January 31, 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. Over the years, we have covered a lot of territory in transit discussions. I say “we” not as the royal plural, but to recognize the contributions of reader comments, and the many conversations I have had via social media or in person that collectively expanded my views.

The stats for the past year:

• About 120 articles pushing the total to 3,118
• About 1,300 comments pushing the total to 62,279

Yes, I’ve slowed down a bit, but as regular readers will know, some of the articles have grown longer and take more background work to prepare.

Those 1,300 comments do not include the bilge from various trolls who I suspect to be only a handful of people with their hobby horses, a very recognizable style, albeit many pseudonyms. I have an archive of their words but do not burden readers, most of the time, with what passes for “comment”.

Frankly, it is the wide range of comments, favourable or not, but civilized in tone that makes editing and publishing them worthwhile.

The community of “transit advocates” has certainly grown. We don’t all agree all of the time, and that’s natural, but we share a desire to see Toronto better served by transit.

Twenty years saw many changes, arrivals and departures, sadly more of the latter. Within the transit “fan” community we lost some of the original Streetcars for Toronto Committee members, and others whose photos and movies still grace various sites.

I don’t seek or collect accolades, but was pleased to receive an “Excellence Award” from the Canadian Urban Transit Association in late 2024 recognizing decades of advocacy including this blog. A real treat was the Jane Jacobs Prize back in 2005, the last year she was alive to bestow it in person. That actually happened before the blog started, but was part of the inspiration to write for an online audience. Kind words have come from others for which many thanks. You know who you are.

I went back to my first anniversary article to see what might have changed, and found this concluding paragraph.

The next years will be vital for transit in our city and region. Either we stop pretending that we can be transit oriented without serious investment in operations, vehicles and facilities, a real network of services, not a few baubles to get politicians re-elected, or we will slide into the car-oriented city that “Stop Spadina” and its era were supposed to prevent.

TTC was hard hit by the early 1990s recession losing 20% of its ridership, and by 2006, they were just starting to recover from the “common sense” era of Mike Harris at Queen’s Park. Transit operating subsidies never returned to the Bill Davis level at a one sixth provincial share of the budget. 2008 brought a financial crash, but the TTC build up to record ridership only to be walloped by the 2020s’ pandemic.

The TTC enjoyed almost six years of enlightened leadership under CEO Andy Byford. He built a strong management team and trust among the people who actually made the wheels turn, but this was undone by his successor Rick Leary. Byford left the TTC too soon for a senior job in New York, and we can only guess at how differently the TTC would have evolved had he stayed.

On the capital side, the chasm grows between the available/announced subsidies and the projected spending needed just to keep TTC afloat, let alone pay for expansion.

Over two decades, the travel patterns in the Greater Toronto Area evolved with more trips between Toronto suburbs and beyond, trips that transit does not serve as well as trips to and within the central area. That split became critical with the Covid era when the remote work shift disproportionately affected riders commuting to downtown. This challenge is faced both by TTC and GO Transit whose business models for years depended on the revenue from high commuter volumes.

A commonly cited statistic shows that the TTC is not yet at pre-pandemic riding levels across the system, and worse does not expect to reach that until the 2030s. Why then do we run so much service, and why do riders complain? What is often forgotten was that those record years in the late 20-teens were marked by badly overcrowded service and demand that was not addressed across the network. Toronto should not aspire to return to 2019 conditions.

In late 2004, I was asked to review a major new TTC plan that was a follow-up to the 2003 Ridership Growth Strategy. It began by citing Toronto’s Official Plan objectives:

Link land use and transportation planning policies to create an effective strategy for accommodating the City’s future trip growth in a way that reduces auto-dependency by making transit, cycling and walking more attractive alternatives.

“No one should be disadvantaged getting around Toronto if they don’t own a car”

TTC cast about for a name, and I suggested “Building a Transit City”. The name stuck, and was reused in 2006 as the title of a new rapid transit plan based on LRT (Light Rail Transit, or “Rapid” depending on your preference). The Transit City scheme had a difficult history that I will not repeat here beyond saying the hopes for that plan were vastly better than what has been built.

Transit City originated as a City of Toronto response to work on the Metrolinx Big Move that consolidated wish lists from GTA municipalities. As a City project it had issues including an attempt to fit some LRT lane reservations into streets without enough space to hold them, and some bizarre ways of handling left turns at intersections. It was not perfect. Then Ontario got involved and the plan fell into the maw of Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario with their focus on P3 project delivery. The history has not been good as we have seen on Finch and Eglinton.

That car-free objective is still out of reach, and I sense we are losing ground. If anything, transit service continues to discourage riders through unreliable service, and the TTC has only a vague sense of how to fix this. A major problem lies deep in TTC culture which looks primarily to external causes, notably traffic congestion, as an uncontrollable force.

This outlook absolves management of responsibility to look inward. The headway management pilot now underway has only limited success, but this has shown TTC that the problem is not as easy to remedy as they thought.

A key issue is service frequency and the perceived capacity of service on unevenly spaced vehicles. Uneven spacing leads to uneven loading, and most riders are on full buses no matter the stats that show acceptable, average loads.

Where are we now?

Toronto Council is muddling through its 2026 budget with a low tax increase in an election year. The increase in the City Building Fund levy (for housing and transit capital projects) is actually more than the proposed increase in the basic property tax (1.5% vs 0.7%). However, there is little sense of what will happen in 2027 and beyond. Much depends on the municipal election and on the degree to which Premier Ford further meddles in transit planning and operations in Toronto.

The TTC needs metrics that truly show what is happening — riding patterns, service and fleet reliability, potential for improvement — and a Ridership Growth Strategy that is aspirational, not merely cut to fit a preconceived budget level.

Capital funding remains a big problem because new projects are added and existing ones grow in cost faster than new funding is available. Toronto is always playing catch-up and never really discussing priorities. That is particularly hard when much of the wish list is for “state of good repair”.

In the short term, there will be no new rapid transit lines beyond the soon-to-open Eglinton-Crosstown. The Ontario Line, Scarborough Subway Extension, and North Yonge Subway Extension are all targeted to early 2030s. Waterfront East and Eglinton East LRTs are even later. Meanwhile, GO expansion seems to be continually in construction, but without dates and service levels for the completed network, let along the benefits that electrification might bring.

A hard truth for Toronto is that we must make do with what’s there today. That is not sexy. Costs on the Operating Budget cannot be hidden or deferred through financing and P3 schemes as is commonly done for Capital. Running the TTC and improving service will largely be a City cost, and moreso thanks to a policy of reducing fares as a proportion of total revenue.

Today’s debating context is more about spending billions with little to show for it, and service that too often leaves riders peering down the street for signs of an approaching bus or streetcar. Transit has to succeed for Toronto to achieve its mobility goals, and that success cannot just depend on projects that are years from completion.

What will I do for the coming years? Beat the drum mercilessly for better service, for better strategic planning and awareness of what must be done. This is not a one-year-fix leading to a siesta when we can all sit back and admire our o-so-perfect transit network. There is plenty of work for the community of transit advocates. Retirement is not an option.