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Island airport announces expanded service

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Yesterday Porter Airlines announced that as of Dec. 11 its service will expand to include Montreal. The expansion takes place despite the efforts of local politicians and community groups to stop operations from the controversial airport. A one-way trip to Montreal will set passengers back $119, which is $20 more expensive than an Air Canada flight from Pearson on the same day.

A piece on the CBC evening news mentioned another problem associated with the airport: worsened vehicular congestion from Porter’s shuttle bus. Interviewees expressed concern that the bus, which runs every 10 minutes, worsens traffic in the already congested downtown core and is a danger to the children attending nearby schools and community centres.

Image from the CBC

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10 comments

  2. I mean,. of all the things to protest, why waste energy on protesting a bus?

    If the airline is doing one decent thing, they are encouraging people to use public transit and providing their own extension to make that more accommodating for people.

    10 people in a bus vs. 10 people each taking their own massive taxi/limo to pearson (that probably has 300-400k kms on it — how efficient do you think those things are?)

  3. If you really want to be environmentally-conscious, take the damn train already! It’s cheaper than flying, leaves right from Union Station, is nearly as fast, and you get to keep your dignity! No need to have someone rifle through your luggage or make you remove your shoes.

  4. It would be nice to see AC and Westjet pony up for a bus or two for their combined 26 return flights to Ottawa alone on a weekday. [That’s about 8112 seats averaging it out to an A320 or B737-700.] This compares to Porter’s 10 returns or 1400 seats.

    On that basis, on the Ottawa route alone, there should be 6 AC/WestJet buses shuttling from Pearson to Union although lets say 3 for AC and 1 for WJ on the basis of filling each bus.

    Jonathan – I took VIA to Kingston yesterday but I’ll be flying to Ottawa in a week or two – for leisure I would take VIA (and have done in the past when Westjet wasn’t keeping Air Canada honest enough) but eight hours round trip is too much for business travel which is what I do at the moment with a preprinted boarding pass and carry-on bag, especially since the VIA station is not in downtown due to an act of stupidity in Ottawa.

    Also, it would help if the Feds would pony up for minimum hourly service between Toronto and Ottawa and Toronto/Montreal to mirror the service you can get from the airlines, as well as increasing service to Kitchener so you can go from Toronto to Waterloo and be back within the business day. If the train doesn’t arrive when you need it to it adds to overall travel time.

    Given that the car is about the same, that leaves flying. A turboprop is more fuel efficient than an A320 or a B737 over a short sector so theoretically Porter is the best of a bad lot environmentally, as well as it being closer to Pearson, ferry notwithstanding.

    Complaining about the bus for safety reasons is hilarious – count how many riders, divide by (let’s by generous given that it’s business traffic) 1.5 and that’s the number of cars it’s saving. Those cars would cause a lot more problems in the neighbourhood, not least given the bus’s higher driving position.

    Personally I’d just take the Harbourfront streetcar if I was going downtown or the Bathurst streetcar if going from home on the B-D, but I’m weird that way 🙂 Going on the TTC from Coxwell Stn to Pearson via Kipling is a LOOONG way, especially with a suitcase, speaking as someone who’s done that trip.

  5. One can make a slim profit flying the Q400 1/3 full provided you don’t spend too much on corporate overhead, so if they are actually running at >30% load factors then hopes for a marketplace failure are likely to be dashed.

    Airliners.net is hardly authoritative being mostly a hangout for plane spotters rather than actual flyers. Reports over at Flyertalk.com where more people actually are regular business travelers are more mixed but that too is skewed by the particpation of a solid crew of AC boosters and WestJet “owners”.

    Bashing the bus is particularily ridiculous when you consider that AC ran a bus on a similar schedule and nobody complained about safety issues there.

  6. Geez, that saw about the bus has to be the most farcical thing I’ve heard in a while, which is saying something considering I’ve been listening to Jane Pitfield on the news for the last 3 months.

    To even pretend that one bus (as noted, the same number of buses that were cruising the streets looking for roads to clog and children to mow down when Air Canada Jazz was flying out of the TCAA) worsens congestion and endangers the children of the area damages the credibility of the airport opponents so badly that, if I were Deluce, I would officially be declaring victory in this tete-a-tete.

    This has become knee-jerk reactionism for the protesters. They used to know what they were talking about but now they just look foolish.

    And Jonathan Cooper, you’re crazy if you think it’s just as fast to take the train. I love the train and take it whenever I can, but I’m under no delusions about the compartive speeds of the two travel modes.

    When service to Montreal commences, the TCAA will be serving exactly the same number of routes that it served when Jazz flew out of it, and nobody raised a fuss about that.

  7. I’m with the folks above. I do TO-MTL via VIA enough for personal travel that I’m a preference member (double points!), but it just doesn’t have the frequency nor the speed for business travel. Twenty bucks more? A bus endangering children’s lives? You’ve got to be kidding … trust me, the $50-odd taxi I take up to Pearson, careening through the downtown streets, is worse in every way imaginable.

  8. The attack on the bus is farcical. Rather than putting across serious topics for debate, this has unfortunately cheapened both the debate and the position of the protest.

    Buses being a cause of danger for the children? As opposed to the the thousands of other vehicles passing through the area? And as mentioned above, would the neighbourhood prefer taxis and limos per person, weaving their way through the streets?

    I could sympathize before with the neighbourhoods (and I’m in the midst of my own neighbourhood issue with the portlands powerplant), but this turns me right off. I’ll pay heed again when sensibility returns to the rhetoric.

  9. Preference is nice alright – both the VIA1 trip I just made and the next two will be heavily discounted due to upgrade coupons I got when they upgraded everyone for the 10 year anniversary.