In two debate performances this week, mayoral candidate Saron Gebresellassi showed that she isn’t prepared to quietly stand by and be considered an also-ran. Particularly on Tuesday, at a debate hosted by Global, she was a dominating presence, often steering the agenda of the entire discussion.

Gebresellassi also brought up the most interesting discussion idea of the debate — one that occupied an outsized amount of debate time, given that it’s a promise she alone has made. Free public transit, for everyone.

According to polls, transit is among the most pressing issues on Toronto voters’ minds — a concern for 70 per cent of respondents to a recent Forum poll of 944 Torontonians. Eliminating fares is a big, eye-catching moon shot of an idea.

But is it a good idea?

Mayor John Tory, for his part, immediately balked at the potential cost. Keesmaat said it was a “dream” — a lovely thing to discuss but not realistic in the short term. Sarah Climenhaga, the other candidate present, said making the TTC free for seniors might be a realistic step in the right direction.

The benefit of eliminating fares is obvious. Those who most rely on the TTC are often those who cannot afford a car. The current fares — $3.25 per ride cash, or more than $146 per month for a pass — can present a real burden. Eliminating these costs from what is an essential service to get to work or school is an obvious benefit.

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It would also encourage more people to take the TTC. Getting people out of their cars would also, potentially, offer environmental benefits and some relief to our crowded traffic situation.

The most obvious downside is the cost, which is not small. TTC fare box revenue is more than $1.2 billion per year — roughly 10 per cent of total city revenue. Trying to replace that funding with a straight ahead property tax increase, for example, would require raising rates by more than 25 per cent. Over the course of a decade, we’d be talking about spending something like $12 billion to eliminate fares. If you wanted an alternative option to spend that money, it could be more than enough to build an entire new relief subway line up to Don Mills.

But free fares might also cost significantly more than that. The hope and the expectation is that you’d see ridership skyrocket.

And this in itself is a problem because, right now during rush hour, the TTC is essentially full. That same recent Forum poll on election concerns asked those for whom transit was a big issue what the biggest problems were. Only 10 per cent said fares being too high were a problem. Twenty-nine per cent said overcrowding was the main concern.

The cost and the unmanageable surge in ridership are key problems that have been faced elsewhere in the world where free transit has been tried. Hasselt, Belgium made transit free beginning in 1993, and was long thought to be a European success story. But the 1,300-per-cent increase in ridership eventually became too much to manage, and in 2013 the city reintroduced fares for adult riders.

Gebresellassi mentioned Estonia during the debate, and its city of Tallinn has had free public transit for municipal residents (but not visitors) since 2013. But one strange funding loophole has made the costs manageable for them: Estonian law gives a certain percentage of federal income-tax revenue to cities based on the number of residents registered as living there. When people who’d failed to update their residency to reflect they lived in Tallinn did so in order to take advantage of the free transit, it became a big windfall for the city — bringing in €20 million, enough to cover the free transit subsidy, according to a report in CityLab. It’s an ingenious way to game the tax system in Estonia to provide local benefits. But it doesn’t apply here.

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Paris is considering making its transit system fare-free, and it will be worth watching how they do it, if they do, and what the results are for them. The German government has also been studying implementing the idea in some of its most polluted (and biggest) cities.

I think, in the short term, for Toronto, the cost and the crowding and service implications mean it is likely not a feasible plan.

But I like it as a goal to work towards. If we think that our eventual goal is free transit, it means we’re working to set the conditions where it would work — expanded service with enough capacity to handle more riders. It means we could begin phasing fare reductions in, like former mayoral candidate David Soknacki’s free-before-7 a.m. plan, aimed at using the capacity that is in the system to make it better for everyone. We could introduce free Metropasses targeted at needy groups. We start reducing fares gradually rather than raising them substantially every year.

Eliminating the fare box immediately could be a big, expensive disaster. But working towards it over a longer period could lead to real improvements to the system, making it less crowded, more reliable, and more affordable, especially for those who need it most.

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