Sunday, February 20, 2011

Event Ticket Transit Fee

One thing that I would like to see is Transit fee applied to each and every single ticket for events at large stadiums, similar to Edmonton's U-Pass.  The U-Pass is a deal that was struck between the city and its Universities, and charges every student $110 for a whole semester.  If the U-Pass did not exist students would have to pay $360 for the whole semester, this is a 70% savings.  The U-Pass is charged to every student regardless of whether they actually use the transit, and has limited scenarios in which it can be opted out.  This is great since the majority of students have limited funds, and provides unlimited access to the whole city at a discounted rate.  The U-Pass also serves as an encouragement for those that would normally drive to take transit since they are paying for it anyways.

This idea can be applied to hockey/football/baseball games, concerts, or any large scale event that occurs.  The Rexall place arena in Edmonton has a capacity of 16,839 seats.  The University of Alberta has 35,000 students which allows a 70% reduction in price.  At the same scale, 16,839 patrons for a hockey game would see a 33% savings in a transit round trip from $5.70 to $3.78.  If a fee of $3.78 was applied to every ticket for all of the Oilers games in one season alone, the transit system would see a surplus of $2,800,000.  This is only the money from hockey tickets, however according to The Edmonton Journal a total 322,114 tickets were sold in 2010 for concerts.  This would have provided an additional $1,200,000 for a total of $4,000,000 per annum.  According to the City of Edmonton the public transit budget is $155,000,000.  

The revenue from a transit fee from events at Rexall Place would make up 2.5% of the total budget.  This money could be used to expand transit to new areas, to the airport, for late-night service, and for LRT expansion.  You could also expand this to the Shaw Conference Center, Edmonton Expo Center, Stadium, and Telus field with 5,000 [330,230], 24,000 (2500), 60,000 (>20) and 10,000 (>47) capacities, [attendance], (events) respectively.

You could even go further and apply this to office buildings with hundreds of employees. What if you could apply this on a city scale?

The majority of patrons attending an event at Rexall place or the stadium use transit anyways.  The transit fee would allow the majority of event attendees to get their cheaper, and would also increase transit revenue at the same time.  The ticket transit fee would also encourage those that don't usually choose transit as their main mode of commuting, to take transit.

No comments:

Post a Comment