The scope/scale of the Edmonton LRT in 1981 was tiny...a single leg starting from downtown past our two stadiums (football & hockey) and finally to a neighborhood in the northeast. Primarily built to coincide with the 1978 Commonwealth Games.

From Wikipedia: The LRT system had an estimated 18,220 weekday passenger boardings in 1978.

If I remember correctly fares ranged somewhere between 35-65 cents in those days.

I don't know about Edmonton/Alberta, but provincial and municipal transit in British Columbia and Vancouver (which is a separate entity but likely still benefits from provincial resources) are subsidized with taxpayer money. Fare collection supposedly makes up a minority of the funding for Vancouver's transit system.

Also, with 68 fare machines in the city in 1978, how many repairmen do you really need?

Heh, every Toronto subway station is manned, you can imagine what that does to costs. Often multiple entrances = multiple booth staff.

Going to unmanned and paying someone a premium to rapidly respond and fix machines 24/7 would be a massive cost reduction.

We don't even have drivers for our trains in Vancouver.

Newer system. But technically with the upgrades in Toronto, they should be able to run driverless.

Recently discontinued Scarborough Rapid Transit could have been driverless, but still wasn’t.

Toronto’s will have both a driver and and an on-train “guard” person to look out the window to make sure nobody is trapped in the door or something. Might get eliminated tho: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/toronto-says-no-to-ttc...

The article's author probably just messed up the math somewhere. According to wikipedia, there were 18,220 daily rides in 1978 on the Edmonton LRT. If he got $900 daily and that's 20%, then there were a little under $5000 proceeds daily, so each ride would have only brought in about $0.25.

I guess most people who ride rail frequently have monthly passes, only those who use it occasionally have to buy tickets at the ticket machine. Also, isn't 25 cents a reasonable price for a single ticket, given that this was 1981?