City presents pandemic budget
The city’s 2021 budget is out and there are various stories. The total is $6.17 billion. Residential and business taxes are not going up although boroughs have the option to hike residential taxes, which make up 20% of the tax bill.
Public transit will be free for kids under 12 as of next July, and fares for people 65 and over will be half of what they are now.
The city is not cutting services, partly thanks to money handed over by Quebec to help it face the pandemic.
There are bound to be more stories, and more reactions, to the budget over the next day or two.
It’s not part of this new budget, but the city is considering cutting garbage pickups to once every 2 weeks, in 2022.
The presentation of the budget was briefly held up by protesters at Marché Bonsecours who demanded the defunding of police,
Chris 10:22 on 2020-11-13 Permalink
Free public transit for the young is great, hopefully they’ll get used to it, grow to like it, become dependant on it, whatever, and keep it a lifelong habit. But giving seniors a further discount? They already own or car or not by their age, I don’t think it’ll increase ridership.
Kate 11:21 on 2020-11-13 Permalink
Chris, you’re displaying an exceptional lack of imagination here.
Blork 12:06 on 2020-11-13 Permalink
WTF, Chris? I guarantee there is no shortage of seniors in Montreal who are scraping by on a fixed income and who most definitely don’t own cars.
DeWolf 12:11 on 2020-11-13 Permalink
Even if an elderly person owns a car and is in the habit of driving, they can change their habits. Besides, many old people can’t drive or can no longer drive, and making transit more affordable for them will help them avoid the social isolation that can so often plague the elderly.
Not long after I moved to Hong Kong, seniors were given a flat HK$2 (about 35 cents Canadian) fare for any journey, no matter how long. Older people on a fixed income who previously stayed very close to home suddenly got into exploring the city. They travelled across town to see family and friends, to go to the central library or whatever. By all accounts it was very liberating.
Bill Binns 13:07 on 2020-11-13 Permalink
12 seems like an odd age to draw that line. Are we assuming they are gainfully employed at 13? I’d rather see them make public transit free for everyone. Mostly because the method of selling and collecting fares looks wildly inefficient and expensive.
To Chris’s point, I don’t see elderly people (or anyone else really) giving up their cars based on the price of public transit. Having a car is already orders of magnitude more expensive than public transit. Do we think these crafty geezers were just waiting for them to reduce the cost to nothing? Driving and public transit are not two ways to achieve the same thing. They are completely different ways of life. Somebody shifting from driving to transport will have to shop at different places on a (very) different schedule. Some places they currently go or may have been going for decades will become unreachable. I’m fit and healthy, work from home and can afford to rent a car when I really need one butliving without a car still feels like a serious handicap sometimes.
Orr 11:54 on 2020-11-14 Permalink
For non-monthly pass retired-people like myself and my wife, right now it is cheaper to drive and pay two hours parking than to pay two round trip bus tickets. So we are very interested in this development. Hopefully this applies to the round trip paper ticket and we don’t have to use the infernal opus card because as occasional users we never know how many trips still remain on the card. Having that number flash for a microsecond on the tap terminal for opus card when getting on to the bus is not an adequate source of this information btw.
We would prefer to not use the car for short city trips but we are not going to pay EXTRA to leave the car at home.
Ant6n 12:39 on 2020-11-14 Permalink
Those seniors will likely avoid rush hour. Leveling demand throughout the day is a nice side effect besides increased mobility for the elderly.