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Hersh: Free Transit isn't just possible, it's popular

Hersh: Free Transit isn't just possible, it's popular

Ottawa Citizen4 days ago
At the beginning of the month, our Mayor Mark Sutcliffe announced on social media that it was a record day for the LRT Line 1.
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'Almost 250,000 trips were recorded,' he said. 'The highest single-day ridership in the history of Ottawa's LRT, and a 66 per cent increase over Canada Day last year.'
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He forgot to mention an important detail: it was free.
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Every year on Canada Day, the City offers residents a day of what they call 'no-charge' transit. They did the same thing at the beginning of May to encourage people to take the new LRT line. The result was similarly positive. Ridership was up 54 percent that weekend, according to OC Transpo.
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In December 2021, OC Transpo offered free transit for the whole month as a way to make up for the failings of the LRT. Despite it being a bit of a gimmick, the transit riders group Ottawa Transit Riders reported, based on a survey they conducted, that 'people chose to ride transit more often because it was free and some people changed their travel patterns.'
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Other cities have also shown us that free transit is a popular idea.
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Last month, Zohran Mamdani was elected as the candidate for the New York City Democratic Party. One of his biggest and most prominent promises was 'making buses fast and free.'
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According to his campaign, it would save New Yorkers 36 million hours every year and generate $1.5 billion in economic benefits. The promise was also popular; according to a poll from the organization Data for Progress, 72 per cent of New York voters approved of the idea.
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Several other cities across the U.S.—like Albuquerque, New Mexico and Kansas City, Missouri—have also made transit completely free. The small Ontario town of Orangeville introduced free transit in 2023, and its ridership increased by 160 percent.
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So, if fare-free transit is popular and might help encourage people to ride the bus or LRT, why hasn't our city jumped on the free transit train yet?
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The argument is often made that there is a binary choice, that we must choose between reliability and affordability of our transit services.
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Detractors argue that if we spend money on making our transit system free, then we would not have enough to increase reliability — something that is admittedly sorely needed in Ottawa, especially after Mayor Sutcliffe and our council approved the largest service cut in a decade in the last city budget.
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This premise, however, presents a false choice — we can and we should have both. Our current approach makes clear that higher fares do not lead to a better, more reliable system, and the pandemic made it clear that solely relying on transit fares for revenue is not sustainable.
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Ottawa's fares have now crossed the $4.00 threshold and are some of the most expensive in North America, yet our transit system has continued to disintegrate because of a lack of political will to improve it.
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If ridership was up to pre-pandemic levels, free transit would cost the city about $200 million, according to OC Transpo's own estimates. This might sound like a lot.
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However, when you consider other unnecessary expenses like the $258 million the city is projected to spend on road widening in the next couple of years, then the number does not seem that out of the ordinary.
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Free transit on its own will not solve our transit woes. What it does do, however, is signal our city's willingness to prioritize the climate crisis, a cheaper alternative to car travel, and improve our most valued public services like health care, schools, roads and sidewalks — which by the way, are all free.
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