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?).
  

I wonder if the 3% includes expired fares. I will admit I did get caught the other day with a transfer that expired about 2 minutes before the fare inspector boarded. I tapped on at Conestoga, which still had 10 mins left on my card, and the LRV lingered for a few minutes like it usually does, and the fare inspectors got on at Northfield. When he mentioned the fare expired two minutes earlier, he just asked if I tapped at Conestoga or not, and then went on to the next person.

I used to get the monthly pass, but where my ridership dropped significantly due to me working from home, its no longer feasible for me to get one until the office reopens.

We were (eventually) told that this is an acceptable use of the system, and that it wouldn't be considered non-payment of fares, so it shouldn't be included in the 3%...although it absolutely could be, because they often don't seem to be on the same page.  Of course, it's on the honour system anyway....so I'll ask again, why are we inspecting 10% of fares...that is absolutely nuts.