Victoria youth under 19 will be able to ride transit buses for free starting Dec. 1.
Mayor Lisa Helps confirmed Tuesday that the city will begin handing out free bus passes this month as a way to encourage transit ridership and reduce traffic congestion. “If we get kids riding transit, they’ll become lifelong transit riders and then they’ll encourage their parents and their grandparents and their elders to take the bus as well,” she said.
“It’s a sustainable mode of transportation. It’s probably the most sustainable mode we have. The more people moving on the bus, the less people congesting the roads, and the better for everybody.”
Helps said the city is still working out the details of how to administer the program for an estimated 7,200 youth in Victoria.
“We don’t know yet exactly how it will work, but at some point in late November, parents and kids will have to come down to city hall with a proof of address and pick up their pass,” she said. “And they’ll need to do it, unfortunately, on a month-by-month basis in this short-term period.”
By next September, the city hopes to have a U-Pass program in place where young people will be able to use their student identification cards as bus passes, the way college and university students do.
Victoria will cover the $11.25-a-month cost for all 7,200 youth — whether they end up using their passes or not. Helps said the total annual cost of $972,000 will be covered in part by revenue from Sunday parking fees that took effect in May. The city has indicated that it expects to bring in about $500,000 to $600,000 a year from the new fees.
Victoria council had hoped to negotiate a better deal and buy only as many bus passes as it needed at the $11.25-a-month U-Pass rate for the first nine months of the program.
But members of the Victoria Regional Transit Commission were concerned that would erode transit revenues and result in other municipalities subsidizing Victoria. So Helps agreed that the city would buy passes for all 7,200 youth. “This is doable for the city,” she told the commission Tuesday. “Some of this will be funded by the 2019 budget, some of it will be coming from the 2020 budget. But we can say for certain that not one cent of subsidization will come from other local government to the City of Victoria.”
Juliet Watts of the University of Victoria Students’ Society spoke in support of Victoria’s initiative at the commission meeting. “If I was here on behalf of my constituents, if I was a mayor or a council member, my biggest concern would be how jealous the youth in my municipality will be of those in Victoria,” she said. “I’ve already heard from friends I have in Esquimalt. The youth climate strikers are so mad that they don’t live in the municipality of Victoria.”
But Saanich Coun. Susan Brice, who chairs the transit commission, noted that Victoria is in the unique position of having a new source of revenue from Sunday parking that other municipalities do not have.
“When you take the number of youth in Victoria and extrapolate that to Saanich, we would be looking at perhaps a $2-million-a-year cost,” she said in an interview. “I guess any time you’re looking at those kinds of expenditures, you have to compare that with other things that you would invest in.”
Oak Bay Mayor Kevin Murdoch said his municipality will watch the Victoria experience with interest. “There is a fixed amount of money available, so there’s always going to be a balance between are you driving usage through reducing costs or are you driving it through improving service?” he said.
“And you can’t necessarily do both. So that’s going to be always the hard question.”
