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Good to know the 4 will be routed down Mount Hope Street now, thank you.
I hope the extra traffic will motivate GRH to move their parking shuttle stop off of the road and into one of their lots. I've never really understood why they were permitted to do this in the first place, it really snarls up traffic and creates a dangerous situation during peak periods.
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The Planning and Works committee will be voting on fare hikes. Averaging about 3%.
I do wonder how much the price of parking is being hiked...
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New audio announcements on board buses pulling into Forest Glen (and presumably Charles), confirming no more service there after June 24 and directing riders to the website.
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(05-27-2019, 10:43 AM)KevinL Wrote: New audio announcements on board buses pulling into Forest Glen (and presumably Charles), confirming no more service there after June 24 and directing riders to the website.
I heard something similar at Laurier as well, but I didn't catch the whole message as I had headphones on. When I took them off, I just heard the June 24th part and directing to the GRT website. I'll have to remember to listen to the entire thing tomorrow.
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The Laurier one must be that the 200 is no longer servicing it; a big change for that local area.
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I heard the entire message on the way home. It said GRT bus routes are changing starting June 24. For more information visit GRT.ca
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If you click on a stop that is being closed on Google maps now, a notice is displayed.
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(05-27-2019, 08:28 PM)bgb_ca Wrote: I heard the entire message on the way home. It said GRT bus routes are changing starting June 24. For more information visit GRT.ca
They seem to be playing this at all terminals and major transfer points that will be seeing changes.
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(05-24-2019, 04:26 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: The Planning and Works committee will be voting on fare hikes. Averaging about 3%.
I do wonder how much the price of parking is being hiked...
For 2019? My impression was that a 3% hike was already approved, but deferred to September 1 (from July 1).
3% doesn't seem excessive to me as a transit user. That's barely inflationary. And almost identical to the 2019 property tax increase for the Region.
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05-28-2019, 01:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-28-2019, 01:08 PM by danbrotherston.)
(05-28-2019, 11:37 AM)MidTowner Wrote: (05-24-2019, 04:26 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: The Planning and Works committee will be voting on fare hikes. Averaging about 3%.
I do wonder how much the price of parking is being hiked...
For 2019? My impression was that a 3% hike was already approved, but deferred to September 1 (from July 1).
3% doesn't seem excessive to me as a transit user. That's barely inflationary. And almost identical to the 2019 property tax increase for the Region.
It is definitely above inflation, although not by a whole lot. And yes, it doesn't seem excessive, but it's only in the latest of many many hikes.
The real thing which bugs me is that this raise is happening in the context of generally flat parking rates, and an extreme response to the increase in cost of gas.
In fact, how many times do you hear people invoke the less fortunate as argument against raising the cost of driving, but hear nary a peep from them about fare hikes.
Measuring the cost of driving is much harder, as it has many factors, but most components of driving aren't increasing at nearly the rate transit fares are.
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They're slowly starting to officially activate fare machines. Conestoga, Allen, and Kitchener Market are now up and running (but no cash, debit/credit only).
Also, EasyGo cards will soon cost $5 each, the free-card-with-first-load policy was just a promo.
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GRT is offering 3 "Golden Tickets" - you and a plus one could be on the first ride.
https://www.grt.ca/en/about-grt/ion-gold...ntest.aspx
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If we look at the June 18, 2018 report on the subject (starts page 32, but the "good stuff" is in the tables on page 37) the parking rate increases are split into hourly and monthly.
The hourly parking rates increased $0.25 to $3.00 ($3.50 for the parkade) in 2019 and will increase another $0.25 in 2022, 2025, and 2028.
The monthly parking permit rate increased 2.5% in 2019 (from, for example, $113.14 in 2018 to $115.97 for Waterloo Town Square South Lot) and is scheduled to increase 2.5% for 2020 and 3% every year thereafter.
I'd like to perform some sort of similarity comparison with GRT fares but I don't have the data. Even this venerable tritag report doesn't publish its data or list its sources. Suffice to say GRT fares increase in price irregularly and unevenly over the cash fare/strip of tickets/monthly pass spectrum of fare products. With the GRT easyGO Fare Card this may change so that all fare products on a card are adjusted by percentage on a regular schedule whereas the cash fare price still aims for $0.25 increments every 3 years or so.
In summary: Parking fees are indeed going up and it seems like council's trying to keep that increase around ~3% per year. GRT fees are also going up, but without a similar forecast of recommended prices or the time to pull historical data it's difficult for me to say whether it's by a similar or different amount.
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Thanks for posting that Chutten.
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