and ODSP. Monthly passes will be reduced to $117 and single rides will
cost $2.10.
The Fair Pass is an important first step, but the Fair Fare Coalition wants
deeper discounts rolled out faster: We want $50 passes and $1 fares for low income people, and free transit for people
on social assistance.
The next phases of the Fair Pass will extend the discount to people earning
the low income measure plus 15% (about $23,000 per year) by 2021, but these
stages are not yet funded.
Want to get involved in the Fair Fare Coalition? Come to the
Transit Summit on March 3 or contact us at [email protected]. Scroll down to see photos
of our celebration.
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How We Got Here & Where We Need to Go
Statement by the Fair Fare Coalition
The 2018 Toronto city budget will roll out a plan for low income TTC fares.
The Fair Pass program is a modest first step in a long battle for a true,
affordable pass for people on low incomes. The first phase of the Fair Pass
will be available to people who receive OW and ODSP, and will cost the same as
the current seniors pass, $116, reduced from $146. The next phases of the Fair
Pass will roll out the discount to those earning less than the low income
measure plus fifteen percent by 2021, but are not yet funded. There is clearly
a long battle ahead of us to move forward. But getting the city and TTC to
provide any commitment to lower fares has been a long and difficult challenge.
This is how we got here and some comments about where we need to go.
Beginnings
In January 2010, a group of community members and people who work in
community-based agencies responded to a fare hike, alarmed at the impact of
unaffordable TTC fares on the physical health and economic, mental and
emotional well-being of people who are transit-reliant. The Fair Fare
Coalition was formed to challenge the high cost of public transit.
We set about building a movement to demand a low income transit pass and
created a network across the spectrum of Toronto’s activist communities. One
of our first projects was to find out about low income people’s experiences
with the public transit system. We constructed a mock fare box and invited
people on low incomes to deposit a comment on their concerns with the TTC. It
was circulated throughout community agencies across the city.
Cost and accessibility were primary concerns. The Fair Fare Coalition
published and circulated our findings and set about mobilizing people to
pressure the TTC, the city, and province to create low income fares. Over a
period of 4 years, we organized demonstrations — including one that featured a
memorable cardboard subway model — deputed at City Hall, lobbied politicians,
mobilized low income transit users and allies, and created educational
materials.
In 2015, Fair Fare Coalition organized a series of consultations with low
income centres and training spaces, to collectively develop a series of
demands for a low-income pass. Thank you to all of the groups and individuals
who co-created these demands with us. After two such consultation days, the
Coalition decided to call for $50 monthly passes for people on low incomes;
$1.00 single passes; and fare free transit passes for people living on social
assistance and disability pensions. Working along and as part of the larger
anti-poverty movement, the Fair Fare Coalition made these demands a key
reference point for the transit movement in the city. We also published and
circulated a report, Affordable TTC: a Ticket to the City.
The Fair Fare Coalition began collaborating with TTCriders in 2015. This
brought FFC into the developing movement for transit accessibility and
affordability. It also helped the Coalition deepen the capacities of its
members – many of whom are low income transit users – to organize, mobilize,
write and deliver deputations and generally integrate the movement for low
income passes with a broader set of demands around transit and poverty.
Most important, it brought a larger set of networks into the movement and
helped to build pressure on the city. When the city government created an
advisory committee on low income fares – signalling a plan to eventually bring
in reduced fare passes – the FFC and TTCriders participated. This coincided
with a public (but not necessarily financial) commitment by the city to apply
poverty reduction measures in a number of areas.
Winning the Fair Pass
TTCriders and the Fair Fare Coalition dramatically increased the intensity
and breadth of their campaign in 2017. Demonstrations of over 300 coincided
with deputations at City and TTC meetings, along with tactics such as
disrupting meetings, marching inside City Hall, demos and marches in
partnership with the transit workers union to Queen’s Park, and a growing
drumbeat of activism.
When the city announced its plan in December 2016 to implement a modest
Fair Pass, the FFC and TTCriders decided to advocate for the Pass. But we
continue our movement towards what people on low incomes actually NEED: free
transit for people on social assistance and $50 monthly pasess and $1 fares
for people with low incomes
Toronto remains far behind other cities and needs to catch up. Niagara,
Calgary, Vancouver, Hamilton, Edmonton, Waterloo and others already offer far
deeper discounts. Niagara offers a monthly fee of $50 to low income riders;
Calgary has a new sliding scale program where low-income riders pay between
$5.15 and $50 per month.
This 2018 Toronto city budget will finally fund the first stage of the Fair
Pass. It is a first step, and more or less, a statement of intention to do
something about the cost of transit. But it is only a first step.
Where do we go from here?
We will continue to organize and mobilize for quicker implementation of the
Fair Pass; applying it across the board to low income people and social
service recipients; full funding; a role in the implementation process; and,
deeper discounts, to include free transit for people on social assistance and
$50 monthly fares for people living on low incomes.
And there other important fights ahead. The introduction of Presto and phase
out of tokens means there are added barriers to accessing transit.
Presto cards are unaffordable — a Presto card should be free. There is a need
for a single-use fare option that will be accessible to low income people and
to the hundreds of agencies who currently distribute tokens. Agencies need to
make discounted bulk purchases of single-use transit fares, or the number of
people able to access the TTC will go down.
The Fair Fare Coalition will be thinking through our next steps with our
members and community partners in the coming weeks. If you want to get
involved with the fight for truly fair fares, please join us.
Thank you to the founding partners of the Fair Fare Coalition: Young
Parents No Fixed Address, Toronto Drop-In Network, LGBT Service Providers’
Network, Metro Toronto Movement For Literacy, and Sistering. Thanks to the
dozens of organizations
who endorsed the Fair Pass and worked with the FFC to win it.
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