The Argument for Fare Integration in the GTA
There aren’t actually that many new ideas in the transit and transportation space. Realizing that can be a good thing: we don’t literally need to reinvent the wheel (much less the shoe) to get people moving around more effectively in our cities. But it can take a distressingly long time for ideas to go from talk to action, meaning that some ideas will seem novel long after they’ve been adopted elsewhere. This, alas, is a particularly Canadian predicament.
Take transit-fare integration, the notion of allowing transit passengers to pay a single fare when they get on a bus in, say, York Region, move onto a GO train, and then board a TTC subway. The Hansard at the Ontario legislature says that the words “fare integration” were first uttered by an MPP in 1986 — though, even then, it was a member saying ,“This has been discussed on and off for the past 15 years or more,” so we can say with some confidence that it’s an idea that MPPs have been talking about for about a half-century.
The notion of fare integration is popular at Queen’s Park for a few reasons. First, MPPs representing ridings around the 905 get an earful from commuters who get dinged for each service they use. Second, officials in multiple governments have been tantalized by the idea that they could magically improve transit ridership by redistributing fare revenues instead of increasing the subsidies transit services require. This has been my grounds for skepticism about fare integration for many years now.
The Toronto Region Board of Trade has made useful contribution to this generations-long debate with a new report that lays out one implementation for fare integration that solves a few problems. First of all, it effectively retains Toronto’s single-fare system for travel within the city. A pure distance-based fare system might be economically efficient in a theoretical sense, but, given the spatial distribution of wealth in the real world, the TTC’s single fare acts as an effective subsidy from downtown commuters (who take short rides) to lower-income suburban workers (who often take much longer rides).
This has been a real obstacle to fare integration for a while now: Metrolinx wants to charge commuters by distance, but the largest transit operator in the region (and the elected officials it answers to) has substantial reasons to resist that. Sometimes solutions move forward by finding a workaround, and the Board of Trade’s proposal does that.
The proposal effectively divides the GTHA into 15 zones. Commuters would be able to travel between two zones for a single fare ($3.20, the TTC’s current adult fare.) Crossing into a third zone, and every zone thereafter, would add $1.50.
The Board of Trade estimates that this system would cost an additional $154 million, with most of that coming from a reduction in GO Transit fares. (The province, which perennially lectures municipalities on the need to find efficiencies, operates the transit system that is both most lavishly subsidized and also most expensive for its passengers.) Even if that estimate is optimistic, it could cost twice as much and still be a drop in the bucket for the province’s overall transportation spending.
So, as someone who’s been skeptical about the importance of fare integration previously, why do I think this is something worth further exploration right now? Simply put, nobody knows anything about the future of cities right now. We don’t know whether work-from-home will wane as bosses try their hardest to horsewhip workers back into cubicles, we don’t know what the recovery from COVID will look like, and we don’t know whether EVs (cheaper to drive than gasoline or diesel cars) will make people more comfortable with longer commutes. Nobody knows anything.
In a moment of chaos and ambiguity, it makes sense for the government to focus on open-ended solutions that enable people to choose their own paths. Fare integration does that — certainly more so than billion-dollar gambles that new subway lines into the downtown core will continue to reflect real-world commuter flows. Rather than trying to guess where tomorrow’s workers will be travelling to and from, fare integration simply gets out of the way. There are times for government to lead, but there are also times when it’s useful to be humble and wait for the future to reveal itself.
For those of us who have been skeptical of fare integration as a panacea, there’s also an opportunity for its champions to put up or shut up: either the effects of fare integration will be worth the expense, or they won’t be. If we see a large increase in ridership, I’ll be happy to have been wrong. But if the effects of fare integration end up being marginal overall, the government will need to seriously consider measures like funding improved service frequency and lowering fares across the system. Those just won’t be as easy or cheap as fare integration.
John Michael McGrath is a staff writer at TVO.org covering provincial politics and policy.