Exploring fare integration across Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) is one of North America’s fastest growing regions – by 2041 the region is expected to be home to nearly ten million people. To meet this growth, the region is investing in new rapid and regional transit options to provide convenient, fast and safe mobility choices to the region. Currently, the region has multiple transit operators and fare structures. Starting in 2015, we collaborated with Metrolinx, the transportation agency for the GTHA, to explore potential policies and tools that can harmonize and integrate fares across the region.

How we helped

Our team of consultants worked with Metrolinx on the development and evaluation of potential integrated fare structures. This work included:

• Developing a strategic vision, goals and objectives that guide the evaluation of fare structures.
• Exploring global practice for fare and service integration to harness best practices for the GTHA.
• Developing an evaluation framework based on Metrolinx’s four-chapter business case framework that assesses how fare structures align with strategic goals/objectives, realize economic value, impact government finance, and the risks associated with structure delivery.
• Creating a fit for purpose transportation demand model to understand the strategic, economic, revenue, and ridership impacts of fare integration.
• Scoping five potential fare structures and conducting a full business case evaluation of their performance based on a 2031 network.

Successes and outcomes

The outcome of this study is a Preliminary Business Case for Fare Integration in the GTHA. This business case demonstrated that there is significant strategic and economic value in pursuing both short term and longer term transformational approaches to fare integration. Core short term recommendations in the business cases are currently under active development.

Image sourced from https://www.prestocard.ca.