DarrenBarefoot.com

Thanks for pointing out the articles – they look like good reading.

I’m also for a congestion charge for entering downtown with a vehicle, but my perception of sub-urb transit is that it’s pretty good – between the West Coast Express and Skytrain going east/southeast and the seeming abundance of busses traveling north-south, there always seem to be options. That said, I never go to the burbs by transit and may be way off.

I was reflecting on Translink yesterday after some 6 or 7 years of its existence, and I can’t really point to many things about transportation in Vancouver that don’t suck more now than before. The roads are definitely more congested, their selection of bus designs never seems very good, the drivers are stressed, we have transit cops with firearms, and the fares keep going up without service improving.

It’s not that Translink is particularly inept (though it has its moments). I just think its mandate of managing all transportation in the lower mainland is more than one agency can do well.

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I don’t know why people are so against transit increases, at least ones that keep up with inflation. Everything else got more expensive in the last few years – gas for busses, driver’s wages, etc. – so how can the price stay fixed?

Pushing all the cost of transit onto the backs of car owners won’t work if you carry it to its logical conclusion, you’d have no one driving cars (and thus no AirCare or car tax revenue) and everyone riding a transit system that gets no funding. What to do then?

(Disclaimer – I’m a transit user / walker and have never owned a car)

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Despite my default tendencies towards bomb-throwing anarcho-capitalism, I like this idea a lot.

That said, I count maybe 5/17 of the Tyee’s reasons as having legitimacy or signifcance (1,2, and 5, plus probably 3 and 4).

I also get a bit skeptical about car-subsidy figures, since they seem to assume there’s no benefit to non-drivers from deliveries made by road (which, for most retailers, is all of them).

Where was I? The elephant in the room with such proposals is always the latent demand for transit services. Consider the example of the UPass, which has been a big hit among students at SFU and UBC, but which has also meant the transit system has faced big increases in the demand for services there.

That’s good, if it can be funded, but the Simpson-Curtain rule Olsen cites apparently suggests a 30% increase [danger, pdf] in ridership if fares drop to zero.

That same study I’m linking to says that fare-free services make much more sense in small transit systems than in big ones, because small systems generate almost no meaningful revenue out of their fare boxes.

Skytrain, on the other hand, more or less pays for its operating costs out of the fare box (at-grade LRT plans must die!)

Also, Olson gets the math wrong when he suggests that revenue goes down as fares go up. His example of a 10% increase in fares leading to a 4% drop in ridership equates to a 5.6% net revenue increase. Demand is both elastic and price-sensitive, so further increases in fares would likely have ever-more marginal revenue improvements, until they were eventually counterproductive.

But on the other hand, your operating costs drop too!

Ahem. If Vancouver did go fare-free, it would be the biggest transit jurisdiction in the world to do so, and I’m pretty sure it has far more potential to earn farebox revenue than any of the free-fare systems.

There’s no such thing as a free ride,

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At the risk of sounding like a complete snob, I would actually support paying a lot more for my transit ride if it meant not having to put up with all the crap from other riders that I’m now forced to deal with on a daily basis. I currently ride transit about 3 hours each day and if it’s not the really smelly guy with the bag of pop cans sitting next to you its the yelling teenagers swearing at each other across the bus.

I think people take their cars so that they can have a bit of privacy and relative calm and to avoid being forced to snuggle up with other people they find annoying or repulsive.

Take the Westcoast Express for example. It costs about double the amount of other forms of transit and, for the most part, the people are quiet and respectful. I know that Tyee readers would balk at this idea but I would totally support going back to some kind of class-based segregation on transit. A first class ticket could cost twice as much but with it, you get to sit only with other first class ticket holders. I’d bet if you did that, you would see a lot more people giving up their cars.

Planes do it, trains do it, even BC Ferries now does it. Why not do it with Transit as well?

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Hey Darren,

Thanks for picking up the series and chatting about it.

I agree with your comment about the lack of links: the about the $5378 slipped by. But here it is and it is being included in the version that is about to be published on Alternet.org

http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm66.htm

Let’s keep talking so we soon get the transit we all want!

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