The TTC Board agenda for its April 16 meeting includes a pair of reports giving the year-end status for the Operating and Capital budgets, as well as a detailed update on major capital projects.
In this article, I will review the status of major projects to summarize info for readers. In a separate article, I will turn to the 2025 operating results. Those wishing more detail should refer to the full reports.
An important factor with many projects is that they are multi-year efforts, and some of them are not fully funded. This has different implications for various types of projects such as:
- A project might still not have full funding, but a portion can proceed with the hope of additional moneys appearing along the way.
- A project might have stages, but only be funded for some of them. A new vehicle purchases might have money for part of an order, but not for a sustained rollout.
- Projects could be interrelated in that full exploitation of benefits cannot be achieved without completion of both. For example, a new Automatic Train Control cannot work without a fleet that can “talk” to the new signal system. Larger fleets cannot be accommodated without new storage and maintenance facilities.
Although these are large and in some cases quite expensive projects, this is not an exhaustive list. Some parts of TTC State Of Good Repair budget involve areas with many smaller projects (for example, building and structures maintenance) that are quite large in the aggregate. Vehicle overhaul is an ongoing cost, but it is not listed as a “major project” because it is routine work. These items do not appear in the Major Projects report although they comprise a large portion of the capital budget.
The projects discussed here are:
- Subway Work Car Fleet and Maintenance
- Station Easier Access, Second Exits and Fire Ventillation
- New Subway Cars for Lines 1 and 2
- ATC Signals for Line 2
- Rogers 5G Rollout
- Capacity Enhancements for Lines 1 and 2
- Bloor-Yonge Capacity
- Scarborough Busway Project
- New Buses for Conventional and Wheel-Trans Service
- eBus Charging Systems
- Facilities for the Expanded Streetcar Fleet
- New TTC Operations Centre
- VISION (Vehicle Tracking System) Implementation
- SAP Enterprise IT System Implementation
- PRESTO System Upgrade
Steve Munro 