Toronto’s election is out of the way, and we have both a progressive Mayor returned to office and a strengthened Council to support her. Now comes the hard part: making the city work and work better.

There are many key files both in sheer budget size and in their importance to the city’s future, and transit is one of the largest. The TTC’s operating budget is over $3-billion, and barely 40% of that comes from the farebox and ancillary revenue such as advertising. The rest comes through the City of Toronto either directly as subsidy or as a passthrough from other governments.

Not to be ignored is the capital budget that pays for major repairs, replacement and growth, except for projects like the Ontario Line that are provided by the Province through Metrolinx. Depending on the period one looks at, the total capital needs are in the tens of billions spread over 15 years or more, and this does not include the major Provincial rapid transit projects.

Toronto professes to want more transit ridership to stem the growth of auto travel, but goals set only a few years ago are nowhere near being achieved. “More of the same” is not a viable plan for the new Council term, let alone for the longer run into the next decade.

The post-pandemic era, fortunately, has not been an anti-transit nightmare, the sort of thing that could arise with a “business oriented” government looking to trim costs. However, support for real improvements has been lukewarm and shows little sign of increasing beyond basic inflationary growth.

The focus by Council and the Mayor (including the pre-Chow era) has been on fares, the transit equivalent of taxes, with freezes for many years and a revised tariff that rewards riders for increased transit travel. This will continue into 2027 with a planned reduction in the monthly fare cap from 47 to 40, and introduction of a weekly 10-fare cap, both likely in the Fall.

A long-standing bugbear for regional travelers was the lack of fare integration between the TTC and systems in the 905, not to mention GO Transit. This is no longer an issue thanks to the Province, but only if they continue their support.

For many years I supported fixed pricing for fares, an equivalent to passes but without the need to pre-pay in anticipation of future use. Even the TTC talked about fare capping a decade ago, but nothing came of this.

Under Mayor Chow’s plan, Toronto will no longer have monthly pricing that exceeds the basic 20-day commute pattern, and the up-front cost of a pass will not be a deterrent to those on tight budgets. However, these proposals pretty much exhaust options for fare structure. I will not go into “free transit” beyond saying that it would require at least $1-billion in new revenue annually, and would do nothing to improve service levels. Moreover, government funders are unlikely to shower Toronto with money just so that the City can give away transit for nothing.

Rider surveys, including those conducted by the TTC, show that the top priority is for reliable, uncrowded service. However, the lack of ridership growth implies that transit service does not address rider needs.

A common observation is that post-pandemic travel patterns have changed, that the reduction in foreign students has hit that segment of transit demand, that work-from-home is a new reality. These are all valid, but oddly enough roads are not empty of traffic. People are still moving around the city. The challenge is to get more of them onto the TTC.

Traffic woes suggest that there is a desire to travel, but limited growth tells us that the TTC is not “the better way” for many Torontonians. What is needed to fix this?

The TTC has many overlapping plans, and a thorough review of them is needed to set a roadmap for coming years. There are two immediate, obvious problems.

First, there are too many plans, and I doubt many if any on the TTC Board know what they contain or even that they all exist.

Second, there is a tendency for plans to come for approval as faits accomplis without necessarily getting a robust review or understanding by the very board who will authorize them.

A common problem throughout the plans is that they are not aspirational, that is to say, they do not reach for the stars, not even the moon. TTC has been through a long period of just keeping the wheels turning, and politicians do not want to see plans that involve big spending, unless they are for rapid transit projects someone else will pay for. The plans reflect the era in which they were written.

However, the last thing Toronto needs is a multi-year effort to completely rewrite these plans. At best, that would bear fruit half-way or more through the four-year term, barely in time to affect budgets and actual operations on a timescale riders can see. Key goals and options should be developed quickly enough to inform the 2028 budget. (Such a review was originally intended as part of of the Board’s Strategic Planning Committee aiming at 2027, but that never happened.) The plans should be reviewed and updated based on current priorities from the Mayor and Council, preferably well in time for the 2028 budget cycle which begins in summer 2027.

Plans for greater transit priority must not be just a few red-painted lanes and traffic signals, but a city-wide approach that affects all transit routes. Equally there must be a recognition that priority alone will not fix problems with irregular, undependable service and crowding. Strong advocacy for transit’s primacy on the road network must be matched by service deserving of a reallocation of road capacity.

If ridership really is to grow, added capacity in the short term can come from improved reliability and from surplus vehicles the TTC already owns. For the medium to long term, fleet expansions on both the bus and subway networks are needed, and yet the funding even to replace existing vehicles is not fully in place. (The streetcar fleet has already been expanded, but some hoped-for service improvements and network growth have not materialized.)

The basic question must be asked: why aren’t riders using the TTC as much as we hope? Transit’s job for decades was seen as getting commuters to and from downtown, and much subway construction aimed to increase transit’s reach and capacity. Similarly GO Transit was created as an alternative to highway expansion. But “downtown” isn’t the only place people travel, and many trips begin and end elsewhere. The bus network whose initial purpose in the 60s and 70s was to expand the subway’s reach into new suburbs now has the task of serving travel within those suburbs and beyond.

An ambitious plan such as the TransformTO scheme for massively increased bus and streetcar service might be unaffordable in the short term, but we need to know whether it is at least practical, what it would entail, and how much investment – capital and operating – would be needed. A more modest goal might be the outcome, but at least we will have tried.

What should our new Council and TTC Board do?

The TTC needs a Board that will ask questions, will really try to understand what is needed to build ridership.

Irregular service brings calls for more route supervision, but sheer quantity is meaningless without an underlying philosophy of what “good” service should look and feel like. Meanwhile, service growth is limited by the number of operators and fleet/facility plans created in an era when aggressive growth was not City policy.

Safety concerns bring promises of more security and social support staff. These must be a visible presence, but without spending every penny just to “show the flag” on every transit vehicle and in every station. Indeed, if that level of pervasive security is really needed, Toronto has much bigger problems than getting more riders on the system.

There is a strong temptation to do everything at once: better service, affordable rides, full funding for system renewal. All of these deserve focus, but with the caveat that the overall aim should be to increase transit use. That means change on a timeframe riders can actually see and feel, and a network that takes people where they want to go, when they want to travel, reliably, comfortably and without delay.

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