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rfmcdonaldJonathan Goldsbie at NOW Toronto describes a positively infuriating press conference held by Metrolinx, at which the regional transit authority blames--among other things--the general public for not understanding the pricing structure.
Metrolinx president and CEO Bruce McCuaig, board chair Robert Prichard, and UPX president Kathy Haley took questions from reporters seated opposite them at the boardroom table. It was actually a brilliant media strategy, keeping the scrum from getting more heated than it otherwise might have.
"Since we launched our service about nine months ago, we’ve learned a great deal," said Kathy Haley, beginning the most awkward presentation of her life. The president of the Union Pearson Express (UPX) had been called to Tuesday's special meeting of the Metrolinx board to answer for her project's failure to attract riders.
[. . .]
[Haley] cited four primary "impediments" to ridership: low awareness of the service; deeply entrenched travel habits that are difficult to change; people having trouble locating the stations; and finally, grudgingly, "perceptions about our price."
None of this was new or surprising. But from the meeting and the media availability that followed, we did learn some spectacular things about the way Metrolinx thinks:
• It's not that the price was too high but that the public was too clueless to get that it wasn't. Haley: "I think there’s a lack of awareness about the price. We did find out that people were not aware of our Presto price discounts, of our concession discounts. There just seemed to be, in all of the research, there seemed to be a lack of awareness about what the price was. For the business community and the people that use it, they were very aware of it. They did not view it as expensive. But some of the local public did. And people that weren’t aware of the service had perceptions from other sources, for some reason, that it was higher than what it really was."
