As transit and city officials work to find solutions to curb social disorder on Calgary’s LRT line, a city councilman wants to explore a change in the way Calgarians pay to ride Calgary Transit. the city.
District 13 County. Dan McLean wants to see how much it would cost to implement turnstiles at CTrain stations outside of the downtown free fare zone, similar to the Vancouver SkyTrain.
“I would be able to just not allow people free access from time to time,” McLean told Global News. “That’s what I think would decrease some of the behaviors that we’re seeing in the transit system right now.”
A turnstile system, also known as a closed system, restricts access to the transit network until passengers pay their fare.
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Calgary currently operates on a proof of payment system, where access to the platform is not dependent on the payment of a fee. Instead, passengers must be able to provide proof that they paid when asked by officials.
It comes after Calgary Transit was forced to close interior access to four stations earlier this year due to gatherings and “social disorder.”
McLean plans to ask the city administration about the costs and implementation of a turnstile system at Tuesday’s city council meeting.
“This is something completely new and I think it will be worth the effort and the money to put this program to the test,” McLean said. “Just give some people some reassurance that they can ride the train and be a lot safer.”
McLean said a formal proposal to pilot turnstiles at some LRT stations could be tabled after he gets more information from city management.
A 2014 Calgary Transit study pegged the cost of switching to a turnstile system for the LRT system at $400 million.
Transit officials told Global News that the figure would need to be updated to account for inflation and new technology.
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But those numbers could be accurate, according to Willem Klumpenhouwer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Transit Analytics Lab at the University of Toronto.
“Putting these doors is expensive. It costs money to build them,” she said. “We have to reorganize the stations, the stations need more space.
“When you have these gates, you need to slow down operations because people have to go through this system, they have to interact with this machine.
“I don’t see a profitable argument for these doors.”
Klumpenhouwer, who studies transit performance, operations and data analytics, said he has several concerns with the turnstile system, including its practicality and its impact on city equity.
“People can pay for tickets and still do things in transit that make people uncomfortable. So it doesn’t seem like it’s a real solution to what the problem is,” she said. “(It seems) that you are only preventing the homeless and other vulnerable people from being able to use the system.”
Calgary Transit is currently working on a relaunch strategy to return service to pre-pandemic levels in an effort to attract more riders.
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In an interview Friday with Global News Morning, Mayor Jyoti Gondek said passenger safety is a priority, but access is also important for getting passengers back into the transit system.
“We have to balance that kind of focus with the fact that we’re trying to make transit accessible to everyone,” the mayor said. “It’s a pretty complex problem, but safety is the most important thing for all of us.”
Gondek said several councilmembers have been exploring possible solutions and the city has been working to ensure collaboration between partner organizations, including Calgary Transit, police and social agencies.
“To make sure that we’re not only helping people in positions of vulnerability, but also that all Calgarians who need to take the train to work and school are safe,” Gondek said.
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Reference-globalnews.ca