Today's weather: High = 18 Low = 13
Jackets and rain
The Vancouver 'skytrain' is basically an elevated light rail track that crisscrosses the city. The Chinese equivalent is 'qing gui' (light rail) or 'di tie' (subway) which can be found all over the place in mainland cities. Many other Asian cities have some variation of a light rail, subway, metro, etc. For example, there is the Bangkok BTS, Hong Kong MTR, Singapore MRT, and so forth.
What distinguishes the skyrain from the mass transit in Asia is that the skytrain operates on an honor system. That is to say, there are no gates or turnstiles where you process your tickets as you enter and exit skytrain stations. Fares are enforced by random sweeps of police or skytrain attendants, with low probabilities of that happening. For those inclined to evade fares, it's not very difficult to get away with it, yet it also costs Translink 5% of its revenue
Recently, Translink has decided to get rid of the honor system by installing fare gates, similar to the design of what already exists in Asia. Swipe your card in the entry gate, then swipe it out the exit gate. The fare gate system should be operational by 2013.
To this I say kudos, but more should be done. In addition to fare gates, Translink could learn a lot from the mass transit system in the cities mentioned above, and completely do away with the concept of zone boundaries.
Currently, there are 3 zones within the transit system. Vancouver is considered Zone 1, and the surrounding suburbs are Zone 2 and Zone 3 depending on how far away you are from downtown.
The fare structure for these zones is unfair for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that you're not paying on a per-distance rate. For example, if you live in Richmond and cross the river to Oakridge Mall in Vancouver, that costs a 2-zone fare but the distance is hardly 5km. On the other hand, you could criss-cross the entire city of Vancouver for a lot more than 5km and still pay one zone.
Let's learn from Asian mass transit systems and charge a fare based on DISTANCE for crying out loud. That is to say, program the fare gates so that (for example)
$1.00 gives you up to 3 skytrain stations
$1.50 gives you up to 5 stations
$2.00 gives you up to 10 stations
Someone might say it's cheap, and yes it is. The trade-off would be that the skytrain / subway systems are separated from the bus systems and that the single journey tickets can't be transferable to the buses.
Meanwhile, the buses could operate on a similar distance-based model, like the Hong Kong buses. The electronic fare would start at, say $2 at the beginning of the bus line and then decrease incrementally as the buses went along.
Another model would be a flat flare for a single bus line, but the fares would be determined by the bus line, not the zones.
In either of these model, the bus tickets would not be transferable.
Someone would then cry foul and say it's not fair to abolish the transfer system, where you can currently ride anywhere for a set time period (think it is 90 minutes).
But this could easily be resolved by the introduction of a pre-paid transit card with discounts and trasfers built into the card. Let's learn from the Shanghai metro system which already does this, and take an example
1. You enter a subway station, swipe your card at the turnstile
2. You exit the station, swipe your card at the gate
3. You transfer to a bus or a different mass transit line, within a time period of 30 minutes
4. You swipe your card to enter the other system, i.e. bus
5. You swipe your card when you get off the bus
6. Based on the time signatures of all this, the computer is able to calculate that you effectively transfered lines and then charge a fare to you card that includes the transfer
The computer could also program in discounts, etc.
When the card is nearly out of money, you then refill it up.
If you didn't have the card and relied on single journey bus or skytrain tickets (i.e. cash fares), you would end up paying more. Tourists could apply for a day pass to make things more convenient, and it would work on the same model as the card above.
It seems like they want to implement such a card system based on what I'm reading with the Translink fare gates, and with a bit of intelligent programming, the whole outdated zone system could be revamped.
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