Here at Toronto City Council for the budget meeting!
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Holyday has the Annual Motion to Restore Mechanical Leaf Collection In Etobicoke, as is tradition. (Like windrow clearing, a frequent subject of last-minute budget horse-trading that was cut in recent years.) I am actually laughing out loud.
If I were a councillor, I would bring up the ecological cost of leaf disposal and ask why Cllr Holyday hates pollinators, detritivores, fireflies, etc., and move for a ban on mechanical leaf collection, and that is why I am not a councillor
Cllr Crisanti has a motion asking the TTC to look into "free to $1 for Wheel-Trans customers aged 65 and over during off-peak hours (10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.) on weekdays and all day on weekends".
Cllr Myers says Wheel-Trans actually costs $50 a trip, and suggests instead making fares free/discounted for "conditional passengers", people who could use Wheel-Trans but are using the regular TTC instead. Crisanti says they could look at both scenarios.
OK, speakers over, voting time i guess
@nev Fucking ghouls. It takes forever to get accepted into Wheel-Trans, and it's such an awful service experience.
@mayintoronto yeah, they've been trying to pare it down for years. The ultimate goal is to improve TTC accessibility to the point where Wheel-Trans isn't needed, which is obviously a pipe dream
@nev My friends with disabilities use Wheel-Trans for some agoraphobia. But also if you use a wheelchair on the subway, people have tried to sit on them multiple times because they don't bother looking down. All of my wheelchair user friends have experienced this.
Jeez.
Make all transit free and eliminate free parking for cars.
@chu @mayintoronto if you can figure out a way to swing it financially, sure
Someone with better access to numbers than we do can probably tell us how much city and street parking needs to go up to break even on this.
Whatever that number is is what parking should cost period
@mayintoronto @chu Here's some numbers: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2026/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-261375.pdf
The TPA's revenue is about $180 million (a few thousand of that goes to subsidizing Bike Share).
Average transaction value per trip is about $9 for parking lots with 9.4 million trips/year, and about $4 for curbside parking with 15 million trips per year. Not sure about EV charging or Bike Share, which would both have to be counted differently anyway, I think.
(Keep in mind that the TPA also has its own operating budget, capital costs, and state of good repair backlog.)
Presumably massively hiking municipal parking rates would mean privately owned commercial parking could undercut the City severely, so ideally you'd implement a very high commercial parking levy at the same time.
One possible problem with this, on a conceptual level, is that you're also trying to incentivize people to take transit instead of driving, right? So if that is successful, your transit costs will be rising and your parking revenue will be shrinking, and you might get a Parking Death Spiral where fewer people park because it costs so much, so you have to raise parking rates even more (not only to keep revenue the same—but if people are taking transit instead, you have to raise even more revenue), so even fewer people park, etc. This is just speculation on my part, if this were for real this is where I'd ask for a staff report or bring in experts or whatever.
What's transit revenue right now? About double that right? Raising parking 3X is absolutely nothing.
It should go up at least 8x to make sense for a family of four to take transit instead of drive to brunch (considering the cost of getting on the TTC)
@mayintoronto @chu TTC operating revenues are about $1.5 billion, with gross expenditures about $3 billion. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2026/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-261481.pdf
10x increase in parking would make it make sense for a family of four to take transit to brunch instead of drive.
As it stands, it costs ~$28 to take transit there and back. Getting it done on a single transfer doesn't allow for enjoying brunch (or any other activity like the museum).
Regardless of whether transit is free, parking absolutely needs to be on par with transit costs for 4.
@mayintoronto @chu worth an op-ed at least
@mayintoronto @chu (but maybe don't put in the stuff about sandworm Olivia Chow)
