Chris Selley: Presto! TTC snubs seniors, students as Uber continues slaughter of sacred Toronto cows

NationalPost.com
Dec. 17, 2015
Chris Selley

The Toronto Star shut down its online comments forever on Wednesday, which is only regrettable because that was also the day the TTC board approved major changes to the way transit-riders will pay their fares: eliminating discounts for seniors and students who pay cash, as opposed to using the Presto smart card — which all users will soon have to tap to get on any transit vehicle, and off when they exit any subway station. Daily Presto expenditures will be capped at the cost of a day pass. Weekly and monthly passes will live on Presto. That will happen by the end of 2017.

In the longer term, the TTC will consider peak and off-peak fares, and further inconvenience people determined to pay by cash. Vending machines in subway stations and on the new streetcars will dispense single-use Presto cards for cash, credit or debit. (Fare collectors, liberated from their booths, will help passengers in ways machines can’t.) Buses, however, may have no cash-receiving facility at all.

Single-use Presto cards could be available from independent retailers. You should eventually be able to tap on with a credit or debit card. London did it and civilization didn’t collapse. But this is the sort of issue on which Star commenters were at their unrelenting, multifariously negative best. The lefties would have claimed it was war on the aged and poor; the luddites would have insisted people would simply never figure it out, and chaos would forever reign; and the righties would have insisted we should just privatize transit, as if that were on the table.

On transit issues specifically, that commenter community was not an inaccurate snapshot of the crippling suspicion of change that has so long afflicted this city.

Speaking of which, and speaking of privatizing transit, Uber continued its ritual slaughter of sacred Toronto cows this week by rolling out uberHOP — a technologically enhanced jitney cab service ferrying rush-hour passengers to and from downtown and Liberty Village, Fort York, the Distillery District and City Place in private cars for $5 a passenger.

TTC staff are examining the service’s legality, which seems even more dubious than uberX’s. But at Wednesday’s meeting, commissioner Denzil Minnan-Wong informally asked TTC CEO Andy Byford to consider any potential benefits of uberHOP, and Byford signalled he would.

That’s good news. UberHOP may or may not represent a significant threat to the TTC’s bottom line, but by rights the TTC should view it as something more than simply a threat. It could view it as an incentive to get better. It could view it as a potential partner: Wheel-Trans contracts business out to cabs to meet demand. Why couldn’t another private operator meet demand for the ambulatory when demand doesn’t indicate a city bus?

At the very least, as with the taxi industry, the TTC should use uberHOP as an opportunity for self-examination: Why are these long-established and unthreatened business models suddenly so vulnerable to a bunch of scofflaws driving Honda Civics? Why are they so reliant on their monopolies for their continued success?

That said, the most intense self-examination should come from the TTC’s political overseers. Considering the hyper-political fashion in which Toronto builds public transit, it should come as no surprise that certain areas of the city enjoy far poorer service than what they need.

We have one very expensive subway line running vastly under capacity along Sheppard Avenue, because politicians wanted it. We’re about to build another into Scarborough because politicians wanted it. With a finite pool of capital, someone has to suffer as a result. UberHOP wasn’t even the first private concern to challenge the TTC’s monopoly on transit service to Liberty Village. And at the risk of sounding like a Star commenter, municipal policy still defers far too much to automobiles at the expense of jam-packed streetcars and buses — especially at rush hour. The TTC can’t fix these things by itself.

TTC staff logically advocate holding off on studying time-, distance- or zone-based fares pending a Metrolinx study on opportunities for fare integration across the GTA. They also note that Presto will give them a much more accurate and useful portrait of how people use the system and how they would like to use it: every time you tap on and off, you’ll be sending an empirical message the TTC could use to improve service.

But if a majority of city councillors continue to prioritize votes and populist bugbears over sane transit policy, the TTC won’t be able to do much with that information. In such a world, Torontonians might well come to appreciate uberHOP.