By Edward Lander

It’s not often the TTC makes my day. But on Monday, it got pretty close. I tapped my card at the turnstile and to my surprise, I’d hit the 47 tap fare cap. If you’re not already familiar, fare capping is a system that replaces traditional fare passes, allowing anyone who surpasses 47 trips in a month to ride free for the rest of it. Essentially, it eliminates the need to calculate whether a monthly fare pass would be worth it for your wallet.

Fare capping has also become a central part of Mayor Olivia Chow’s re-election bid. On Sept. 11, Chow promised to lower that tap number to just 10 per week. Meaning, someone who rides transit to and from their nine-to-five job would hit the cap by Friday afternoon and cruise through the weekend fare-free.

Transit promises are being made left and right this election. Brad Bradford, who is trailing close behind Chow (and used to be an urban planner himself), is promising to get things moving on the Scarborough East LRT, a proposed 18.6-kilometre rapid transit line. He told reporters on Sept. 8 he’d have shovels in the ground by the end of his “first term.”

Transit issues are also, arguably, the ones that matter most to students. According to a 2020 study from the university, two-thirds of us commute to campus, and many of us travel more than an hour each way.

But in this election, students seem to be getting left out of the picture. Fare capping doesn’t apply to those with a postsecondary student pass, and it’s unclear whether candidates would extend it to them. In fact, the TTC advises students to continue buying postsecondary passes, saying they remain the cheapest option for this cohort. The Ontario Government’s One Fare program did make things cheaper for the many of us who travel between municipalities during our commutes, but this isn’t the best we can do.

A standard for student fares already exists in some parts of the country—and it’s called a U-Pass. Students at the University of Toronto Mississauga have been riding that city’s transit system free for the past 17 years thanks to a U-Pass paid through through a levy on their tuition. In the Metro Vancouver area, post-secondary students have the option in the form of TransLink’s U-Pass BC Program.

In 2018, the Toronto Metropolitan Students’ Union held a referendum on whether to implement an ‘RU-Pass’ on this campus. Though the vote succeeded, the new levy was caught up in the turmoil of the Student Choice Initiative, which allowed students to opt-out of once mandatory fees. Fearing students would back out, the TTC got cold feet and never signed an agreement with the university.

But with the cost of living on the rise, the Ontario Student Assistance Program slashed and student fares seemingly not on the minds of our candidates, perhaps it’s time the prospect of a U-Pass returns to Toronto Metropolitan University?