streetcar, etc.  But while one might make those extra trips if one has a pass, one will almost certainly not make them if they have to pay per ride.  (People have a strong attachment to the number zero, and a “free” trip is a lot more appealing.)  Going beyond 44 x fare for a monthly pass is a bad, bad formula.