{"id":47076,"date":"2019-02-27T05:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T10:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47076"},"modified":"2019-02-26T13:04:25","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T18:04:25","slug":"torontos-transit-cheat-epidemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/02\/27\/torontos-transit-cheat-epidemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto’s transit cheat epidemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) had an issue with fare evasion, but I had no idea it was as prevalent as this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyone who has ever sat through a Toronto Transportation Commission meeting has likely heard anecdotal evidence that fare evasion on the transit system is utterly rampant, if not a mockery of Western civilization itself. Traditionally, such people tended to be treated as harmless cranks. TTC staff would placate them with various internal audits conducted over the years that found roughly two-per-cent fare loss. As recently as 2017, the TTC was claiming just 1.8 per cent of passengers on streetcars \u2014 where it\u2019s easiest not to pay \u2014 weren\u2019t ponying up.<\/p>\n

Well, so much for that. In a convincing report issued last week based on 136 hours of in-person observation and 38 hours of security footage, city auditor-general Beverly Romeo-Beehler estimates fare evasion rates at 15.2 per cent on streetcars, 5.1 per cent on buses and 3.7 per cent on subways, for a total weighted average of 5.4 per cent\u2014 around $61 million a year, plus roughly $3.4 million thanks to malfunctioning Presto card equipment owned by Metrolinx.<\/p>\n

To put that in perspective, last year\u2019s average 3.2-per-cent fare increase was projected to add $17 million to TTC coffers. If the AG is right, commuters are paying something like 12 cents per trip to subsidize free riders. And the problems underlying the issue are nothing short of jaw-dropping. For one thing, the auditor-general\u2019s team observed scores of adults \u2014 and precisely zero children \u2014 using child Presto cards to ride for free.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) had an issue with fare evasion, but I had no idea it was as prevalent as this: Anyone who has ever sat through a Toronto Transportation Commission meeting has likely heard anecdotal evidence that fare evasion on the transit system is utterly rampant, if not a mockery of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6],"tags":[527,207],"class_list":["post-47076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","tag-publictransit","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cfi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47078,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47076\/revisions\/47078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}