Editor's note: An earlier version of this article, including the version sent to newsletter subscribers, included incorrect URLs in the sources list. The links have been updated below to point to the correct documents. The error is mine to own. Thank you to readers who flagged it.
When Langley City Council convenes Monday evening, councillors will be asked to do something small, cheap, and overdue: vote to put the city's name behind a request that the province expand the BC Bus Pass Program to include all low-income households in Metro Vancouver.
The motion comes from Mayor Nathan Pachal and is short enough to quote in full. It directs the mayor to write the provincial Minister of Transportation and Transit "requesting that the Province of British Columbia expand the eligibility requirements for the BC Bus Pass Program to include low-income households in Metro Vancouver."
That is the entire ask. No municipal spending. No new program. A letter on city letterhead added to a growing pile.
Council should pass it.
The fare hike is here
On July 1, three days after Monday's meeting, TransLink will implement another five per cent fare increase. For a rider on a three-zone monthly pass, the hike works out to roughly $120 per person each year. Last year that pass crossed $200 for the first time.
Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders has spent months making the case that this is unsustainable for the people who can least afford it. In a recent op-ed in The Tyee, the group documented riders skipping job interviews, missing medical appointments, and risking $173 fare evasion fines because the monthly pass no longer fits the household budget. A region that prices people out of its buses is not delivering a public service. It is operating a toll road.
The program already exists. It just leaves people out.
The BC Bus Pass Program currently offers $45 annual transit passes to people receiving disability assistance and to low-income seniors. It does not extend to low-income working-age adults, and it does not extend to youth. A single parent earning poverty wages in Langley City pays full price for the bus that takes her to work.
The fix is not theoretical. Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kamloops, and Halifax all run discounted passes for low-income residents. Edmonton's Ride Transit program starts at $35 monthly and automatically considers anyone already approved for the city's recreation discount. Penticton has made transit free for everyone aged 24 and under. Orangeville, Ontario, made local bus service free for everyone in 2023.
Metro Vancouver, home to the largest and most expensive transit system in British Columbia, offers nothing comparable for its working-age low-income riders.
In 2024, senior TransLink staff themselves recommended that the expansion be included in the Mayors' Council provincial election policy platform. They estimated the annual cost to the province at $60 million to $70 million. In a provincial budget north of $100 billion, that is a rounding error with an immediate return.
The Surrey-Langley SkyTrain makes the gap impossible to ignore
The province is spending roughly $6 billion to deliver rapid transit to Langley by 2029. The Surrey-Langley extension is the largest single transit investment this community has ever seen, and the case for it rests on a premise: that a frequent, reliable, electrified rail line will move people across the region without requiring a car.
That premise collapses the moment a working-age renter in Langley City cannot afford the fare to ride it.
Building a $6-billion rail line to a community whose lowest-income residents are being priced out of the buses that will feed it is not transit equity. It is infrastructure as ornament. A region that hikes fares above what its own residents can pay is engineering its own ridership shortfall and undermining the return on the largest capital investment in its history.
A low-income transit pass is how rapid transit works as advertised.
Council's role is small. That is the point.
Langley City cannot expand the BC Bus Pass Program. The province can, and Victoria will only act when enough municipal voices ask it to. Council motions, mayoral letters, and UBCM resolutions work the way water erodes stone. One voice does not move a ministry. A chorus does.
Pachal's motion puts Langley City in the chorus. That is what makes it worth passing. The city's letter on its own will not change provincial policy. The city's letter added to dozens of others, from councils across the region, eventually does.
It is the bare minimum a municipal council can do on transit affordability. It costs the city nothing. It commits Langley to no new spending. There is no defensible reason to vote against it.
The meeting begins at 7 p.m. on Monday, June 29 at Council Chambers, 20399 Douglas Crescent. It will be livestreamed on the City of Langley website. Residents who want council to pass the motion should say so before then.
Sources
- Motion text, Langley City Regular Council Meeting Agenda, June 29, 2026 (Item 11.a.1)
- A Transit Fare Hike Is Coming. We Need a Low-Income Pass, by Aman Chandi and Sacia Burton, The Tyee
- More fare hikes, yikes! We need a low-income transit (LIT) pass now!, Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders
- Ride Transit Program, Government of Alberta and City of Edmonton
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