Following Olivia Chow’s election as Mayor of Toronto, the process is now underway to repopulate committee and board appointments that will reflect the Mayor’s and Council’s priorities .

The Striking Committee – Councillors Malik (Chair), Bravo (Vice-Chair), Carroll, McKelvie and Perks – is very different from the crew who managed this process under Mayor Tory. Only Deputy Mayor McKelvie was carried over from previous era.

The City Clerk polled Councillors to determine each member’s interest in a wide variety of positions, and their requests will be considered by the Committee at its meeting on August 10, 2023. Their recommendations will be forwarded to Council for approval at a special meeting on the afternoon the same day.

Up for grabs are six positions on the TTC Board including the Chair and five other seats. The Councillor members’ terms will run to the end of 2024 when the process of juggling appointments will be repeated (standard practice at Council’s mid-term), although the sitting TTC Board members are likely to be reappointed for a further two years.

The remaining four members of the board, non-Council “public” members, will not be up for reappointment until early 2025 or 2027 unless Council rescinds them sooner. Any selections will be affected by the revised membership in the Civic Appointments Committee.

Today there are only five Councillors on the Board and there is one vacancy.

Councillors who have asked to be considered for the TTC Board are: Ainslie, Burnside, Holyday, Mantas, Matlow, Moise and Myers. Of these, all but Matlow and Myers are already on the Board, and Burnside is Chair. (The Vice-Chair is chosen from among the citizen members.)

The Striking Committee and Council should aim to create a TTC Board that actively pursues policies to improve transit. This includes public debates about just what we, as a city, expect of the system. Wringing their hands and saying “we can’t afford anything, so we won’t bother trying” should not be an option.

There are huge challenges financial (the City’s budget deficit), political (the Ford government at Queen’s Park) and organizational (the less-than-steller performance of and reputed poisonous environment under CEO Rick Leary). Any would-be Commissioner who views their job as simply showing up for meetings now and then to hear good news stories should seek work elsewhere.

The TTC has just embarked on consultation for its 5-Year Service Plan and a Customer Experience Action Plan. This might have been a business-as-usual plan under Mayor Tory entrenching a “Board approved” set of targets driven by a conservative agenda.

Toronto needs much more, an aspiration not just for “better” transit, but for a greater relevance of transit to riders across the city. Even if our goal is out of reach in the short term, we should aim high.

The TTC faces severe problems. Some are the financial aftereffects of the pandemic including a shift in travel patterns, but some are of its own making. I have written about many of these topics before and will not repeat the detailed arguments here.

However, if I were interviewing candidates for this Board, here are the issues I would expect them to address.

Service Restoration and Growth

A campaign promise from Mayor Chow was to undo the TTC service cuts of recent years, but this is not as straightforward as it seems. Simply going back to January 2020 schedules will not address changes in demand patterns, not to mention the shortfall in service that existed before the pandemic. Hard as it might be to imagine, there is also a question of future growth especially through making transit more attractive, a “better way” for travel the network does not serve well.

An important factor will be the Service Standards that were unilaterally changed by TTC management as part of the 2023 Budget. They were never presented to the Board for a policy debate in their own right. What should the standards be? Can the Miller-era Ridership Growth Strategy standards be restored in one leap? Should we go further?

Before Covid, calls for better service inevitably ran into claims that the TTC didn’t have enough vehicles, or garages, or operators, or budget headroom. Collectively, this put a drag on the pace of change, and the situation was not helped by medium range plans based on very modest ridership growth. Today, the TTC has surplus buses, streetcars and subway trains thanks both to service cuts and a spare ratio well above industry norms. The only problem is to find budget room for operators to drive them and maintenance workers to keep them on the road.

The City’s Net Zero plans include expanded use of transit, not simply marking time carrying existing users. The shortfall in TTC plans relative to City goals was clear, but along with many other issues this vanished in the pandemic crisis.

Schemes to improve the rider experience through services such as on board WiFi, enhanced shelters at major transfer points or a wider range of subway shops miss the basic point: the buses, streetcars and trains have to be there to carry riders.

How high should we aim? Simply getting back to 100 percent of pre-pandemic demand does not touch goals for a greener transit system. Buying electric buses does not achieve much without more riders and trips diverted from auto travel. The TTC is happy to defer a new garage for a decade as this relieves a capital budget pressure, but this does not support an aggressive growth plan.

Service Quality and Communications

Much has been said about cuts of recent years and the cost of running more service than demand might require. However, these cuts are compounded by reliability issues that plague every route from the shortest to the longest across Toronto. Buses might, on average, be only moderately loaded, but thanks to bunching more riders are on full buses than empty ones. They wait longer (and unpredictably) for service to appear.

The cheapest “new” capacity and advertisement for riding transit is sitting in plain sight: provide regular service that riders can depend on. Far too often buses and streetcars run in pairs or worse with little apparent effort to sort out the service. The average “customer experience” does not match what the schedules advertise.

Quality metrics bury the truth about service with averages rather than specifics, with performance goals that do not reflect rider experience, and with substantial leeway to consider erratic service “on time”. There is no fine-grained reporting to show what is actually achieved at stops and on board vehicles.

All of this is compounded by fragmented communications with information, to the extent it is both provided and accurate, scattered through various media. The TTC’s website is a hodge-podge of information that challenges even a dedicated, experienced user.

Transit service is useless of riders cannot find it, cannot tell what might affect their trips. There is more truth to the satiric spaghetti maps of service diversions than the TTC would care to admit.

The problem is not just outside the TTC for riders, but internal thanks to fragmentation of responsibility and scattered sources of information. Customer relations staff should not have to depend on outside commentators to know what is happening on their own system.

Subway Renewal

Back in March 2017, TTC management had a plan for renewal of Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. This included a new fleet, a new carhouse west of Kipling Station, Automatic Train Control, One Person Train Operation, infrastructure renewal (track, switches, power) and provision for both the Scarborough Extension and the Downtown Relief Line (whose trains would have used Greenwood Yard).

Board members who watched the planned spending on Line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina regularly asked “where is the plan for Line 2”, but it never saw the light of day. Parts of the Line 2 plan are sprinkled through the 15 Year Capital Plan, but as line items not as a consolidated project.

This is a typical problem with TTC Capital budgets. Both for fear of sticker shock with the overall price and in the hope of getting the most critical parts funded, plans are advanced and implemented piecemeal. That is how the Line 1 ATC project became such a mess with bits and pieces funded, designed and implemented without regard for how they would work as a system.

The Work From Home shift shaved the peak off of subway demand buying the TTC time and capacity. However, the problems remain both of future growth and particularly of existing infrastructure and fleet renewal. The recently-started Bloor-Yonge project will spend $1.5 billion to expand passenger capacity at this key transfer point which was badly congested pre-Covid, and this is not the only capacity expansion on the horizon. If subway service and demand eventually do rebound to winter 2020 levels, or go beyond with the capacity available through Automatic Train Control, several stations will require added platform-to-street capacity. This is not just a question of running more trains.

The Board should understand how the TTC’s capital plans work not just for shiny new projects, but also for ongoing maintenance and renewal. This should inform advocacy for funding at the scale actually needed, not just for individual projects. Priorities are hopelessly skewed when the provincial subway building budget would roughly cover the entire TTC capital shortfall.

BRT and LRT Expansion, Transit Priority

The RapidTO project seeks to install red lanes on several corridors and 20 are listed in the City’s Surface Transit Network Plan (the top five are Jane, Steeles West, Finch East, Dufferin, Lawrence East).

There are several problems with this plan including both its slow pace of implementation and the resistance of some neighbourhoods to the loss of road lanes in areas where streets have different form and usage than on the prototype lanes in Scarborough (Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside).

If the desire is to improve transit quickly, the city simply cannot for a rollout of one street or two a year ad infinitum. Telling riders that priority is coming is cold comfort if their place on the priority list puts that “priority” in 2030 or beyond. This links to the issue of service management where benefits can occur across the network, not one street at a time, and wait/transfer times can be reduced. Where there are specific bottlenecks that affect reliability, these should be addressed but on a targeted basis.

Service reliability whether through line management or transit priority (ideally both) should not be viewed as a potential cost saving, but as a way to provide better service with existing resources. This was shown clearly with the King Street pilot where the primary benefit was reliability, not speed. Reliable service reduces waits that can contribute substantially total trip time and frustrate riders who must pad their travel estimates with allowances for uncertain service.

Transit signal priority should give real priority to transit, not the leftovers after serving auto traffic. Some so-called priority signals in Toronto actually slow service by forcing transit to “wait its turn”. A particularly troubling concept is the idea of giving priority only when vehicles are “late”. This basically says that transit can wait most of the time, and is particularly bad for unusual circumstances such as diversions where the concept of “on time” has no meaning. (This has not been implemented in Toronto, but the idea pops up in discussions of future TSP work.)

The most important pending BRT project is the Scarborough RT replacement busway. This is currently planned to open in late 2025, a time that seems more attuned to leisurely spending than to a must-have project. Haggling over who will pay takes priority over getting the work done for the benefit of riders as soon as possible. Acceleration of this project should be a top priority for the TTC including the possibiliy of splitting the work and completing the southern half (Lawrence East to Kennedy Station) as quickly as possible to get buses out of the tangle of construction on Eglinton for the Scarborough Subway.

LRT projects on Eglinton and Waterfront East are longer term. They are important and should advance as quickly as possible. Lines in other corridors are are unlikely within this decade given the scale of competing transit construction.

(I have not included Metrolinx projects here because they lie outside of the scope of the TTC Board.)

Fare Policy

For many years, the idea of cheaper fares was central both to transit advocacy and to political exploitation. Keeping fares low is an easy sell, the transit equivalent of “no new taxes”, but this eventually translates to a perception that “the TTC costs too much” especially when service is poor.

If a system is funded at a level barely adequate to serve demand, transit’s broad constituency can be lost. Those who can afford to go elsewhere do so, and transit could be seen as a social service, not as a key part of the city for everyone. This can skew political focus to building expensive new lines to serve commuters while leaving local service to rot.

Fare policy must be part of the overall advocacy for transit, but it must not eclipse the need for improved service. “Time is money”, and unreliable service steals time from every rider.

Toronto has just expanded its “Fair Pass” deal to a wider group of low income riders, and the plan is close to full implementation. At some point, everyone who “deserves” lower fares will get them, but cheap transit without good service does not provide mobility.

A broader question is whether the fare structure works overall for all existing and potential riders.

Within the TTC itself, the Fare Policy review includes an option for fare capping. This would replace pre-paid passes with a cap on transit fares on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The two-hour transfer is a miniature version of this, but it could be expanded so that riders with bursts of frequent use would not have to buy a pass in advance that they might not require.

The next level up from this is a regional implementation without regard to the logo on the bus you ride. Elimination of the inter-agency fare boundary would flatten the fare structure for all trips. Fare caps should apply to cross border travel so that occasional forays beyond a rider’s home system are not billed at the full occasional user rate. A fare is a fare is a fare.

The problem remains of how to pay for such fare reductions not to mention for the service required for induced cross boundary demand.

The Role of GO Transit

What should be GO Transit’s role? GO is often mentioned as a potential form of rapid transit within Toronto, and already Toronto is spending about $1.5 billion on five “SmartTrack” stations that really should be on Metrolinx’ dime. Ontario has agreed to fund a $234 million overrun on the estimated cost of this project.

The GO network is downtown centric, and some of its suburban Toronto stations do not serve much as they lie in old industrial areas. Reorienting the bus network to feed these stations would be possible, but the result might not serve local travel well. Think of how the TTC’s grid network is distorted around major transfer stations.

Toronto has no control over provincial spending policy or GO service levels, but this is a case of “be careful what you wish for”. If more provincial funding were to appear, where should it be spent? Is GO fare integration and service the best use of whatever cash might shake loose at Queen’s Park?

The TTC should concentrate on making its local service work before it views GO as a magic solution to travel challenges.

Finance

When the TTC unveiled its 15 Year Capital Plan in 2019, this revealed a deep shortfall between planned and necessary spending. This was before the post-pandemic era when key city revenues fell threatening far more than just the TTC.

Toronto needs honesty about what we can afford, and the coming Council debate about a long range financial plan will show what the city faces. As Toronto plans for a post-Tory era and rebalanced spending priorities, it cannot afford surprises.

For many years on the capital side, projects were hidden to fit apparent TTC requirements within then-available funding and to give the impression of a sustainable financial plan. Needed work went unacknowledged, or was scheduled beyond the City’s ten-year planning window. Meanwhile, the level of ongoing provincial and federal funding through gas tax allocations do not keep up with a growing backlog. The focus on major, one-time project funding allows governments to appear supportive of transit while leaving the City on the hook for that backlog of state of good repair work.

This is a direct result of years of understated budgets and a spending focus on megaprojects.

On the operating side, the Board and by extension Council do not know what options for future service levels will actually cost. During the pandemic, the TTC sought “efficiencies” to reduce its standing costs, but it is not clear whether these reductions can be sustained without harming basics like system maintenance.

Too often, savings are touted on a cumulative basis. This inflates their one-year value and falsely gives the impression that there is new money every year.

Future operating costs will include jumps outside of routine inflation as new rapid transit lines on Eglinton and Finch come online, and further out the new subways now under construction. These could crowd out basic system-wide improvements or even threaten existing operations.

Toronto’s political aspiration is for “better” service, and this will require clear understanding of how the budget “works” and what is possible. This does not mean simply throwing up our hands and saying “we can’t afford anything”, but of understanding the resources needed to achieve improvements. Past attempts by Board members to get at the cost and options for service improvements beyond a very basic level failed thanks to lack of support from other members and management.

Politics

In the medium term, one big challenge for transit and for the city in general is the political tension with Queen’s Park and a Premier whose seems eager to thwart the city whenever possible. Combine this with a Mayor who is not in the Premier’s pocket, and this could produce a stalemate and years of minimal improvement at best. While the Province spends a fortune on its own projects, it’s attitude to Toronto and other cities is that they waste money.

Despite this environment, the TTC must visibly improve to show that the City Hall crew under Olivia Chow can actually deliver. That will be vital for the work to continue beyond the 2026 election. We do not need a repeat of the shattered hopes of the Miller/Ford transition nor more years of Tory mediocrity.