Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, honourable chairman and members of the Standing Committee on Finance. Thank you for inviting me today to discuss the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public transportation.
My name is Kelly Paleczny, and I'm the general manager of the London Transit Commission in London, Ontario. I also serve as chair of the board of the Ontario Public Transit Association and I am an executive member of the Canadian Urban Transit Association.
I've been invited here today to speak to you on behalf of the London Transit Commission. Based on ridership, we are the 15th-largest transit agency in Canada. In 2019 we moved 24.9 million passengers and collected $34.2 million in revenues.
Our transit service provides Londoners with access to their community, bringing patients and employees to our city's hospitals, students to local high schools or Western University or Fanshawe College, workers to our industrial parks, or shoppers to every corner of our city.
Prior to mid-March of this year, the London Transit Commission was beginning work on an exciting new infrastructure project to bring bus rapid transit to London. The federal government committed to investing $123 million in our rapid transit initiative and supporting projects in 2019. The accessibility, frequency and reliability of public transit were set to improve in our fast-growing city. Our mayor has also recently outlined his intention to transition our fleet to zero-emission buses in the near future.
Then the pandemic hit. In response, in the interests of public health and in an effort to continue moving essential workers to and from their workplaces, our transit agency, like hundreds of others in Canada, moved to rear-door boarding of buses to encourage physical distancing between drivers and passengers. We also heightened cleaning and disinfecting of our fleet and maintenance facilities, among other measures, to ensure that the transit service is offered in a safe and sanitary environment for all.
These measures have been rolled out while our transit agency has forgone the collection of revenues in the interests of public safety. This deprives the London Transit Commission of our largest revenue source, but the service must continue to operate for essential workers as they continue to battle the pandemic.
In an effort to address the budget shortfalls associated with the lost revenue, London Transit has reduced service levels to approximately 70% of what they would normally be and cancelled the service improvements planned for the fall of this year. We have depleted two of our operating reserves in order to cover shortfalls through June and have now put the city on notice that we are out of funding options.
As in other provinces and territories, municipalities in Ontario are prevented from running deficits. This means that there is not much of a local funding backstop available for transit agencies in their hour of need.
It's critical for higher orders of government to support transit, given that they have the fiscal tools at their disposal that city governments lack. We urgently need federal and provincial support for emergency operating funding. This support will avoid doing decades of damage to our transit networks and reinforce our ability to decarbonize the public transit sector.
As our communities slowly begin to reopen and as our economy begins to rebuild, it's critical to have well-functioning public transit systems. We move people to jobs, appointments, attractions, classes and pretty much everything in between. We cannot afford to have our transit agencies on their knees and contemplating service cuts and layoffs while customers continue to return to our service.
Just this past week, as Ontario slowly began to loosen restrictions, we saw ridership increase by 10% over the previous week in London. Service reductions at this time will hamper our local and national recovery efforts and could encourage transit riders to move back to their cars.
I would like to thank members of this committee and members of the House of Commons for coming together to support Canadians during the pandemic. Your work and dedication have been exemplary. So, too, have been the efforts of front-line transit workers. It's time to support those efforts to ensure that our communities have the safe and reliable transit services they deserve.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee. I would be pleased to answer any questions.