Fares Not Paid To Translink...The Irrelevant Show.

It'sAllThePoor's
FaultVille


Stephen Rees, perhaps the most thoughtful (and thorough) transit blogger in Lotusland makes the case that, in the big scheme of things, that all this fuss about dollars lost to poor people getting on the bus for free really means nothing in the grand scheme of things for Translink:

Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers is making a big fuss about the number of times CMBC bus drivers push the button which records “fare not paid”. He thinks that the loss of fare revenue is such a big issue that it justifies voting NO in the upcoming referendum. You can’t trust Translink, he says.

I thought it might be helpful to actually work out what the size of the problem might be – something that Travis Lupick has a shot at in the article I linked to above but fails to make clear. The Average Fare on Translink was $1.86 in 2012 (Source: Translink) and the size of the business (according to Lupick’s article) $1.41 billion. 2,762,363 button pushes multiplied by $1.86 is a revenue loss of $5,137,995.10. It looks like a big number but it is 0.36% of the amount needed to cover Translink’s expenses...


Of course, there is another thing to consider here.

Which is the fact that when the screamers and the usual suspects started started making a similar cynical/diversionary fuss about this fare evasion business once before we soon thereafter got that man-of-many-hats-assisted $200 million dollar fare gate monstrosity foisted on us that will never, ever pay for itself.




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Mr. Rees' also links to an excellent blogpost from the Exile that makes it very clear that the good Mr. Bateman was once for transit expansion before he was against it....And, just for the record, another blogger once also pointed out that the good Mr. Bateman also laid down a little of the astroturf that helped make it possible for the BC Liberal government to pay for that ice bomb bridge that hardly cost taxpayers anything...Gosh, the crazy mixed-up things you can learn from blogs, eh?


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