ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

Also I was looking at the latest council report on ION and there are a few interesting points.

• A bunch of revenue, boarding, and ridership data that's hard to draw any conclusions from due to the transit strike and COVID-19.
  
• Bombardier has essentially halted warranty deficiency work on the LRVs since February, again due to COVID-19.
  
• Bombardier is replacing deficient welds on 11 of the region's LRVs at the OMSF over the next two years. They claim the issue poses no safety risk but is being done to meet the expected 30 years service life.
  
• Bombardier is building a spare LRV for the region in Kingston, to be delivered late 2020 or early 2021.
  
• Approximately 11% of fares are inspected daily. 3% of inspected riders have not paid their fare, and approximately 35 people are charged with provincial offences related to fares every month.
  
• The region didn't anticipate the failure rate with platform validators and had to order more spare units as a result.
  
• Various work was done on the fare system during the free fare period, including altering the fare payment terminals to improve cashless transaction speed (has anyone noticed improvements?).
  

Thanks for digging these up...I've been swamped with other regional items and haven't had time to take a look. Some of these are extremely concerning.

The platform validators are garbage...the fact that we already need spares just shows how much of a piece of trash they are. We should be immediately terminating this contract and seeking damages.

Which leads to the second part...it is completely insane that we are inspecing 11% of fares. That's absurdly high.  That is probably, I dunno, between five and seven orders of magnitude (that's 10,000 and 1,000,000 times) as high a frequency as we inspect drivers.

And 3% no fare rate is also very low.  (Ungodly low compared with driver who approach a 100% violation rate for minor offenses like speeding <10km/h over limit, failure to signal, or running amber, and still very very low compared with the number of drivers with major offenses like texting and driving, major speeding, and reckless driving).

But most disturbing of all, that we are laying charges. Tom Galloway claimed this wasn't the case publicly on twitter. It is extremely concerning that we are charging people in the face of a payment system that was, at least last time I tried to use it, nearly completely unusable. I have ridden without paying my fare due to broken equipment, and I am extremely fastidious and technically capable, if I am unable to make it work sometimes, I know with certainty others will be having issues.

I find this whole situation infuriating. I have been on an LRV that was forced to brake extremely hard WHILE being fare inspected. At this point, the fare inspections are sending a very strong message to me. I'd like to raise this with regional council...unfortuantely...it's at the end of an already long list...

In terms of ridership, yeah, all bets are off these days (sure is too bad that we fund the system out of user fees, roads won't suffer similar collapses in funding I'm sure), but I believe before that happened ridership was strong, and at least some businesses seem very happy, and have seen an increase in customers.