Grand River Transit

[tomh009]

But seriously ... what would be the incremental cost to eliminate fares altogether?  The taxpayers already pay two-thirds of the costs, and eliminating fares would simplify a lot of things -- not to mention substantially increase ridership.  The cost per passenger might not change at all if this were to increase ridership by 50%.

This is a radical option, but is it really so crazy?

The foregone current farebox revenue plus the increased costs due to that increased ridership means this is a pretty expensive proposition.

For serious discussion, I was hoping for more detail than just "pretty expensive proposition".  OK, so I can search myself, too, and I found GRT's business plan here (not latest, but has good detail):
http://www.grt.ca/en/aboutus/grtbusinessplan.asp

From here you can see that fares recover roughly 40% of the costs, and then calculate backwards to find the total cost of GRT to be about $79M, so the fares are bringing in about $30M.  That's about 4% of the total regional property tax base (of $750M), or $70/household, using the region's average assessment value.  Is $70/household really an outrageous amount to pay to make transit completely free?


Now, this doesn't include the cost savings of NOT collecting fares, nor does it include additional capacity, so some route might be fairly busy.  In the above business plan, you can determine that GRT was delivering 550K hours of service for 20M passengers, or less than 40 passengers per service-hour.  If you assume an average ride of 30 minutes, that's only an average of 20 people on a bus: clearly there is capacity to carry more people on many routes.  Adding 20% capacity (should free transit become outrageously popular) would cost about $15M, or an additional $35/household.