Toronto: The Sliding State of the TTC.

One of the most important posts I will write.

This post is about the state of the TTC.

It will not end with a positive aspiration because the TTC functioning as normal should not be seen as positive or aspirational. Instead, what I ask of you, the reader, is to think carefully about the issues I raise in this post, and maybe raise them with your community and elected representatives. Torontonians should expect a high-quality and reliable transit system from our well-compensated, civic and transit leaders, not an unreliable, low-ridership, low-frequency system that you might expect in an American city (outside of New York). The issues with the Toronto subway depress me, and are one of the things that makes me worry about our ability to deliver good transit — and they are likely mostly organizational, not technical.

I woke this morning to an article shared in my “Transit Group Chat” about the TTC’s next round of analysis of its subway infrastructure, which may bring yet more slow zones to a system that has already become completely loaded with them over the last few years. To give you a sense of how bad things have become, the segment of track along Allen Road where subway trains run down the middle of a stub of uncompleted highway, which many will recall features signs that jokingly suggest drivers get out of traffic and into speeding subway trains, sees trains crawl along as cars fly by for most of the day.

The TTC as a whole is in decline. The streetcars in many ways perform better when replaced with buses that run faster (even on routes like Spadina with oft-touted dedicated lanes) — without various required slow downs and the unreliability that comes when you combine poor operations with the inflexibility of rails. Bus service remains often frequent, but completely chaotic, as it has been since I moved to Toronto — with no buses for 23 minutes and then three buses in a row being a common sighting. And the few low-hanging fruit items like wayfinding that could be upgraded without grand infrastructure programs or huge budgets remain stuck somewhere between small American town and French village (an insult to most French villages, which manage substantially better signage than Toronto’s transit system), not to mention every other major transit system in Canada.

But something broke in me when towards the end of the article it was suggested that we ought to learn from Boston — with emphasis placed on multi-week subway shutdowns having delivered more reliable service there (no mention is made to the catastrophic state of Boston’s much older transit system beforehand, with trains catching fire, derailments, and even worse slow zones than Toronto). It seems that TTC leaders think that Boston — a city where transit ridership is a fraction of that in Toronto, and where the transit system was allowed (but also could afford to be) let to decline to the point that trains were catching fire — is a place we should compare ourselves to, or draw inspiration from. (To be clear, I both think the situation is less dire in Toronto, but that we damn well better hold ourselves to a higher standard).

Photo by Jed Dela Cruz on Unsplash

To be clear, Toronto’s problems are not small. The streetcars are again almost a write-off in many instances, and the subway, which once used to at least be quite consistent, has gotten both unreliable and slow. Toronto media and organizations like the Board of Trade love to talk about road congestion, but they almost entirely ignore the much more severe degradation of the subway system (that moved over a million people a day pre-pandemic, more than the DVP, Gardiner, and 401 combined) that has dropped a bomb on transit users’ quality-of-life, and surely worsened congestion by getting more people into cars.

The TTC has not managed this well: At first, they were almost in denial of the problem, and they still haven’t really come up with a rationale for these problems outside of “we need more money” (which I will address later). Transparency and communication, which the TTC does not need more money to provide, has been highly lacking.

But what concerns me most of all is the narrative around maintenance. As of late, I’ve heard officials from the TTC complaining a lot about how they are limited to a few hours a week of overnight maintenance on the subway — which is crazy, and in my opinion shows a sort of contempt for the intelligence of the public, who are well aware that the TTC closes large chunks of the subway most weekends so that it has additional time for maintenance! In 2025, the subway is meant to have tens of weekend closures, not to mention other types of maintenance impacts to service. This is already more than many transit systems around the world, including older ones, have (while delivering notably better service). The reality is that the vast majority of subway systems are limited more-or-less to a few hours of maintenance every night (with some exceptions for truly major work, like opening a new station, or rerouting a line), and yet manage to deliver more reliable and modern systems than the TTC has, even as it’s opened up dramatically more time for maintenance.

What’s worse though is that the TTC takes it a step further. I’ve heard claims that the system is providing service frequencies and moving ridership like never before, but this is plainly false. Ridership has not recovered on the subway to where it was pre-pandemic (now over five years ago), and anyone riding the subway will tell you service is certainly not more frequent or reliable than it was then. This narrative that the subway is “as good as ever”, and that “overcrowding on the TTC shows signs of ‘good service’” as the CEO stated not so long ago, both feels out-of-touch and tuned to a political leadership that doesn’t regularly use the system its managing, and doesn’t take transit seriously enough to understand the decline. TTC officials often boast that they are doing better than American systems (which the TTC often chooses to compare itself against — instead of those internationally) in a painfully Canadian example of punching down and setting a low standard for oneself with systems that often move just 1/10th of comparable ones internationally. The lack of curiosity about international best practices is a long running problem at the TTC, but they are truly lost if they think Torontonians, who often come from places with reasonably-run subway systems (most other subway systems outside of the US!), are buying this.

The insanity of the situation was highlighted by a friend in the chat who mentioned that before Andy Byford — who was generally a great leader for the system — there were not all these regular shutdowns (for the 50+ years the system had been running), and service was better! To hear leaders claim that because American systems with a fraction of our transit capabilities and culture should be teaching us lessons, and that we need more shutdowns, while just years before we had better service without any shutdowns gives me major 1984 rewriting history vibes. Torontonians and our leaders especially need to remember and not normalize the pitiful current state of affairs, creating a new baseline where the bare minimum is seen as a positive.

What’s worse is that the system is not the same as it was in Byford’s time. Since then, we’ve had 20+ weekend subway shutdowns a year, huge amounts of money sunk into various elements of the system, and an expensive and drawn out resignalling of Line 1 that should be delivering more reliable service and the flexibility to do more work without huge shutdowns. The system both is and should be in a very good state of repair given the innumerable upgrades we know have been made, and the massive increase in time allotted to the TTC to do maintenance beyond what other similar systems (not American systems) get.

I think the real problem at play in Toronto is just Parkinson’s law (I will explain), which also underlies my apprehension when the TTC makes claims of needing tens of billions for state of good repair work (that’s several times more than entire new systems the size of Toronto’s subway cost — and no maintenance should not be as hard or costly as building an entirely new subway). The transit system is aging, but we’re doing more maintenance than ever (at least the TTC is inconveniencing travellers with this rationale), and while we should upgrade it to handle more ridership, it is currently not moving near its peak levels. Of all people, I do not need to be convinced that we should invest in public transit, but right now our whole modus operandi seems to be running to stand still. Let me explain.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of Parkinson’s law, it’s the idea that “work expands to fill the time you allot it”. Now, obviously taken to extremes if I give myself 2 minutes to write a blog post it will not happen, but if I give myself a week it will take a week, even when it should take an hour. You have to be careful giving yourself more resources, because human nature is to overwhelmingly use additional resources to slack and become less efficient, and it’s hard to see this as not being a big part of the TTC’s problem.

Imagine back in the early 2000s when the subway still required similar maintenance to today (even if a lower volume because service and ridership were legitimately lower and the system was younger), those planning the maintenance and actually undertaking it had a lot more time pressure, because the vast majority of the work had to happen in brief (and yes, maybe too brief) overnight hours. More work would have to happen concurrently when the whole system “slept” and maintenance would be more expensive because you needed more workers concurrently at a particularly expensive time — the middle of the night. It’s just going to be hard to keep up that level of discipline when you not only start doing (again, probably reasonable!) early closures to extend overnight work hours, but also weekend closures that provide 10-20x more hours to get work done. When the TTC started to engage in these weekend closures, it seemed to make the poor decision of not keeping a tight cap on them (say, under 10 weekends a year or something, and with the CEO needing to approve them), and now roughly half the weekends a year, a large chunk of the subway isn’t running.

To be clear, the weekend shutdowns are worse than they need to be. They would be blunted if Metrolinx was faster to deliver parallel subway lines that would cover the section of the Bloor-Danforth from Kennedy to St. George, and the Yonge Line south of Eglinton — providing higher quality relief routes. But the City is also to blame for doing so little to make the experience of crowded subway shuttle buses better, like having more cops out directing traffic or, god forbid, giving buses carrying subway levels of people temporary dedicated lanes.

Of course, it also doesn’t help that there are going to be times where a big shutdown makes sense, and as the subway ages, some maintenance work will be essentially impossible to do over one night. But since the TTC does so many closures, it’s impossible to believe most of them are for work like this, and at the same time, the TTC’s refusal to learn more from cities where transit functions well (aka not America) means that doing big work like replacing large amounts of track and ballast probably don’t happen with the same well-oiled speed that they would in London or Tokyo.

I’m sure you can imagine how Parkinson’s law can be extended to funding too. I’m sure the TTC legitimately needs a lot of funding, but then it’s also buying some of the most expensive subway trains ever for Line 2, despite the existing ones being fairly young by international subway train standards, and arbitrarily not being upgraded with better interior features like digital “where-am-I” screens (something loads of other cities do) to seemingly make the case seem stronger. Resources just often feel like they are not being used super well, either in terms of time or money — and that should lead to pause in providing more, lest far more dollars are spent, and far more subway shutdowns happen, and we end up right back where we started, but having spent a lot of money and made peoples lives a lot worse.

I think ultimately the only direction we can go to from here is one where more pressure is provided for the TTC to provide results — explain in detail why its maintenance productivity has seemingly fallen so much (beyond what could be reasonably expected with an older system etc.), and leadership is forced to adopt best practices from places that are actually better at this (so Paris and Stockholm, not Boston or Chicago), so that we can (as we did in the past) have a more reliable system, with less shutdowns, and where the dollars we spend on the system (and that should be a large quantity) are making it very noticeably better every single year. Our politicians should be informing themselves and asking hard questions - “Why are we doing another shutdown of a section of track that was shut down recently, to do work that could have been done then?”, “What specific measures do other metro systems internationally take to minimize disruption from this type of work?”.

The TTC, and so far our politicians are letting Torontonians down, and we should feel angry, but we should also take action and hold people to account. The TTC should, and can be a great transit system that we are proud of, but not if we hold it to the standards of Boston.