Cross-posted from Eye Daily.
There were some questions raised about one of the stats I included in my “By the numbers” post last week. The questions centered around this snippet of information from a recent report published by the Pembina Institute: for every dollar spent on roads in Toronto, the City spent $3.79 on transit. The study found that Toronto forks out more for public transit than other cities in Ontario. But the big question was: does this figure take TTC fares into account?
The answer is no. The numbers were derived from information on the City of Toronto’s expenditures; where the spending money came from wasn’t considered. The dollar-to-dollar comparison, in other words, didn’t look at, say, the amount of property taxes that the city spends on transit versus the property taxes that it spends on roads.
Some might argue that ignoring that fares account for a large percentage of the TTC’s budget skews the ratio. Drivers, after all, don’t pay fares to use the roads, therefore the amount of money that the city actually puts into transit isn’t as great as Pembina’s numbers make it seem. Let’s give transit riders credit where credit is due.
In total, TTC riders pay for nearly 70 percent of the TTC’s operating budget, a higher percentage than transit riders in other cities pay. In the United States, where municipalities receive ongoing federal and state funding for transit, fares finance on average 40 percent of budgets for public transit. Vancouver has it even better:
Compare this to the projected funding sources for the TTC’s 2008 budget:
As transit guru Steve Munro points out on Spacing Votes, no transit system in Canada runs at a profit. “Without operating subsidies, service improvements, even if you have the vehicles and facilities, are impossible because every improvement drives up the net cost,†he writes. “Somebody, either the municipality or Queen’s Park has to make up the difference.â€
As Toronto struggles to balance next year’s budget, however, it’s possible that riders could be forced to pay for an even greater percentage of the costs of running the TTC. Other levels of governments should step in to help. Prior to 1997, Ontario paid for 50 percent of the TTC’s operating budget after fares were accounted for. So far, only the NDP has promised to go back to the old days of funding if elected. As it stands now, those largely responsible for public transit in Toronto are the transit riders themselves.
