As a long-time transit activist, issues accumulate over the years and decades. Attempts to discuss “what needs to be done” quickly become a tangle of interlocking subjects. There is no simple solution to many problems.

Advocates for better transit run into comments like “you’re so smart, what would you do?” The intent is usually to shut down debate and prove that armchair criticism is a lot easier than the hard professional work of running a city and its transit system.

Recently, after a wide-ranging conversation about Toronto’s transit and the political history of the city, I was asked to boil down my feelings into three key issues about the TTC. This is the sort of question one might encounter in an interview to see how well a candidate knows their material and can focus on core items without rambling. I wasn’t interviewing for anything, but did not hesitate in my reply. This article grew from that discussion.

The intent is not to be exhaustive, but to sharpen debate to key issues. For every question there would be dozens of subsidiary issues, and always a chance that something would be missed. However, senior managers and politicians have limited attention spans, and they cannot deal with every issue at once. Neither can the organizations they lead. There is a “trees and forest” problem where many small details deserving of attention can obscure the larger picture.

Here are my three issues as a launching pad for debate about where the TTC should focus. There is a common theme: if you don’t know what’s broken, you cannot possibly fix it.

• Honesty and transparency about service
• The state of infrastructure
• Headroom for short-term growth

I have not discussed transit funding, a perennial topic at the TTC and City Hall, and one we will hear much about as the 2026 budget season unfolds. This is a deliberate choice.

Funding debates consume vast amounts of time, usually to address a handful of key problems. The most recent example was the new Line 2 subway fleet, but there are many, many more budget lines both for state of good repair and system expansion, and many of these are interlinked. We rarely hear about any of them.

Even modest growth, a “business as usual” approach, has challenges, but aggressive transit growth as foreseen in Toronto’s TransformTO strategy adds very substantially to an already difficult situation. Council has not yet endorsed this plan fully, and the TTC has only produced an incomplete estimate of its implications.

If we hope to build a more robust transit system, we need to understand both the shortcomings of the existing one as a base and the challenges of accelerated growth. Toronto came through the Covid era with its transit system more-or-less intact, but we face a decision. Will we just muddle through, content with small improvements and a handful of future rapid transit lines, or will we launch into an era of real growth in transit across the entire system? Will we really make the TTC “The Better Way”?

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