Transit pass fees for disabled get 16.4% hike

User tells commission ‘shame on you’ over big jump in community pass cost

A big hike in prices for transit passes used by people dependent on provincial disability payments is particularly unfair because it hurts people who get some of OC Transpo’s worst service, the city’s transit commission heard Wednesday.

The commission approved a 16.4-per-cent price increase for “community passes,” as they’re called, in voting for OC Transpo’s and Para Transpo’s 2014 budget.

Overall, transit fares are going up an average of 1.9 per cent next July, but the community passes are a big outlier. Paper tickets — which many poor people buy a few at a time — are also getting 3.3-per-cent more expensive as the city tries to push people to give them up in favour of new Presto fare cards. Those are cheaper to use but you have to load at least $10 onto them in each transaction, which can be hard to pull together if you’re barely scraping by.

“Sixteen- point- four per cent,” said Kevin Kinsella, who uses a wheelchair, addressing the commission before it voted. “Sixteen-point-four per cent. You want to raise the price of the community pass 16.4 per cent and you don’t see that as sort of outrageous? It’s eight times the rate of inflation. ... Shame on you. Shame on you all.”

The commission’s decision raises the price of a pass from $35 to $40.75 and is the second big hike in two years, as the transit commission pursues a policy goal of making community passes the same price as passes for seniors. The cost of the community pass has climbed 27.3 per cent in two years.

The price hike is particularly galling because of the poor standard of service on Para Transpo, said Stephen St. Denis, who also uses a wheelchair. Para Transpo refused 80,000 attempts to book rides last year, he and several other speakers told the commission. That’s one attempt in 12.

“Can you imagine the public outcry if one in 12 residents didn’t get garbage collection or a response to an emergency call?” St. Denis asked.

The service can’t be expected to carry absolutely everyone at all times — even OC Transpo’s regular buses are sometimes too full to take passengers — but increasing its funding to target a “refusal rate” of five per cent seems like a reasonable compromise, he said.

The simple fact is that Para Transpo rations service. Its $32-million budget, a small part of the city’s $483-million total spending on transit, is not enough to meet demand. The city’s general manager of transit, John Manconi, told commissioners that “a difficult discussion” is coming about Para Transpo, and they’re going to have to make decisions about service standards, who should be eligible for Para Transpo, and what they’re willing to pay.

But they did not have that discussion on Wednesday. Nor did they do anything more than talk about the fact that OC Transpo is taking on more money in taxes paid by homeowners in new communities but hasn’t increased its total service levels since it cut service markedly in 2011 — only shuffled around the same number of vehicles and drivers to cover a larger and more populous city.

The agency believes that isn’t a factor in OC Transpo’s continually sliding ridership figures, which the agency forecasts will stabilize next year. The decline from a peak ridership of 103.9 million in a year to 98.4 million in its most recent 12-month period will reverse itself in 2014, supposedly, with an uptick to 98.8 million rides.

“It’s the best estimate we have in terms of confidence level,” Manconi promised.

City councillors chose earlier this year to limit their own ability to change the budget they oversee by requiring any spending increase to be matched with a spending cut somewhere else, and commission chair Diane Deans warned the budget is the wrong place to make policy changes. Citizen commissioner Blair Crew filed a formal inquiry with the city’s transit staff to ask what would happen to OC Transpo’s budget if they limited the hike in the price of community passes to take it to just $36.15, with an answer due by the time city council votes on the whole city budget Nov. 27.