Mississauga transit program helps people afford to get aboard

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For Sophia Samuels, the little bit of paper is more than a free bus ticket. It's a lifesaver.

A single mother of three, Ms. Samuels works two jobs to support her family. She needs transit to get to work, but there are times when it's a struggle to buy tickets.

"Sometimes when I do get my paycheque, it all goes to my bills," said the 31-year-old resident of Mississauga, just west of Toronto. "If it hadn't been for these tickets I don't know how I could get to work. Because sometimes after my payday I have nothing left."

Ms. Samuels is an occasional beneficiary of an idea that helps bridge those gaps, a support program in which food banks can buy transit tickets at half price and distribute them to those who need them.

Mississauga's discount-ticket idea started in 2016 as an experiment but was recently made permanent. While a number of cities have some variation of a low-income transit fare, allowing food banks to buy cut-rate tickets to distribute as they see fit is more rare.

For a modest cost to the city, Mississauga's program allows recipients more freedom to travel to work or to visit family and offers a way for homeless people to escape the cold. It can also make it easier to carry away food-bank provisions for those clients who don't have access to cars, people who would otherwise have to rely on child strollers, bundle buggies or purloined shopping carts.

According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian household spends more on transportation than anything else except shelter. Since many of the costs of transportation are fixed and unrelated to net worth – gas is priced the same for everyone, and both wealthy and low-income residents pay the same price to ride transit – poor people tend to spend a greater proportion of their money on getting around.

Historically, people could at least walk instead of paying for transportation. As recounted in Robert Caro's book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and Fall of New York, which profiles New York City builder Robert Moses, a reporter once asked a 1930s worker toiling in a park why he walked hours a day to work instead of taking the trolley. "Carfare is 20 cents a day," he replied.

But the size and sprawl of modern North American cities has made that option increasingly unrealistic for most. And walking long distances in the Canadian winter can be dangerous to people who cannot afford warm clothing.

According to the city of Mississauga, the four food banks participating in the pilot project bought about 5,000 tickets over the last 10 months. The face-value cost for these tickets – $15,087 – was split between the city and the food banks.

"We try to give them away where we can," said Reverend Jennifer Reid of St. Peter's Anglican Erindale, one of the churches that participates in Deacon's Cupboard, where Ms. Samuels gets her tickets. "It's such a great way to make our money stretch."

That ability to do more with scarce funding is at the heart of the discount ticket idea. Councillor Jim Tovey, one of the drivers of the program, remembers talking to the people at one food bank about the thousands of dollars they were spending on tickets for their clients.

"I thought, that [money] they could be spending on food," he said, adding that part of the logic of the program is that it leaves the decision about who is needy to the food banks, who know their clients well.

"We trust these people to feed our most vulnerable citizens. Don't you think we can trust them with tickets?"

People working at the food banks report varying methods of doling out the tickets. Some distribute them for free. Some distribute them for free. Others pass them on at the same 50-per-cent discount they had paid. Feedback is mostly positive, though there are scattered complaints about the bureaucracy involved.

"We haven't been advertising it because it takes some time to get the tickets," said Niva Sandhu, the program co-ordinator at Seva Food Bank, who otherwise praised the program.

"Many of our clients don't have cars, so they walk or borrow cars or take transit," she said. "A lot of people will walk very far to save a bus ticket."