Appendix · Appendix A1

Fares, Equity, and Who Gets Left Behind

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Capping outperforms making transit free, evasion enforcement is the single biggest lever TTC controls on the revenue side, and none of it matters if the people it's designed for never enroll.

Toronto's fare system is about to change shape. Starting September 1, 2026, the TTC replaces its monthly and 12-month passes with automatic capping: pay for 47 single trips in a calendar month and every ride after that is free, dropping to a 40-trip threshold in 2027. For Fair Pass riders — the City's income-tested discount program — that cap works out to $98.70 a month, roughly $24 less than the pass it replaces. It's a real, measurable gain, and it lands on the group best positioned to benefit from an automated system rather than one that requires remembering to buy the cheapest option every month.

The international evidence is clear that capping, not eliminating fares outright, is the sustainable version of this idea. Tallinn made its entire transit system free in 2013 and saw ridership jump 14% in year one — but by 2022, transit's share of trips had fallen from 40% to under 30%, and low-income ridership specifically collapsed from 60% to 35%, because free fares alone didn't fix service frequency or reliability, and car commuting rose to fill the gap. Kansas City's free-fare program, running since 2020, is ending in 2026 after rising operator-assault rates and an unsustainable subsidy burden. Luxembourg's nationwide free transit, the most committed version of this experiment, required a 53% budget increase over four years to sustain. New York's weekly OMNY cap, the closest working precedent to what TTC is launching, earned over 168,000 riders free rides in its first month alone and saved more than $1 million — without giving up the farebox entirely.

Fare evasion is where the City-controlled money actually is. TTC lost $140.9 million in fare revenue in 2023 — $123.8 million to outright evasion, the rest to partial fares — and the losses are wildly uneven by mode: streetcars lose 29.6% of fares to evasion, buses 12.9%, the subway just 6.3%. Enforcement is already working and it's cheap relative to the loss: closing crash gates alone recovered $9.5 million, and deploying Provincial Offences Officers on streetcars netted $2 million after staffing costs. The Netherlands' experience points the same direction — access control, physically barring entry without a valid ticket, outperforms confrontational enforcement, and its first fine increase in a decade (up 40% to €70) took effect in October 2025.

None of this closes the equity gap by itself, because the binding constraint on every income-targeted fare program studied here isn't the discount — it's enrollment. New York's Fair Fares program offers a 50% discount to residents at up to 150% of the poverty line; more than 760,000 people are eligible, and only about 360,000, 45%, are actually enrolled, a gap that outreach and eligibility expansion haven't closed. Seattle's ORCA LIFT program has sustained five-plus years of operation through dedicated enrollment storefronts and social-service partnerships specifically because program designers treated enrollment as its own problem, not an afterthought to setting the discount level. Toronto's own Fair Pass program faces the identical structural risk: a well-designed discount that under-enrolls the people it exists for is a program that looks successful on paper and fails on the street. The evidence across every city surveyed here says the enrollment infrastructure — easy proof-of-income options, active outreach, storefronts where people already go — deserves the same budget attention as the discount rate itself.