Toronto Sun
TORONTO - The trains will run on time or your money back, Premier Dalton McGuinty promised Tuesday.
“I’m proposing a service guarantee — a money-back guarantee if you will,” McGuinty told about 1,300 people at a United Way fundraising lunch sponsored by the building industry.
“I’m proposing to refund (GO) passengers their full fare if the train is 20 minutes late.”
McGuinty said the government and GO Transit will be consulting with commuters before moving ahead with the plan and did not offer a target date when it might come into effect.
He estimated it would cost up to $7 million to refund fares for late riders but that the figure would likely go down if such a guarantee was hanging over GO Transit’s head.
“What we discovered with other service guarantees that we put in place, is that as soon as you put a service guarantee in there, all the people who are responsible for delivering — they find a way to deliver,” McGuinty said.
Bruce McCuaig, president and CEO of Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency that operates GO Trains, said only 362 of more than 53,000 trips are late more than 20 minutes and the system is on time 95% of the time.
How fares would be refunded has yet to be worked out.
GO would like to avoid having people forced to line up for refunds at Union Station and it’s possible the guarantee might only be available to customers who have a Presto fare smart card, McCuaig said.
“That might be one scenario,” he said. “We’re likely going to over time move to an environment where the Presto card is the fare media that the vast majority of our customers are using.
“It’s the convenient choice for them to pay for their fares.”
The Progressive Conservatives, leading McGuinty’s Liberals in the polls ahead of the Oct. 6 election, dismissed the promise as gimmicky.
“It’s 7 3/4 years since Dalton McGuinty has been in office and he’s never, ever asked the public’s opinion on anything,” PC MPP Peter Shurman said.
“Why would I even begin to believe him now?”
Asked if the TTC should have a similar policy that refunds customers for major inconveniences, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said he’d have to look at the idea but wasn’t optimistic.
“There’s a lot of delays and I’d think we’d go broke doing that,” Ford said.