Report details plans for low-income transit fares

A long-awaited city report to be published on Thursday will detail plans to provide financial relief to 200,000 low-income transit riders by cutting their fares by up to one-third, the Star has learned.

The report, which will be on the agenda for the mayor’s executive committee meeting next week, will outline recommendations for implementing what is being dubbed the “Fair Pass Program.”

A partial draft of the document obtained by the Star recommends that Torontonians who make less than 15 per cent above the low-income measure be eligible. The discount recommended by city staff is 33 per cent for single adult fares, and 21 per cent for an adult monthly pass.

Any clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program or Ontario Works who already receive transportation supports wouldn’t qualify.

In an interview Wednesday, Mayor John Tory praised the Fair Pass plan as “ambitious, but necessary.”

According to the report, low-income Toronto families spend between 20 per cent and 35 per cent of their disposable income on the TTC, an amount the mayor described as “stunningly high.”

“The principle that we need to do something for this group of people who are the lowest-income people, who are having difficulty getting jobs or having difficulty getting to the kind of day-to-day things that a lot of us take for granted who may have a car or may have the means to use transit, to me that is a given,” he said.

The anticipated cost of the program, which would begin in 2018 and be implemented in three phases, is $48.2 million annually by 2021.

Funding for the first phase of the program would be “a property tax pressure,” according to the report. The second and third phases would be “subject to the availability of funding within the city’s operating budget and . . . federal and provincial costsharing contributions.”

Tory suggested the cost of the Fair Pass could also be offset by reviewing existing TTC concession fares.

The city spends $72 million a year to provide discounts to certain groups, including seniors, high school students and children12 years old and younger, but those concessions aren’t directly matched to riders’ ability to pay.

Tory said that it would be “common sense” to review the existing discounts and consider whether they should “apply as they do now to ev-Sery single person across the board regardless of their income, or should we be focusing our efforts on people with lower incomes.”

While the mayor hailed the plan, it may not go far enough for anti-poverty advocates, who for years have pushed Toronto to follow other cities like Calgary, Hamilton and Saskatoon and introduce a low-income pass.

Karin Meinzer, co-chair of the Fair Fare Coalition, argued that transit should be free for all people on social assistance, including those already eligible for provincial transportation supports.

“If you look at the money that people receive, it’s really impossible” to live on, said Meinzer, who hadn’t seen the city report. “People really don’t eat in order to stretch their budget.”

Council voted to study fare equity in 2014, and a report was expected by the end of last year.

Michael Polanyi, a member of the advisory committee for the city’s poverty reduction strategy, said that action on the issue has been delayed long enough and that the program should be rolled out next year.

Polanyi, who also hadn’t seen the report, said waiting any longer would be a “huge strike against the legitimacy and commitment to the poverty-reduction strategy.”

The mayor argued that low-income fares shouldn’t be implemented until the TTC completes the switch to the Presto fare card system, which is scheduled for late 2017.