This can't be right. How can one person steal 20% of the coins going through all the machines? Have they miscalculated the amount he took versus one year rather than 13 years?
> maintain and fix the 68 ticket machines of Edmonton’s LRT
So it’s not like the total number of machines is that crazy either.
That said, https://edmontonsun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-edmonton-t... gives much higher numbers operating costs and fare revenues.
> In a report released Tuesday, Wiun revealed the cost to operate Edmonton Transit went from $105 million a year in 2000 to $327 million last year.
Maybe a lot of the revenue comes from transit passes and/or card payments and the 20% are supposed to represent only tickets sold for cash?
Edit: Just saw the year, so you'd have to adjust that for inflation again too, but credit cards likely weren't a thing for transit passes.
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.
Also, with 68 fare machines in the city in 1978, how many repairmen do you really need?
Going to unmanned and paying someone a premium to rapidly respond and fix machines 24/7 would be a massive cost reduction.
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...