(The following story by Ian Robertson appeared on the Toronto Sun website on May 23.)
TORONTO — GO Transit has come a long way since its first trains ran 40 years ago today in an experiment to ease traffic on increasingly clogged roads.
The Lakeshore test runs came three years before buses, but succeeded far faster than a speeding locomotive.
With 2 million passengers a year in those early days, to 50 million annually in this millennium, chairman Peter Smith said that without GO, “you would need three QEWs and four DVPs” to handle the traffic.
The Union Station central terminus “handles more passengers per day than Pearson Airport,” Smith said.
GO has had its ups and downs, but with expansion under way and ridership up 3% — despite a 10% fall in rail performance compared to last spring — he said that “it has been a great success story.
“This is an exciting time,” he said. With longer freeway delays, higher fuel costs and renewed environmental concerns, “we’ve entered a period of transit culture.”
After a 1965 survey in the five regions, studies of other systems and a financial snub from Ottawa, Tory Premier John Robarts announced the Department of Highways Commuter Service.
Two years later, after several proposed names — including The Blue Goose for Tory blue — the first green-and-white GO for Government of Ontario “trainset” headed downtown from Oakville and Pickering.
Buses and more trains came later, GO’s first managing director Bill Howard said.
“We didn’t know if we could lure people out of their autos,” the retiree said from Florida. In addition to reliable trains, “we had to build parking lots; that was the big demand.”
There were many skeptics, said Howard, 82, whose staff grew from 11 to today’s 1,200. “But right from the get-go, we had a schedule for introducing more service.”
In The Toronto Telegram that first day, Michael Popovich reported Ontario’s new single-level GO commuter trains “were such a smash hit on their inauguration runs today that they had customers standing in the aisles.”
While passengers socialized in a way most couldn’t on the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway, others relaxed to piped-in music while looking from windows at a passing show of homes, cars at stoplights and sunlight dancing on Lake Ontario.
There was a bonus. All rides were free that day. As an incentive to motorists, parking at GO lots mostly outside Toronto was — and still is — free for commuters.
The lineup was well worth it, said Marilyn Ruston, who shaved her downtown trip from Mimico from 90 minutes by bus to 12 minutes by GO.
Then as now, CN provides train crews and leases the tracks, except on the Milton line, where crews and tracks are Canadian Pacific.
Introduced for $24 million, GO got into full swing by September 1967 with 50 trains a day to 16 stations from Hamilton to Pickering. A new six-lane freeway cost $4-to-$6-million a mile then.
More than 1 billion passengers have used GO. That milestone, at a rate of more than 48.5 million riders a year in an 8,000-square-km area with a population of more than 5 million, was passed last fall.
Considered one of North America’s premier and safest systems, coaches rarely derailed, but service has been interrupted by freight trains jumping tracks and by frozen switches in winter, trouble on the railway lines, plus accidental deaths and suicide.
“We are not masters of our own destiny,” Smith said. CN and CP have mandates to haul freight first “and you have to book rail space to use the train.”
GO has been copied for systems across the continent, including one in Florida for which Howard worked for two years after retirement.
A Crown agency in 1974, GO’s official name is the Greater Toronto Transit Authority (GTTA).
Officials say operating shortfalls are topped up by the province, but those costs are covered up to 90% by distance-based fares, making GO “one of the best financial performances for any transit system in the world.”
Not all has been rosy, with occasional political faceoffs, but today Ontario taxpayers pay all rehabilitation and replacement capital costs, equally sharing growth and expansion capital costs with Ottawa and municipalities.
Howard said the first stations were meager, “fibreglass and glass shelters, really, plus ticket booths.”
Today, some newer stations like Oshawa and Pickering even have snack bars.
Buses were introduced with Canada’s first — and later much-copied — dial-a-buses in July 1970 using high-top vans that riders rode to the Pickering station after phoning in their addresses. Regular buses began that Sept. 8.
They are a key service, but the big double-decker rail cars introduced 29 years ago get the most attention.
Each day, 10 coach trains leave Union Station on seven lines. Some stop at all stations, others are expresses to bigger depots.
Runs and timetables have changed many times, including cutbacks caused by a declining economy in the early 1990s. But officials have restored and extended some systems, which keep changing to keep up with urban sprawl.
Trains and buses link up with all municipal transit systems in the GTA and many municipalities discount fares for GO ticket-holders.
Most of the 165,000 daily riders ride the 181 trains, 30,000 more use the 305 GO buses. On many routes, buses meet the trains to carry passengers beyond the rails