The issue of income-based fares has been raised at the TTC and other city departments individually. Now, however,a report before Toronto’s executive committee July 2 recommends that staff from social development, the TTC, public health, planning and others develop joint guidelines for affordable fares. The policy would come back to council in early 2015.The article later points out that six dollars per day on transit fares is a lot of money for lower income people, like the unemployed, but should include students as well.
Instead of rolling out a special Low-Income Metropass (I'm not holding my breath for the rollout of Presto just yet) and creating yet another class of fares, the TTC should work with the Ontario government to provide refundable tax credits on a single class of transit passes.
That's right, get rid of Post-Secondary and Senior Metropasses. One class of TTC Metropass would probably simplify the TTC's operations to a small extent.
The best feature of this scheme is that since most post-secondary students are low income, and arguably some seniors are also low income, everyone the existing policies are intended to cover is still covered. It would basically work like the Federal Transit Credit, except that if you earn less than $20k per year, you get 50% of your transit costs refunded, as an example.
As an aside, note that I said 'some seniors' as it's not really fair for me to be subsidizing people with pensions that exceed my income. The same with the rare students getting by on dividends from inherited stock market investments. Hey, it's not just me saying so: “It’s not necessarily fair to ask other customers to pay more [to subsidize low income fares],” says TTC chief customer officer Chris Upfold.
Running this scheme through the income tax system keeps everyone's income information more or less private. It's hard enough for people to live on a low-income, and giving them a special card to identify them as such isn't really the hand up that they need.
