Month: October 2026

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A Marathon of Transit Disruptions (Updated)

Updated Oct. 16/26 at 4:00pm:

Diversion info for the 501/301 Queen service has been added.

On the weekend of October 16-18, the Toronto Waterfront Marathon will cause extensive disruption to transit service downtown. This is on a scale we have not seen for previous events, and begs the question of just how serious Toronto is about maintaining transit service even when promoting the TTC as the best way to get to the event.

Marathon closures will also affect motorists. See the Race Weekend Schedule and scroll down to the detailed list of road closures.

There are two races: a 5k run on Saturday, October 17 and a full/half marathon on Sunday, October 18.

Transit service will be suspended on many routes including the creation of some “transit deserts” through the combined effect of overlapping changes. This article consolidates information in many TTC service notices. Some of these have changed while I built this article. Readers are advised to check for further updates on their day of travel on the TTC’s site.

Maps and a table showing the service changes are in the next section following the “more” break.

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Is Transit Better or Worse in Scarborough?

In the recent Mayoral debates, a topic surfaced regularly that boils down to “who is doing more for Scarborough”. That’s a rather crass way of putting things, especially for those who don’t live in that part of Toronto.

This post looks at some of the broad-brush claims as well as the level of bus service in Scarborough in detail. If I have one conclusion from the exercise, it is that candidates’ support teams should do better work to avoid faux-pas in claims from the podium.

The problem of overstating the quality of transit service applies across the city, not just in Scarborough. Both major candidates are trolling for votes there, and so that’s the part of the system we hear about.

When politicians carp about congestion, they inevitably talk about downtown, the streetcars and the unending list of construction projects (many of which are triggered by reconstruction of ancient water and sewer mains, not by the TTC).

However, an insidious effect on suburban bus service is rising congestion outside of downtown. The common TTC reaction is to stretch travel and recovery times running buses less often to compensate without spending more money. Many of the service reductions in past years come from this type of adjustment. On the statistical side, such a change does not affect vehicle hours, the commonly cited metric for overall service. From a rider’s point of view, buses come less often and their trips are longer.

This article looks at a few high-level topics that come up in stump speeches – ridership and subway service – and then reviews Scarborough bus services line-by-line from 2016 to 2026.

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Why I Voted For Olivia

Earlier today I dropped my Toronto election ballot in the local mailbox.

I voted for Olivia Chow to return as Mayor of Toronto because I think that she is, by far, the better of the two remaining serious candidates.

Am I head-over-heels impressed with her transit policies? Not entirely, but she believes in transit, more and better transit.

So far, the programs coming down the road, so to speak, are Chow’s proposed fare reduction through a weekly cap at 10, on top of the already planned monthly cap of 40 likely going into effect in September 2027. But, as I wrote recently, there is much more to making transit attractive than twiddling with the fare structure.

We hear a lot about capital investment for the future with the help of federal and provincial subsidies: the Waterfront East and Eglinton East lines, new subway cars for Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. But the needs are even greater with no sense of how we will pay for everything both for state of good repair and on the wish list of additions and enhancements.

Operating costs and subsidies see no discussion, and indeed fare cuts will trim revenue. It’s good politics and good policy to make transit easier to use by everyone, but “easy” includes not just the fare but also the service.

A dispiriting part of any transit mega-project is the “benefits case” where a major offset to capital spending is the alleged travel time saving of new lines. The hours saved are translated to notional dollars, but what really happens is that public investment turns into time that riders can use for other things. It also translates to massive stimulus for the engineering and construction industry.

Oddly enough, the same equation is not applied to day-to-day service in the hands of fiscal hawks who see transit as a drain, not as an investment. This is an argument the Mayor must champion: transit provides a public benefit to the city’s economy.

I have no illusion that Mayor Chow will shower the TTC with new money, in part because she (or any other Mayor) faces the imminent expiry of the Ontario “New Deal” funding that pays for operation of Lines 5 Eglinton and 6 Finch. There is talk of a “New Deal 2.0”, but nothing definite yet.

But transit service – quantity and quality – must improve, and that is a challenge for the Mayor and Council. The next TTC Board must demand that management provide clear information on system performance and real improvement riders can see in their daily travel.

Chow will not find this easy, and her priorities for housing and social services may well trump new transit spending. However, Bradford’s priority for transit does not lie in service, but in massive spending on security. Yes, there is an issue with unsocial behaviour on the TTC, but it must be addressed by more than a large police presence. It is also, I believe, over-hyped for political reasons, a common problem not just in Toronto’s transit debates.

There is no point in having a heavy police presence if people still cannot get on the Dufferin bus.

The choice of TTC Board members is key, and we need aggressively pro-transit Commissioners who will hold management to account for system performance and advocate for real improvements, even if this cannot be achieved in one year. I believe that Chow will drive for such a Board, while Bradford would focus on penny-pinchers whose relationship to transit lies mainly in complaining about being stuck behind a bus or streetcar.

Toronto’s election and its future turn on two contrasting views of our city. One assumes that tax cuts will solve everything and public services should be farmed out to private ownership and management. The other believe in public service and the good local government can provide to a wide range of its citizens.

My vote’s with Olivia Chow.

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How Can We Increase TTC Service?

Much discussion in the current election campaign targets TTC fares and proposed changes in 2027. Depending on which candidate you trust, they might go up, selectively, be frozen, or even go down with the effect of future changes to fare capping rules.

Many surveys, including a recent one from Liaison Strategies, show that the key factor in retaining and attracting riders to transit is not fares, but service reliability, frequency, and comfort. This includes many factors, and the “fixes” do not lend themselves to simple campaign slogans.

Drawing lines on maps is a favourite pass-time for politicians and the consultants who feed off their desire for a credible plan. We went through that with John Tory’s ever-vanishing SmartTrack scheme, then later with Doug Ford’s subway plan. They share one thing: nothing needs to be done today, and come tomorrow the plan might shrink thanks to technical challenges and limited financing. The Ford plan survives because of spending (and borrowing) at a level that would never occur without a generous infusion of political ego. Planned spending on the provincial subway plan is on a par with the TTC’s entire state of good repair backlog.

Fare schemes, be they new concession rates, discounts or regional amalgamations, can be quickly implemented at comparatively modest cost, but they do little beyond, possibly, generating added ridership which might, or might not, be translated to added service and capacity. With fare revenue covering only 40% of the operating budget and none of the capital, it is impossible for fare cuts to generate enough new riding and income to pay for service increases.

Toronto has a long-term plan, TransformTO, that seeks “net zero” transportation emissions through complete electrification of transit by 2040. That is comparatively easy to achieve because it is the path the TTC is on already. However, a more ambitious plan originally aimed at a major shift away from autos to transit by 2050, but now has a 2040 target. There is no sense of how Toronto will achieve this.

A technical backgrounder to the 2050 plan proposed, among other things, that Toronto:

  • Convert one lane of traffic to exclusive bus lanes on all arterials.
  • Increase service frequency on all transit routes:
    • bus by 70%, streetcar by 50%, subway off-peak service increased to every 3 mins.
  • Tolls of $0.66/km on all arterial roads.
  • Free transit. No transit fares.

In the current political climate, it is easy to guess the fate of exclusive bus lanes and road tolls. Free transit would cost over $1-billion annually before accounting for the cost of the additional service.

The TTC Capital Plan includes a long-range, unfunded provision for TransformTO:

  • Vehicles (added buses and streetcars): $3.51-billion
  • Infrastructure (2 additional garages, upgrades to existing garages and carhouses, expanded terminals to handle higher service levels): $3.82-billion

There is no mention of operating costs for the larger fleets and all of the added service nor is there even an outline of a plan to get from the transit system of 2026 to the hoped-for 2040.

Somewhere in between the aggressive goals of TransformTO and current service levels is likely what riders will actually see. The TTC has not published a detailed analysis of options, and the Board, in spite of having a “Strategic Planning Committee”, has not asked for one.

Any plan to improve transit service must look at the network as a whole, at how routes in many parts of the city can provide better service. This will require decisions about the size of the transit system, growth of the surface bus and streetcar services, and tradeoffs needed in the use of road space.

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