HSR has struggled for years with virtually no growth, but could look down the highway to the transit innovations of another older Ontario city that is making giant strides. By utilizing multiple methods Kingston has jumped its bus ridership by 80 percent in just five years.
It began in 2013 when Kingston began providing [video] free transit passes to grade nine students and then taking a bus to each high school to provide instructions on how to use it, how to load bikes on it, the routes and other features. The next year’s grade nine class got the same transit education and free passes.
Now after four years all secondary students have free passes for the full school year. In Hamilton, elementary and secondary students are charged $88 a month for a bus pass. In Kingston children under 14 years of age ride free. A similar step has also been adopted in Toronto and is being kicked around by Hamilton council but not yet approved.
Cash fares are the same as the HSR’s at $3.00, but monthly passes are $25 less in Kingston. It also offers multiple options including weekly passes, and five-day passes. Like Hamilton, there is a half-price monthly pass for low income riders, but since the full rate is much lower so is the half-price one.
In Kingston a “transit employment program” gives newly hired eligible workers for either full-time or part-time work a free two month bus pass. Free transit is now also being provided to “those who are looking for work through a recognized employment service program.”
Like in Hamilton, college and university students get transit passes as part of their tuition. But in Kingston there’s a youth rate for those 15 to 24 that cuts the monthly fare by $20 to encourage young people to make transit a permanent habit. Seniors in Kingston pay the same reduced rate as youth, higher than in Hamilton.
Employers can obtain lower fares for their workers, with the incentive that the more employees sign up the lower their fares. Over fifty employers are part of this program. The publicity for it explains that “the average cost of operating a car in Canada is approximately $9,712 per year or 68 cents per kilometre whereas it costs $786 per year for Kingston Transit.”
Also starting in 2013, Kingston introduced express buses and quickly expanded them to four major cross city routes running every day of the week mainly at 15 minute intervals or more frequently. They are connected to a half-dozen free park-and-ride facilities on the outskirts of the city that include recreation centres, MTO lots, and one shared with a gospel temple.
The HSR has had an express service between Eastgate and McMaster since the mid-1980s. It is one of its most used services, but it still only runs on weekdays and shuts down after 7 pm. More recently an express bus has been added between downtown and the airport although it only runs every half hour through the middle of the day and also shuts down for evenings and weekends.
Smaller cities usually have a much harder time attracting transit users and Kingston has less than a quarter of Hamilton’s population, but it has already achieved a higher number of annual rides per person. The aggressive expansion program only started in 2013 and within three years the use of buses by commuters had jumped by a third.
At the heart of Kingston’s success is a commitment by their city council to offer significantly more financial support to transit. The funding formula used in Hamilton city council demands that half the transit budget come from fare collections, while in Kingston it is less than a third.
That shows up in lower fares in Kingston, and in fewer fare hikes. Kingston’s official policy is a fare increase every three years, while HSR fares are pushed up every year. All of this adds up to the fastest growing transit ridership in Ontario. That’s a much different picture than in Hamilton which last year attracted fewer riders than in 2014.