Transit issues frequently challenged and divided the outgoing council and will likely roil the next one even beyond the continuing saga of the LRT. Over the last four years HSR has seen cancellation of the bus-only lane on King Street, substantial fare hikes, hundreds of continuing pass-bys every month, and a multi-month crisis of cancelled trips.
The hangover from amalgamation of variable transit taxes because of area rating also haunted the last council and will confront the new one when it takes office in December. And for all the debates and plans, HSR ridership has remained nearly frozen, in stark contrast to most municipal transit systems in Ontario.
Not surprisingly transit is a major issue for candidates in the October 22 election. Perhaps to the frustration of the 70,000 people who already ride the HSR every day, discussion of its operations and funding are being crowded out by a loud debate over a light rail addition that won’t be operational for eight more years.
The bus-only lane along a short section of King Street from Mary Street to Dundurn was a pilot project approved by the previous council, launched in October 2013 and funded by provincial dollars. Lanes devoted to transit are a requirement of both LRT and bus rapid transit (BRT). For the brief period it operated on King Street it already carried as many passengers as there were cars using the other three lanes.
But it aggravated drivers and many business owners who lost parking in front of their stores and debate about its continuation was at the top of the agenda for the council elected four years ago. In a mid-January 2015 committee meeting four different directions on the bus-lane all failed to get a majority. The final decision to kill it was taken at city council a week later by a 9-7 vote.
The nine were Chad Collins, Doug Conley, Scott Duvall, Lloyd Ferguson, Tom Jackson, Judi Partridge, Rob Pasuta, Arlene Vanderbeek and Terry Whitehead. Voting unsuccessfully to keep it were Jason Farr, Matthew Green, Aidan Johnson, Brenda Johnson, Sam Merulla, Maria Pearson and Fred Eisenberger.
That level of division was evident again less than two months later during the debate on establishing a citizen’s panel on LRT versus BRT, or more specifically on whether to ask that panel to review transit area rating that forces residents of the former city of Hamilton to pay three times the transit tax rate for the HSR as those who live in the urban parts of the former suburbs, and excuses rural residents from contributing anything at all.
The vote to have the panel examine area rating passed 9-7, supported by the mayor and all councillors from the former city, and opposed by all councillors representing suburban and rural areas. As it turned out the citizen’s panel process was upstaged by the provincial government’s surprise decision to fully fund the LRT.
After that it became harder to use council votes to assess councillor views on the HSR and its crises. At the same meeting that divided over area rating, council unanimously approved steep fare increases to pay for the first two years of the HSR’s ten-year growth strategy.
Cash fares climbed 8 percent in each of 2015 and 2016. That added $15 to the monthly adult passes (now $105.60) and more than $20 to those for high school students ($88), while also setting in place annual increases to senior’s passes ($29.50). And it avoided the initial staff proposal to instead raise taxes some by less than two dollars.
That 2015 decision approved further hikes in 2017 and 2018 – but also called for taxpayers to contribute in both those years. To the outrage of HSR riders, the 2017 tax contribution didn’t happen and the promised addition of buses was delayed. The tax funding came this year converting the 10-year strategy to an 11-year one.
In between the financially squeezed HSR cancelled hundreds of buses last fall and winter – a crisis that forced council to authorize temporary hiring of more drivers. Overall, HSR ridership has gone down rather than up in this term of council and city predictions offer little hope of changing that significantly before LRT starts in 2024.