Don’t look now, but the City of Ottawa’s public transit system is about to get slammed into reverse.

In the recently released City of Ottawa budget, the bean-counters and other big thinkers at OC Transpo are proposing some drastic changes to the transit system’s fare structure that will not only adversely impact seniors and students, but will also further degrade ridership at a time when OC Transpo can’t afford to lose a single rider.

It’s no secret that ridership is still down considerably since the pre-pandemic days. And while much of the blame for the inability of ridership to rebound since the pandemic can be blamed on federal civil servants not having to travel in to work two or three days a week, the overall inefficiency of the system, and the O-Train in particular, has given people reason to take other forms of transportation such as Uber.

Now OC Transpo is proposing to increase the cost of a senior monthly pass 120 per cent from $49 to $108 dollars, and scrapping the youth pass for 13- to 18-year-olds altogether, leaving them having to purchase an adult pass instead which are going up five percent from $128.75 a month to $135. University passes are also going up $11.45 to $240.52 a semester.

How this is supposed to increase ridership is anybody’s guess. It will more likely have the opposite effect, but I guess staff are hoping the increase in revenue from people using the system will offset the negative impact the fare increases will have on ridership. Not to worry because tax-paying homeowners are being asked to fork over an even bigger portion of the cost-sharing pie to subsidize the bad decision-making on fares and inefficient and unreliable service.

As the transit services budget is designed, fares are supposed to generate 60 per cent of OC Transpo’s revenue. The remaining 40 per cent is supposed to be generated by the transit levy on the property tax bill.

Since the pandemic that formula has been flipped around so that fares are only generating 40 per cent of the revenue and the transit levy is generating 60 per cent. And that is about to go up as the budget contains a proposed eight per cent increase in the levy which equates to a full one per cent increase in your property tax bill. With the proposed fare increases, that formula isn’t about to improve for property tax paying homeowners anytime soon.

The city is trying to buy time until the LRT extensions east, west and south become operational and the riders will hopefuly return in droves. It follows along the lines of the, “If you build it, they will come.”, theory.

But what if the riders don’t return in droves? And what if the new hub and spoke system, whereby bus service in the suburbs will focus on delivering riders from their homes to the LRT stations, doesn’t work? What then? Suffice it to say, things will likely get a lot worse before they get any better and property taxpayers will once again be forced to pick up the tab.