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”?

Honesty and Transparency About Service

The quality of service transit riders experience day-to-day is key not just to retaining the riders we have, but of credibly making a call to grow transit’s share of travel. Toronto’s population is quickly rising, and the road space to absorb more trips is limited, in spite of provincial fantasies about more lanes and a 401 tunnel. Some trips will occur by walking and cycling, especially where road design favours these modes, but transit must take the lion’s share.

This is especially a problem for longer trips and for trips outside of the core area, neither of which are as well-served by transit as the old city with its dense concentration of housing and destinations such as jobs and academic campuses. A few planned rapid transit lines and the long-awaited growth in GO Transit rail service will deal with some of these trips, but the regional and local rapid transit network is too coarse to directly serve everyone’s needs.

The idea that regional commuters would drive to a station was central to GO Transit’s early business model, and to some of the TTC’s subway expansion. This only works for the traditional suburb-to-core commute trip, and the approach hit a wall of parking capacity some years ago. If you are a subway rider, you probably face a tedious bus journey at one or both ends of your journey. GO Transit riders are even worse off. The “last mile problem” bedevils transit riders and planners.

Many trips simply do not lie along rapid transit corridors, and all the fantasy maps seeking a much denser rail network will not fix travel challenges in the short or even medium term.

The TTC has a major problem with the gap between the advertised quality of service and what is actually on the road. Although total ridership still sits 10% or more below pre-pandemic levels, complaints about irregular service and crowding are common. All the management metrics and standards are worthless if they do not reflect what riders actually see.

This requires action on three fronts:

• Adopt targets for what “good” or at least “acceptable” service looks like.
• Report in detail on service behaviour line-by-line, day-by-day, with a focus not on long-run average experience, but on the frequency and severity of cases where service falls short.
• Be honest about what will be needed to improve service system-wide, not just in a few corridors.

The TTC plans to review its Service Standards in coming months, including public participation to understand what riders really need to see from their transit system. A parallel study will review the metrics and methods used to present service data and to improve the way quality is publicly reported. Budget proposals for 2026 include service improvements to address capacity shortfalls. These are all good starts.

For a very long time, TTC culture focused on looking good while actual delivery fell short. Toronto cannot hope to attract substantial growth in transit if claims of service quality do not match actual rider experience.

The State of Infrastructure

When the Scarborough RT met a sudden, unexpected end with the July 2023 derailment, the initial reaction was to see this as a isolated case. However, investigations revealed a pattern of insufficient routine inspection and repair of the SRT reaction rail (the structure lying between the two running rails), and a related problem of inadequate training of maintenance staff. The SRT never reopened because of the magnitude of required repairs and the planned Fall 2023 shutdown.

Streetcar riders have for years been familiar with glacial operation through junctions between lines. The more complex the junction, the slower the crossing. Not only does this delay riders, it limits the capacity of busy intersections and fouls up signal priority schemes based on faster operation. Why so slow? Decades of making do with unreliable controllers for automatic track switches coupled with deterioration of track to unsafe levels. The worst of this, King and Church, has now been rebuilt, but the standing slow orders affect the entire network whether they are justified or not.

The subway managed to hold its own, or at least appeared to, but we now have a long list of restricted speed zones where track is considered unsafe to drive over at normal operating speed. A detailed review of the subway system found that these problems are more extensive than originally thought. Some of them will be difficult to repair, and they have been on the official list of RSZ’s for well over a year. The problem is so bad that it prevents the TTC from operating at full scheduled capacity as was noted in the July 2025 Metrics Report (p. 24). Less than a year ago, interim CEO Greg Percy claimed that a dozen slow zones would be normal, but the network has been well above that level for months.

All of these have a “canary in the coal mine” nature, a small flock of chirping birds that finally got the attention of politicians and management. The problem for Toronto and the TTC is how many more problems lie out of sight posing a threat of further decline in service, or even the ability to operate the system.

Capital budget plans for the streetcar system now warn of the possibility that routes would be shut down if track repairs are not addressed, although unlike the subway there is no list of critical locations.

The subway is the most infrastructure-intensive part of the network, and it brings large fixed costs simply to keep it in operating condition regardless of how much service runs on the line. All of the tunnels and stations have a myriad of systems for monitoring and control. Service depends on track, signals and power, but there are also ventilation and pumping systems to keep the air fresh and the tunnels dry. Stations have escalators and elevators on which riders depend, and which are key to the capacity to move large numbers of riders to and from trains. All of this is existing infrastructure before we even contemplate one kilometre of new subway.

The Capital Budget contains many lines related to infrastructure maintenance, but there is little indication of the criticality and condition of various subsystems. Before 2020, the TTC published an extensive report detailing each of the budget lines, but this vanished in the pandemic era. Some information is now accumulating in a new Asset Management System, but the information is not publicly visible and tends to be reported only when a specific project is up for discussion, not on a system-wide basis.

If the infrastructure is threatened or fails, then service cannot operate. Little else matters if you cannot run the trains and the streetcars, or even garage vehicles because of issues with maintenance equipment or structures.

Although the reports leading into the 2026 budget process do flag some key projects, they do not present the details needed to gauge current conditions or which parts of the system are threatened with slow orders, service interruptions or shutdowns.

Headroom for Short-Term Growth

A problem often faced by transit systems, and certainly by the TTC in 2019, is that they can “fill up” with riders, but plans for growth have not kept pace with demand. This can occur when the focus is on a handful of megaprojects or even worse if budget decisions throttle growth both of capital assets and operating funds to run better service. The $1.5-billion project to expand platform and circulation capacity at Bloor-Yonge Station was born of that era, but a similar focus did not extend to the future of the surface network.

This is not a new condition. In the early 2000s, when David Miller was first a Councillor and then Mayor, the City and TTC were still recovering from the combined effect of the early 1990s recession and the Mike Harris funding cuts. This was the era of the first Ridership Growth Strategy, and a common problem was a vicious cycle of no buses, no operators, no budget. The intent of the RGS was to show what could be achieved, what resources were needed and when changes could occur.

Today the TTC has a surplus of vehicles in all modes partly due to fleet growth (new streetcars and some new buses), and partly due to under utilization during the pandemic years. This condition can actually be dangerous for a transit system because there are always spares to substitute for failing equipment. In the worst case, the lemons sit in a boneyard and might even be pillaged for spare parts. This is not a sustainable way to operate a system.

What we do not know is how much of the fleet actually works and is available for service including a routine provision for maintenance spares. Industry targets are typically 20%, although they were lower in past years when equipment was simpler and more maintainable. TTC routinely runs well above this figure, at least if the published fleet size represents working vehicles. If anything, delivery of new buses should have allowed retirement of the least reliable fleet, and the actual bus availability should be improving.

The July 2025 CEO’s report claims a fleet size of 2,044 buses. Planned peak service in September is 1,596 (PM peak), a spare factor of 28% (almost three spares for every ten scheduled buses). The streetcar fleet will soon reach 264, but peak scheduled service will be only 158 (Saturday afternoons), or 67% spares.

The 55 trains now on order for Line 2 represent a 20% spare factor over 2019 peak requirements.

On the subway, service levels are constrained both by the available fleet and the older signal system on Line 2. In 2019, Line 1 operated with 65 trains at peak, and Line 2 with 46. Today, the numbers are 56 and 42 respectively. Growth is possible with new signals already in place on Line 1, and planned for Line 2 in coming years, but not without more trains. There is provision for this in the capital budget, but service cannot be improved beyond 2019 levels in the near future.

Running more service than the subway was originally designed for also affects systems such as power supply as well as station capacity.

Overall, the TTC and Toronto politicians need to know what can be accomplished with existing fleets, and what plans for the medium term are required to grow beyond that.