Finance

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Fare Evasion on the TTC

Updated Mar. 20/24 at 11:15 pm: The URL in the link below to the Fare Compliance Strategy has been corrected.

Updated Mar. 21/24 at 2:45 pm: A section about children’s Presto cards has been added at the end of this article.

On March 19, 2024, the TTC’s Audit & Risk Management Committee considered a presentation from their Internal Audit group and management’s response regarding an updated Fare Evasion study conducted from April to October 2023. See:

The fieldwork was conducted on weekdays and weekends between 6:30am and 1:00am with a total of 25,730 observations. The intent was to update findings from the 2018 and 2019 studies to post-pandemic conditions. One addition to the scope was a review of underpayment of cash fares. Two items remained outside of the scope: illegal entry to stations via bus loops, and fare evasion on Wheel-Trans and night services.

The Committee is small with only three members, of whom only its chair, Councillor Dianne Saxe and citizen board member Julie Osborne were present. They both had time to ask many questions, and it was clear that the report’s findings took them very much by surprise.

The headline number is an estimate that fare evasion costs the TTC $123.8 million annually, and that 11.9% of riders (on a weighted basis across the three modes) do not pay. This is about double the rate found in 2019. A further $17.1 million is lost to underpaid cash fares.

Lurking behind this entire discussion is the question of Special Constables and Fare Inspectors. The higher the purported loss, the greater the political pressure to regain the missing revenue through enforcement. I will not impute a motive behind the audit study, but observe that finding $140.9 million “under the cushions” every year will get Council’s attention. Whether enhanced enforcement will lead to productive staffing decisions and a real increase in revenue is quite another matter.

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The State of Disrepair

Updated March 14, 2024: The table listing subway restricted speed zones has been updated by addition of the TTC’s March 12 and 14 lists.

Updated March 22, 2024: The table of restricted speed zones has been updated with the TTC’s March 21 list.

In July 2023, the Scarborough RT met its unexpected end with a derailment south of Ellesmere Station. The underlying cause was a loose segment of reaction rail struck by the train. The last car separated from the train and the rear truck lifted completely off of the tracks. A major issue raised by the investigation was poor track inspection and maintenance procedures, possibly influenced by a combination of badly trained junior staff and the assumption that the line would close soon and did not require much ongoing work.

Fortunately, the location was an at-grade segment where there was little danger of the car falling far. Had the accident happened on the elevated stretch from Midland to McCowan, this could have been a very different story.

For a detailed look at this accident and the investigation, see:

The SRT would never re-open. Subsequent inspections found other problem locations including some with similar faults to the one causing the derailment.

This might be regarded as poor management choices and bad luck for a line that would soon close, but only half a year later, the subway was beset with widespread slow orders that hampered service. These arose from an annual track geometry inspection performed by a contracted service using a test rig that is run through the entire subway system. The equipment looks for problems a visual inspection will not spot including rails out of gauge and potential failures due to metal defects and fatigue.

At the January 2024 TTC Board meeting, management claimed that this was a normal outcome of the annual inspection. However, a month later in February, management admitted that the number of defects was higher than usual. Unfortunately, for unknown technical reasons, the video record of the February meeting is not available on YouTube to provide an exact quote.

An obvious, but unasked question is why there was such a jump in defects. Have past inspections missed problems or been too infrequent? Have their findings been ignored? Have repairs been less than adequate?

Quite recently, on March 1, 2024, a broken switch blade was discovered north of Museum Station. This defect was so serious it required service to be suspended from early morning until mid-afternoon when repairs were complete.

Riders on the streetcar system know that there are slow orders everywhere. Any junction slows streetcars to a crawl, and any facing point switch has a mandatory stop-and-proceed so that the operator can verify the switch is correctly set. There is even a rule, not much observed except by junior operators, that streetcars should not pass at junctions lest one of them derail and strike the other. (This rule originated from just such a sideswipe collision several years ago.)

The attitude that poor track condition can be dealt with simply by going slow spread from the streetcar system outward, and now affects the key routes of the TTC’s network.

Somebody made decisions over the years that led to declining maintenance on the rail systems. This was never presented to the TTC Board or Council explicitly, but was the inevitable effect of making do year-by-year with cuts to the Operating and Capital budgets. Three decades ago during a recession and funding cuts, TTC management claimed that they could get by without compromising the system. The parallels are far too clear, and that era’s result was the Russell Hill subway crash.

The term “State of Good Repair” (aka “SOGR”) comes up a lot in TTC budgets as a key component – maintain what we already have, ensure that the system continues to provide safe, reliable service and only then worry about spending on shiny new projects.

A report making its way to Council’s March 20 meeting includes a rough prioritization list of many rapid transit proposals, but the first priority above all is to invest in SOGR. However, the backlog on that account is so big that were this priority taken seriously, Toronto would never have another penny to spend on anything else.

One problem in discussing SOGR is that there is much emphasis on the Capital Budget with big ticket projects like new subway cars and buses, automatic train control, electrification, and replacement of major items such as track, escalators and elevator. We rarely hear about the SOGR buried in the Operating Budget and the day-to-day work of keeping the system in good condition.

An important difference is that the Operating Budget is funded by fares and City subsidies, while the Capital Budget comes from taxes and borrowing at all levels of government. As an example, the cries for Line 2 subway car funding are familiar in recent years. This diverts attention from much-needed ongoing repairs, a very unglamourous part of transit operations.

Spending on operations means money goes out the door today, not in future years for a project that might only now be a line on a map. That money comes from current revenue, not from borrowing, and directly affects taxes and fares depending on which pocket we reach into. There is a lot of competition for whatever spare change we might find.

Any decision to limit tax increases for transit or to freeze fares has a direct effect on how much service the TTC can operate and how well it can maintain the system. Under the Ford and Tory administrations and their low tax policies, there was very strong political pressure to say “we can make do” with no detailed examination of the effects.

This might change under Mayor Chow, but there is no indication that the current TTC budget philosophy has shifted. Indeed, the big push is to restore service and freeze fares. Raising uncomfortable questions about maintenance shortfalls will not serve that agenda.

In this article, I will review the issues with subway and streetcar infrastructure, and then turn to the wider problem of whether “State of Good Repair” can stay as the City’s “priority 1” in the face of typical Council politics. The focus here is on track because that links many current events on the three rail networks, but the concern should be general for the adequacy of TTC maintenance and budgetary limits that are now baked in to overall system quality.

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A Ridership Growth Strategy for 2024

Introduction: Regular readers of this site will recognize threads and arguments from past articles here. Indeed some recent posts were intended as background to this overall article on our city’s transit direction. There is a new Mayor with Council support for change. However, we risk that momentum will be lost and content ourselves with “full service restoration” and a handful of RapidTO projects.

This is not exactly a manifesto, but we have been here before with hopes for new and improved transit seeking progress beyond “business as usual”. Will this round be any different?

Thanks to readers for tweaks in the text. This is a long article, and I have broken it into segments with hotlinks here so that you can jump to specific chapters.

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Overcrowding on TTC Bus Routes

An ongoing issue with TTC service levels is that TTC claims about crowding do not always appear to align with rider experiences.

The TTC Board’s February 22 agenda includes a report about proposed free transit for Middle and Secondary School students, particularly for group field trips.

See: A Step Towards Free Transit for Middle and High School Students

Among the issues raised by the report is the ability of the transit system to handle the additional loads, and the need to co-ordinate planned outings with the TTC for provision of extra service. There is a map showing existing “hot spots” where mid-day routes are over capacity.

Many bus routes have this problem, but none of the streetcar routes.

A related issue is the degree to which crowding varies by day-of-week and the danger that Monday-Friday averages could mask problems with midweek demand levels.

Of particular note here is that the off-peak capacity shown is 35 per bus, not the higher value introduced with the 2023 budget that is close to a standing load. The heat map shows us where current operations exceed the 2023 standard, i.e. those over 100% occupancy vs a bus capacity of 35. Note that these are six-hour averages and individual bus loads will vary.

This also shows the scale of service changes required to reinstate the pre-2023 standard.

Here are the official Service Standard crowding levels and those implemented in the 2023 Operating Budget. The TTC Board has never formally change the Service Standards, and management plans to work back to the existing standards from the 2023 levels as part of future service and budget planning.

Service Standards Peak2023 PeakService Standards Off-Peak2023 Off-Peak
Bus50503545
Streetcar1301307090

The TTC produces a lot of charts in their monthly CEO’s report, but crowding maps like this one showing actual conditions only appear to support analyses of specific issues. They should be a standard part of the CEO’s Report so that there is an up-to-date indication of service capacity versus demand for all time periods.

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Honest Budgeting Needed At TTC

This article began as a Twitter/X thread responding to a post from Mayor Olivia Chow.

From the better way to the *best* way. This budget will restore 97% of pandemic-era TTC service cuts and get the city back on track.

There is a big problem with this claim, and I fear riders will be disappointed by what they actually see. Here is my consolidated thread.

It pains me to write this, but this post by Mayor Chow is simply not true. Either her spin doctors cannot read a budget, or she has been bamboozled by TTC’s misleading use of “restoring” service.

This chart is right out of the TTC budget and shows the planned service restoration by mode. Note that only the bus network gets back to 100%.

Because the values are based on vehicle and train hours, and buses (with relatively small capacity per vehicle) account for most of the hours, the total gets to 97% while leaving streetcars and the subway far behind.

But 97% is not really 97% as seen by riders. Many routes run more slowly than they did in 2019, and so it takes more hours to provide the same frequency and capacity of service.

For added clarity, “100%” of service hours will *not* reverse all pandemic era cuts because some hours go to routes running over 100% while others stay below that level. But spin doctors don’t do pesky details like that.

On top of that, crowding standards brought in by management without advance approval in 2023 mean that off peak service can be more crowded before triggering service improvements. These might be reversed in 2025 but only if there is budget headroom.

Talk about prepandemic service levels forgets that there were major problems with overcrowding and inadequate service back in 2019. Actual planned service in 2020 was higher than 2019, but was cut due to covid.

The shift in commute patterns means that total ridership is less than 2019 levels, but it is concentrated on a shorter work week. Off peak riding is already at or above former levels.

The TTC does not break out service frequency and capacity as metrics, but using vehicle hours hides deeper cuts in these areas.

The February 18 schedule changes include cuts on many routes which are described as “adjustments” on the TTC’s website. A few of these are erroneously called “improvements”.

One reason for the February cuts is that service in January was actually *over* budget and the cuts back that out.

The TTC has no public measurement of crowding conditions and service quality including gaps and bunching. That 97% number will be broadcast far and wide, but will hide many problems.

Service Budgets

For comparison, here are the 2019, 2020 (pre-covid) and 2024 service budgets. The important column is the third from the left, “Regular Service Total”.

For a comparison of January 2024 service levels to January 2020, see this article:

There is work to be done, and a vital first step is to understand just what is needed and what is possible. The TTC Board plans a strategy session in March, and their Budget Committee will probably start meeting in June-July.

Soon I will publish an article about a Ridership Growth Strategy for 2024 that will set the stage for the kind of debate that should be on the agenda.

Can we hope that these meetings will not be consumed by self-serving management dog-and-pony shows, but rather will be an open discussion of the state of and options for our transit system.

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TTC Service Changes Effective February 18, 2024

The TTC will modify service on many routes effective Sunday, February 18, 2024. Several of these changes involve “reallocation” of service between routes and time periods, and overall there will be a small decline in scheduled vehicle hours.

One concern about this process is that the TTC has stated that it would only impose the new, more crowded, off-peak loading standards when changing schedules, but would not retroactively cut service based on the 2023 management-imposed values. With many routes seeing service trimmed, we do not know what the new target crowding level will be because the TTC has not published this information for several years.

There will also be some adjustments for service reliability. These generally involve giving vehicles longer travel times with resulting wider headways on affected routes. In some cases, service does improve because extra time that had been allocated for construction effects is removed.

The table of construction projects affecting transit service is shown below. This does not include ongoing works on the subway system and slow orders for which there is no scheduled provision.

The major project beginning with this schedule period is the reconstruction of water mains and track on King Street West. This is the subject of a separate article:

The new service designs for 504 King, 501 Queen and 63 Ossington are included in the spreadsheet listing all changes below.

The configuration of the streetcar network is shown below.

Scheduled vehicle hours will decline slightly with these changes in part to correct for an overage relative to budget in January. A small increase is planned for the schedule change in late March, and a large one in September. The drop shown for December is the usual effect of the holiday break and the removal/reduction of school services.

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Ontario Confirms Co-Fare Restoration for TTC (Updated)

Updated Feb. 5, 2023 at 6pm: Metrolinx has clarified aspects of the One Fare operation on Presto. See the end of this article for details.

Updated Feb. 5, 2023 at 6:30pm: The TTC has an extensive FAQ page about One Fare.

On February 5, 2024, Ontario announced that it will extend the co-fare arrangements between GO Transit and local municipal transit systems outside of Toronto to the TTC. The branding for this scheme is “One Fare”.

As of February 26, any trip including GO Transit will be discounted by the removal of local transit fares at either end of the journey. Trips beginning or ending on a local system will only pay the GO Transit fare.

Trips using only local systems (such as TTC+Miway) will pay the local fare on the system where they begin, but will transfer free onto any connecting system.

This arrangement corresponds to “Option A” in the Metrolinx Initial Business Case Final Report detailed in a previous article here.

Timed transfers will be valid for 2 hours for trips starting on a local system, and for 3 hours for trips starting on GO Transit. The Metrolinx announcement is not clear about whether a trip beginning on local systems but shifting to GO gets the expanded 3 hour window from paying a GO fare. In effect, does the tap on to GO “top up” the remaining transfer time with an extra hour, or does starting on a local bus fix the transfer window at two hours. I have asked Metrolinx for a clarification.

Update: See the end of the article for further information on the transfer window.

The new fare scheme will be funded by Ontario and local systems will be reimbursed for the foregone fare revenue. The anticipated ridership growth is about 8 million per year.

The anticipated saving for riders, on average, is $1,600 per year. That corresponds roughly to two local transit fares per weekday.

There will be no change in fare payment procedures. Riders will only tap on to the local systems, but must tap on and off for the GO Transit portion of the ride where the fare is distance based.

The provincial press release states “The government will continue to work with municipal partners to identify opportunities to make transit more seamless for riders by harmonizing discounted fares and other measures.” What this will actually entail remains to be seen.

Update: Metrolinx Clarifies One Fare Issues

The following responses were provided by Metrolinx in response to my queries.

On transfer windows:

The initial two-hour window begins when the customer first taps onto the local transit service. When a transit rider transfers and taps onto GO Transit, a new three-hour window begins. For example, a customer who takes an HSR bus (local transit) and then transfers to GO Transit starts with a two-hour window upon their first tap on the HSR bus. When they tap onto GO Transit, a new three-hour window begins. 

On the monthly pass: 

PRESTO transit passes for TTC, Brampton Transit, Durham Region Transit, MiWay and York Region Transit are eligible under Ontario’s One Fare Program.  Please note, customers transferring to GO Transit using a transit pass will not receive any additional discount using a transit pass.

On concession fares: 

Customers also benefit from concession fares through Ontario’s One Fare program because the second fare is always free on local transit, or reduced on GO Transit. For example, in the case of a senior, if the customer begins their journey on the TTC and they transfer to YRT, they pay only $2.25 (the TTC fare) because the second fare is free on local transit. This saves them $2.40 on the trip.  On a TTC to GO Transit trip, in the case of a senior, the GO fare would be reduced.

Metrolinx Media Relations Email of Feb. 5/24

It is possible that the GO Transit fare is less than a TTC fare, for example for a short GO trip by a senior where the TTC fare is $2.25 and the GO fare (using Union to Long Branch as an example) is only $2.13.

The TTC FAQ clarifies that the UP Express is not part of One Fare due to technical constraints. It is not clear when or if this will be fixed.

Thanks to reader Adam Chojecki for providing the link to the TTC page.

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The Vanishing Business Case for Regional Fare Structure

Anyone who deals with Metrolinx from the outside knows that getting information can be a real struggle, but every so often the veil of secrecy lifts, although not always intentionally.

The implementation of “regional fares” is supposed to happen in March 2024, but this will be on a fairly limited scale, at least according to anything published so far. The TTC will come into the same arrangement as the 905 systems with recognition of each other’s fares across the 416/905 boundary, and the reinstatement of a GO Transit cofare.

Like the elusive Toronto sun of recent weeks, a report appeared, and then disappeared on the Metrolinx website called Regional Fare Structure Initial Business Case Final April 2023. This is not a draft, but gives a sense of Metrolinx thinking on the subject and how little some of their fare objectives have changed over the years.

To be blunt, fare planning at Metrolinx has always eyed the Toronto subway as a “regional” facility and its riders as potential cash cows who will help fund other parts of the system. I wrote about this back in 2017-18.

A major problem with earlier proposals was that the Toronto subway was treated as a premium service, like GO, where riders should pay more for the speed and comfort compared to the surface system. This utterly ignored the fact that the TTC system is designed as a single network with subway lines as the backbone and feeder/distributor surface lines. The underlying reason for pushing up subway fares was to make the model revenue-neutral, in effect, to subsidize the elimination of extra fares for cross-border trips with more expensive subway rides.

That scheme would have seen any trip longer than 10km charged an extra fare, and that would have affected the vast majority of suburban commuters who already complained of long bus+subway trips to get to work and school. This idea appeared to die off, and with the ascension of the Ford government in 2018, nothing more was heard. Ford concentrated on large-scale capital projects, not on tinkering with fares.

In the Final version of the business case, the subway fare proposal has changed so that it would only apply to cross-border trips of 10km or more. This would have the effect of undoing part of the supposed benefit of the pending 905/416 fare boundary elimination where riders will not face an extra fare for the subway portion of their journey.

Future Richmond Hill riders look forward to a single fare to central Toronto, but this scheme might not be attractive as a 10km ride will only get them to roughly Yonge and Sheppard (8km for the Yonge extension, plus 2km on the existing subway). In the tariff modelled in the Final Report, the fare to Union Station would be $7.50. Similar issues face trips in other parts of the future rapid transit network.

Removing of the 416/905 fare boundary so that the TTC’s relationship with systems in the 905 and with GO becomes the same as every other system remains an option, but it is presented as the least attractive choice. The clear intent is to pave the way for higher subway fares for “regional” travellers while preserving the flat fare, for now, within Toronto. The political considerations are obvious, but so is Metrolinx’ intent to move forward in their implacable way. Both the Draft and Final versions of the report speak of a path from the current fare arrangements to a totally “integrated” future, albeit one that is not clearly defined.

Options with further levels of “integration” perform well as riding stimulants because they involve significant reduction in GO fares at a time when service will be increased through the GO Expansion program.

A major barrier to fare-by-distance on the subway is the need to “tap out” from the subway fare zone. This is not simply a question of putting Presto readers on the “inside” face of every fare gate, but of establishing fare lines between the surface and subway portions of stations. This has a substantial cost and creates a barrier to free flow for the vast majority of trips that would still pay a flat TTC fare, Moreover it would be a Trojan horse making future conversion of the subway within Toronto to a separate fare zone much simpler.

This is not a “fare integration” scheme, but rather a plan to increase GO rider subsidies while also setting the stage for subway fare increases. The idea of a revenue neutral change in the tariff has been abandoned, at least for now. The historic pattern emphasizing GO capacity for longer trips has been turned on its head to give GO rail a larger part in local travel within Toronto.

In order to sell this concept, Metrolinx now includes rebalancing the GO fare structure under the “integration” rubric. This is a completely separate issue and it should have been addressed years ago on GO independently from the cross border fare problems.

An intriguing caveat in all of this is that the Ministry of Transportation is listed as a “partner” in the study, and its conclusions will be referred to MTO for review. One has the sense of Metrolinx being on a short leash.

It is not surprising that this report was pulled from public view, but it is worth discussing because it reveals Metrolinx’ thinking. A document does not become a “Final” report, even if it is only a “Final Initial” version, without a lot of policy signoffs along the way.

Note: In this article, I use Draft and Final (capitalized) to refer to the two versions of the Initial Business Case.

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Fun With Figures: The Value of Transit Investment

A common, but troubling practice in talking about transit is the attempt to build a “business case” as if city’s transit network can be examined through a rather simplistic management school lens. Everything is reduced to a monetary value, be that direct spending, spinoffs, or the notional value of benefits.

Aside from basic errors in methodology, this approach assumes that the supposed value of transit spending can be gleaned from a one-dimensional view of its so-called worth in dollars and cents. Bad enough that this practice is entrenched in Metrolinx, an agency that sets priorities based on political, not financial, evaluations thereby undermining the credibility of financial analyses. The scheme has trickled down to the municipal level with a TTC/UofT study intended to show that money for transit has financial benefits and should be encouraged for the good of city and country.

You might ask why a transit advocate has misgivings about this exercise, but the answer lies in my long-standing conservatism (with a very small “c”) about public spending generally. Megaprojects bring press coverage, especially with the opportunity to announce over and over the latest step, no matter how trivial, as work inches along. This tactic works as long as there is success to report, and we just don’t talk about abject failures like Line 5 Crosstown any more often than needed.

A huge problem with the TTC’s gaping hole in Capital funding, and to a lesser extent on its Operating side, is that the cry “please, Sir, I want some more” for transit support wears thin with would-be partners. Moreover, everything on Toronto’s wish list does not necessarily align with political priorities elsewhere, and it must compete with demands from other cities and provinces. Thus the desire to show that transit spending has a great “payback”, but that number hides fundamental questions.

The problem with spending for its own sake is that one rarely hears the question “what else might we do with these billions” or “is this project really worth its cost compared to other demands on public funds”. How much is not built or operated because some other project took priority, or the growing cost of works already underway crowded other new schemes off of the table?

Into our political environment, one rife with patronage, cronyism and outright corruption, comes an attempt to justify spending on transit as an inherently good thing.

In 2022, the TTC launched a joint study with the University of Toronto Mobility Network which surfaced as part of the 2023 and 2024 Budgets. The goals of the study were “to identify and quantify the economic and other key benefits resulting from investment in transit and the TTC”:

  • Economic benefits realized from investments in transit services and capital works that enhance TTC’s existing transit network
  • Economic impact of the TTC on the local, regional, provincial and national economy
  • Qualitative and quantitative social, equity, health and environmental benefits and the economic spin off benefits derived from these other benefits
  • Impacts should the necessary service and capital investments not be made in the TTC
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TTC Board Meeting: December 20, 2023 – Part II

This article continues the series about the December 20, 2023 TTC Board meeting with details of the budget discussion.

Items discussed here:

This article deals mainly with the Q&A session at the Board meeting as I have already written about the 2024 budgets in detail elsewhere.

The 2024 Operating and Capital Budgets

A major problem with TTC budget “debates” is that they are quite perfunctory compared with the size and importance of the reports, and the spending involved. There has been no TTC Budget Subcommittee for years, and even when it existed, it rarely met. The idea of at least part of the Board doing a deep dive into budgets seems to be utterly beyond their idea of “good governance”, at least until the recent change in the Mayor’s and Chair’s offices.

Commissioner Ainslie asked that the Chair work on creation of Budget Committee with a report in 2Q24. He observed that agencies with much smaller budgets than the TTC have budget committees, and the TTC should too. The Board asked staff to report in Q2 2024 on the establishment of a Budget Committee.

It should not be for staff to report on creation of such a committee, but for the Board to say “we need this” and immediately canvass members for their interest. An informed committee will be essential for review of the 2025 budget priorities before the budget is struck. The budget should not come to the Board as a fait accompli based on discussions at the staff level. Moreover, the Mayor’s Office should have visible input to the process. If the level of so-called review by the Board amounts to a once-a-year dog-and-pony show by staff, there is no opportunity for Board input and queries about the underlying policies, assumptions and options available.

Some TTC Board members are strong in their belief that the role of the Board is to provide policy and oversight, and of management to manage. That is a great model provided that the Board actually engages in its role, but for many years there was no sense that the TTC Board actively developed policy, let alone held management accountable.

By the end of the budget debate, Board members were very concerned about the financial status of the TTC, even though quite complimentary about the detail of work presented by staff. Some of these members sat through the years when Mayor Tory ran the show, and the primary message was “everything’s just fine”. They bear some responsibility for problems that have festered for years.

After the staff presentation on the two budgets, there were many questions from the Board. The items below have been consolidated by topic. Illustrations are taken from the presentation deck.

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