The TTC Board will hold a special meeting on Tuesday, April 2. The announced agenda includes only one report TTC Board Orientation, Education and Training Session which includes several topics:

a. Overview of the TTC, its Governance, Safety and Communications
b. Code of Conduct and Municipal Conflict of Interest Act
c. Being an Effective Director
d. Key TTC Strategies and Plans
e. Strategy Training Exercise

Although the agenda page advertises this as a public meeting and invites public deputations, the report states that it will be held in camera as permitted by the City of Toronto Act (S. 190.3.1). The report recommends that the “training materials” be publicly released after the session, although this could be amended. More importantly there will be no public record of the Board’s discussion.

The first three topics should be familiar to most of the Board as they have been in office for some time. Only three Councillor members changed with the arrival of Mayor Chow, and the existing Tory-era Citizen members are still in place except for one who resigned late in 2023. His replacement has not yet been appointed by Council. Training on how the TTC works should be an orientation session for new members, not a topic consuming a full Board meeting that could be spent on overall policy discussion.

Some years ago, the TTC Board attempted to arrange an agenda-free meeting to discuss general policy, but this was hijacked by management with a dog-and-pony show on their own accomplishments and the duties of the Board. This could be a repeat performance.

The time is long overdue for the Board to ask hard questions of management, of each other and of the City about the TTC’s future. We got a sense of what is possible at the recent Audit and Risk Management Committee meeting. Board members Saxe and Osborne grilled management who, frankly, were not fully prepared to answer questions about the Fare Inspection audit report. We have also seen an accumulation of issues regarding infrastructure maintenance and priorities that require informed debate and direction.

Probably the largest overall issue is budget, service and maintenance planning for 2025. In December 2023, the TTC Board wanted to establish a Budget Committee, but this has not yet happened. The motion was couched as a request to staff to report on the idea in Q2 2024 rather than as direction to “do it now”. By the time Q2 ends, it will be too late.

A Budget Committee must exist before the budget is locked down to allow a proper debate about options. For too many years, the budget has landed on the Board’s desk at the last minute with no scope for review of any but the most trivial parts.

As a matter of history, the TTC Budget Committee has not existed since January 10, 2019. Even then it had been moribund since November 2017 thanks to lack of interest by its members, a less than sterling example of good corporate governance.

The fundamental questions are what should the TTC be doing, and what can it do. Starting with the attitude that “we can’t afford it” is an abdication of the Board’s responsibility.

Toronto should know what might be possible and how much this will cost, and only then make decisions about what we choose to afford. The past decade plus of Ford/Tory tax policies precluded this approach, but with a new administration, it is time to seize control of the transit debate.

Here are questions I would ask were I on the TTC Board. This is not an exhaustive list, but then the “education and training” meeting is only scheduled for one day.

Service

Transit exists to provide mobility. Although the system is still in post-pandemic mode, recovery varies across the system. Complaints of crowding and erratic service are common.

The proportion of spare vehicles is well above industry standards, and more service could be operated without buying more buses, trains and streetcars. As of January 2024, for every three peak buses in service there was one spare in the garage, and the ratio is even worse for streetcars. Industry standards peg this ratio at most at four peak vehicles to one spare, even better at five to one, a level the TTC achieved before the pandemic.

• How much is current service constrained by older vehicles that are little-used or out-of-service?
• How much more service could the TTC operate with its existing and planned fleet in the short to medium term (the next three years)?
• What are the staffing and budget implications of a higher level of service?

At one end of the scale, there is the City’s proposed Net Zero 2050 target with a very large increase in service frequency across the system. At the other is a “business as usual” approach with minimal growth to accommodate demand, but not to actively court riders with better service. NZ2050 is treated as a daunting goal, but there is no discussion of growth at a less aggressive scale.

• What are the implications for fleet, facilities and staffing of service growth above the currently “BAU” level and an intermediate range of improvements below the NZ2050 proposal?

Several rapid transit lines are under construction, and a few might even open in 2024, but these do not address travel across the entire TTC service territory. Others lie in the early 2030s at best.

• How can the TTC be more attractive to riders today, not in the distant future?
• How will the TTC serve demand beyond the corridors where new rapid transit will, eventually, have a direct effect?

Maintenance

Infrastructure and vehicle maintenance are key to system operations. Recent declines in rail infrastructure affect service across the system and were responsible for the SRT derailment. Vehicles must run reliably to ensure that the maximum possible service can be scheduled and operated.

Maintenance costs lie in both the Capital and Operating budgets, but the shortfall in Capital gets all of the political attention including calls for provincial and federal funding. However, on the Operating side decisions are made about maintenance levels as part of the saw-off in balancing yearly budgets with available revenue. These decisions are not publicly reported, nor are the options and cost for improvement.

• What maintenance has been reduced or deferred, both in the Capital and Operating budgets, relative to spending that would occur if there were no budget constraints?
• What was the value of work that might otherwise have been done?
• What staffing will be required so that the organization is capable of maintaining a “state of good repair”?
• Is growth in service constrained by the maintenance backlog, and is there a cap on what the TTC could provide even if enough drivers were available to operate more vehicles?

On the Capital side, there is a large backlog of unfunded projects lumped under “SOGR” plus others for system improvements. Descriptions of some needs have a “the sky is falling” feel, but this is unhelpful without a clear prioritization of “must have now”, “should have tomorrow” and “nice to have” work. Timing is also key because of project lead times, interdependencies and overall financial capacity.

Council recently debated a report on transit priorities, but this addressed only projects such as BRT lanes and some subway projects. Special pleadings for subways, as usual, took precedence with some dismissing “state of good repair” as at best a secondary need even though it sits at the top of the priority list.

• What are the “drop dead dates” for commitment to the must-have SOGR projects?
• What are the priorities within the SOGR list and the resulting financing requirements?
• How much headroom, if any, for additional capital projects exists once needed SOGR is funded?

Reporting Metrics and Goals

I have written before about problems with TTC metrics, and the disparity between actual rider experiences and reported performance statistics. There are two fundamental problems:

• Stats are reported in the aggregate over time and space so that problem periods and locations are buried in data for the system as a whole.
• Some performance stats, notably for vehicle reliability, are reported on a capped basis making it impossible to know just how high the values reach, or to compare the performance of various types of vehicles. For example, the true performance of diesel and hybrid buses is not shown in CEO reports making it impossible to compare them with each other or with the new eBus fleet.

In turn, these affect reports of:

• Crowding
• Service reliability
• Scheduled vs operated service
• Vehicle reliability

Service recovery is reported on the basis of vehicle hours operated compared to pre-pandemic conditions. Changes in traffic congestion, the rise in stop service time for crowded vehicles, and added recovery time all affect the amount of service one vehicle hour represents. Slower buses provide less capacity per hour because they arrive less frequently. Although the TTC might operate as many vehicle hours in 2024 as in 2019, this does not translate to the same capacity of service for riders.

The questions:

• Will TTC management reorganize performance reporting to increase granularity and meaningfulness of system metrics?
• What is the actual level of service capacity recovery at the route and time level as opposed to scheduled vehicle hours?

Revenue, Ridership and Fare Evasion

The recent presentation and debate at the Audit and Risk Management Committee brought out much information about fare evasion and its cost. However, some important fundamentals were not covered.

Of particular importance is the audit’s methodology in terms of coverage across routes and by time of day compared to the actual deployment of fare inspectors. If these are not the same, then it will be no surprise to see differing results. Fare inspections concentrate on streetcar lines because this is a perceived area of revenue loss, but the audit tells a different story about the system as a whole.

The full audit report has not been released, and so it is not possible to know how field audits were factored up to assumed system-wide numbers, nor to compare audit findings with actual fare inspection activity.

Different types of evasion, some of which were not audited (e.g. walking into paid areas from the street), represent different levels of revenue loss and require their own approaches to resolve, or at least control. The A&RM Committee directed management to report in May 2024 on their plans, and so this topic is, for the moment, parked. However, many questions remain:

• How does the field work of the audit compare to the actual locations and times of fare inspector deployment?
  • What changes have occurred or are planned to deploy inspectors to areas of frequent and growing fare evasion?
• Where should policy changes occur to maximize revenue recovery?
• What is the likely improvement in net revenue due to enforcement techniques for various types of evasion such as non-payment, under-payment, barrier free access to stations, jumping barriers, and discount card abuse?
• Based on international experience, what is the minimum evasion rate that the TTC is likely to achieve without the cost of enforcement exceeding the return in revenue?

Any fare recovery will be a one-time bump in revenues. This might help out with budget challenges over the next few years as paid trips go up and evasion goes down, but this will level out. Budget plans should not depend on year-over-year revenue growth that cannot be reproduced forever, but equally enforcement efforts should not be curtailed simply because there is no new revenue to gain.

Fare evasion has a potential effect on ridership statistics depending on how the TTC converts various forms of revenue (tickets, passes, two-hour transfers) to “trips” in the conventional sense.

• How is reported “ridership” calculated relative to fare revenue? Has the increase in non-payment since 2019 contributed to under-estimates of ridership recovery?
• Does the reported “average fare” reflect riders who do not pay?

Management Culture

There is an open secret that the TTC’s work culture is less than collegial, and a “my way or the highway” attitude prevails at senior levels. This is poisonous to organizational morale, and damaging in the loss of corporate skills, memory and openness to new policies.

• Since January 2018, how many senior staff (supervisors and above) have resigned or otherwise left the TTC’s employment?
• How many of these were subject to a severance payment and/or a non-disclosure agreement?
• What was the total value of these payments?

Of course individual cases are subject to privacy, but in the aggregate numbers will show how pervasive this is and the ongoing cost.

This is a basic responsibility of any Board. Is the organization they govern compromised by a bad work environment, and how much are they spending to cover up rather than to address this problem?

See Also

• The State of Disrepair (Mar. 14/24)
• A Ridership Growth Strategy for 2024 (Feb. 19/24)
• Overcrowding on TTC Bus Routes (Feb 15/24)
• Honest Budgeting Needed At TTC (Feb 14/24)
• When 95% Really Isn’t 95% (Dec. 28/23)
• Rick Leary Lives On (Oct. 27/23)
• New Metrics for a New TTC (Sept. 11/23)
• A Revived, Activist TTC Board? (Aug. 8/23)
• How Many Buses Does The TTC Use? (Apr. 22/23)
• A Transit Platform For Toronto (Apr. 6/23)