Tag Archives: transit fares

| Montreal, Public transit

STL fares for 2009

The STL today announced its fare table for 2009, with moderate increases in fares (though La Presse is all up about side issues including increasing the limit on intermediate fare eligibility from 22 to 25 years old, and reducing the single fare to $1 on smog days).

Here’s the skinny:

2008 2009 Difference
Single fare $2.50 $2.60 +4%
8 tickets (regular) $18 (8x$2.25) $18.50 (8x$2.31) +2.8%
8 tickets (reduced) $12.50 (8x$1.56) $13.00 (8x$1.63) +4%
Monthly pass (regular) $74 $76.50 +3.4%
Monthly pass (intermediate) $59 $61 +3.4%
Monthly pass (reduced) $44.50 $46 +3.4%

The STM announced its fare schedule two weeks ago. Still waiting on AMT and RTL, though you’d think they’d give the customary 30 days’ notice.

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

STM releases 2009 fare rates

There were rumours that the fares would go up again (not exactly going out on a limb), but the STM last night made it official. The new rates (PDF) are as follows:

Regular Reduced
Monthly CAM $68.50 ($66.25 + 3.4%) $37 ($36 + 2.8%
Weekly CAM $20 ($19.25 + 3.9%) $11.25 ($11 + 2.3%)
Three-day tourist pass $17 (no change) N/A
One-day tourist pass $9 (no change) N/A
10 trips (Opus card only) $20 ($2/trip) $10.75 ($1.08/trip)
Six trips $12.75 ($2.13/trip, $12 + 6.3%) $6.75 ($1.13/trip, $6.50 + 3.8%)
Single fare $2.75 (no change) $1.75 (no change)

Transit agencies have to give 30 days notice for fare changes, which means they have until 11:59pm on Dec. 1 to announce any changes to take effect for Jan. 1, 2009.

| Montreal, Public transit

STM to let kids on free on weekends

The STM has announced that, starting Dec. 6, adults who pay their fare to get on the bus or metro will be able to take up to five kids under age 12 for free on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. (Via Transport in Montreal)

The STM has pulled $400,000 out of its ass as the projected “cost” of this program.

It’s part of a campaign by the city to get families out doing stuff (going to museums and other attractions) on weekends by reducing prices.

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

11 problems with STM’s new magnetic fare card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

Nameless new STM fare/transfer card

This spring, after outfitting all buses and metro stations with new equipment, the STM introduced a new, smarter fare system which uses smart cards instead of magnetic-strip passes, and cards with magnetic strips instead of … tickets with magnetic strips. Both not only serve as fare payment, but also as transfers.

Though Opus, the smart card, is the sexier and more revolutionary of the new fare cards, the STM started with this flimsy paper thing that has caused nothing but confusion and problems (even its website is down)

Below is a list of the problems I’ve noticed with the non-Opus paper card, even though I’ve never actually used one:

  1. It doesn’t have a name. Unlike the Opus smart card, which has a whole branding effort behind it, this paper magnetic card has neither a proper branding name nor any simple two-word description. The result is that people can’t describe it in a way that obviously differentiates it from the Opus card.
  2. The card was announced in the same breath as the Opus card, further leading to confusion.
  3. The card is neither reusable nor recyclable. The result is that they fill trashcans and litter streets.
  4. The card also acts as a proof-of-payment system, which means it must be carried until the end of the trip. This is a departure from the current fare payment system which has not adequately been explained. Since proof of payment isn’t enforced in the system (because some people still use old tickets and old metro transfers), it leads to even more confusion.
  5. The card replaces both single fares and strips of six tickets. This has led to a problem where users insert the card into a turnstile and then don’t retrieve it, losing the other five tickets. That has resulted in a change of policy, and they now issue six cards with one fare each, instead of one card with six fares. This leads to more waste.
  6. Metro turnstiles don’t open until the user retrieves the card. Many users have no reason to retrieve the cards because they’ve already paid their fare.
  7. While the Opus card arguably makes fare payment faster, this card makes it take longer. The machines on buses take five seconds to process a card or eject a new one, from the time payment is accepted and the green light appears. Five seconds may not seem like much, but multiply that by a dozen people getting on, and the bus is already a minute late. A bus that gets a lot of tourists or occasional riders is going to experience significant delays.
  8. Bus fare boxes issue cards for every fare paid. But because they’re treated as optional transfers, users who aren’t planning to transfer move to the back of the bus before the card is issued. Drivers have to manually collect the cards, which they then give out when other users pay using tickets. When the number of people paying cash and not wanting a transfer outweighs the number paying tickets and wanting one, a surplus emerges which the driver has to dispose of.
  9. When inserted into a fare box, no feedback is given other than a green light (fare accepted) or red light (fare rejected). Because the cards act as both fare payment and transfer, there’s no way to tell until after the fact whether the fare box has accepted a transfer or deducted another fare. (This is a larger problem with the Opus card, which has no human-readable indication of how many fares remain on it.)
  10. Because the card is designed for disposability, it isn’t very tough. As a result it gets folded and wrinkled and then becomes unreadable, causing further delays.
  11. The cards are not accepted on minibuses or collective taxis.

Have you noticed any problems with the card apart from these? Comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

| Montreal, Public transit

AMT fares going up too

$TM

Following the STM/STL transit fare increases announced last week, the Agence métropolitaine de transport has put out its list. Fare increases for monthly passes range between 1.0% and 3.8%:

Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Intermediate fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
TRAM 1 (Downtown Montreal) $77.00 $74.50 3.4% $61.50 $59.50 3.4% $46.00 $44.50 3.4%
TRAM 2 (Midwest/ mideast/ North Montreal) $90.00 $87.00 3.4% $72.00 $69.50 3.6% $54.00 $52.00 3.8%
TRAM 3 (Longueuil, Laval, Far West/East island) $105.00 $103.00 1.9% $84.00 $82.50 1.8% $63.00 $62.00 1.6%
TRAM 4 (Ile Perrot, La Prairie) $115.00 $113.00 1.8% $92.00 $90.50 1.7% $69.00 $68.00 1.5%
TRAM 5 (Vaudreuil/Dorion, Chateauguay, Kahnawake, north shore, Repentigny, Sainte-Julie, Saint-Constant, St. Bruno) $133.00 $131.00 1.5% $106.00 $105.00 1.0% $80.00 $78.50 1.9%
TRAM 6 (St. Hilaire, Mercier, Hudson/Rigaud, Blainville) $159.00 $156.00 1.9% $127.00 $125.00 1.6% $95.50 $93.50 2.1%
TRAM 7 (Mirabel, Oka, St. Sulpice, lower St. Jerome) $185.00 $182.00 1.6% $148.00 $146.00 1.4% $111.00 $109.00 1.8%
TRAM 8 (upper St. Jerome, Valleyfield, St. Hyacinthe, Sorel) $211.00 $207.00 1.9% $169.00 $166.00 1.8% $127.00 $124.00 2.4%

STM (Montreal):

Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly CAM $66.25 $65 1.9% $36 $35 2.9%
Weekly CAM Hebdo $19.25 $19 1.3% $11 $10.75 2.3%
Six tickets $12 $11.75 2.1% $6.50 $6.25 4%
Cash fare $2.75 $2.75 No change $1.75 $1.75 No change
Tourist card (3 days) $17.00 $17.00 No change
Tourist card (1 day) $9.00 $9.00 No change

STL (Laval):

Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Intermediate fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly pass $74 $72.50 2.1% $59.00 $58.00 1.7% $44.50 $43 3.5%
Eight tickets $18 $21 -14% $12.50 $12.25 2.0%
Cash fare $2.50 $3.00 -17% (None?) $1.80 ?

Still no word from the RTL about Longueuil rates for 2008.

UPDATE (Dec. 18): Finally the RTL releases their 2008 rates. The increase is substantial, especially for reduced fare monthly passes.

Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly pass $76 $73 4.1% $45 $42 7.1%
Six tickets $15.50 $15 3.3% $9.25 $8.90 3.9%
Cash fare $3.25 $3.25 No change $2 $2 No change
| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

Family transit fares don’t make sense

St. Laurent’s Alan DeSousa wants the STM to introduce “family” fares, which would supposedly give group discounts if a household buys multiple transit passes. He says his borough offers family prices for leisure activities, and we need to get more cars off the road.

DeSousa isn’t specific about what he means by family fares. It could be discounts (or tax rebates) when buying monthly passes, or it could be discounts when travelling as a group.

Here’s the thing with the latter option:

  • Leisure activities tend to be done as families, because families spend their leisure time together. Public transit tends to be the opposite: Everyone headed in different directions at different times. How often do you board a bus with two or more members of your immediate family at the same time?
  • Even the most fervent public transit supporters will concede that family activities will almost always require use of a car, if only to transport all the food, diapers and other supplies they need to take with them.
  • How do you enforce such a thing? I’ve gone to Ottawa and travelled on their “family” fare with a female friend, pretending she was my wife. The drivers there don’t care, it’s not like they’re going to ask for a marriage certificate. So it really comes down to a group discount, usually for two adults and up to two or three children. And why should group discounts be limited to families?
  • Families travelling together is hardly the most pressing need environmentally. In fact, environmental policies encourage carpooling. What we need to get off the roads are people who drive alone to work during rush-hour, not the family carload heading to the amusement park.

The other option (giving families discounts for buying monthly passes) has its own problems:

  • We already get a federal tax break for buying transit passes.
  • Once again: Why is this treated differently from any other form of group discount? Certainly others, like offering a discount for someone who buys a transit pass for 12 consecutive months, would be more popular and more successful.
  • It increases paperwork, which benefits accountants and civil servants more than it does anyone else. This is especially true if families have to prove relationships before they can get the discount.
  • Unless more people start buying passes as a result, this would decrease revenue for the STM, requiring either more cash from the city, reduced services or higher fares for everyone else.
  • There’s no direct link between number of people in a household and ability to pay for public transit. There are plenty of poor people without families (indeed, for many of them that tends to be why they’re poor in the first place), and plenty of rich people with families (where mommy and daddy both have their cars and drive them to work, coming up with some flimsy excuse why they can’t take public transit).

It’s a gimmick, and I doubt it’s going to do anything to help public transit. Instead, more buses, lower fares and more investment in things like reserved bus lanes will bring people out of their cars. It’s boring, but it works.

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

Transit fares going up (but down in Laval)

$TM

It’s about to hit December, which means it’s that time of year when the STM announces its fare increases for the coming year. It’s required to give 30 days notice of fare increases, so that’s why it happens now.

The skinny:

  Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly CAM $66.25 $65 1.9% $36 $35 2.9%
Weekly CAM Hebdo $19.25 $19 1.3% $11 $10.75 2.3%
Six tickets $12 $11.75 2.1% $6.50 $6.25 4%
Cash fare $2.75 $2.75 No change $1.75 $1.75 No change
Tourist card (3 days) $17.00 $17.00 No change      
Tourist card (1 day) $9.00 $9.00 No change      

The STM argues that these fare increases are modest (average of 1.9%, and lower than last year’s increases), and combined with a hefty increase in the amount Montreal is giving the corporation will help pay for increased capital expenditures and better services, some of which have already been announced or implemented. These include:

  • Running six trains all day on the Blue Line
  • Replacing 40-year-old train cars (currenty operating on the green line) with new ones
  • Increased metro service (26%), especially before and after rush hour on the green, orange and blue lines
  • Increased bus service on its 30 most popular lines, including the 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu, 18 Beaubien and 24 Sherbrooke
  • Longer service hours for rush-hour expresses 470 Pierrefonds and 194 Rivière-des-Prairies (running both during the day between rush hours), and running the 12 Île-des-Soeurs on Sundays.
  • General budget expenses to cope with a 2% increase in ridership.

Laval cheapens up

  Adult fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase Reduced fare
(Jan. 1, 2008)		 Now Increase
Monthly pass $74 $72.50 2.1% ? $43.00 ?
Eight tickets $18 $21 -14% ? $12.25 ?
Cash fare $2.50 $3.00 -17% ? $1.80 ?

The Laval transit corporation, meanwhile, is going in the opposite direction, reducing its single-use fares. A single fare will now be $2.50 instead of $3. There will also be cute little incentives like increasing the age at which children can travel freely from 5 to 11 on weekends and holidays.

The decrease makes sense, especially because now it’s cheaper to take the metro from Montmorency to downtown Montreal ($2.75) than it is to take an STL bus down the street ($3). The change will reverse that. (The fact that neither STL nor STM tickets are valid at the Laval metro stations is still a huge annoyance though.)

On the other hand, the price of a monthly pass is going up, from $72.50 to $74. This changes the math of how often you have to use transit for the monthly pass to be worth your purchase. Right now, if you use public transit fewer than 28 times a month (14 round trips), it’s better off to get tickets. That number goes up to 33 (16.5 round trips). So in the unlikely event that you travel by bus exactly 14, 15 or 16 times a month, you’re now better off getting tickets than passes.

The STL is also dramatically reducing fares on smog days to just $1, if a smog warning is in effect as of 3pm. That sounds great and all, but it takes effect during the evening rush hour, when people either have their cars at work with them or they don’t. It will also require some system to inform travellers (and drivers) when the reduction takes place.

Still no word from the AMT, which controls prices of regional transit passes, on what its 2008 rates will be.

| Montreal, Public transit

Better metro service in exchange for higher fares

Interesting how just after we hear the news that metros will run more frequently in the hours around rush hour (though not during rush hour when they run pretty well at capacity), we get the first hints that transit fares may go up again for the 11th straight year.

In 1997-1998, the last time fees didn’t go up, a regular monthly pass was $45 ($19 for reduced fare) and a single adult fare was $1.85. That puts today’s prices into perspective.

The problem, of course, doesn’t lie with the transit authority (or its 90% unionized workforce) but with the government, which is forcing the users of public transit to fund its operation to an increasing extent. In 1990, users were funding 42.5% of the STM’s revenues, now that number is above 50% (though not as high as the 58% of 2001).

How much the government should be funding public transit operations is a matter of personal opinion. If you think we should be paying all the basic operating costs, expect to pay $130 a month on transit passes, or up to $400 a month if you live in the suburbs. If you think it should be free, well you’re not going to be happy with this news.