The cost of tokens will be highest in Canada ...
Looking at page 20 of the presentation, it's already $3 in Durham, and $3.40 on YRT. So wouldn't even be the highest in the GTA, let alone Canada.
and the Metropass hasn't been cost effective for a long time...
The currently multiplier (number of tokens per cost of pass) is 50.5. When they first introduced it in 1980 it was 52. And it oscilated from 51.5 to 53 until David Miller was Mayor, and briefly dropped to about 48, before coming up to 50.5, which is still lower than it was traditionally.
And if you take the federal tax credit into account it's only 43. If you buy an annual pass instead of a monthly pass (and take the tax credit into account) it's only 39.4.
The whole point of a monthly pass is to offer a deeply discounted travel ticket, but the TTC seems to raise the Metropass cost concurrently with its average cost per trip per token. Ridiculous.
Given funding cuts to TTC from both Ontario and the federal government, how then do you suggest they fund it?
I haven't bought a Metropass since the last fare increase as I no longer broke even. Does anyone have stats to see if Metropass purchases have been decreasing?
The data is all online at
http://www1.toronto.ca/City Of Toronto/Information & Technology/Open Data/Data Sets/Assets/Files/1985-2014 Analysis of ridership.xlsx
It's the opposite actually. Pass usage (monthly & weekly, adult/post-secondary) has become an ever greater percentage of total payments. over the years, with little increase to cash, despite the lack of increase.
You can see how cash usage plummeted when they increase cash from $1.30 to $2 in 1992 (tokens went from $1.07 to $1.30).
In 2005 the multiplier for tokens changes from 52 to 49.4,and that seems to have increased pass usage, followed by the tax credit in 2006.
I haven't broken out Presto separately, but it was 0% until 2011, then 0.3%, 1.0%, 1.9% and 2.3%. Token usage has fallen correspondingly.
It's hard to argue that the passes are too expensive relative to tokens/cash when relative pass usage has increased for 19 years in a row!