In our previous post, we explained how the City of Toronto is looking to appoint four members of the public to the Toronto Transit Commission, the TTC’s board of directors.

Transit advocacy group TTCRiders wants one of its members to represent us — meaning all TTC passengers — by applying for one of those four positions on the board.

According to a recent TTCRiders blog post,

“TTCriders represents the needs of close to 1.8 million people who take the TTC every day. We’ve made huge gains together with over the last few years for public transit in Toronto and that was when we didn’t have representation inside the City government. Where is there a voice for riders on the Commission now? Who better to rep riders than TTCriders? Who better to introduce motions for TTC service improvements than a grassroots riders organization who depends on the transit and knows its problems and opportunities inside and out?

The last few years have shown pretty poor representation of transit rider interests on the commission. TTC service cuts and fare hikes seemed to be the norm. Now under a new administration Toronto has the opportunity to get things right again. This term of office citizens appointees could help make 2015 the year of the rider but only if the new appointees are truly representative of our needs…”

So, TTCriders has decided to apply for membership on the TTC Commission. It wants members to nominate others or themselves for a single seat on the board and then hold its own election to choose its candidate from the nominees. You can learn more about this campaign here.

You can apply to become a member of TTCRiders here.

TTCriders is a membership-based group “advocating for an affordable world-class public transit system for Toronto”.

A coalition of organizations, including the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Social Planning Toronto, the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, ACORN ((Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Canadian Federation of Students, founded the group in 2010.

Source: TTCRiders