This is an article I wrote for the February 7th edition of The Meliorist on the recent transit fare hikes, LA Transit's reasons for them and the Students' Union's response to them. The full interview I did with John King, Transit Manager and Wade Coombs, Manager of Transit Planning and Schedules, can be listened to by clicking here. The first person you hear answering a question is King, followed by Coombs.
- Cody
As of January 1st, LA Transit has a new fare schedule. With it, ticket and monthly pass prices have gone up for all user groups, with post-secondary students seeing the largest single increase in their monthly pass price. Students will now be paying $58.50 for a monthly pass, the same monthly price as an adult pass. Why has this happened? Were students consulted? Is the increase “an attempt to strong-arm the student body into [supporting U-pass] the next time around,” as recently suggested by Students’ Union President Kelly Kennedy? Transit Manager John King and Manager of Transit Planning and Schedules Wade Coombs answered these questions in a recent interview.
A fifty-page report entitled Development of LA Transit Fare Strategy was presented to Lethbridge’s City Council on September 24th of last year by King and Paul Gooderham of the Gooderham Group. Conducted over March and April of last year, its stated purpose is to create a fare adjustment plan which is long-term in scope, flexible enough to suit LA Transit’s changing business needs, suitable to stakeholders, and in accordance with the best practices of comparable transit authorities. According to the report, “approximately twenty Canadian transit authorities that were determined to be comparable to LA Transit” were studied, and in-depth telephone interviews with arranged with nine of them. Nine different local stakeholders groups are listed as having been consulted, with individual students and representatives from the ULSU and Lethbridge College Students’ Association included in separate groups. King clarified that this meant that Gooderham “consulted the Students’ Union of the day…Dustin Fuller was our key contact.” King also held that Gooderham didn’t consult with the current executive as he was already writing his final report by the time Kelly Kennedy’s executive was taking office.
President Kennedy disagrees with the methodology of the Gooderham report, which did fare comparisons of adult, senior and youth transit users, but not students. In his words, “we obviously found this disturbing, considering post-secondary students make up 30% of their ridership, which they recognized in the document.” To Kennedy, this means that LA Transit has provided no argument for raising student rates so dramatically. Regarding King’s contact with former ULSU President Dustin Fuller, Kennedy further claimed that Fuller did not “agree to any fee increases during that or those meetings.” Further, Kennedy stated he was unaware the Gooderham report was presented to City Council last September, and that he only became aware of it in December during a meeting with LA Transit.
The most significant business-side goal promoted by the report involved increasing LA Transit’s revenue-to-cost ratio from the current 33.7% to 45% over a five-year period. Achieving this will require further fare increases, which the report recommends happen annually so that smaller raises will be required. Coombs claimed that the reason fares rose so dramatically this year is because LA Transit had not enacted any increases for the two previous years. In his words, “this is a catch-up year for us…so what you can start looking for is an annual increase...which should be more manageable for our customers.” According to King, this particular fare increase is coming after “almost a half-million dollars in service” were added last July, including service on Columbia Drive, fifteen minute service between the university and downtown, and increased nighttime service. Further, Coombs claimed that the reason the monthly post-secondary student pass discount was ended was because LA Transit wants to place more emphasis on the semester pass, a change which will be focused on beginning in 2009.
During his December meeting with LA Transit, Kennedy proposed that the student monthly pass be raised in price by 11%, rather then the approved 20%, so that the difference between an adult and student monthly price would be maintained. King explained that adopting this proposal was not possible because the new fares had already been approved by City Council and that “we had a very short time frame to put in the new increase as it was.” King continued on to qualify that LA Transit only has one year of fares currently committed to, and that they are willing to look at Kennedy’s concerns prior to institution of the 2009 fare schedule.
Kennedy’s sharpest statement regarding the fare increases was his suggestion that the hikes may be “an attempt to strong-arm the student body into [supporting U-pass] the next time around.” When asked to clarify this statement, Kennedy said that this “is a question intuitively raised considering the unsuccessful referendum on U-pass last year.” He declined to totally commit to the idea that LA Transit is attempting to coerce students, but did illustrate his position by commenting that a U-pass system would provide LA Transit with a stable revenue source, “revenue that would be easy to forecast in the future, which they can plan around. U-pass would benefit a great number of students…but will also greatly benefit LA transit.” When asked if there was any truth to this suggestion, King responded with “none whatsoever.” King admitted that the failure of the U-pass referendum last year was a disappointment, but that after its failure “we just moved on. We still have a transit system to run…the fare increase is not related whatsoever to the U-pass…it had nothing to do with retribution.” King also admitted that LA Transit was interested in co-operating with another U-pass referendum, “but only if the students are.”
Regarding the process of consultation itself, both King and Coombs expressed disappointment that they did not have time to engage as fully as they would have liked with all of their stakeholders. Coombs stressed that the fare increases impacted all of LA Transit’s users – 70% of whom are not post-secondary students – while King stated that LA Transit has specifically “committed to discussing future fare increases with the Students’ Union of the day.” Kennedy has also committed to ensuring students are consulted about future fare increases and that he hopes “to do a presentation to city council this semester.”
