This past weekend Toronto's spectacularly unsuccessful airport train, UPX, offered free rides, in the hopes of familiarizing people with the service and converting them into paying customers. The weekend certainly taught us a few things, starting with the fact that Torontonians, and Canadians generally, love stuff that they don't have to pay for. Despite blisteringly cold temperatures -- it was supposedly the coldest Valentine's Day since the late 19th century -- about 10,000 people showed up for a free ride on Saturday, which is more than four times the normal daily ridership.
That 10,000 figure is significant for a more important reason, however. That ridership, spread over the full day, led to wait times of as much as an hour as people lined up to board the trains. Yet the minimum hourly ridership that's deemed necessary to justify building a subway in Toronto is usually seen as about 15,000. What this means is that the growing clamor to rescue UPX by making it a part of the regular transit network is completely misguided. The service isn't remotely up to the task, and can't be easily expanded either.
The catalog of errors made in developing UPX is a long one. First of all, the trains are diesel-powered: who in the world does that any more? Conversion to electric traction is planned, but not for several years. Second, they're very short: three cars maximum, and the platforms are built exactly to that length, so there's no scope for yoking trains together to increase capacity.
Third, instead of using the existing platforms at the three stations UPX serves within the city, the decision was taken to raise a portion of those platforms, and to install platform-edge doors. There's a case to be made for the higher platforms: passengers boarding the existing passenger trains at the same stations have to climb a couple of steps because the platforms are very low. That would be awkward for people toting luggage to the airport, adding to dwell times and possibly causing delays. However, the platform-edge doors look like little more than an affectation. At the Union Station terminal, the dedicated UPX platform is far wider than the shockingly narrow strips that thousands of commuters are expected to use every day, so the safety concerns seem to be quite literally misplaced.
Of course, none of these factors explains the dismal ridership statistics. You can put that down to the exorbitant price: C$ 27.50 one way, although frequent travellers get a break on that. Thanks to the two largely superfluous intermediate stops, the trip isn't especially fast (and belies the "express" designation in the name UPX), and for two people travelling together, a taxi to or from downtown costs no more, and delivers you to exactly where you want to go. By all accounts UPX is a pleasant ride -- especially as you may well have the train almost to yourself -- but it's just not worth the price they're asking.
Hence the suggestion that it be integrated into the existing transit system, ideally at the same fare (about $3 per ride) as the buses and subways. But that suggestion runs smack into the design flaws listed above. At that price the trains would be full to bursting, which would quickly drive away the air passengers for whom UPX was supposedly designed, yet would -- because the capacity of UPX is so limited -- do very little to ease Toronto's chronic traffic problems.
If not regular transit fares, then, what can be done? -- because it's clear things can't go on like this. Setting fares at the premium levels charged by the existing GO regional commuter services would probably be a good start: those fares are much lower than the existing UPX tariff and would attract more commuters to the service while leaving space for the air passengers. Longer term, look for UPX to be integrated into the "RER" service that's planned for the next decade or so -- much the same thing, in fact, as will be happening to London's Heathrow Express when the Crossrail project is completed.
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