Ontario has (only a little late) announced that commuters in the Greater Toronto Area will soon be able to enjoy a single-fare discount when they travel across multiple transit services. Starting February 26, the hypothetical commuter who begins their journey on, say, Mississauga transit, boards a GO train to downtown Toronto, and then takes the TTC the final leg of their journey will pay for only one fare. The government says this measure will save people up to $1,600 a year.
That estimate should be tempered by two facts: First, the policy as announced last year was supposed to already have been implemented by now. And second, this change will be of relatively little benefit to the majority of transit users in the GTA, who begin and end their commutes on the TTC without ever boarding another service. (GO’s annual estimate for ridership this year — 72 million or so — is only slightly larger than Toronto’s still-COVID-reduced streetcar ridership and a tiny fraction of the passengers carried by buses and subways.) Nevertheless, it’s a milestone for GTA transit. The entire point of adopting the Presto system in the first place — from the perspective of Queen’s Park — was to make fare integration easier, since GO commuters are a small but noisy demographic that MPPs are eager to please, and GO is unquestionably a provincial responsibility.
I’ve been skeptical of the merits of fare integration for a while, in large part because I suspected that Queen’s Park would not want to pay for it and would therefore find a way to make TTC riders end up covering the cost. The good news on that front is that the Ford government is paying the bill — for now — so this won’t be yet another burden for Toronto’s transit users to bear. Last year, I moderated my stance on fare integration in large part because of the massive disruption to commuting patterns since COVID-19. We’ve got good reason to be humble about our ability to predict commuting flows in the near future; fare integration enables a more flexible use of transit without prescribing it and at a moderate cost. So, as far as it goes, we should be willing to chalk this up as legitimate good news for the region’s commuters.
The problem is that this is one thin reed of good news appears in the context of several bad-news stories. At Monday’s announcement, Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster reiterated that, no, he won’t tell the public when the Eglinton Crosstown LRT will open for service; the provincial capital’s transit system is effectively acting as a homeless shelter of last resort for many; and Toronto’s budget woes mean that it’s unclear when or even if a replacement for the Scarborough Rapid Transit line, decommissioned last year, will be in place.
Transit boosters in the GTA are correct when they say there’s lots of good work being done to expand rapid-transit networks throughout the region — the problem is that commuters can’t ride these services until they’re actually, you know, in operation. Nowhere is that clearer than in Scarborough, where more than a decade of promises that a subway could be built quickly and cheaply have turned to ash, with commuters now paying more to enjoy service worse than what they had when Rob Ford was elected on a platform of “subways, subways, subways.”
Mayor Olivia Chow has promised some kind of quick replacement rapid-transit service for Scarborough, but part of the blame for this state of affairs lies with Queen’s Park as well: both Doug Ford and his predecessor in the premier’s office, Kathleen Wynne, found it politically profitable to dangle promises of a Scarborough subway in front of voters. It’s reasonable to ask what the province could do to ameliorate the mess in Scarborough.
As it turns out, the fare integration announced this week will help: the same transit riders who once took a bus to the Scarborough Town Centre to hop on the RT and head downtown (or do the reverse to come back home) can board the GO train instead. This is, to be clear, not a perfect solution and doesn’t obviate the need for better local service in Scarborough. But it will arguably help meet a lot of the existing demand for transit: according to the business case for one iteration of the Scarborough subway, most of the RT’s riders were using it to get downtown rather than as local service in Scarborough.
Queen’s Park could do more for Scarborough, however. And, given the provincial responsibility for this mess, it should. It could offer to fund the operations costs for whatever bus-based solution Toronto city council approves, but the idea of shovelling more money at Toronto after last year’s New Deal announcement while other cities in the province look on with mounting frustration might not make it past the Tory caucus at the legislature.
What’s called for is something modest enough to be politically palatable that could still meaningfully improve people’s lives. One idea that the province could implement easily enough: make transit trips starting, ending, or connecting at the Agincourt GO station — about 2.5 kilometres from the Scarborough Town Centre, the former terminus of the SRT — free for the rider. Given the billing apparatus the province and Metrolinx have engineered for fare integration, this shouldn’t be impossible, and it would amount to some provincial compensation for the current state of affairs.
There would, of course, be details to settle. GTA commuters might try to crowd the parking lot at Agincourt GO to take advantage of the free fare. To them, we could say “good luck” — GO lots across the city are already regularly full well before what we’d otherwise think of normal rush hours. If it became a truly disruptive problem, GO could take the breathtakingly rational step of charging for parking spaces, thereby leaving transit accessible to people who take the TTC, walk, or bike to the station. (I won’t be holding my breath for this.)
Scarborough’s transit riders have been left in the lurch by political machinations originating in no small part from Queen’s Park. The province can and should be part of the solution — and the premier’s office should be thinking creatively about what more they can do.
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