LTC’s Fare Hike
Further to my last post on the subject.
LTC’s 2009 budget was subsequently approved and includes an across-the-board fare increase that takes effect December 1, 2008.
To view all the ugly details, click HERE.
I must confess to some surprise. I haven’t reviewed the LTC minutes/agendas since I wrote that last post and so I didn’t know that the fare hike had actually been approved until I spotted an ad in today’s The Londoner. And although I monitor most ETC meetings down at City Hall, I can’t recall any discussion about whether or not such a hike ought to be approved. That’s why I just did a search on the city website using “fare increase” as a search term, but the city’s lousy search facility did it’s usual lousy job of not returning anything pertinent to what I was looking for. Which means that I’ll have to painstakingly manually explore all of that committee’s minutes/agendas for the past 2 months to confirm what I think.
In the meantime, what’s your reaction to the fare hike?
© Fowler Media
In this era of sliced transfers to municipal government, it’s a sad reality that transit systems, squeezed by fuel price volatility, supplier instability and generally rising costs of operations have no choice but to pass some of that on to the user.
London’s experience, in that regard, is no different from most transit systems across North America. They’re all feeling the pain. And if they do, we do, too.
Totally agree re. the lame built-in search capability on the city’s web site. As an alternative, I often use Google’s command line structure to search in from the outside. Syntax is as follows:
searchterm site:www.london.ca
It’ll “reach in” to the web site – which has been opened up to Google indexing, apparently – and have better luck finding stuff than the built-in engine ever could.
Hope that helps!
If they’re charging me more, I want to be able to sit down once in a while. During my morning commute, I sit down MAYBE once a week.
Carmi: According to Larry Ducharme, London’s public transit users already pay more per capita than most (all?) other cities. That’s “London’s experience” with City Council BS about how important alternative transportation modes are. Thanks for the Google reminder, one of those things I already knew but usually forget about. Mind you, the bottom line is that the city website should be better managed.
Erica: I’m in full agreement. It took LTC 65 minutes to get me from Commissioners/Eagle to the Galleria today; most of that time was spent waiting for my 2 buses to arrive. We need to start getting much better service for the money we’re already paying. And I’ve long thought that Mr. Ducharme and Mr. Ford ought to be sent packing back to Toronto.
I argue on a regular basis that we need to start improving the service that already exists before expanding the service. I fully believe that if current service was more consistent and reliable that more people would ride it and it would get better press.
Kevin: I don’t think that LTC realizes how bad their service is, because it’s a complaints-driven system and not enough of the users make the effort to complain. I’ve got an article in the works about that and should be able to get it posted later on this morning.