A Permanent Universal Transit Token?

If you have ever tried to park downtown in the middle of a weekday in nearly any Canadian city, you’ll find that it is expensive or difficult, often both. But if you have considered taking transit, it’s slow, requires an oddly specific amount of exact change, a ticket you have to ride transit to find a place to buy, or a pass you have to get in advance. It is very much not designed for the occasional user. What if there were a universal transit token, modelled on Canada Post’s permanent stamp?

In my first ever public policy related presentation in 2008, I suggested using transit tickets as parking meter tokens in order to send a message that it would cost a transit fare to go downtown whether or not you used transit to get there.

Since that time, many cities have adopted various tap-to-pay systems, most of which are not interchangeable from one city to the next, and all of which require purchasing a local transit card for the purpose. It has frustrated me to no end that buses, subways, and commuter trains across the country have been designed around tap payment but don’t accept credit and debit cards which almost universally now support tap payment.

It is said that “a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.” Canada treats public transit as a last option and does little to promote it or develop it outside of dense urban cores. Inter-urban transit is all but dead, with subsidised bus routes having been quietly wound out of existence in my lifetime. Interconnection is nearly non-existent; cars reign supreme.

The fact that transit systems generally aren’t even interoperable is a sore point. The ten years I spent in Ottawa was a testament to the short-sightedness of our national transit strategy. Early on in my time in Ottawa, I observed Ottawa and Gatineau bus routes #1 driving side by side down Wellington St, each headed in a different direction, showing the poor integration of the two cities in the National Capital Region.

It bothered me to no end that Ottawa’s light rail transit system ended at Bayview in the north, at the southern end of the Prince of Wales rail bridge over the Ottawa River. At the other end of the abandoned bridge that the city had bought, Gatineau transit ripped out the rails to build a bus rapid transit line the length of it through the city shortly after I arrived, then restored the tracks adjacent to the roadway with no plans to use them. A viable, ready-to-use LRT link between the two cities became a no-man’s land.

Then to compound it, Ottawa recently celebrated the conversion of the rail bridge into a bicycle path, putting an end to any dreams of integrating the capital via LRT. It was short-sighted, stupid, and frankly embarrassing for Canada. Our entire nation’s public transit system should be integrated so that you can get between neighbourhoods, towns, regions, and provinces with a single fare or app yet we can’t even integrate a single city that spans a provincial boundary.

Ontario has brought in Presto, a common payment system for participating transit systems within the province, with cities like Guelph not participating — while being capable of reading Presto cards for connections. Say what? And that’s still better than most other provinces.

None of it makes sense. If we aren’t going to make transit free in Canada, and we aren’t going to be smart enough to universally accept tap-to-pay systems that the vast majority of people already have in their wallets, could we at least make a common physical payment system?

Since that presentation in early 2008, I have pondered, quietly to myself, what it would mean to the country if the Royal Canadian Mint minted a coin whose value was exactly equal to one standard transit fare, that every municipal and regional transit system — and municipal parking meter — in the country was required to accept in whole numbers. For example an express ticket might cost two Permanent Universal Transit Tokens or an intercity might cost exactly three. Each transit company would be free to sell their fares at the price their transit system charges for a fare. The interoperability would eventually force transit rides to have a fairly constant price across the country, lest people start buying up these universal transit tokens in different cities from their intended use in order to resell them.

Parking meters, too, could be priced in transit tokens per unit of time. Want to park down town? It’ll cost you a bus fare every 20 minutes. And you have the bus fare in your hand — you’re using it to pay the parking meter.

It would also mean that that these coins would have an inflation-proof cash value, so, like buying Canada Post permanent stamps now for later use, having these universal transit tokens would be normal, and it would not be unreasonable for stores or vending machines to accept them as payment.

Like the original idea of having Guelph’s parking meters accept Guelph transit tickets, it would mean that Canadians could generally have ready-to-use transit tokens in their pockets, have change that doesn’t lose value in the piggy bank, and have a physical incentive to take transit without having to hunt for tickets that expire at obscure locations or for exact change.

Although, to be fair, unlike urban transit systems, most parking meters accept debit and credit cards now, as part of a wider public policy of making driving easier than transit. Even in downtowns where parking is difficult, little effort is made to make transit easier for the occasional user.

Maybe it is a totally ridiculous idea, or maybe it could help reform the way we travel.

Is it change worth exploring, or just a silly fantasy? And what would we call it?