A recent Council debate considered a report on Prioritization of Planned Higher-Order Transit Projects. Its first recommendation:
City Council reaffirm the policy that maintaining the existing system in a state of good repair is the first priority for investment in transportation.
Despite the State of Good Repair (SOGR) ranking first, some Councillors pursued their subway dreams. Amending motions included the Finch West LRT extension to Pearson Airport, the Bloor subway extension to Sherway, and the Sheppard subway western and eastern extensions. All of these are long-term projects that will have no effect on the transit system for a decade at least.
(Two lines, the Eglinton East and Waterfront East LRTs, were not under discussion as they are already City “priority” projects, although what benefit this status confers remains to be seen.)
The TTC’s Capital Plan includes a very long list of projects for which there is only partial committed funding, or none at all. Meanwhile, the backlog in SOGR work will climb to about $8 billion over the coming decade in spite of $13 billion in spending. In other words, the 10-year budget should be $21 billion, but is actually only 60% of that figure.
Even this pales by comparison with the 15-year total which now stands at almost $48 billion of which only 25% is funded. This number does not include many proposals including the rapid transit projects favoured by Council.
My review of the TTC’s 2024 Capital Budget and Plan includes more details on the December 2023 Unfunded Projects report and I will not repeat that here.
SOGR is seen by some as getting in the way of their preferred system expansion projects, and that a way forward might be paved (so to speak) with a focus on a short list of the most important SOGR items. This is absolute folly, but typical of the priorities that created the problem in the first place.
This misses the key question about our transit system: what do we want it to be? This includes choices not just for capital repairs and/or expansion, but for the overall scope and quality of service transit will provide.
Will the TTC always be a second class service except in a handful of rapid transit corridors, will transit play a much larger role in moving people around the entire city, or will it decline for want of resources to an unattractive last choice for travel? Only after we decide on the goal can we address the question of where to spend, and how much we need.
The 15-year Capital Plan grew substantially from 2023 to 2024 with the principal additions in the bus fleet and a provision for added capacity under the TransformTO Net Zero program. The big jump in bus costs reflects the higher unit cost of battery buses now assumed to be the standard. (Facility Maintenance and Network Wide Assets are new categories in 2024, but they simply replace the “Other” group from previous years with a comparatively small increase.)
Portfolio | 2022-2036 ($m) | 2023-2037 ($m) | 2024-2038 ($m) |
---|---|---|---|
Subways | $25,400.0 | $25,343.0 | $27,613.0 |
Buses | $6,300.0 | $6,948.0 | $8,705.2 |
TransformTO | $5,339.8 | ||
Streetcars | $2,230.0 | $2,277.0 | $2,307.4 |
Facility Maintenance | $2,415.1 | ||
Network Wide Assets | $1,474.8 | ||
Other Infrastructure | $3,300.0 | $3,478.0 | |
Grand Total | $37,230.0 | $38,046.0 | $47,855.3 |
Even the $5.3 billion TransformTO line is an understatement because it accounts only for bus fleet expansion, not for the other modes, and there is no discussion of the related operating cost and competing funding needs.
A quick-and-dirty way to approach the budget is to pick a “top five” project list as if, by implication, all of the rest can wait their turn behind Councillors’ aims for their “deserving” wards. A top five list is a simplistic approach that does not recognize the complexity of TTC’s maintenance needs. Even worse, it implies that if the worst of the backlog is addressed, we can sleep soundly.
I challenge anyone to pick only five lines from the tables below as the subset we could pay for while downplaying the rest.
Another challenge lies in project linkages (you cannot buy more buses without some place to store and maintain them), and in deciding which items should be stripped of priority, in effect relegated to a “bottom five” group. That will be a hard fight.
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