Fare bargain triples ridership on UPX
Airport train’s popularity surges but it still likely won’t break even
Two months after the Union Pearson Express slashed its fares, ridership on the troubled airport rail link has tripled, according to a spokeswoman for the provincial transit agency.
Metrolinx spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins said Wednesday that as of the end of April, 6,500 people on average now use the service on weekdays. Including weekends, when ridership is lower, the daily average is about 6,000, she said. About 80 per cent of the riders are coming to or from Pearson International Airport, and the rest are commuters.
Before UPX lowered the cost of tickets in March, daily ridership hovered between 2,000 and 2,200 people. Immediately after the price change, that number increased to about 5,000 a day. Aikins said since then, ridership has grown at a rate of about 6 per cent a week.
“It’s very, very nice to see. I can tell you that,” Aikins said in an interview. “Staff worked very hard to get this service out on time and on budget, and they want to see it utilized.”
She added that there was “every indication” ridership will continue to grow. “We’re still a very young service, and we are still doing marketing to spread the word.”
The numbers Aikins provided were based on passenger head counts; she said they are reasonably accurate despite being less precise than the official figures reported every three months to the Metrolinx board. But even as the UPX becomes more popular, Aikins conceded that it may not be possible for the service to break even. Metrolinx originally projected UPX revenue would cover the train’s costs within three to five years when ridership was to reach 7,000 a day, but the agency is now reviewing its cost-recovery strategy with the province, Aikins said.
“It was a goal set to say we didn’t want this service to cost the taxpayers any more money, to be self-sustaining through the fare box. That was an admirable goal, but whether or not it’s . . . realistic now is difficult to say,” Aikins said.
A study commissioned by Metrolinx in 2012, but not made fully public until last month, suggests that at current fare levels, revenues could fall more than $20 million short of covering operating costs each year.
Cheri Di Novo, the Ontario NDP’s urban transportation critic, said subsidizing a train service used mainly by airport travellers isn’t fair, given that parts of the public transit system are overburdened. She called the UPX a “white elephant” and said the provincial dollars spent on it would have been better invested in new vehicles for TTC routes such as the 29 Dufferin bus, which carries 44,000 people a day, or the 504 King streetcar, which carries more than 64,000.