Letter & Survey: TTC must exchange expired tokens and tickets

Do you still have TTC tokens or paper senior/student tickets or day passes? The TTC has announced that they will stop accepting TTC tokens and paper tickets after December 31, 2024. But the TTC will not be issuing exchanges. This is unfair to people who have saved up tokens and tickets, especially low-income seniors. Gift cards and permanent stamps never expire --  why are transit fares any different?

Use the form above to sign on to a letter to TTC Board members and to share how this issue affects you or your clients. 

Dear TTC Board members,

Purchasing items like permanent stamps or transit fares is an investment. Taking away peoples’ ability to spend their TTC fares with little notice and without an option for exchange is unfair: Seniors feel like their savings are being stolen. 

The Consumer Protection Act bans most retail business gift cards from having an expiry date. This means a gift card can be used to its full value no matter when you decide to use it. Why are transit fares being treated differently? 

The TTC CEO’s report notes that “less than one per cent of riders today pay their fare with tokens, youth/senior tickets or day passes.” If the TTC knows how many people continue to pay their fare with legacy media, the TTC should be able to provide a cost estimate of exchanging tokens and tickets for single-use PRESTO tickets.  

The TTC’s CEO report claims that the TTC began informing transit users of this change in October, 2024. But the only advertising that we are aware of is the following webpage, which was published online in mid-October. A Tweet was shared for the first time on October 22, 2024.

Posting a page to the TTC’s website or social media is a completely inadequate method to inform transit users of a change happening on December 31, 2024, especially since many affected people are seniors, particularly immigrant seniors who speak English as an additional language. 

Those transit users who are are more likely to be impacted by this change use TTC infrequently, speak English as an additional language, and have lower digital literacy.

We, the undersigned, urge the TTC Board to allow transit users to exchange tokens and seniors’ tickets for single-use PRESTO tickets so that low-income seniors are treated fairly.

[Sign the letter using the form above by October 27 at midnight to be listed as a signer]

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