For the past year, Toronto’s transit advocacy and hand-wringing focused on a planned order of new subway trains for Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. The City committed its share of funding through special transit taxes, and Ontario came in with the proviso that the Federal government pony up too.

For their part, the Feds dragged their heels not just on the subway cars, but on transit funding generally. They announced a $30-billion, ten-year national program, but money will not flow until 2026. Toronto’s subway car order will draw its federal share from that pot.

One of Toronto’s many problems is solved, but Canada still faces a Federal program inadequate compared to the backlog of national needs, not to mention the dubious future of a government that may be out of office before many dollars flow to local transit systems.

Lost in all of this is a nation-wide crisis in funding for transit operations and maintenance, money that is needed today. Since 2020, special subsidies at all levels masked the severity of the problem to keep transit afloat for pandemic-era mobility and economic support. Those subsidies are ending, and transit systems are back to the problem of finding the next dollar to operate their services.

This is the boring stuff with few photo-ops, but a huge impact on making transit an alternative to driving, or not traveling at all. Money is needed to pay operators and mechanics to drive and repair buses, and to run enough of them that service is attractive and comfortable. Low cost transit is useless if it shows up infrequently and unreliably.

The situation is compounded by inflation in labour and materials costs, and revenue losses from ridership decline and fare freezes. Actions to keep transit operating as a credible, useful mode of transport through the pandemic were necessary and laudable, but the fiscal landscape has changed and cities are hard-pressed to sustain their systems as the special subsidies evaporate.

Many transit systems face perilous service cuts if they do not obtain sustained, improved operating subsidies, but the political situation in many governments is not exactly pro-transit. There are big bucks for construction of new routes and major upgrades, but running better transit today is quite another matter.

Global News recently produced a series of reports on this problem looking at several cities in detail. The consultancy Leading Mobility published This is the End of the Line in May 2024 reviewing operating budget funding and potential revenue tools in several cities.

Just getting “back to normal” with added funding is not enough with transit’s key role in supporting economic, population and environmental change.

For many Canadian transit agencies, new revenue tools alone will not be able to meet the growing fiscal challenges for transit operations. Each level of government has mandates, plans and policies related to climate action, population growth and immigration, equity, economic development and affordability that will significantly rely on useful, reliable and convenient transit service. [This is the End of the Line, p. i]

We tend to forget that the pre-pandemic TTC had severe problems with crowding that were not addressed by penny-pinching budgets. Creeping back to 2019 demand levels a few per cent each year will not address capacity problems transit faced five years ago, let alone the need for more transit, better connected communities and transit as a welcomed first choice for travel. The problem is compounded by a misleading TTC metric of service recovery that overstates how close to “the old days” we actually are. See:

• The Mythology of Service Recovery – November 2024 Update

The revenue tools proposed by Leading Mobility for major Canadian cities are based on some aspect of vehicle ownership or use, although several others were reviewed. Note that this would cover only the municipal portion of transit funding with operating contributions still required from other governments.

• Vehicle levies
• Off-street parking taxes
• Vehicle kilometres traveled tax

A basic problem with vehicle-based revenues is the underlying premise that road users should pay for transit, and that new levies would divert travel from private cars to public buses and trains. This assumes that the transit network actually would serve the demand now handled by autos. However, Toronto’s system, as an example, grew primarily to serve commuting trips to the core area, and planning abandoned much travel to and between suburbs to cars. The dispersed nature of suburban residential and work locations makes transit provision much more difficult.

So-called business cases for major transit projects use the imputed value of time saved by commuters who would fly past traffic congestion on new lines. This is often the primary positive value in evaluations, and it strongly underpins building the fastest possible routes, sometimes at great cost. By contrast, the disincentive of a poor transit network is rarely discussed when the real political goal is to minimize subsidies by limiting service. Nobody talks about the cost of time wasted waiting for the Dufferin bus.

A late addition to the TTC Board’s agenda for December 3 is a presentation on the characteristics the TTC should look for in a new CEO by the search firm hired to manage the process.

Updated Dec. 4, 2024: A section has been added at the end with additional information from the Board meeting.

Jayson Phelps, Senior Partner, Phelps Group, will make the presentation, but the deck is already available and contains some interesting reading. Over recent weeks, Phelps Group conducted 1160 surveys via a publicly available web site, as well as 1062 by email invitations. Individual interviews were conducted with 31 people including the TTC Board, Leadership Team and “key stakeholders”. [Full disclosure: I was one of those stakeholders.]

The presentation summarizes feedback from those surveys and interviews. It is broken down into four sections: Experience, Leadership Attributes, Capabilities, and Challenges/Opportunities. There is also a section on Key Success Factors At 18 Months.

Anyone who has read position descriptions for senior management will recognize many points of which these are only a few.

• Knowledge of transit systems,
• Intergovernmental experience,
• Good communications skills,
• Ability to build relationships with employees, governments and the public,
• Valuing diversity,
• Planning, budgeting and capital project management,
• Working within limited funding,
• Exploiting technology for organizational improvement.

Two particularly stand out:

• Demonstrated focus on rider experience, accessibility, and affordability.
• Passionate about improving transit systems as essential public services.

There is a long list of challenges including restoration of maintenance and service reliability, but also related issues such as organizational structure, departmental silos, and conflicting priorities.

Through the presentation, some points imply a very troubled background within the TTC. It has been no secret that the past era was not a happy one, but seeing some of these issues in print as part of a new CEO search gives a sense of the rot.

• Ethical Leadership and Accountability
  • Upholds ethical standards, communicates honestly, and takes accountability for decisions.
• Stakeholder Engagement and Public Advocacy
  • Skilled at navigating relationships with unions, government entities, and community organizations, fostering collaboration and trust.
  • Skilled spokesperson, building credibility with the public and enhancing organizational reputation.
• Workforce and Organizational Culture
  • Low workforce morale, mistrust in leadership, nepotism, favoritism, and resistance to change.
  • Talent drain to competitors, non-competitive compensation, and limited diversity in leadership.
• Operational and Infrastructure Issues
  • Maintenance backlogs, reliability issues, and slow zones requiring urgent state-of-good-repair projects
• Key Success Factors at 18 Months
  • Public Trust: Strengthened public confidence through visible leadership, improved service quality, and consistent dependability.
  • Employee Morale: Enhanced employee engagement and reduced turnover through recognition programs, inclusivity, and fostering a collaborative workplace culture.
  • Workplace Culture: Addressed toxic workplace culture by fostering fairness, collaboration, and transparency

Terms like ethical leadership, honesty, accountability, credibility, low morale, mistrust, nepotism, favouritism and toxic workplace culture do not sound like the kind of organization TTC purports to be. Many senior staff have left either through retirement, buyouts, constructive dismissal, or simply through disgust with the TTC’s leadership.

That list of key characteristics and challenges for a new CEO tells a grim tale.

Rebuilding the TTC will be a challenge on many fronts, not the least of which is getting hold of today’s pressing issues, but simultaneously developing a plan for a new TTC and building the organization’s trust that it can be and should be implemented.

For many years, the TTC Board failed in their duty to manage their CEO and actions taken by him, and were happy to sit back as long as he met the City’s and Mayor’s target of keeping costs down. Whatever investigative details were provided to the Board prior to the CEO’s departure, we will probably never know.

For too long, some Board members chose wilful blindness. They have no place at the TTC.