The results are in. Toronto City Hall has discovered a ridiculously effective program that helps people get access to employment, education and health care. The program didn’t require hiring hundreds of bureaucrats or the creation of some pricey new government department. It’s actually kind of absurd how simple it is.

Are you ready? Here’s what the city did: they made transit cheaper.

In April 2018, Toronto introduced a Fair Pass program that gives people with low incomes access to discounts on TTC fares. The first phase of the program was available to anyone receiving payments from Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Where your average TTC rider using Presto currently pays $3.10 for a single ride or $151.15 for an unlimited-use monthly pass, Fair Pass holders pay $2.05 and $119.40, respectively.

These discounts have made a transformational difference, according to a consultant’s report coming before Mayor John Tory’s executive committee this week. Before they received the cheaper fares, just 55 per cent of people eligible for the program who were surveyed said they were able to take transit as much as they’d like. After getting and using the discounts, that number jumped to 90 per cent.

And the transit trips they’re able to make now are important ones. The number of survey respondents indicating they can work or volunteer as much as they’d like leapt from 36 per cent to 72 per cent after the pass launched.

Ditto for people accessing education, training or job interviews, where the number went from 35 per cent to 73 per cent, while people who said they can access their medical appointments went from 50 per cent to 84 per cent. Access to stuff like grocery shopping, visits to family, and children’s activities also increased big time.

All because transit got cheaper.

The cost to city hall? Not much in the grand scheme of things. Providing the fare discounts in the first phase of this program cost about $5 million, while a report from 2016 pegged the annual overall cost of poverty in Toronto at between $4.5 billion and $5.5 billion.

None of this is to say the program has gone off without a hitch. The rollout of the Fair Pass has been slow. Phase two of the program — extending availability to parents with low incomes who receive child care subsidies — was supposed to launch last March, but got held up until September.

Phase three of the program, which will extend the discounts to anyone with income below a set threshold, was once set for March 2020, but the latest update has it as coming in 2021 — if the city finds funding.

And some people with low incomes are still facing barriers. The consultant report notes some eligible riders haven’t applied for the Fair Pass because even with discounts the cost of the TTC is still too much. Some also say they’re not participating because they’re worried about glitches with the Presto fare card system.

Still, usage is improving, with more than 68,000 Fair Pass cards issued to date. And it’s hard to argue with those survey results.

But all this success also works as an indictment of past and future fare increases. According to a report by transit advocates CodeRedTO, TTC fares grew 29 per cent faster than inflation between 1998 and 2018. If these newly-offered cheaper fares are enabling people to get to work and school, logic suggests many past fare hikes worked to deny access to those same things.

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To that end, there’s merit in looking an ideas that go further than the Fair Pass program. Provincial Liberal leadership candidate Michael Coteau says he wants to eliminate transit fares entirely within a decade, which he argues would pay environmental, economic and social benefits. It’s worth considering.

But before free transit, let’s start with cheap transit. This Thursday, Tory’s executive committee will consider a report on the city’s anti-poverty strategy that includes a recommendation to continue with implementation of the Fair Pass program. The committee should accelerate it. And while they’re at it, take the opportunity to consider a larger lesson from this experience — in a city where so many struggle to get by, don’t discount the value of making it cheaper to get around.