The hoopla over the Scarborough subway has distracted us from a more urgent transit issue that surfaced this week. After a long run of record growth, ridership on the TTC is dropping.

Increasing transit ridership is a crucial city building goal. Getting people on transit reduces congestion, and ensures Toronto does its part to address climate change and air pollution.

Instead of addressing the ridership slump, however, city council is making the problem worse.

What is causing this drop in ridership? The TTC suggests many reasons that are mostly beyond the agency’s control, including the slowly growing economy, the rise of precarious work (riders travel less if they only have a part-time job), and low gas prices.

These factors have an impact, sure. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that fare and service levels are also critical: if you make the TTC expensive, uncomfortable and unreliable riders are going to take another way or travel less. Unlike the economy, fares and service levels are almost completely controlled by city council and the provincial government.

Service levels on the TTC are just not good enough. The broken air conditioners on Line 2 have turned the subway into an uncomfortable sauna. Riders can no longer rely on the TTC to get to their destination on time. Nearly 50 per cent of street cars are late, and those subway breakdowns that turn commuting into an epic sardine nightmare feel like the new normal.

Toronto now has the priciest monthly pass in Canada and it does not TTC provide a discount to low-income riders, unlike Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Brampton, Hamilton and many other Canadian cities. If you want evidence of the tight relationship between fares and ridership just look to the Union Pearson Express: the train ran virtually empty until Metrolinx buckled under public outcry and slashed the outrageous $27.50 fare to more reasonable GO-fare levels. Ridership has increased fourfold.

What the TTC needs to boost ridership is fair government funding. The TTC gets just 88-cents of government support a ride, the least amount of financial support in North America. More funding could pay for bread-and-butter service improvements and rider-friendly fares like a low-income pass and two-hour fare transfers.

What the TTC is getting is a budget crisis. The agency needs $178 million just to maintain current service levels for next year, and city council just slapped the TTC with a 2.6 per cent budget cut.

This is incredibly short-sighted. Budget cuts mean fare hikes and service cuts in 2017, which will only exacerbate the ridership problem. When you cut service or hike fares, you get less fare revenue, which creates a new budget crisis and so you cut service again. It’s a vicious downward spiral to the bottom that’s hard to escape.

Toronto has taken this “race-to-the-bottom” option before. Premier Mike Harris stripped provincial funding from the TTC in the 1990s, which led to fare hikes and service cuts. Ridership plunged to 385 million (it’s at 545 million today), and it took 15 years for ridership to return to pre-Mike Harris levels.

What our city needs is a race-to-the-top to a world-class, affordable public transit system and that requires all levels of government to commit to fair funding. In fact, the TTC’s funding crisis is partly due to the Wynne Government’s stubborn refusal to reverse Harris’ anti-rider decision.

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City council has spent all week debating a $31-billion plan to build new transit lines in order to increase transit ridership. This week they also forgot about the riders they already have.