Presto...fares, fees and harassment!: The war on transit riders continues in Ontario

Fresh off an end of year holiday surprise that saw the TTC raise fares in Toronto while hiring expensive new rent-a-cops to harass riders, and the province screwing the people of Hamilton with the Christmas cancellation of their long-planned LRT, 2020 dawns with more bad news for public transit users.


Despite the fact that it cost the provincial government a mere $18 - 19 million annually -- a tiny drop in the bucket of the vast provincial budget -- the wonderful folks at Queen's Park decided to cancel the program that gave a small discount to users of both GO Transit and the TTC. The way it worked was that if you tapped your Presto card on both systems during your commute you would get a $1.50 discount on a single ride encouraging the use of interconnected public transit travel.

While the cancellation of this program will mean very little for the province's bottom line, it could cost commuters as much as $720 annually, yet another powerful disincentive to get on public transit in the first place.

The irony is that the program has also been a huge success with so many people taking advantage of it that it ran over-budget by a few million each of the last two years. From a public policy point-of-view this is obviously a very good thing as more people using transit means fewer people in cars. The pettiness of this move begs the question, does the Ford government really want anyone to use transit at all?

Then we hear of the predictable consequences of the inane "zero-tolerance" policy for so-called "fare evasion" on the GO system itself. I have looked at the problems with the whole "fare evasion" narrative to begin with in pieces like The "fare evasion" narrative on the TTC is a total fraud. Here's why. An emphasis on policing fares has also led to very negative outcomes in cities like New York as I looked at in the piece The policing of fare evasion reveals the twisted agenda of our politicians.

It is totally predictable that this will happen here as well and has with cases like:

 A Toronto woman who says her Presto card malfunctioned just after she loaded it with money is angry she was still given a $240 fine by transit inspection officers.
Samantha Chong-Luke was given the hefty fine after not having proof of payment on a recent GO Transit trip and claims the officers told her she was going to be arrested.
“I started crying and I was panicking because I didn't expect this to be happening," Chong-Luke told CTV News Toronto. 

Remember that she is being harassed and intimidated by wanna-be-cops, threatened with arrest and issued a steep fine for what amounts to a fare of a few dollars and, in her case, due to a glitch that was the system's fault.

Really makes you feel like hoping on GO Transit doesn't it?

There are plenty of other issues with the Presto card system such as the steep $6 activation fee for the card itself and another $6 fee for every new card you need. This is especially annoying as the cards are rather flimsy and, as the CBC noted, a "thin crack is all it takes to render a Presto card completely useless". It is also an obviously unfair hit for people with lower or on fixed incomes.

What the CBC article did not note, however, is the fun fact that if you lose or break your Presto card you cannot transfer your balance to your partner's card, your kid's card or a backup card you already have registered with Presto. You can ONLY transfer the balance to a new card that will cost you $6.

Seriously.

So, in other words, if you have a balance of less than $6 you de facto lose everything and with any other balance you take a $6 hit even if you have another card registered you could transfer this balance to.

There is absolutely no valid reason at all that you should not be able to transfer your card balance to whatever card you want whenever you want. It is your money that you have already spent and placed on a Presto card. The reason that you are not able to is likely seen when Metrolinx, who administers Presto, refused to tell the CBC how much money they make off of replacement cards.

If you cannot transfer your funds to an already registered card they are guaranteed to get another $6 out of you, aren't they?

It is hard at times not to feel that the people in charge of the system are at war with transit riders and seem to be constantly looking for new ways to make their lives miserable and to take their money.

Corporate names for public stations are as dangerous as they are idiotic and absurd

How does Oakville Station Brought to You by Burger King or No Frills Pickering Station sound to you? Or, even worse, how about Filet-O-Fish Station (Exhibition).

Absurd? Ludicrous? Inane?

It is certainly all of those things but it is also exactly what the geniuses running Ontario are proposing with their idea to sell the naming rights of GO Transit stations. They also are suggesting selling off naming rights for bathrooms and parking lots so one day soon you may be able to do your business in a toilet stall "brought to you by Walmart".

This surreal and disturbing creeping forward of the commercialization of public spaces and life has been going on for a long time now. The most obvious examples are the naming of sports stadiums -- almost all of which are built in part or entirely with public funds as one of the more grotesque forms of corporate welfare. While stadium names used to have historic or national references in many cases, now they are all corporate advertisements devoid of any character or community meaning such as the Rogers Centre or Minute Maid Park.

How would you know Minute Maid Park was in Houston? Well you wouldn't until you were told. The name has zero connection with the city and its history at all.

Names like these are, frankly, soul-deadening. They are a logical goalpost along the neoliberal path to tearing down the very idea of the "public" and replacing it with a world where everything is private and corporate including what once were your communal services or gathering places.

Ontario Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney sweetens the pot for the companies by offering to  provide those who do "sponsor" stations with ridership data. Allegedly your privacy would be protected, but who can really say for how long. She also makes it clear that her government is thinking of other ways to sellout the system for short-term corporate cash when she says “We are looking to maximize the value of Metrolinx assets, properties, and services to increase non-fare revenue."

Of course, they could increase funding to GO Transit, but that would be too obvious and run counter to their false narrative that the province is in terrible financial shape due to the Liberals.

How about instead of selling naming rights to corporations the government levies a Public Transit Tax on them since all this public infrastructure, among many other things, is necessary to get workers to their jobs and keep the economy moving? Making companies pay for public transit through higher corporate taxes also makes sense given that transit is an essential component of any program to combat the climate emergency that corporations played the central role in creating.

By making the corporate a part of the very names of your local stations it is a strategy -- conscious or intuitive  -- for the government to build a daily, ingrained association between transit and private corporations. Given that the Ford government is quite open in its desire to grant the private sector a much larger role in the provision of public works, having stations with corporate branding is a form of propaganda to breakdown the general, natural resistance to the notion that there is nothing that belongs to us collectively anymore that should not have some shitty logo on it.

Maybe McDonald's could build a giant Golden Arches entryway to Union Station. Why not?

What a terrific tribute to the conquest of the civic by the corporate that would be.