Long range strategic planning is not a common sight at the TTC. Yes, we see maps, we see service plans, we even have some nominally “bold” projects like RapidTO’s red lanes. But what we do not see is a focused debate about where Toronto and its transit system should be going, and how we will get there.

Pre-pandemic, the system was bulging with riders. Among other things, this launched the Bloor-Yonge station expansion project and deferred the Richmond Hill subway extension until we could be sure of having capacity to handle new riders from York Region.

Things changed in the early 20s with widespread ridership loss, especially downtown commuters. GO Transit was hit hard by this thanks to their long-standing commuter driven business model. On the TTC, although commuter traffic remains below 2019 levels, weekend demand has built higher. Demand does exist, although not always on the old model, but provided that there is service to handle the rides.

Since 2020, the overwhelming question has been where the money will come from to keep service running. A mixture of provincial and federal contributions got us through the worst of those years, and some special provincial subsidies still flow. The dollar value of the City’s share roughly doubled from 2019 (actual) to 2026 (budget) with the City now paying 49% of total operating costs (including WheelTrans). The Provincial share in 2026 is about 9% of the total of which about 3% is from gas tax and the rest from special subsidies which will soon end unless they are renegotiated.

Fare freezes under both the Tory and Chow administrations coupled with lost ridership limited revenue growth. Because fares now make up a much lower proportion of total revenue, a large fare increase would be required to restore the historic fares:subsidy ratio if that were the target.

The Capital Budget has an even worse situation with a long list of unfunded projects and no clear indication how much the Provincial or Federal governments have any appetite to fund them. In the short to medium term, the substantial Provincial spending will go to works in progress including Toronto subways and GO expansion.

With all of the focus on just finding money to keep the lights on, there has been little attention to service beyond preserving as much as can be afforded. TTC claims of service recovery use a metric, service hours, that appears to show recovery to 2019 levels, but does not allow for the effects of congestion. Actual service frequencies are down on many lines.

Back in 2018, the Ridership Growth Strategy proposed a tiered set of changes to drive growth at 1%, 2% or 5% annually. This was not pursued in any detail, and the pandemic overtook any thoughts of aggressive growth. The RGS was replaced by the Five Year Service Plan which, in its current version, covers years 2024-2028. It aims at modest growth, and yet even those goals are not fully funded.

What is needed to drive growth beyond business as usual levels? Is there a latent, unserved market for travel because transit is too inconvenient or simply not serving trips people need to make? Where is this market? Does the current network serve it well? Some growth can be achieved by making transit easier to use by existing riders, but what is needed for net new travel made by choice, not necessity?

Within this gloomy setting, the question of “where are we going” can turn into debates about funding without much thought to what might be possible, or what will be needed to encourage annual growth well above a few percent.

TTC’s Strategic Planning Committee meets on March 31. This will be their last chance to launch any discussion and study that can affect the 2027 budget cycle, and provide the basis for any post-election discussion of transit policy for 2028 and beyond.

TransformTO

TransformTO is a plan adopted by City Council in 2021 under Mayor Tory. The goal is to reduce environmentally damaging emissions from many sources including the transportation sector to make Toronto “Net Zero” by 2040. The first phase ran from 2022-2025, and a five-year plan for 2026-2030 was adopted under Mayor Chow to continue this work.

One basic problem with the overall plan is that it is “back end loaded” with the really heavy lifting in the later years. Some of the ideas will take a long time to implement, and Council has not committed to the final decade and its implications.

In the medium term, the transit segment essentially follows what the TTC planned to do anyhow with the continued electrification of the bus fleet and small increases in service. The goals for system growth are modest especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The longer-term goals of TransformTO assume and require a combination of factors, some of which will be hard to achieve:

• shift a majority of short distance travel from auto to walking, cycling and transit, including moving some transit riders to cycling
• dedicate one lane each way on all arterials for transit
• toll travel on all arterials
• eliminate transit fares
• shift half of jobs that would otherwise require office commutes to work-from-home
• very substantially increase transit service
• full electrification of transit by 2050

Some of these points are dead-on-arrival in the current political climate, but still the question remains: how much of this will City Council (and the Ontario government) support, and what will be needed to achieve even a partial plan.

The transit component proposes that bus service be improved by 70% on all routes, and streetcar service by 50%. Off-peak subway service would run every 3 minutes. What resources does this scheme require?

Current peak bus service uses about 1,600 vehicles out of a fleet of about 2,200. This is a generous spare ratio by industry standards (20% or 320 buses) and there is some room for service growth within the existing fleet and garage space. However, a 70% bump implies a peak service of 2,720 buses with a fleet of about 3,260, or more than 1,000 net new vehicles. This can be partly offset by faster operation with red lanes but on nowhere near the scale to avoid a large growth in the fleet. 1,000 new buses translates to about 3 new garages, but current TTC plans (and property) allow for only one.

Peak streetcar service today (assuming all routes were actually using streetcars) requires 175 cars out of a fleet of 264. Adding in spares brings the total needed to 210, leaving room for growth in service. If streetcar service were improved by 50%, the fleet would grow to 315 requiring more cars and a new carhouse in a location that can be easily connected to the existing network.

Growth of the surface fleets to these levels cannot be achieved overnight, and if Council is serious about this scale of change, planning should be underway now with the first stages of implementation by 2030 to achieve the targets by 2040. A plan of this scale does not begin with a flurry of construction, fleet and staffing growth in 2039 and a grand opening one year later.

On the subway, there is no mention of peak service growth although this is possible now on Line 1 thanks to automatic train control, and eventually on Line 2 when it converts to ATC in about five years. However, signalling only makes better service possible. Also needed are more trains, more storage and maintenance facilities, power supply for heavier service, and upgrades to already-busy stations to handle more passengers. Very little of this is funded in the TTC’s Capital Plan.

Some growth will come from rapid transit expansion including the North Yonge, Scarborough and Eglinton West extensions, the Ontario Line, and the proposed but unfunded Eglinton East and Waterfront East LRT lines. Importantly, none of these will enter service before the early 2030s. Any growth until then will occur on the existing network. If the TTC and City assume that the bulk of new ridership will come on these lines, they owe Toronto an explanation of where and how many new riders will be attracted to them. Equally, however, the transit network cannot attract new riders without better service.

All of this will require much more operating and capital subsidy than the TTC receives today. Ridership growth alone will not fund this expansion. Revenue will increase, yes, but more riders require more service, vehicles and infrastructure well beyond the marginal revenue.

Quite bluntly, I do not believe that Toronto nor its funding partners have an appetite for spending on the scale required, especially if Toronto aims at a much higher usage level for transit than other cities drawing from the same subsidy pots.

The question then is what should Toronto aim for, and what strategy would the City use to get there?

A Ridership Growth Strategy

The original Ridership Growth Strategy in 2003 arose from a constant problem between the Board and TTC Management in setting options for the future. At the time, the TTC was still recovering from the 1990-1996 recession, and the Provincial government under Mike Harris had eliminated almost all subsidies. Proposals to improve the TTC were inevitably met with claims that “we can’t afford it” mixed in with “we have no buses” or “we have no operators”.

The premise of the RGS was to examine alternatives and determine what would be needed to implement them. This would give the Board and Council a firm basis to decide, if they wanted to increase transit funding, what it might be spent on.

In 2018, an updated RGS was approved by the Board.

See:

• Dec 2017:
  • Preliminary Report and Presentation
  • My comments from the Board meeting
• Jan 2018:
  • Final Report and Presentation
  • Can the TTC Gain More Riders?

The strategy had three goals:

• Retain current customers
• Increase transit rides per current customer
• Attract new customers to the system

The 2018 RGS cited five key “drivers of customer satisfaction” applicable to both existing and potential new riders:

• Trip duration
• Wait time
• Crowding
• Affordability
• Reliability

In brief, riders want as little delay as possible, including short and predictable wait times, uncrowded vehicles, and fares they could afford.

Another important consideration was that it is easier to get existing riders to use the system more than to attract net new riders. That outlook, however, might miss changes that could increase transit’s share of the overall travel markets it does not serve well today.

All that said, three scenarios were discussed:

• 1% per year growth through reductions in crowding and improved reliability
• 2% per year growth through fare options and better transit priority
• 5% per year growth through system expansion and major service improvements

These options are cumulative.

Not to be missed here is that the “1%” items – reduced crowding and improved reliability – are integral to the plan. There is no point in throwing money at more buses and transit priority schemes, but continuing to schedule service based on the least necessary to handle current demand, and operating without regard for vehicle bunching and uneven loads.

This requires both new Service Standards and measurement/reporting tools to show that these are achieved.

Fare options that have been implemented since 2018 include the two-hour transfer, increased flexibility in Presto payments, integrated cross-boundary fares, and fare capping (2026 and 2027). These primarily benefit existing riders for whom the same fare buys more travel. Car drivers are much less sensitive to fare levels than they are to service quality, or whether transit even serves their trip patterns.

Transit priority schemes have been slow to appear and in some cases do not achieve what is claimed for them. “Priority” tends to lop the peaks off of travel times, but not on a 7×24 basis over entire routes. This can make trips more bearable, but some of the alleged savings are comparable to time lost awaiting the unpredictable arrival of a bus.

Although the 5% option cited service improvements, the detailed version of the plan did not explore the implications of that scale of sustained growth. On a compounded basis, 5% growth would double the ridership in about 15 years. Some of that growth will come from new rapid transit lines, notably North Yonge according to TTC projections, but the lion’s share would be on the surface network.

There are two types of trips surface routes might handle: feeder services to rapid transit, and local trips within the surface network including connections to routes beyond Toronto’s boundary. Ridership growth here requires system-wide improvements that will benefit most riders, not one or two select corridors.

Retaining existing riders is an important part of TransformTO. A lost rider is harder to get back because they have already decided to abandon transit, and will likely tell anyone who asks to avoid the TTC.

Many transit schemes seek to reduce travel time by making vehicles faster, but an important component of TransformTO is the shift of short trips out of autos. For a short trip, access and waiting times are a substantial portion of the total journey. Stop convenience and short, reliable wait times are key.

Today we need a clear, detailed examination of scenarios for the TTC Board and Council. If this starts with a “we can’t afford it” premise, that pre-empts debate and robs the City and transit riders of clear information about trade-offs.

The question boils down to this: should a plan be driven by today’s budget limitations, or should ridership goals drive service levels and quality? The political reality lies somewhere in between, but the decision should be well-informed.

Supporting Components of a Plan

Service Standards

Many aspects of TTC Service Standards need review. These include a variety of factors including:

• Acceptable crowding levels
• Acceptable variations in vehicle spacing
• Maximum walking distance to and between stops
• Maximum scheduled headway between vehicles
• Metrics that reflect a rider’s point of view of service quality and crowding at the levels of routes, times and locations

Current standards include a lot of averaging and target ranges in values that hide, or at least excuse, irregular service. Crowding can vary with most riders travelling on crowded buses while average loads appear to be within standards. From a rider’s perspective, regular vehicle spacing can reduce crowding by avoiding parades of buses and streetcars with most riders stuffed onto the first vehicle.

Overall capacity should both accommodate new riders and carry the existing ones in reasonable comfort. New service should be added before vehicles are full, and standards should reflect provision for this. Published metrics should identify how well this is achieved, and where the shortfalls lie on a route, location and time of day basis.

Attempts to speed service with stop consolidation have mixed results. Yes, there are some closely-spaced stops, but there are fewer than advocates for this approach make out. Moreover, the time saved can be small if a stop is not used by every trip, and especially if it is not at a traffic signal where stopping could mean losing an entire cycle.

A simple example of the effect of stop removal can be seen by comparing express and local services where travel times do not vary much, and the time saved by an express can be less than the waiting time for a bus to arrive. Express stops are much further apart than stops on a local route, moreso than would be achieved by culling existing too-close stops. Stop spacing is also an accessibility issue.

The service standard sets a distance between stops, although the TTC recently misinterpreted this to mean the maximum distance to a stop which effectively doubles the standard. In either case, a rider must also reach the route from within their neighbourhood, and this can add considerably to the total access distance. Thanks to the disconnect between TTC stop planning and the City’s street furniture program, some stops have no shelters or benches.

The ability to use the “conventional” system is an important part of the TTC’s “Family of Services” strategy so that as many as possible do not require door-to-door transit.

A deadly phrase that often appears in planning reports is “subject to budget availability”. This can mean that more service is deserved according to standards, but it is not implemented for lack of funding. The TTC should regularly report the shortfall between advertised standards and service actually provided, but they have not done so since pre-pandemic days.

Fleet and Infrastructure Planning

In the short term, TTC can increase service without more fleet, but they will need more operators. Further out, buying new buses, streetcars and subway trains is useless without people to drive and maintain them, not to mention facilities and staff to store and maintain them.

Any scenario for increased service requires a detailed plan for new vehicle acquisition (in addition to routine replacements), for garage space and staffing.

Subway:

• Cars for the North Yonge and Scarborough extensions are an add-on to current Line 2 order, and they will be purchased by Metrolinx as part of the projects. A new yard (as yet unfunded) is proposed at the north end of Line 1. Some online storage will be provided near Sheppard/McCowan station for Line 2.
• Growth cars for Line 1 & 2 are unfunded, although they will likely be add-ons to the Line 2 order. Getting from a 2’20” headway (140 seconds, the current minimum) down to 2′ (120 seconds) requires 1/6 more trains plus storage. This applies over entire lines unless a short turn scheme limits full service at the outer ends. A proposed yard west of Kipling Station is now at the design stage, but has no funding for construction.
• The currently planned fleets will operating at roughly a 20% spare ratio with no room for growth.

Buses:

The current TTC fleet plan is based on modest growth including one new garage on Kipling. Service expansion at a 5% rate will trigger the need for at least two more garages. Service expansion will pull forward the date when the first new garage is needed, and in turn this will affect interim plans to use the property for other TTC functions.

In the short term, scheduled service can be improved by reducing the spare ratio and reallocating the “run as directed” buses (which do not show up in the scheduled service count) to regular runs. Medium to long term, more buses will be needed, but the TTC does not even have funding for routine replacements let alone for growth.

Conversion to eBuses brings separate implications that compound with any growth plans. Recharging buses requires a mix of added garage trips and charging facilities at major hubs enroute. This also affects the profile of power demand (more during peak daytime hours) and distribution/charging facilities. The TTC is supposed to produce an update on its eBus program soon, but this has not yet surfaced.

eBuses are also more expensive to buy than hybrid buses, not to mention the charging facilities. The tradeoff between capital costs and future operational savings is not yet clear.

The question must be asked: if the intent is to get more trips onto transit, should money be spent on electrification or better service? The answer depends on the actual quality and performance of eBuses available to the TTC.

Streetcars:

The streetcar fleet is underutilized and has room for service growth provided enough operators are hired to drive the cars. Longer term there is a question of just how much demand and growth is available on the existing network, and what might come from the Waterfront East extension, a comparatively small part of the network. (The Eglinton East line will be completely separate from the existing system with its own fleet.)

Metrics:

Any vehicle performance metrics should report actual numbers, not artificially capped values. The CEO’s report has only recently adopted this practice.

Availability, reliability and maintenance metrics should be split out by major groups of vehicles so that differences are obvious and the “lemons”, if any, cannot hide behind better-performing vehicles. This is particularly true for the bus fleets where there is considerable variation in supplier, model and propulsion technology.

Changes That Riders Can See

A goal of 2% continued ridership growth implies a 35% increase by 2040. The higher 5% goal, as mentioned earlier, would double ridership. Even the 2% goal will require that riders see and feel that their travel has improved, and by extension that the TTC’s reputation to potential new riders improves.

This will not be achieved with small scale tweaks to a few routes, nor with changes that never seem to arrive. At annual budget time, we hear brave promises of better service, but even to the extent these are actually funded, they are usually small and are implemented late in the year. Most riders see no change in the short term, and little change later on.

If there is to be a concerted effort to build service, reliability and ridership, this will require continual improvements riders across the system will see. At the same time, reported service quality must not be compromised by self-serving stats that riders cannot believe. Credibility and accountability are essential.

Some work on this is already underway with a review of metrics and the proposed system dashboard. It is entirely possible that results, in the short term, will not be as complimentary to management as they would like especially in an initial “reset” from current reported values.

As for special projects such as RapidTO and the red lanes, it is important to recognize that these will benefit specific routes, but leave most of the system untouched. The amount of new demand from a single corridor, even a busy one, is limited. For example, the 29/929 Dufferin services carried 40,800 daily passengers according to the 2024 stats out of a bus system total of 1.22 million. Even doubling the demand on the Dufferin corridor will only add 3.3% to the total system. Increases across the network are required, and this means that schemes to improve service frequency and reliability cannot be confined to a handful of routes.

Equally, if ridership does grow even at a modest rate, but service does not keep up, riders will be discouraged just as they were just before 2020 when ridership actually fell even before the pandemic.

Promises of multi-billion dollar subways to open in the 2030s will do nothing to attract riders today, and even those subways will not serve large parts of Toronto. Sitting back and waiting for them to open is no recipe for improving transit.

Fare Incentives

Various fare incentives to encourage transit use have been implemented in recent years including:

• the two-hour transfer
• cross-border fare integration
• fare freezes in most years
• reduced fares for low-income riders
• fare capping at 47 rides in September 2026 and 40 (proposed) in September 2027

A fare freeze is politically simple and requires no effort or investment of effort beyond the foregone revenue. With the total budget for 2026 at about $3.028-billion and fare revenue bringing in 35% of that, $1.06-billion, a 1% increase (assuming no change in ridership) would bring in about $10-million. At the same time a 3% increase in costs (assuming no change in service levels) would require $90-million more.

One can “twirl the knobs” all one likes on this formula, but the basic point is that subsidy costs will rise much faster than fare revenue in a business as usual scenario. Anything extra comes on top.

Is spending on keeping fares down a better “investment” than spending on more service? How much, one way or another, is Toronto prepared to fund TTC operations? This question cannot be avoided, and it runs headlong into the financial crunch faced by the TTC and the City as a whole.

Communications and Wayfinding

At a recent meeting of the TTC’s Audit & Risk Management Committee, an Internal Audit report detailed the many issues with TTC information sources including its website, social media and other channels. A major redesign is required so that riders can find information the need easily, especially when looking at unfamiliar routes or dealing with temporary service changes like diversions. Some changes are already visible on the site, and much more is needed. This is a work in progress.

“Wayfinding” is often confused simply with signage, standard fonts and the like, but it is much more. This includes assisting riders in planning and taking their journeys, with accurate and timely information about unusual circumstances. This includes notices at stops, an item which often appears at the last moment when planned route changes occur.

Some stops have next vehicle arrival signs, but these are not always correctly programmed. With the coming changeover in the city’s street furniture contract, transit information must be presented on video screens at stops as an integral part of any new contract. If we can show updates on video screens in subway stations, why not on the many large screens in transit shelters?

See: TTC Audit Committee: March 11, 2026

The Role of GO Transit

GO Transit has a role in future transit growth by providing major corridors between central Toronto and both its outer suburbs and the wider 905 region beyond. However, recent media reports suggest that the scope of GO service expansion will not be as great in the next decade as originally claimed by Metrolinx.

See: Shorter, more frequent GO train plan ‘unlikely to materialize’: leaked document by Jack Hauen in The Trillium

This is an issue for Toronto in that access to some transit markets might be limited by GO’s inability to serve more riders. Conversely if Metrolinx can come up with a credible plan, including capital and operating funding guarantees, then improved GO services should be incorporated in overall City plans.

One major issue both for GO and for Toronto’s rapid transit system is that many areas outside of the core, and particularly trips between such areas, are poorly served and there is little incentive for transit travel. This is compounded by trip lengths that are generally long and do not show the “transit experience” in good light. This limits the potential market for transit growth.

We need to ask what proportion of regional travel lies beyond transit’s reach and how, if at all, the regional networks will change to improve transit coverage. “Coverage” is not simply having lines that appear to fill in the map, but frequent, reliable services with good connections.