One of the TTC’s premier shops will hold an open house as a fundraiser for the United Way.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
TTC Greenwood Complex – 400 Greenwood Avenue
Admission is $5, kids two and under are free.
This event is accessible. Bus and Wheel-Trans shuttles between Coxwell Station and the event will be available.
In previous articles, I have tracked the evolution of subway segments where Reduced Speed Zones (RSZs) are in place since February 2024. Recent comments in other articles suggest that readers have not been following this.
Here are updated charts showing areas where speeds are or have been restricted on Lines 1 and 2.
The charts on the left are for 2024, while those on the right show 2025 with a gap at the top where I did not check for about a month. The longevity of the RSZs can be clearly seen in the length of more or less continuous coloured vertical bars notably on Line 1 between Eglinton and Bloor, and north from Eglinton West to Sheppard West.
The coloured areas show where RSZs were located, and the arrows show the direction with “<>” meaning “both ways”.
Tables with location details and expected times to repair taken from the TTC’s site are below. Note that in previous versions, many of these sites were expected to be repaired in August, but the target dates have been adjusted.
At the request of a reader, here are the Line 1 and 2 charts condensed onto a single page for each line so that the year-to-year continuity of problem areas is more obvious.
As a long-time transit activist, issues accumulate over the years and decades. Attempts to discuss “what needs to be done” quickly become a tangle of interlocking subjects. There is no simple solution to many problems.
Advocates for better transit run into comments like “you’re so smart, what would you do?” The intent is usually to shut down debate and prove that armchair criticism is a lot easier than the hard professional work of running a city and its transit system.
Recently, after a wide-ranging conversation about Toronto’s transit and the political history of the city, I was asked to boil down my feelings into three key issues about the TTC. This is the sort of question one might encounter in an interview to see how well a candidate knows their material and can focus on core items without rambling. I wasn’t interviewing for anything, but did not hesitate in my reply. This article grew from that discussion.
The intent is not to be exhaustive, but to sharpen debate to key issues. For every question there would be dozens of subsidiary issues, and always a chance that something would be missed. However, senior managers and politicians have limited attention spans, and they cannot deal with every issue at once. Neither can the organizations they lead. There is a “trees and forest” problem where many small details deserving of attention can obscure the larger picture.
Here are my three issues as a launching pad for debate about where the TTC should focus. There is a common theme: if you don’t know what’s broken, you cannot possibly fix it.
I have not discussed transit funding, a perennial topic at the TTC and City Hall, and one we will hear much about as the 2026 budget season unfolds. This is a deliberate choice.
Funding debates consume vast amounts of time, usually to address a handful of key problems. The most recent example was the new Line 2 subway fleet, but there are many, many more budget lines both for state of good repair and system expansion, and many of these are interlinked. We rarely hear about any of them.
Even modest growth, a “business as usual” approach, has challenges, but aggressive transit growth as foreseen in Toronto’s TransformTO strategy adds very substantially to an already difficult situation. Council has not yet endorsed this plan fully, and the TTC has only produced an incomplete estimate of its implications.
If we hope to build a more robust transit system, we need to understand both the shortcomings of the existing one as a base and the challenges of accelerated growth. Toronto came through the Covid era with its transit system more-or-less intact, but we face a decision. Will we just muddle through, content with small improvements and a handful of future rapid transit lines, or will we launch into an era of real growth in transit across the entire system? Will we really make the TTC “The Better Way”?
Continue readingRecently, the TTC added tables to its page mapping all reduced speed zones indicating the nature of each problem and the anticipated time to repair. Many of the dates were in August, and we’re well into that month already. Given past history, this seemed optimistic.
The table has now been revised with a number of dates pushed into September. A few items have vanished, but there are new entries too.
Despite the premise of an open, competitive bid among potential carbuilders for new subway trains, various politicians have openly argued that the work should go to the historical provider, the Alstom (formerly Bombardier) plant in Thunder Bay.
On August 15, all three funding governments, Canada, Ontario and Toronto announced that a sole-source contract will be awarded to Alstom Transport Canada. This is intended to support Canadian jobs and an existing manufacturing facility. All bidders have been notified that the former bid process has been cancelled.
According to the news release:
To ensure that Alstom delivers state-of-the-art trains at a fair market price, maximizes the creation of Canadian jobs, and benefits Toronto, Alstom must:
• deliver a product that is compliant with the TTC’s original requirements;
• maximize Canadian content and create Canadian jobs;
• have its pricing subject to an independent third-party market price assessment.
It is expected that negotiations will occur over the next few months with a report back to the TTC Board on the status of negotiations by the end of the year.
The proposed contract would provide 70 new trains
There is also provision for future train orders that would support expansion of service on both Lines 1 and 2. The 55 trains are sufficient to operate Line 2 at the capacity supported by its existing signal system, but more trains would be needed to exploit the capabilities of CBTC (Computer Based Train Control) which will be installed in coming years. Similarly, the existing Line 1 fleet will support the pre-CBTC service level of 140 seconds (25.7 trains/hour), but more trains are needed to go beyond that level. There is no funding for the additional trains in current budgets, nor for the added maintenance facilities a larger fleet will require.
The award of additional trains to Alstom is dependent on their performance on the 70-train order.
The new release states:
The TTC is working diligently to ensure the aging Line 2 fleet operates safely and reliably until new trains arrive.
Originally, the TTC had planned to replace the Line 2 trains by 2026, but that scheme was shelved by former CEO Rick Leary who claimed the trains could be life-extended to 2040. That solved a budget pressure for funding, including the proposed new maintenance yard at Kipling, but created a potential crisis in subway reliability and fleet availability.
The TTC has more than 55 of the current T-1 stock used on Line 2 due to changes over the years in the scope of automatic train control implementation on Line 1. These would, if all trains were working, have allowed the Scarborough extension to open using the existing fleet, but only barely. The delay in the Scarborough project bought the TTC time to procure new trains.
The challenge now is to keep the T-1 fleet operating reliably until new cars arrive. TTC management reported at a Board meeting earlier this year that some cars are being used as a source of spare parts. There are obvious limits to how far this practice can go, and if carried too far will limit the TTC’s ability to restore full pre-pandemic service on Line 2.
See also:
The TTC maintains a list of reduced speed zones on its website, and this constantly changing list is tracked in a previous article here showing how long some restrictions have been in place.
The format of the TTC page has been changed to include not just a map showing where the zones are, but why they were created and, in most cases, a target date for remediation.
The current map and table of repair targets, as of July 31, 2025, are shown below. Note that some of the items on the map are not included in the detail (e.g. Warden to Kennedy eastbound), and the table includes entries that are not reflected on the map (e.g. Sheppard West to Wilson). This does not speak well of the TTC’s ability to communicate consistent, accurate information.
Updated August 1, 2025 at 9:10am: The TTC has updated their page so that the map and tables are now in sync with each other.
Most of the zones listed here are scheduled for removal by early September with only a few continuing into the Fall or beyond (“TBD”). This list will bear watching for additions, and for removals of cleared sections within the expected time frame.
Original July 31 versions:
Revised versions:
Since February 2024, I have tracked the TTC’s posted list of Reduced Speed Zones (RSZs) on subway lines 1 (YUS) and 2 (BD). A pattern has emerged that some RSZs are very long-lasting, others are brief, and some come-and-go.
Former Interim CEO Greg Percy claimed that we should expect about a dozen of these at any time, but the current total as of July 13, 2025, sits at 27.
If these zones came and went in short order as problems were discovered, one might tolerate a period of travel delay. My own recent experiences with glacial trips from Vaughan to St. George makes me thankful that I don’t take this route every day, but regular riders there have my sympathy.
Current reporting makes actual tracking of track defects difficult, and there is no sense of the underlying problems or limitations on performing repairs. Transparency demands that more information is provided for the status of RSZs, specifically:
Whether this will speed repairs depends on available resources (capital, work equipment, crews) and conflict with other works along the subway lines, but at a minimum riders deserve to know when they can expect relief from slow orders. The TTC Board and Council deserve to know how deep-seated the outstanding problems might be, where they originated, and what will be required to fix them.
Continue readingOn January 10, 2025 as part of the budget process, the TTC Board approved:
- Establish a Strategic Planning Committee to assist the TTC Board in managing strategic planning and priorities, including through a Ridership Growth Strategy and other existing strategic documents, and direct the Director, Commission Services to report back to the February 24, 2025 TTC Board meeting on a proposed structure and meeting schedule after canvassing Commissioners’ interest in committee membership;
- Amend the 2025 Schedule of Meetings to add a Special Meeting of the Board in September 2025 to consider recommendations from the Strategic Planning Committee, receive an update on the 2026 Budget, and discuss budget priorities informing the development of the 2026 TTC Operating Budget; 2026-2035 Capital Budget and Plan and 15-Year Capital Investment Plan and Real Estate Investment Plan Update;
- Direct the Director, Commission Services to include a Special Meeting to consider recommendations from the Strategic Planning Committee, receive an update on the next year’s budget, and discuss budget priorities informing the development of the next year’s budgets in future year’s recommended annual schedule of Board and Committee meetings for the Board’s approval, in
accordance with Section 20 of the By-law to Govern Board Proceedings;- TTC Staff conduct public consultations and develop a Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0, building upon the Ridership Growth Strategy 2018-2022 and report back to the Board in July 2025;
- TTC staff develop a hiring strategy on the basis of the approved Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0 and report back to the Board by October 2025; and TTC staff use the approved Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0 and associated hiring strategy to inform the 2026 TTC Budget process.
I began writing this article before the meeting took place as background based on the then-posted materials. After attending the meeting, I found that it was more productive than I had expected thanks in part to two presentations that were not in the original published agenda.
TTC Chair Jamaal Myers praised Councillor/Commissioner Alejandra Bravo who chairs the Strategic Planning Committee for the work she did in producing a focused agenda that made for a useful meeting. Past attempts by the Board to engage in general policy debates have been rare.
There was much more meat on the presentations than we have seen in a long while at the TTC. Heavy going in places, and some hard truths about the options available. This type of briefing is long overdue, and will provide the foundation for informed discussions at the TTC Board and eventually at Council.
The actual establishment of a committee contemplated in point 11 did not actually occur until the Board meeting of April 16, 2025, and the first meeting only now happened, six months after the original motion. It is not clear how much influence the committee will have on the 2026 budget process considering the length of delay.
Although the next meeting date is currently shown as October 25, 2025, Chair Bravo indicated that she does plan to schedule one in time to feed into the budget.
As for consultations on a Ridership Growth Strategy, these have not yet begun, and the TTC is now only in the first round of its Annual Plan consultations. By extension, any service improvements flowing from a new RGS including hiring required to staff buses and streetcars do not yet exist. How much would be done in the 2026 budget remains to be seen.
The delay in the committee’s initiation places the Board in a familiar position. Actual discussion of policy options is pushed off, if it occurs at all, so late in the year that the next budget is “more of the same” because there was no time to consider alternatives. Options for significant growth are never presented to Council because the TTC Board never discusses what might be done.
“Value for Money”
Almost at the end of the meeting, Chair Bravo made a comment about advising the budget process. She posed two questions about funding:
This slipped by quickly, but a vital issue here is that these are not the same question, but two separate issues depending on what one assumes as the role of transit. Best value for money for whom? For taxpayers asked to subsidize transit? For riders awaiting a bus that never comes?
That distinction lies at the heart of every transit funding debate I have heard, but the actual question is never asked, and “value for whom” rarely starts with riders. This can be an important change in budget planning and in advocacy for financial support from the City and Province.
There are three items on the July 10 agenda:
At its meeting on June 23, the TTC Board considered a report on platform doors for its subway system:
The main report recommends that the Board:
- Receive the PEDs Study report.
- Approve addition of PEDs requirements, including operational and technical system requirements to the TTC Design Manual and Master Specifications for implementation at future new stations.
- Direct staff to include funding based on estimates for the implementation of a pilot installation at TMU Station (Dundas) as part of the 2026 budget submission.
- Approve ongoing planning work, including prioritizing stations for implementation of appropriate technologies based on specific needs and drivers of each station.
At the meeting, there was an attempt to refer the report to staff for further study:
Motion to Refer Item moved by Fenton Jagdeo (Lost)
Refer the report back to staff for further analysis to compliment [sic] the platform edge door study that includes:
- Other technology, infrastructure, or passenger management solutions at stations that could improve operational efficiency, customer experience, and safety.
- Prioritization of stations that would most benefit from platform edge doors and those that could realize safety, operational, and customer experience improvements utilizing other solutions.
- Capital budget costs of (non platform edge door) station enhancement investments that could be implemented in 2026 to improve safety, operations, and customer experience.
- Expanded business cases that include metrics for potential operational cost savings, service reliability improvements, and customer delay time savings that could be realized with platform edge doors at the highest priority stations.
- A jurisdictional review of alternate platform edge door funding models that leverage non-fare (advertising) revenues.
There was also a motion to refer the report to the Strategic Planning Committee for further discussion:
Motion to Amend Item (Additional) moved by Councillor Dianne Saxe (Carried)
The TTC Board requests that staff provide the Strategic Planning Committee with class 5 estimates of the costs and benefits to the TTC of technically feasible options to detect or discourage track-level intrusions at subway and LRT stations, including those being installed by Metrolinx on new stations in Toronto.
The Feasibility Report by AECOM is a long document, but the core of it lies in the first 90 pages covering many aspects of potential implementations and designs. One significant conflict between this report and the management recommendations lies in the choice of stations for a trial installation. Although management recommends Dundas/TMU, a busy downtown station, the Feasibility Report recommends lightly used stations where problems can be worked out without a major upset to service and riders.
It is further highly recommended that TTC implement a number of PED installation pilot projects at different stations representing the typical condition for each type of design solution. Representative stations are proposed based on low ridership numbers to minimize impact to the subway system and ridership inconvenience associated with performance of the work and the anticipated learning curve. Potential stations include North York Centre, Lawrence, Glencairn and Old Mill. This variety of stations will allow contractors to familiarize themselves with all station groups and structural solutions. [p. 19]
The project is estimated to take over 20 years to complete system-wide at a substantial cost:
The total capital cost for the implementation of the PEDs system for Lines 1, 2 and 4 is estimated at $4.1 billion, with average costs of $44 million to $55 million for two platforms of a station based on the preliminary (Class 5) cost estimate, which includes a cost escalation to the midpoint of construction projected in 2036. The estimated cost was also included in the 2025-2039 Capital Investment Plan and remains unfunded. Subject to the approval of the recommendations of this report and available funding room available, $44 million will be included in the 2026-2035 Capital Budget and Plan submission for the implementation of a pilot installation at TMU Station (Dundas) for Board consideration. The preliminary cost estimate does not include the ATC interface. This will be further reviewed and discussed with the Line 1 ATC supplier as the PEDs project progresses and an implementation strategy is developed. [Management Report, p. 2]
Note that the study lists many other aspects of the project for which costs are not included. I will turn to these in the detailed part of this article.
The PED project is not funded in the Capital Plan and would have a significant effect on annual spending, especially if there is political pressure for a compressed timeline.
The study reviewed four different implementations:
Based on a scoring system full-height doors were favoured because they are the only proven system that completely prevents track level access. However, this is only one component of the evaluation and the differences overall are small, except for “rope” systems due to a “less-proven” ranking.
The costs for full- and half-height doors are substantial thanks to the station modifications needed for their installation many of which are common to both schemes.
An important issue in such a review is to determine just what reason lies behind the desire to install PEDs. The commonly cited issue is suicides, and yet the TTC has a greater problem with people walking at track level. Other problems include fires caused by debris blown onto track level, and the potential contact between passengers on the platform and trains. Various implementations address each of these to a greater or lesser extent.
If the intent is to make track level access difficult and deter the majority of intrusions, then walls of some height are required. Sensors can detect unwanted intrusion, but they will not prevent it, and could be prone to false positives.
The operative word in “IDS” is “detection”. Such a system can detect entry into the guideway, but not prevent it. This will be used on the underground portions of the soon-to-open Lines 5 and 6 in Toronto, and we will see how well it works, especially in distinguishing between real intrusions and false positives that would halt service.
Installing PEDs is not simply a matter of erecting a wall along the platform. There are issues of structural integrity of platforms, relocation of services in the under-platform area, station and tunnel ventilation, power supply and control systems, and emergency operation of the doors. Most of these are common to half and full-height implementations, although the effect on ventilation is less for half-height doors.
The implementation of PEDs at existing stations will require extensive planning, with the majority of the work taking place at track level during non-operating hours and will need to be implemented alongside ongoing State of Good Repair (SOGR) work in subway tunnels and stations. Implementation of the PED system as part of major works, such as Bloor-Yonge Capacity Improvements (BYCI) will minimize operational and customer disruptions while addressing cost and schedule efficiency.
Extensive subway station closures and station bypasses will be necessary to effectively complete track-related work for the PED system and to minimize the challenges. Partial and full closures of subway lines and stations were used in Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Copenhagen, and Seoul’s Metros to successfully retrofit the PED system in existing stations. [Management report pp 1-2]
The TTC has never undertaken an “extensive” closure of a station, let alone a line, beyond weekend maintenance shutdowns. This has substantial implications at busy stations near major destinations or with extensive surface feeder services.
The Business Case (also by AECOM) presents the advantages and disadvantages of PEDs.
The Business Case is a troubling document because it purports to show the monetary value of the project, albeit over an extended period. I am not convinced that this is an appropriate way to address the issue. The majority of the savings comes from fatality incidents which contribute to many of the factors below, notably to the imputed value of lost lives. Some of these savings are not direct dollar spending (such as emergency response costs), and cannot be recouped as an offset to the capital cost.
Arguing the preservation of life as a “business case” begs the question of whether fiscal hawks would agree to the project if there were not a good “return on investment”. Conversely, a 20-year implementation plan has little sense of urgency. The question, then, is how quickly the project could actually unroll, at what cost, and a what disruption both to ongoing subway operations and the overall capital plans for the TTC.
The footnote above refers to anticipated longer dwell times at stations as the control systems for both the platform doors and trains agree with each other about opening and closing while trains are stopped.
There is some irony to the proposal of Dundas/TMU Station as a trial installation. At the previous TTC Board meeting, the University made a proposal to set up a research effort with the TTC based on their business startup model. The idea was that there were potential developments that could be marketed to the world. One of the focus areas was to be intrusion detection, although such systems have existed for decades in various forms. In December 1985, SkyTrain in Vancouver opened with an Intrusion Detection System, although a replacement technology is now under consideration. IDS is not a new concept, and whether TMU can bring some enhancement that does not already exist in the market remains to be seen.
At this point, management asks the Board for approval to continue study of a potential PED rollout. This would include evaluation of appropriate technologies for different types of stations. and make budget provision for a trial implementation at Dundas/TMU. Any installation work is still a few years away, and a full rollout further still. An obvious question is whether an interim Intrusion Detection System is worthwhile, or even sufficient for the less heavily-used stations.
The challenge is to define the system’s goal and the level of protection needed to achieve this. Will problems simply migrate from stations with full segregation between platforms and trains to others with lesser or no detection or barrier? What proportion of the system must be converted to achieve a significant reduction in unwanted events? How long would it take to achieve this?
The remainder of this article delves into the technical review of PEDs and what their implementation on the TTC network would entail.
Continue readingThe TTC continues to issue notices of Restricted Speed Zones (RSZ) for the subway system. Some appear and disappear in short order, while others are extremely long-lived. I have been tracking the status of these since early 2024, and the charts below show where and when the zones were in place.
Some areas have had RSZs in place continuously for over a year. The TTC has not given any indication of when these will be repaired, although the list has thinned out over the past year.
The departing interim CEO has claimed that 12 RSZs will be a normal situation. This might be credible if problem areas appeared and disappeared quickly, but this is only the case for some of the zones listed here.
A related problem is that some of these areas have been in bad shape for an extended period thanks to deferred maintenance and the complexity of repairs. TTC management has mused about extended shutdowns to attack these problems, but without any specifics, and especially regarding replacement services.
Where the symbols “>” or “<” are used, the RSZ is only in one direction. Where “<>” is used, the zone applies both ways. The charts are broken by year with 2024 on the top, 2025 below. The dates correspond to my visits to the website.
Steve Munro 