When the Spadina subway extension opened just over a year ago, it was celebrated as a victory for York University students who would now have a stop on campus and residents of the 905 who, for the first time, saw subway stops constructed outside Toronto’s city borders, in Vaughan.

So it’s especially odd to realize, now, that the expensive transit renovation is turning out to make commuting longer and more expensive for lots of students who are also 905 residents.

See, beginning this month, York Region’s Viva buses and GO Transit’s regional buses will no longer make trips directly into the York University campus, as they have for years. Instead, they’ll now conclude their trips at new stops on the subway line at Pioneer Village in the case of Viva and Highway 407 in the case of GO. As provincial NDP transit critic Jessica Bell wrote in an op-ed in the Star this weekend, those stops are 1.5 kilometres and 3.8 kilometres from York University.

Students who used to take the bus right to class will now have to either walk 20 to 40 minutes or pay an additional TTC fare to transfer to the subway.

What do you think?

This is, understandably, annoying and enraging for many of the students involved. It is also, sadly, not all that surprising.

Because something our governments — municipal and provincial — have been absolutely terrible at when they have to work together to provide overlapping services is considering how they will affect the experience of the person using those services. Or perhaps they do consider it, and have decided they do not care to prioritize it. It’s hard to know which of those options reflects worse on our government agencies.

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During one of the last speeches he delivered directly to the public as Toronto’s city manager in 2017, at the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, Peter Wallace called out the need to erase the “nonsensical” divisions between services delivered by different governments across jurisdictional and municipal borders, and instead look at them from a “client perspective.”

“Somebody from Main and Danforth,” he said, imagining a commuter heading downtown, “has a choice. They can take the subway down, and the Bay bus down, or they can hop on the GO Train. There is a massive price differential for what is essentially the same public good. That makes no sense at all.”

If that person is arriving at Main and Danforth on a streetcar, the price differential gets even higher. They can transfer to the subway free, using a transfer, or they can pay an additional $3.52 (or more, if they aren't using Presto) to transfer to a GO train

As Wallace says, that makes no sense if you look at it from the perspective of the commuter.

There are reasons — GO has its own pricing strategy and funding from the province, the TTC has a separate strategy and funding almost exclusively from the city and riders, and each is serving its own goals with the resources available to it. But lost is the main goal of moving people in the best, easiest way possible, especially as Wallace noted, when there’s a larger stated public policy goal of encouraging people to take public transit.

He was speaking hopefully then about “fare integration” that was supposed to apply some consistent and fair pricing across municipal and transit agency borders.

That long-heralded fare integration was also an assumed precondition of the changes at York University. If it makes some sense, given York University’s plans, to decrease the bus congestion in areas of the campus they’d like to pedestrianize, and if it makes some sense to arrange a network that uses the capacity of the new subway extension by having riders transfer, it makes more sense that achieving those goals shouldn’t result in high new costs for the students and other commuters involved.

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“We’re not there yet,” Wallace said, 14 months ago, about fare integration. A change of provincial government and a set of municipal elections later, we’re still not there, and it’s hard to say if we appear to be any closer.

In the meantime, we’re left with the bizarre conclusion that for many York University students, the opening of a new subway stop to serve their campus has actually made their commute to it worse.

That’s nonsense, of course, as Wallace might have said. Of course it is. Sometimes looking at these things, you think, if it wasn’t for nonsense, we wouldn’t have no sense at all.

Correction — January 8, 2019: This column was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Brampton Transit is leaving York University. In fact, it has no plans to stop servicing the campus at this time. As well, it stated that a person will pay an additional $5 or so to transfer to a GO train. In fact, an adult Presto user transferring from the TTC to use GO will only pay an additional $3.52.

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