The agenda for the January 27 TTC Board meeting contains two reports containing information about infrastructure work planned on the rail networks in 2025.

• Subway and Streetcar State of Good Repair, Expansion and Modernization – 2024 Review and 2025/2026 Forecast
• 2025 Annual Service Plan
  • Covering report
  • Service Plan

The Service Plan details proposed route changes for 2025 and evaluations of some options that were not recommended. I will address this part of the report in a separate article.

The State of Good Repair report addresses the current situation with needed infrastructure maintenance, and contains a detailed calendar of planned work including major projects requiring streetcar diversions. The Service Plan includes some of the proposed route configurations.

Subway Plans

The subway plans are extensive and will see more partial or total service suspensions than in past years. This comes in part from the fact the subway is aging, but also from a recognition that past years have not seen the level of maintenance required to keep the system in good shape. One key item arising from recent major disruptions is the state of the work car fleet. Many specialized vehicles are used for aspects of subway maintenance, and their reliability and availability have not been at the level the TTC needs.

Work planned during subway closures are reliant on work cars to aide in the performance of the scheduled activities. As such, the TTC’s 2025 Operating Budget includes $0.8M to bolster work car maintenance and the 2025-2034 Capital Budget and Plan includes $35.6 million of approved funding for work car overhauls as well as $62.9 million toward work car procurements. These investments, as approved by the TTC Board on January 10, 2025, and before City Council for consideration on February 11, 2025, are required to increase reliability and respond to increased demand for work cars due to higher capital activity. [p. 2 SOGR report]

In a section reflecting on the growing amount of maintenance work, the report observes:

[…] significant investment into these programs is required along with the procurement of suitable work cars through a phased fleet replacement approach and rolling stock transition plan. To ensure the TTC is able to continue delivering on its state-of-good-repair program, while accommodating future growth and expansion projects, the availability of work cars for trackside activities and the time required to maintain the work cars in a state of good repair is inversely proportional, and as such, it is critical that the capacity to provide safe, reliable and available work cars is built into future plans. [p 12 SOGR report]

Many problems with the work car fleet originated with deferral of a renewal and expansion plan proposed in Andy Byford’s era as CEO, but sidelined under Rick Leary.

Closures are expensive because of many factors. These costs are recovered through the capital project budgets and from external parties, notably Metrolinx. They are not part of the regular operating budget.

Subway closure costs are variable and dependent upon the duration and distance of the closure territory, along with the complexity of the work. The cost for each closure is attributed to the incremental costs for buses, advertising, and staffing. This includes Operators, contracted customer service support staff, TTC staff to supervise the closure, paid duty police officers, and parking enforcement officers. The average subway early closure cost is approximately $35,000 per evening and the average full, two-day weekend closure cost is $500,000 per weekend ($250,000 per day). [p. 1 SOGR report]

The detailed list of proposed 2025 closures is organized by date and this shows how some work has been scheduled so that two or three projects can take advantage of one shutdown at a time [pp 17-30 SOGR report]. However, this makes major projects that spread over many weeks more difficult to see along with the dates when specific parts of the network will be closed. The main part of this article includes charts showing the dates and locations of closures.

An important issue raised by the report is the TTC’s ability to perform all required maintenance work in the time available.

On the subway side, a significant increase in production time is required to continue to maintain its assets in a state of good repair. Given the current rate of track asset deterioration, it is expected that the average production time of approximately 92 minutes will need to approximately double to more than 180 minutes to continue to ensure all assets remain in a safe and reliable state. [p 11 SOGR report]

That “92 minutes” refers to the productive work interval between shutdown and startup of subway service, and has been cited recently by management when discussing the Reduced Speed Zones list. That connection is misleading in that major track rehabilitation is done during longer “possessions” of subway lines either through early closing, or weekend shutdowns. Indeed, TTC management have often touted how one weekend’s work is equivalent to many short weekday sessions.

The TTC contemplates options for extending the time to perform maintenance:

1. Organizing full weekend closures with significantly larger closures boundaries (i.e. Kennedy to Broadview closure).
2. Weekly early access closures commencing at 10 p.m. with larger boundaries.
3. Nightly suspension of subway service at midnight across some or all subway lines, rather than 2 a.m.
4. Various multi-day or multi-week closures of various points of the subway system. [p 12 SOGR report]

An important question here is how much of the SOGR list’s size is due to growth and aging of the network, and how much from deferred maintenance? Is the TTC in danger of becoming unmaintainable because the backlog is too long? Are more extensive shutdowns a “new normal”, or can we hope for a time when the project list is shorter?

Closing the subway earlier will have major effects on riders. Toronto is not a city where transit riding evaporates at 7pm. The transit network is vital both for entertainment activities and for the many workers who do not have 9-to-5 commutes. Indeed, the TTC routinely cites the importance of evening and night service for both economic and safety reasons.

Streetcar Plans

The report acknowledges that streetcar infrastructure is falling out of good repair:

Given the City’s challenges, certain TTC work has been deferred over the past several years. As the assets continue to age and are subjected to the daily service demands, a long-term execution strategy, post-2026, is required. This situation is further compounded by the ongoing Gardiner Expressway construction work and the Ontario Line expansion that limits TTC’s ability to replace its deteriorating assets on parallel routes (i.e. King, Queen, and Dundas). In the coming years, the prognosis is that TTC will need to expand its current state-of-good-repair work to meet the growing service demands at the forecasted asset deterioration rate. [p 12 SOGR report]

Again, the question is whether the system can sustain an increased level of SOGR work without having many major routes out of service simultaneously. The main part of this article looks at the proposed work and the related diversions, where they are known.

One project that will end, eventually, is the reconstruction of the overhead power distribution system for full pantograph compatibility. Some of this work is co-ordinated with shutdowns for track, road and utility repairs, but some projects are scheduled on their own. Work is not necessarily undertaken when scheduled, and riders have suffered from service replacements and diversions while nothing appears to be happening.

Across both the subway and streetcar systems, Toronto now sees the effect of reduced maintenance and past year budgets that claimed to be adequate but concealed a slow decline. This has happened in other cities, but the TTC always fancied itself immune to such problems.

The report warns of changes needed in 2026 and beyond, but does not explore the details. The TTC Board and the riding public deserve a full airing of this situation together with a recovery plan.

In the political hoopla surrounding the City budget, and the level of support transit will get, we regularly hear claims from the TTC that its service is close to 100% of the pre-pandemic level. Further improvements are planned for 2025.

This story is echoed by Mayor Chow as one of the “good news” pieces about our city.

There is only one small problem: it isn’t true.

The metric behind the claim is “service hours”. This translates directly to the number of operator hours in the service budget. Yes, other factors affect total costs, but operator hours relate fairly well to expenditures and provide a simple, single variable to track over time.

However, the rider experience comprises three very different factors: frequency, reliability and capacity. Infrequent service is not worth the wait, especially for short-hop trips. Service that shows up in bunches, if at all, following an interminable wait compounds the problem. Inadequate capacity tells riders that comfort is not important in spite of a customer first focus.

Over the years, a service hour has provided less real “service” to riders because buses and streetcars take more time to make the same round trip than they did in past years. This was acknowledged by a chart in the TTC’s 2025 budget presentation deck. Slower buses and streetcars arrive less frequently and provide less capacity.

Another metric, vehicle mileage, does not tell the whole story either. The average speed varies quite substantially from route to route, and the relationship between vehicle hours and kilometres is not the same across the system by route, time of day, or day of the week. Average values system wide can differ greatly from those for individual routes and time periods.

The charts in the main part of this article review service levels in January 2025 and January 2019, before the pandemic with data taken from the TTC’s own Scheduled Service Summaries (archived copies are available on this site).

All streetcar routes and the most heavily travelled bus routes are included. The streetcar comparisons also include January 2013 data from the period before new, larger vehicles were introduced.

There is no question that traffic congestion across the entire city is an issue, and this shows up in longer travel times scheduled for these routes. However, a larger component of the increase lies in terminal time that is provided not just for a bio-break for operators, but as padding to attempt better on time performance. (I will turn to OTP and how well the TTC achieves its own goals in a separate article coming soon.)

When Rick Leary was CEO, his stock approach to improved route performance was extra time in schedules, coupled with a “no short turns” edict. The result can be seen in clusters of buses and streetcars at terminals thanks to extra time they do not always require. We can argue about the appropriate amount of terminal time, but there is no question that this factor has grown more than the time actually provided for travel along the route. This translates to extra operator hours that only indirectly provide service to riders to the extent that they might provide less erratic service.

The combined effect of traffic conditions and added terminal time is that capacity actually provided on routes has declined and by a far greater percentage than “getting back to 97% of pre-pandemic service” implies.

On streetcar routes, lower capacity combines with larger, less frequent vehicles to produce wider gaps, and to make any irregularity much more pronounced. We have seen the effect of larger vehicles and longer headways before when the 15m CLRVs were replaced by 23m ALRVs on Queen. The wider headways (arising from a combination of vehicle size and slower operation) succeeded in driving away roughly 1/3 of the demand on 501 Queen at a time when other routes were holding their own. This is a major concern with new streetcars that arrive, even if on time, much less frequently than in the era of shorter cars.

By widening the scheduled gap between streetcars and buses (the “headway”), the TTC has avoided increasing its peak vehicle requirements and staffing.

If the capacity of streetcar routes in peak periods were restored to 2019 levels, the TTC would need 40 more cars in service. On the bus network, considering only the routes analysed here, they would require about 150 more buses. (This will be reduced by the opening of Lines 5 and 6 which will eliminate many buses on routes 32 Eglinton West, 34 Eglinton East and 36 Finch West.) This shows how riders are short-changed by a metric that only looks at vehicle hours, not at how vehicles are used and the capacity they provide.

These increases can be accommodated within the existing fleets. The problem is not vehicle availability, but the budgetary headroom to operate the service.

One can argue that ridership has not fully recovered on all routes, and a return to full capacity would waste resources. What we do not know is how many former and potential riders are lost to the decline in service quality especially when the TTC repeatedly claims it is close to 100% of former service.