Grand River Transit

[MidTowner]

That's right: forced amalgamation in Ontario has had very mixed results. Many Ontarians now live in municipalities created by Queen's Park bureaucrats and politicians that seemed to make sense on paper, and in reality have had at best mixed results. I don't mean to sound like I am completely opposed to amalgamation- especially in situations where a central city is overburdened because of a declining tax base and affluent residents choosing to reside in nearby bedroom communities, I think it's a logical thing to do. Compare that with Centre-Wellington (which most people know as Fergus and Elora, now defunct entities), which were amalgamated just because they were pretty close together and someone assumed you'd be able to divide all the services in two. That's not the way it works.

mpd618 mentioned Hamilton, which functioned (to one degree or another) with a second-tier Regional government for a long time before recent amalgamation. I think there are a lot of good reasons for those municipalities to be joined, but it's going to take a while for any kind of savings, I would expect. And since this discussion was spurred on by the area-rating we use for transit in Waterloo Region, the City of Hamilton actually has area rating for transit, so residents of the 'Old City' pay several times more than residents in the suburbs. That kind of scheme isn't impossible even within an amalgamated municipality.