The province certainly has the constitutional power to rationalize public transit. I am in awe of how many countries that just have one fare system. Just tap on and off with the same card and the fares are uniform. All the calculations about which transit company gets what part of your fare is handled behind the scenes. You can be confident that you aren’t paying more than have to. The best systems have the basic fare cover two zones, so if you happen to travel across a border just down the street then there is no penalty.
You don't have to look that far for a good example... TransLink in the Vancouver metro area has pretty good fare integration. I do feel like conversations about how fare integration would work behind the scenes are unnecessarily delaying the rollout of full fare integration. If the transit agencies truly cared about riders, they would all agree to implement full fare integration (which in most cases is just a matter of everyone charging the same fare) and figuring out the "accounting" later.
Super good stuff. Be curious to see how a regional system a la Montreal, that integrates all agencies, could work. At the core of it there are so many different players, as opposed to just the STM & Exo….it makes it a lot more complicated.
Update: The new One Fare Program will begin sooner than expected, on February 26th, 2024.
And I am so very grateful for that
9:47 it's worse for YRT than you describe, because ZUM 501 is more frequent than VIVA orange, so chances are you'll end up getting a ZUM bus
The province certainly has the constitutional power to rationalize public transit. I am in awe of how many countries that just have one fare system. Just tap on and off with the same card and the fares are uniform. All the calculations about which transit company gets what part of your fare is handled behind the scenes. You can be confident that you aren’t paying more than have to. The best systems have the basic fare cover two zones, so if you happen to travel across a border just down the street then there is no penalty.
You don't have to look that far for a good example... TransLink in the Vancouver metro area has pretty good fare integration.
I do feel like conversations about how fare integration would work behind the scenes are unnecessarily delaying the rollout of full fare integration. If the transit agencies truly cared about riders, they would all agree to implement full fare integration (which in most cases is just a matter of everyone charging the same fare) and figuring out the "accounting" later.
Super good stuff. Be curious to see how a regional system a la Montreal, that integrates all agencies, could work. At the core of it there are so many different players, as opposed to just the STM & Exo….it makes it a lot more complicated.