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Mallick: TTC fare hike like poison for the poor
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The Toronto Star-By Heather Mallick
The experience of taking the subway downtown — normally a zippy 20 minutes, if that — has noticeably changed in the past year.
The trains stop, inexplicably. Then they give a metaphorical sigh and start up again. Fuzzy announcements drone on about the Spadina line closing south of Eglinton West, but TTC buses are waiting at the station. Lines are regularly closed for maintenance at times that are inconvenient for passengers but the TTC seems to feel it a matter of urgency.
The TTC is not in good health, and this is visible each day. What Torontonians endure is more telling than consultants’ reports about cheaper modes of people transport and Mayor Rob Ford’s incoherent plans for more subways even though the system we already have isn’t being sufficiently fed and watered. Our watchword is “cheap.”
Streetcar advocate Steve Munro says on his blog that this won’t do. And he’s right, as he often is, but I can’t agree with his proposal to raise fares.
“There’s no point in soaking up new subsidies with fare freezes,” he writes. “Just as Toronto creates headaches for itself with tax freezes and forgone revenue, the TTC is hurt by the absence of small, regular fare increases to cover, at least in part, its increasing costs.”
But what is a small, regular fare increase? It depends on who you are. If you’re poor, you probably can’t afford the TTC at all. If you work a minimum wage job, no increase is small. You factor an extra dime into your survival sums, gasp, and recalculate.
Two dimes a day at least five times a week adds up to a dollar you don’t have. It’s hard for many to imagine that. But when I look around the subway car, I see people who barely made it on. I see people shocked and distressed when they can’t conjure up the cash to get on the streetcar.
These scenes happen daily. Put yourself in another person’s worn shoes, a person who doesn’t have an extra dollar. Students and the elderly get help with TTC fares. But people who don’t have the money get no help at all.
The TTC is the bloodstream of this city. Using it keeps pollution down and the clogged streets less hateful than they might be. It gets us to work, it makes us look at our fellow citizens (though not straight in the eye, if we’re being polite about it) and rub shoulders with them. There is nothing about the TTC that is not socially useful and practical.
Raising fares rather than subsidizing them is a false economy that does great harm. For the TTC shouldn’t raise fares, it should abolish them.
It shouldn’t have to make a profit or break even, because it justifies its existence in ways that go far beyond money. And that’s the problem: when you provide a social good, it’s very often in ways that are not visible or easily quantifiable.
On the TTC, students from poverty-stricken or violent neighbourhoods can escape to a good school in minutes. You can lose your loneliness in a distant suburb and head to Dundas Square. You can get to a farmer’s market outside your area and pack a better lunch for your children. You can make it home safely late at night when you’re in a terrible state, thanking the city for the Vomit Comet.
You can escape your life, or race back to it, in a way that is nobody’s business and costs the planet almost nothing. You see your city as a unit, each part of it offering a welcome to strangers. You are no longer lonely in your own city.
I buy 10 tokens for $25, but the single fare is $3. When you’re poor, you don’t have $25 to hand. So you’re already paying six bucks a day to get to your job and the experts are suggesting a “small, regular” fare increase.
Suggestions that seem superficially rational should be studied with care. They can turn out to be counterproductive, and worse, heartless.
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