June 17, 2023 – Steve Munro

Yes, dear readers, I have cast my ballot. My yellow envelope with a mail in ballot is safely in the hands of Toronto’s elections office.

Full disclosure: I have advised, pro bono, on some transit policy proposals for both Josh Matlow and Olivia Chow, but have not determined which were eventually adopted, if any.

My vote went to Olivia Chow for several reasons.

First, thanks to the absence of ranked ballots, I cannot pick candidates secure in knowing that if they don’t attract enough votes, my choice will go to someone else to my political liking. This time out, the job is to ensure Toronto stands up to Doug Ford’s gang at Queen’s Park and rejects the Tory cabal on City Council. I only get one vote, and it goes to Olivia.

If there were ranked ballots, I would have picked Josh Matlow first because he has been in the trenches for years, has a detailed platform and shows he can stand up to the Tory crowd. Sometimes over the top, yes, and he has a reputation for “not playing well with others”. I will take that any day over the back room dealing of Tory and any in his camp who yearn for the job.

Ana Bailão presents herself as a centrist, but her campaign started off with the prince of darkness himself, Nick Kouvalis, a long-time associate of the Fords, and a pack of development industry supporters. When on Council, she supported Tory’s fiscal program, and I have no faith in a miraculous conversion.

Mitzie Hunter has a full platform, but not, as I have written in a platform review, one that is as “fully costed” as she would have us believe. Some revenue sources she touts are already spoken for, including for transit, and to present the money as if it’s just looking for a home is, as they say in parliamentary circles, misleading.

She also flip-flopped in the past on support for Transit City in order to ride the subway bandwagon to a seat at Queen’s Park. Her embrace of the “Scarborough deserves” trope might have some foundation, given how voters there have been played for support by pols for over a decade, but as Mayor of all the city, there is a need to see other districts that deserve attention too.

Brad Bradford I know from his days on the TTC Board, and we would speak regularly about coming items on the agenda. But he rarely delivered advocacy and settled into accepting the management line, something that desperately needs to be changed at that organization. It is not the Board’s function to direct day-to-day decisions, but the Board should set policy and demand accountability.

As a candidate, Bradford has embraced the safety issue and speaks as someone right of Tory, not as someone I could imagine being even moderately right of centre. He also embraces the strong mayor powers to get things done. That path is both undemocratic and an opportunity for very bad, unchecked decisions.

Mark Saunders is Doug Ford’s candidate, and on that basis alone, cannot be trusted. Moreover, he is known both for substantially dismantling the machinery of police traffic enforcement, for his blind eye on a major serial killer case that wrecked his credibility with the gay community, and for a paid advisory role to Ford on the Ontario Place privatization. He is unworthy of consideration.

Returning to Olivia Chow, I believe that criticism of her detailed platform as rather thin is valid, but I am willing to believe there is room for improvement. A major problem with the past decade and more at Council is that policy debates begin with the tax increase (or lack of it), rather than with determining what we actually need and what has top priority. Departments and agencies were given budget targets, and they generally do not present a “Plan B” for what might be done with more money.

That brings at best “business as usual” plans, or trimming in the name of “efficiency” often without revealing the actual effect of budget cuts. The sham of the 2023 TTC budget process was disgusting. Details of service changes that were already designed in January were withheld from the TTC Board and Council until long after any alternate policy might have been adopted. We might not be able to afford all of the service we want, but we should know what is really on the chopping block, and what the cost of alternatives might be.

Simply having an open, frank discussion will put council and citizens in a much better position both to know what is possible, and to defend calls for better funding and new revenue streams. That is a path I hope Chow will follow, and with Matlow as a trusted ally on Council.

This post is intended as historical background to debates on ridership, fleet and mileage trends, together with breakdowns of Operating and Capital Subsidies. The data here come from TTC Annual Reports and Financial Statements.

Updated with charts of various factors compared to the Consumer Price Index, and with a chart of surface vehicle average speed.

Ridership, Fares and Revenue/Cost Ratio

TTC’s ridership enjoyed a long continuous climb after the recession of the early 1990s until about 2015 when the annual trip count hit a plateau and then declined. After a slight uptick in 2019, the pandemic hit and ridership plummeted bottoming out in 2021.

Over the period from 1986 to 2022, the basic adult fare climbed at a steady pace in spite of fare freezes from time to time. The dotted line in the middle chart is a linear trend line which lies quite neatly along the fare values. Note that the basic adult fare is not the same as the average fare, and that discount schemes including passes and time-based transfers can blunt the effect of a fare increase for some riders.

The Revenue/Cost Ratio comes up often in debates, but the value is often misquoted. That is not hard to do as the value has bounced around ever since the initial “Davis formula” of the early 1970s. In that period, the agreement was that TTC’s self-generated revenue (fares and other income such as parking lots and news stand rents) would pay 2/3 of the total, while the remaining 1/3 would be split between the City and the Province. In practice, this never quite worked for a few reasons:

The Province rarely agreed on what constituted an expense they should subsidize, and in practice their percentage of the total “wobbled” around the 1/6 level from year-to-year.
Both the Province and City could effectively dictate the total TTC spending by pegging their contributions. If the Province was feeling stingy, the only option the City had to beef up TTC support was to break from the agreed formula.

The early 1990s recession was followed by the arrival of Premier Mike Harris who slashed transit subsidies. This drove up the R/C ratio until the City began investing more money in operating subsidies. The value has bounced around in the 70-75% range for about a decade, but was allowed to fall somewhat in 2018 and 2019. From 2020 onward, the ridership losses drove the R/C ratio below 30% for a time.

Note that “revenue” includes miscellaneous income such as parking fees and subway shop rentals which account for about 5% of the total. Therefore the proportion from fares is about 5% lower than the R/C value shown in the chart.

Updated: A chart showing the Adult Fare vs the Consumer Price Index has been added below. It is quite clear that the rate of increase of fares (the slope of the orange line) has been running ahead of the CPI (the slope of the blue line) for several decades.