Also, forget Oslo, London, or Tokyo..........the best comparison anywhere on the planet to UPX is Denver's East rail Airport line
Says you. I've dorkily spent a bit of time following that project over last couple of years and while I makes no claims to be a transit planning expert, I disagree.
Denver is a two-in-one system that's firstly intended to fill a GO-type role on a railway corridor that has zero transit on it today, and where they're also hoping to kill a second bird with the same stone by continuing it on out past the edge of the suburbs to their shiny new airport that was built in the middle of nowhere. Imagine if GO had never been built in the 70s, Pearson had been closed in the 90s and a replacement airport had been built another 10 km further out somewhere in a field beyond Brampton, and as downlingm pointed out, the feds were coming to the table with billions in funding... I suspect there would have been serious thought in Toronto of building a two-in-one service to Brampton and then onwards to the airport.
But we're not like that. We have a 40-year-old GO line that's bursting at the seams with commuters who mostly live further away from downtown than the airport, and, thankfully, we finally have plans to expand that service. We have an airport hemmed in by existing development that needs either a dead-ended spur or an expensive diversion if you want to have a one-seat ride using the existing railway line. We have plans for a light rail service on a vaguely parallel corridor that was originally planned to open in combination with this service but got delayed. We have none of the tax options that American cities have and instead need to have much higher farebox recovery. If Denver was in our shoes, maybe they'd have built something that looks a bit like us. It's hard to know.
You seem to think it's insanity to put two transit streams on a common corridor and specialize them a bit to meet each market segment. There are arguments to be made either way on the question of two services vs one, but we're certainly not the first city to take the split service approach.
Also, as far as I know, Denver hasn't set their airport fares yet.
and compared to it, Toronto's is a huge failure.
Call me naive, but I am going to wait until Toronto's service has operated for at least one day and Denver's servie has operated for at least one full day before I write a sentence like that.
Turn it over to the TTC and let them run it on standard TTC fares. Not only would it actually do Torontonians some good but the line's revenue at 43/ride would still be MUCH higher than at $30 ticket because instead of getting 5,000 passengers a day they would get 150,000.
Notwithstanding your carefully researched analysis of the available market, you're forgetting what EnviroTO just pointed out: the infrastructure is built for a 180 passenger train every 15 minutes. You could pay people to ride it and you couldn't move 150,000 a day.
RER or Smarttrack or REX or whatever is coming, hopefully. That will move whatever number of potential commuters that are up for grabs along this corridor at a lower price.