Integrating fares across GTHA is easily the biggest Toronto transit issue we aren’t talking about

Nationalpost.com
April 21, 2016
By Chris Selley

Even before it launched, the Union Pearson Express (UPX) was raising questions about how much faith we should put in Metrolinx, the ostensibly arm’s-length provincial body overseeing many billions worth of transit projects in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). Before UPX fares were halved in February, the airport-to-downtown link was attracting half of its 12-month ridership targets, which were in turn well short of the break-even point.

It was exactly what most people, expert and non-expert, had predicted. Now, thanks to documents released to media after a two-year battle, we know Metrolinx had several expert studies confirming it was simply too expensive. In future, taxpayers may be on the hook for subsidizing this service, which was designed specifically for people who can regularly afford airline tickets.

It is a famous cock-up, but to be fair to Metrolinx staff, everyone knows it’s not just on them. Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca, the guy ostensibly at the other end of the arm, took it upon himself to announce the fare cut. We all know transit planning is filthy with politics. But that doesn’t make it any less of a problem.

In June, Metrolinx will issue recommendations on a vastly more complex costing exercise: integrating public transit fares across the entire GTHA. In the near future there will be no more cash, tokens, Metropasses, paper transfers or stickers. One charge to your Presto card will take you from Hamilton east to Durham and north to York, with Toronto and the TTC in the middle.

It is an unambiguously good idea. “We know that the fare structure is creating barriers for people,” says Leslie Woo, Metrolinx’s chief planning officer. “Trying to get to something that’s more simple and consistent across the region is the key objective.”

But “the devil,” as TTC chairman Josh Colle says, “is in the details.” What will that single fare look like? How will it be calculated? How will each GTHA transit agency’s fare structures mesh with the others? This is easily the biggest Toronto transit issue we aren’t talking about, and the politics of it makes UPX look like a day at the beach.

Metrolinx staff are considering three basic concepts; two are fraught with peril. One would carve up the GTHA into zones, as in London and many other cities: cross into a new zone, pay more. Another would differentiate fares by the type of ride. Fares for “rapid transit” (subway and LRTs) would increase by distance for “medium” journeys (seven to 15 kilometres) and “long” journeys (more than 15 km), while “local” transit options (buses and streetcars) would stay at a flat fare.

To policy wonks, either might sound reasonable: if you’re willing to make a journey by slow bus instead of fast train, shouldn’t you get a discount? But in the real world, it’s a bomb ready to go off in politicians’ faces. In Toronto specifically, it would mean the end of nearly half a century of flat-fare TTC service.

“This opens a rat’s nest of issues,” says transit advocate Steve Munro. “The system was designed around a flat fare where once you get to the point where you need more capacity, you change the mode.”

So imagine telling residents along Eglinton Avenue that the years of construction hell they’re enduring to replace buses with an LRT will come with a fare hike. Or imagine telling Scarborough residents that their hard-won subway will come with a 50 per cent fare increase to get downtown. The Kennedy-to-Scarborough Town Centre extension would be almost a “medium” journey on its own.

“There’d be riots in the street,” says Scarborough Coun. Glenn De Baeremaeker. “You can’t do it.”

De Baeremaeker thinks the politics alone makes this a non-starter, and he might be right: Scarborough’s Liberal MPPs are nearly as heavily invested in that subway as its councillors. But it’s not inconceivable the scads of money Queen’s Park has poured into Toronto transit in recent years might come at a price.

For Colle, the issue is that “Toronto is kept financially whole.” He notes other GTHA municipalities’ transit systems are subsidized far more heavily than the TTC. Asked if he has a “line in the sand,” he says the system “can’t be punitive financially for Toronto so that other jurisdictions’ fares can be artificially low.”

Colle suggests a zone-based system might fly if all of Toronto is “Zone 1.” That could still facilitate regional transit. It’s plausible, if not necessarily fair, and there is no reason to think Metrolinx won’t recommend it. But another UPX-scale miscalculation could lead to a transit battle even more bitter than we’re used to.