As to a couple of your points: Time Transfers are an idea whose time has come, and the TTC is testing them out on the St. Clair route. We should all nudge them to make this system wide. One thing it _could_ do is save money in transfer production (one transfer for the whole city), and could help cut down on illegal use of older transfers to get a free ride on the bus.

And eventually, the TTC should adopt a smart card system. Given the particulars of the TTC, it should probably be a swipe-on, swipe-off affair, where your card is charged $X for every hour on the system, up to a daily maximum, after which point your card would be a day pass.

A big problem is the totally underpopulated vehicles away from rush hours. We could try something like making every two tickets – there and back – be a day pass, so that people are encouraged to keep on taking the bus all day, not just the trip to work, because all the rest is free.
Change the crazy, subjective system of transfers to a fixed time ticket, two or three hours, so people could make a round trip, including some shopping or whatever and return home on one fare.
My favourite: a turnstile lottery. At random times someone pushes through, the gong sounds, and a pile of loonies spills into their lap. Make the system fun.
A bar car on the subway. Make it a happier system – within limits.

But back to transit, I don’t think the argument that just because it failed in the past it’s doomed to fail in the future is a very strong one.

You also say that the benefits of transit are primarily social, and I have a big problem with someone else deciding what’s best for me, especially when lumping everyone together and assuming the same things are best for all people. I don’t, for example, think there’s anything wrong with cars or with people driving. We just need better roads (and better cars), but the government doesn’t seem to be stepping up (on either account).

As this debate gets closer to first principles, I’m starting to see that we’re ultimately doomed to disagree. But I’m enjoying the discourse nonetheless.

There have been experiments in privatization of municipal transit agencies before, in the United Kingdom, and the companies were unable to find a model that could work without government subsidy, or provide a useful service. Instead, what happened was that there were so many agencies competing for rush hour service that there was a lot of capacity but very little profit, and nobody wanted to take up the task of unprofitable late night services, so service wasn’t provided.

So I have to say that I’m quite skeptical of that private enterprise could be innovative enough to find a whole new market reason for transit to exist here in North America where transit is at an even further disadvantage against the car. Transit is something that, if we want it, we’re simply just going to have to pay for, just like sidewalks.

But I can’t say I completely disagree with Nunc. Sure, if a business were to step in and run transit the way it’s running now, it probably wouldn’t work. It’s an outdated model. What we need is someone to step in and completely rethink transit: what it does, what it should do, how it runs, everything. And the only way to achieve that, in my mind, is to privatize.

It won’t happen quickly, or maybe even smoothly, but I think change for the better is possible and don’t think keeping it public is the answer.

But in making my point about Toronto’s farebox recovery being higher than New York, I was pointing out to Nunc why privatization isn’t the solution — at least, not in terms of selling the whole thing off and expecting some private business to provide some innovative service without subsidy. No business would do that, because it’s a fallacy to suggest that public transit doesn’t have competition. It does: it’s called the private automobile. And that’s been kicking public transit’s ass up and down the continent since the end of the Second World War. What we have left is being run not as a business, but as a means of augmenting the capacity of our road networks, and to provide mobility for those who do not have access to cars.

To clarify: there WERE plenty of additional sales. But the added revenues did not keep up with the additional costs of ridership, so the TTC definitely lost money on the deal. Riders won, though, and that’s the important thing.