TTC Token Limit and a Friday Riders' Strike

Will there be empty seats on the TTC this Friday? Photo © Marilyn Campbell

With proposed fare hikes soon to be voted on, the TTC announced on Monday that a large demand for tokens has caused them to limit the number of tokens that can be purchased from TTC collector booths. To deter hoarding, riders will only be able to buy a maximum of five tokens at a time and, if no more are available, they'll need to pay the cash fare instead. The TTC had already announced a ten-token limit, which made sense as a standard amount which many people purchase anyway. But only being able to buy five tokens at a time means many riders will need to head to the booth twice a week. While that may not sound like a big deal to casual or non-transit users, many TTC trips begin and end on streetcars and buses, requiring an extra stop or even an out-of-the-way detour to reach an actual collector booth. Of course other vendors such as convenience stores have no reason to limit sales, so if you're usually a ten-plus token buyer you should still be able to get your regular amount somewhere local - until they run out, that is!

Along with people tying to buy extra tokens at the current price, the announcement of the probable fare hike has caused one Toronto woman to organize a TTC rider's strike on Friday. Although it's now been covered elsewhere I first saw the news of Nicole Winchester's campaign in the Torontoist entry, "Rising TTC Fares Trigger a Riders' Strike". It seems Winchester is using a Facebook event to recruit people who are willing to NOT take the TTC this Friday, to remind the powers that be "that without the riders, there would be no TTC". There are mixed reactions to the idea in article comment sections, but at time of writing 3,682 people were "confirmed guests" on the Facebook event (although agreeing to something on Facebook is far from binding).

I need to get to work on Friday, and I'm pretty sure I'll still be using the TTC to do it. In fact, my only real response to the news of the likely fare hike has been a heavy sigh before resigning my bank balance to the inevitable. How have you been responding to the fare hike news? Looking for a Friday carpool? Becoming one of the token-hoarders the TTC dreads? Or is it all just transit-riding business as usual?