Transit is an Essential Service
We need to change how we think about public transit
Happy New Year!! Welcome to 2026!
I am hoping against hope that this will be a better year than 2025…but, it does seem to be starting off with a literal bang, so we shall see.
Charity Begins at Home
We’ve just come through (survived) another Holiday Season. The flurry of requests from various Not-For-Profits at the beginning of December turned into a blizzard in the last few days of December. Each one asking for donations to support important work serving our community. Our help is needed to maintain the arts, social programs, affordable housing, environmental protection, and much more that add vitality to our communities and lives.
We are also asked for money for charities, in the classic definition of a charity: “an organization set up to provide help and raise money for those in need”. Charity is giving money, our money, to organizations that support the less fortunate in our community, country, and around the world. Canadians are some of the most charitable people in the world. We freely give our money, time, and effort to help make other peoples lives better.
Individuals do these things because they can and because they recognize the value of supporting community, locally and globally. All of this is to lauded and celebrated. As a community we come together to fill the gaps in our social and cultural safety net.
Essential Services
All this charity, both the giving and the need, raises the question of what is an “essential service” in a municipality (at least it does to me!). Cities provide all kinds of services directly and indirectly through financial support. Many of those services are deemed essential services such are fire, EMS, police, water service, waste collection, and roads.
Other services colloquially referred to as the “nice to haves”: parks, arts, trees, pools, recreation programs, and libraries are on that list. “Nice to have” programs are usually the ones that are cut first and the ones residents speak out the loudest to maintain.
The Ho Hum Budget
The 2026 City of Winnipeg Budget was approved on December 16th. It was pretty much a non-event. There weren't a lot of people speaking for or against it. Possibly because it is a budget heading into an election year there really wasn’t anything new or particularly controversial.
Public Transit in the Crosshairs
Leading up to the budget, transit has been a big issue for months in Winnipeg. Since the introduction of the new Primary Transit Network at the end of June, the complaints about transit have increased. From the beginning, we knew it was a big change. And that it would take time to get used to.
But the complaints just kept coming.
September 11:
October 7:
October 17:
December 16:
These are but a few of the news stories generated throughout the fall. Beyond the simple “my stop is in a different place” or “ the bus i’ve been taking for the last 20 years is different”, a lot of these complaints were about the service being provided.
Network vs Service
I spent a lot of time discussing how we need to differentiate between the transit network and transit service level. The complaints about the new primary transit network were mostly about the service level being provided. Buses not running frequently enough, bus service ending too early, buses being full… all these things are about service, not network.
Here is one conversation I had with Hal Anderson at CJOB on December 3rd.
The new Primary Transit Network has exposed the lack of funding that Winnipeg Transit has experienced for years, for decades. The good news is that the fix to service levels is easily achieved: it requires commitment and investment. One of the very positive things about the Primary Transit Network is it is designed to be able to scale up. The network can provide the service level people are asking for. The bad news is this requires the will and funding to achieve it.
In response to all the complaints about the level of transit service leading up to the Winnipeg budget, the only significant change in the final approved budget to improve transit service in the 2026 budget was to add one transit planner to address public concerns and expand late-night service on 11 routes.
Transit as Charity
My partner wisely said to me that one of the challenges is Winnipeg City Council has a “charity model” way of thinking about transit. This is not uncommon in Canadian cities, where we often think of public transit being provided for those who don’t have a car or don’t have any other choice. We see this attitude from decision makers as well as from the general public.
This attitude infects the municipal approach right across Canada, where cities focus on the “farebox recovery ratio” of transit service. This is basically how much fares cover the cost of operating transit. In Canadian cities, the average is about 50%. In Winnipeg, that ratio is roughly 44%. That means that operating transit requires funding from other sources, mostly from property taxes. Transit can never pay for itself, and it is even more challenging in car-dependent cities such as Winnipeg. They are all subsidized to one degree or another. More so in Winnipeg because of our car-dependence.
In Winnipeg that “charity” attitude towards public transit is most obvious.
How Transit is Funded
When you look at the budgets for the various departments, all of them are completely or partially funded by property taxes. Some services have user fees attached to them, such as transit or recreation, but many have no user fees, such as libraries, roads, or police. The cost of the service, outside of user fees, is covered by our property taxes.
Pretty much all of the various services don’t have enough revenue to pay for the service. The shortfall is always made up by property taxes. Most departments are not revenue generating. There is no user fee for roads or police, and yet they show “service revenue”. Those revenues are property taxes. So, beyond the obvious tax support (the net numbers in brackets), much of the service revenue is also property taxes.
For really good discussions about city finances and how they work, I recommend going to the Dear Winnipeg blog, or picking up a copy of You’ll Pay for This by Michel Durand-Wood. This is part of The City Project being published by Great Plains Press right here in Winnipeg.
The Transit Subsidy
I want to draw your attention to one line in the budget above:
Transit is the only department or service that is specifically called out as requiring a “subsidy”. Only for transit is the property tax portion of the budget called a subsidy.
In transit, the revenue is from fares, $103.200M & provincial funding, $42.024M, leaving a shortfall of $122.317M in the budget. That is the identified as the Mill Rate Support (property taxes) on the bottom line. That is also the amount identified as the “Public Transit - Subsidy” in the overall budget.
Taking the service adjacent to Transit in the budget document, Snow Removal, we see here that there is $11,000 in revenue associated with snow removal. Yet, the total expense of the service is budgeted to be $49.86M, leaving a Mill Rate Support of over $49M. Again, property tax.
You can repeat this exercise for every service in the budget. In the “net” column in almost every one is a negative number, all “Mill Rate Supported”, either in the front end revenue column receiving property tax revenue, or in the deficit column receiving a property tax subsidy, or in many cases receiving both.
Yet, for all that, only Public Transit is singled out as receiving a “subsidy”.
Transit Discrimination
Yes, this is semantics, but it is indicative of an overwhelming attitude towards transit. Transit is “subsidized” for those who don’t have any other choice, or are too poor to own a car. Transit is “subsidized” for those less fortunate in our society. Those who need transit shouldn’t complain too much because the rest of the people are “subsidizing” it. Those transit riders are not paying the full cost, so they’d better accept the level of service we give them. That is the definition of charity.
We don't apply the same for drivers of cars and trucks. We accept they receive over $200M of property tax support for construction, maintenance, and snow removal to support their use of public roads. Roads, after all, are deemed an “essential service”, same of police and fire.
Transit as Essential Service
Transit, whether you use it or not, benefits you.
For a transit user, it is an inexpensive way to get around the city. The transit user saves thousands of dollars over using a car for daily commutes.
For the city, building and maintaining transit infrastructure is cheaper than ever expanding roads. Cheaper means having the funds to do all those “nice to haves” that citizens are always asking for.
For the driver, a transit user means one less car on the road in front of you. Your trip becomes easier, faster, and less congested.
Public Transit is an essential service. Transit is a public good, for everyone. Everyone benefits from a transit system that provides good service, that gives people the choice to save money, reduce their impact on the environment, and keep their city more affordable.
We must abandon the “charity model” approach to public transit, in Winnipeg and elsewhere. We must recognize it as the essential service it is, one that benefits everyone.
Thinking of transit as a charity is the major impediment to improving transit service. We need the political and public will to think of it as the Essential Service it is.
brian
Not sure this will get through to the people who need to see it. I don't think of transit as charity - it used to be our second vehicle. I disagree that people are only upset about the service changes - the network changes have made our "second vehicle" become taxis. It is interesting that it's the only item with a "subsidy" attached to it. Is it some accounting mumbojumbo?