From My Bottom Step

London’s public transit system has been woefully underfunded by our municipal government over the years, especially during the “Zero Tax Increase” heyday of Tom Gosnell’s tenure as Mayor. Coupled with very poor service, previous fare hikes had an extremely negative impact upon ridership. So the current LTC Executive cannot be faulted for predicting another reduction in ridership after it hiked fares again last Fall.

According to staff report #8 that is on the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, however, LTC is claiming that 76,600 more people used it’s system during the first half of this year than what was anticipated.

What’s strange is that staff report #15 that’s also on the agenda claims a 15% reduction in the number of overall complaints compared to last year. Although there have been 506 complaints against operators as opposed to 472 in 2008, there have only been 419 complaints about service performance compared to the 593 received for the same first 6 months of 2008. Those two categories represent the two largest categories of complaints, by far.

Although the LTC claims that there was an increase in fare-related complaints (up from 18 to 30), that number seems highly suspect to me, given the fare increase which took place.

Equally questionable is a section of the same report which speaks about media coverage and claims 25 positive articles about conventional service as opposed to 0 negative articles. “Media coverage in the first six months of 2009 mainly focused on the new Automatic Vehicle Communication system, atheist transit ads, transit funding, and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act” with local print media as a main source…