Most of us can only wish that anyone loved us as much as Metrolinx, our provincial transit agency, loves the fabled “business traveller.” Metrolinx loves the business traveller like politicians love the middle class: loudly, extravagantly, longingly.

They love business travellers so much that they spent $456 million in public money to build a train line from Union Station to Pearson Airport to serve them. They love business travellers so much that they run 156 trains a day on those tracks, trains equipped with meal trays, in-ride magazines and large luggage racks. Trains with seating for 173 people that actually carry an average of… fewer than 15 people per trip.

That’s a lot of leg room and a lot of public money subsidizing that luxury ride. But such is the nature of Metrolinx’s love.

Oh, the business traveller plays hard to get — ridership numbers three months after the UPX train service on the airport line launched are about 30 per cent lower than they were projected to be at this point, and are down about 23 per cent from the 3,250 riders it attracted in its first week in service — but Metrolinx and its provincial government masters will not be dissuaded from their courtship.

“We are very pleased with ridership so far,” the agency’s recent report read, “and we anticipate that we will reach our daily ridership target of 5,000 riders by the end of the first full year of operation.”

Ah, 5,000 riders per day. At that point, trains will be running just three-quarters empty instead of nine-tenths empty. That’s the magic number, see! Because that’s the number that means the UPX will be on track to… continue losing money running mostly empty luxury trains for another two to four years. But at that point, it will reach its “mature ridership” of about 8,200 riders per day (trains about 30 per cent full!) and will thenceforth break even on its ongoing operating costs.

Those business travellers will never generate the revenue to recover the half-billion investment in building the thing, you understand, the executive who built the line told my colleague Tess Kalinowski last year.

But it will stop costing us all money to run those trains, at that point three to five years from now. That is, if business travellers just decide they love UPX as much as Metrolinx loves them.

And who knows? Maybe Metrolinx is right. Maybe the seduction will work out as they plan, and by 2020 they will achieve that romantic break-even relationship with business travellers.

But that will be cold comfort to the rest of us — we the spurned, who are not “business travellers,” but travellers who only want to get to on with our business, we unloved “commuters.” Because by 2020, we’ll still be a year away from the opening of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line Metrolinx is building for our use, we learned this week.

If this were a romantic comedy, we dowdy commuters would be played by Janeane Garofalo, just quietly being cool and loyal and constantly ignored because our love interest is too smitten by the glamourous leading lady.

On our way to transit spinsterhood, many of us lowly commuters would love to ride the UPX to work. Many of us, as I wrote earlier this summer, live and work near the stations, and would see our lives greatly improved by affordable access to the empty trains that are passing us by while we wait for our crowded buses to arrive.

We have the desire, and the trains are right there. What we don’t have is the one thing business travellers do: expense accounts. Because who could afford to pay $22.80 a day return — plus TTC fare to and from the station for many — to take the eight-minute ride to Union from Bloor? Or the $30.40 a day to go from Weston to downtown and back?

As an aside: UPX, even if it ran at full seated capacity, can only carry 692 people in one direction per hour. There are many bus routes in Toronto that carry more people than that. This line is never going to provide meaningful “relief” — in the terminology of our transit debates — to our overflowing subway lines during rush hour. But it’s possible to imagine it could provide some relief to a few hundred people each day who might ride it.

It may strike many of us as reasonable that Metrolinx might consider, as long as it is running these mostly-empty trains anyway, on tracks the people of Toronto (and Ontario) paid dearly to build, that the service could be opened up to commuters for a small premium over the usual TTC fare. Or at least for the equivalent of the existing GO fare (less than $10 return from Bloor to Union if you buy in bulk). What would it hurt to try it as a promotion, and see how it works, at least until the business traveller falls in love and needs the seat? Is that unreasonable?

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Alas, reason doesn’t come into it. Metrolinx has given its heart to the idea of a premium, exclusive service for airport business travellers. And the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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