The City of Greater Sudbury is looking into the potential implications of offering free GOVA Transit use to all local high school students, in partnership with local school boards.
St. Benedict Catholic Secondary School Grade 11 student Samuel Sweet presented the idea to Ward 5 Coun. Mike Parent, who tabled a successful motion on the matter this week.
The motion, which was unanimously ratified by city council this week, requests that city staff present a report for city council consideration by March 2025.
Sweet attended this week’s community and emergency services committee meeting of city council, where Parent’s motion was tabled, after which he expressed optimism that next year’s report will be favourable toward free transit service for high school students.
“I know a lot of lower-income students are going to benefit from this,” he said.
“This is more of getting students to work, extracurriculars and doing things in life they could not do otherwise because of the financial barrier.”
Sweet lives in The Valley and pays for a GOVA Transit pass to get him to school each day, plus whatever extracurricular activities he wants to take part in.
Although Sweet said he has made it work, not everyone can afford bus fare, and an inability to move freely through Greater Sudbury can limit what some young people are able to do.
Sweet cited the City of Kingston’s free bus pass program for high school students as a potential guiding light for the city to look into.
A Toronto Transit Commission board report investigating the Kingston program notes that Kingston’s high school bus pass program is “simple but powerful” and “has proven that with encouragement, mastery of transit tools and a bus pass, students gain independence and confidence that improves their lives and, in turn, their communities.”
In Kingston, the program was credited with increasing annual high school ridership from 28,000 in 2012 to close to 600,000 pre-COVID.
The Kingston model formed the basis for a Federation of Canadian Municipalities guidebook titled, “Engaging students to increase public transit ridership.”
This guidebook clarifies that the Kingston high school bus program began as a 2012 pilot project that provided Grade 9 students with fully subsidized transit passes.
“Today, all high school students in Kingston receive free transit passes, along with an on-bus orientation session to teach students how to ride the bus,” according to the guidebook, which credits the program with helping the city’s overall transit ridership increase by 73 per cent.
The Kingston program costs approximately $250,000 per year, which is offset by a contribution of $60,000 from two school boards and an additional $100,000 to $125,000 from the Ontario Gas Tax Fund.
Sweet, 16, has become a regular fixture at council chambers within Tom Davies Square in recent months. He’s interested in pursuing a career in either politics or urban planning, and has been attending city council and committee meetings to see how things work.
“I really like to see the process and learn about how things get done,” he said, adding that it was rewarding to see a motion he advocated for and worked on with Parent get passed.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
