by

New Transit Policies for a New Council

Toronto’s election is out of the way, and we have both a progressive Mayor returned to office and a strengthened Council to support her. Now comes the hard part: making the city work and work better.

There are many key files both in sheer budget size and in their importance to the city’s future, and transit is one of the largest. The TTC’s operating budget is over $3-billion, and barely 40% of that comes from the farebox and ancillary revenue such as advertising. The rest comes through the City of Toronto either directly as subsidy or as a passthrough from other governments.

Not to be ignored is the capital budget that pays for major repairs, replacement and growth, except for projects like the Ontario Line that are provided by the Province through Metrolinx. Depending on the period one looks at, the total capital needs are in the tens of billions spread over 15 years or more, and this does not include the major Provincial rapid transit projects.

Toronto professes to want more transit ridership to stem the growth of auto travel, but goals set only a few years ago are nowhere near being achieved. “More of the same” is not a viable plan for the new Council term, let alone for the longer run into the next decade.

The post-pandemic era, fortunately, has not been an anti-transit nightmare, the sort of thing that could arise with a “business oriented” government looking to trim costs. However, support for real improvements has been lukewarm and shows little sign of increasing beyond basic inflationary growth.

The focus by Council and the Mayor (including the pre-Chow era) has been on fares, the transit equivalent of taxes, with freezes for many years and a revised tariff that rewards riders for increased transit travel. This will continue into 2027 with a planned reduction in the monthly fare cap from 47 to 40, and introduction of a weekly 10-fare cap, both likely in the Fall.

A long-standing bugbear for regional travelers was the lack of fare integration between the TTC and systems in the 905, not to mention GO Transit. This is no longer an issue thanks to the Province, but only if they continue their support.

For many years I supported fixed pricing for fares, an equivalent to passes but without the need to pre-pay in anticipation of future use. Even the TTC talked about fare capping a decade ago, but nothing came of this.

Under Mayor Chow’s plan, Toronto will no longer have monthly pricing that exceeds the basic 20-day commute pattern, and the up-front cost of a pass will not be a deterrent to those on tight budgets. However, these proposals pretty much exhaust options for fare structure. I will not go into “free transit” beyond saying that it would require at least $1-billion in new revenue annually, and would do nothing to improve service levels. Moreover, government funders are unlikely to shower Toronto with money just so that the City can give away transit for nothing.

Rider surveys, including those conducted by the TTC, show that the top priority is for reliable, uncrowded service. However, the lack of ridership growth implies that transit service does not address rider needs.

A common observation is that post-pandemic travel patterns have changed, that the reduction in foreign students has hit that segment of transit demand, that work-from-home is a new reality. These are all valid, but oddly enough roads are not empty of traffic. People are still moving around the city. The challenge is to get more of them onto the TTC.

Traffic woes suggest that there is a desire to travel, but limited growth tells us that the TTC is not “the better way” for many Torontonians. What is needed to fix this?

The TTC has many overlapping plans, and a thorough review of them is needed to set a roadmap for coming years. There are two immediate, obvious problems.

First, there are too many plans, and I doubt many if any on the TTC Board know what they contain or even that they all exist.

Second, there is a tendency for plans to come for approval as faits accomplis without necessarily getting a robust review or understanding by the very board who will authorize them.

A common problem throughout the plans is that they are not aspirational, that is to say, they do not reach for the stars, not even the moon. TTC has been through a long period of just keeping the wheels turning, and politicians do not want to see plans that involve big spending, unless they are for rapid transit projects someone else will pay for. The plans reflect the era in which they were written.

However, the last thing Toronto needs is a multi-year effort to completely rewrite these plans. At best, that would bear fruit half-way or more through the four-year term, barely in time to affect budgets and actual operations on a timescale riders can see. Key goals and options should be developed quickly enough to inform the 2028 budget. (Such a review was originally intended as part of of the Board’s Strategic Planning Committee aiming at 2027, but that never happened.) The plans should be reviewed and updated based on current priorities from the Mayor and Council, preferably well in time for the 2028 budget cycle which begins in summer 2027.

Plans for greater transit priority must not be just a few red-painted lanes and traffic signals, but a city-wide approach that affects all transit routes. Equally there must be a recognition that priority alone will not fix problems with irregular, undependable service and crowding. Strong advocacy for transit’s primacy on the road network must be matched by service deserving of a reallocation of road capacity.

If ridership really is to grow, added capacity in the short term can come from improved reliability and from surplus vehicles the TTC already owns. For the medium to long term, fleet expansions on both the bus and subway networks are needed, and yet the funding even to replace existing vehicles is not fully in place. (The streetcar fleet has already been expanded, but some hoped-for service improvements and network growth have not materialized.)

The basic question must be asked: why aren’t riders using the TTC as much as we hope? Transit’s job for decades was seen as getting commuters to and from downtown, and much subway construction aimed to increase transit’s reach and capacity. Similarly GO Transit was created as an alternative to highway expansion. But “downtown” isn’t the only place people travel, and many trips begin and end elsewhere. The bus network whose initial purpose in the 60s and 70s was to expand the subway’s reach into new suburbs now has the task of serving travel within those suburbs and beyond.

An ambitious plan such as the TransformTO scheme for massively increased bus and streetcar service might be unaffordable in the short term, but we need to know whether it is at least practical, what it would entail, and how much investment – capital and operating – would be needed. A more modest goal might be the outcome, but at least we will have tried.

What should our new Council and TTC Board do?

The TTC needs a Board that will ask questions, will really try to understand what is needed to build ridership.

Irregular service brings calls for more route supervision, but sheer quantity is meaningless without an underlying philosophy of what “good” service should look and feel like. Meanwhile, service growth is limited by the number of operators and fleet/facility plans created in an era when aggressive growth was not City policy.

Safety concerns bring promises of more security and social support staff. These must be a visible presence, but without spending every penny just to “show the flag” on every transit vehicle and in every station. Indeed, if that level of pervasive security is really needed, Toronto has much bigger problems than getting more riders on the system.

There is a strong temptation to do everything at once: better service, affordable rides, full funding for system renewal. All of these deserve focus, but with the caveat that the overall aim should be to increase transit use. That means change on a timeframe riders can actually see and feel, and a network that takes people where they want to go, when they want to travel, reliably, comfortably and without delay.

Continue reading →
by

Effect of the Scarborough Busway: 38 Highland Creek

The Scarborough Busway opened for business on September 30, 2026 giving buses a faster, direct route between Ellesmere and Kennedy Station.

This article reviews travel times in both directions for route 38 Highland Creek between Brimley & Ellesmere (a common point for both routings) and Kennedy Station for the months of September and October. Also included is a comparison of headway reliability leaving Kennedy Station.

The difference in travel times is somewhat less than claims made by the TTC, but an important factor is that times are more reliable with fewer outliers caused by delays enroute. One aspect of travel time comparisons is that the routes differ with and without the busway:

  • Southbound buses formerly turned off of Ellesmere at Midland, ran south to Eglinton, and then west to Kennedy Station. They now travel further west on Ellesmere and through the lanes giving access to Ellesmere Station and the busway.
  • Northbound buses formerly ran via Eglinton, Kennedy and Ellesmere. Now they run directly north from Kennedy Station on the busway, then east on Ellesmere for a shorter route.

The charts of weekday headways at Kennedy Station show that in spite of whatever benefit the busway might give, departures are still widely scattered around what would be expected for regular service both in September and October. An irregular departure pattern can add wait time to trips partly undoing any benefit the busway might give for a rider’s total journey time.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Service Changes November 1, 2026

Updated November 4, 2026:

  • The diversion of 501 Queen cars via Gerrard is now active. For the week to Sunday, November 8, strings of new rail will be welded and stored in the middle lanes of Queen Street. Effective Monday, November 9, the full set of diversions shown later in this article will begin with eastbound 501B/301B and 503 Kingston Road buses running via Leslie, Eastern and Emdaabiimok (formerly the lower end of Coxwell), 31 Greenwood buses will divert both ways via Dundas, Jones, Queen and Leslie.

Updated November 3, 2026:

  • The staging plan for Queen Street East construction is now clarified on the TTC’s project web page. Rather than a combined project for track and sewer work, there will be a first phase to replace track (November-December 2026), and a second phase for sewer rehabilitation (January-March 2027).

Updated November 2, 2026:

  • A list of destination sign changes has been added.
  • The 501/301 Queen diversion via Gerrard will begin at 11pm on November 2.

Updated November 1, 2026:

  • Details of changes added for all routes.
  • Full spreadsheet showing current and new service plans added.
  • Statistical tables and streetcar route maps added.

Updated October 31, 2026:

  • Maps of revised bus terminal operations added.
  • Details of rapid transit service changes added.

Updated October 30, 2026 at 7:40am:

  • Maps of revised routes have been added.

The TTC will implement several service changes on November 1. This article is based on a TTC media release and update on their website.

Rapid transit changes including improved travel times on part of 5 Eglinton.

On the streetcar system, rail service to Long Branch resumes, but service on King Street West will be diverted until mid-2027 for various track and sewer projects (this scheme was previously announced). Service will be improved on 505 Dundas and 510 Spadina.

On the bus network, service to Sunnybrook Hospital will be revised with a consolidation of 11 Bayview and 52/352 Lawrence West services, and the 124 Sunnybrook will disappear.

Service changes will affect several of the express routes. Some services (904 and 939) that have operated to Kennedy Station via Scarborough Town Centre will be cut back to STC.

Seasonal service will end for the 200-series routes to the Zoo, Bluffer’s Park, Cherry Beach and High Park.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Rapid Transit Delays 2014-2026

Recently, the CBC published an article about the changing nature of subway delays flagging the increase in “disruptive patron” incidents since pre-pandemic 2018 and today.

The TTC’s delay logs from 2014 onward are available on the City of Toronto’s Open Data site. The logs for almost 13 years hold a vast amount of detail (over 268,000 individual entries just for rapid transit lines), and one can easily get lost in the mass of data trying to sort out the useful info. The available data for each delay includes:

  • Date and time
  • Station or location
  • Delay code
  • Minutes of delay
  • Minutes of resulting gap
  • Direction
  • Line
  • Vehicle, if applicable

This article looks at the data at increasing levels of detail to examine the evolution of types of delay over the years. An important point here is that delays due to slow orders are not included as these are not single events such as a train held for a jammed door or an ill passenger.

There is also no estimate of the scope of a delay’s effect on riders in the sense of how many trains are held up, for how long and how many passengers were on board or waiting. In the worst cases, the effect extends beyond the immediate area thanks to service suspensions and the tedious process of running shuttle buses.

Delay codes are quite detailed and are broken into major groups such as equipment issues, infrastructure, security, transportation (operating staff) and passenger-related issues. In the charts presented here, these codes are translated to their “plain language” text.

At the most simplistic level, there has been an evolution in the number and length of delays. The chart below shows the monthly count of all delay logs (blue) and the associated average service delay (green). An important point here is that many logs show incidents where there is no delay (orange), and so the average in the chart below is only for cases where service was held.

The number of incidents fell in the early period of the pandemic, but recovered to historic levels in 2022 and has climbed since. Conversely, the length of an average delay has only risen slightly in the 2020s.

There might be more delays, but what is causing them, and how has this changed over time? Although passenger-related issues have grown and crowd out other problems by their number, there is a pattern of growth in delays related to equipment (trains), signals and infrastructure in recent years. This has implications for overall TTC maintenance practices and budgets.

The chart below shows the proportion of the most common events that did not actually cause a delay. The high-roller over the period is Speed Control issues which show up under two separate codes. However, as we will see later, that problem disappeared in the early 2020s, but was replaced by “Disorderly Patron” and “Injured/Ill Customer in Station”. Note that the first of these entailed many delays, while the second did not because the events were not on board trains.

The remainder of this article takes a deeper dive into the delay logs with breakdowns by general class of delay and a review of individual lines where differences in equipment and signalling show up in contrasting delay stats.

Continue reading →
by

A Marathon of Transit Disruptions (Updated)

Updated Oct. 16/26 at 4:00pm:

Diversion info for the 501/301 Queen service has been added.

On the weekend of October 16-18, the Toronto Waterfront Marathon will cause extensive disruption to transit service downtown. This is on a scale we have not seen for previous events, and begs the question of just how serious Toronto is about maintaining transit service even when promoting the TTC as the best way to get to the event.

Marathon closures will also affect motorists. See the Race Weekend Schedule and scroll down to the detailed list of road closures.

There are two races: a 5k run on Saturday, October 17 and a full/half marathon on Sunday, October 18.

Transit service will be suspended on many routes including the creation of some “transit deserts” through the combined effect of overlapping changes. This article consolidates information in many TTC service notices. Some of these have changed while I built this article. Readers are advised to check for further updates on their day of travel on the TTC’s site.

Maps and a table showing the service changes are in the next section following the “more” break.

Continue reading →
by

Is Transit Better or Worse in Scarborough?

In the recent Mayoral debates, a topic surfaced regularly that boils down to “who is doing more for Scarborough”. That’s a rather crass way of putting things, especially for those who don’t live in that part of Toronto.

This post looks at some of the broad-brush claims as well as the level of bus service in Scarborough in detail. If I have one conclusion from the exercise, it is that candidates’ support teams should do better work to avoid faux-pas in claims from the podium.

The problem of overstating the quality of transit service applies across the city, not just in Scarborough. Both major candidates are trolling for votes there, and so that’s the part of the system we hear about.

When politicians carp about congestion, they inevitably talk about downtown, the streetcars and the unending list of construction projects (many of which are triggered by reconstruction of ancient water and sewer mains, not by the TTC).

However, an insidious effect on suburban bus service is rising congestion outside of downtown. The common TTC reaction is to stretch travel and recovery times running buses less often to compensate without spending more money. Many of the service reductions in past years come from this type of adjustment. On the statistical side, such a change does not affect vehicle hours, the commonly cited metric for overall service. From a rider’s point of view, buses come less often and their trips are longer.

This article looks at a few high-level topics that come up in stump speeches – ridership and subway service – and then reviews Scarborough bus services line-by-line from 2016 to 2026.

Continue reading →
by

Why I Voted For Olivia

Earlier today I dropped my Toronto election ballot in the local mailbox.

I voted for Olivia Chow to return as Mayor of Toronto because I think that she is, by far, the better of the two remaining serious candidates.

Am I head-over-heels impressed with her transit policies? Not entirely, but she believes in transit, more and better transit.

So far, the programs coming down the road, so to speak, are Chow’s proposed fare reduction through a weekly cap at 10, on top of the already planned monthly cap of 40 likely going into effect in September 2027. But, as I wrote recently, there is much more to making transit attractive than twiddling with the fare structure.

We hear a lot about capital investment for the future with the help of federal and provincial subsidies: the Waterfront East and Eglinton East lines, new subway cars for Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. But the needs are even greater with no sense of how we will pay for everything both for state of good repair and on the wish list of additions and enhancements.

Operating costs and subsidies see no discussion, and indeed fare cuts will trim revenue. It’s good politics and good policy to make transit easier to use by everyone, but “easy” includes not just the fare but also the service.

A dispiriting part of any transit mega-project is the “benefits case” where a major offset to capital spending is the alleged travel time saving of new lines. The hours saved are translated to notional dollars, but what really happens is that public investment turns into time that riders can use for other things. It also translates to massive stimulus for the engineering and construction industry.

Oddly enough, the same equation is not applied to day-to-day service in the hands of fiscal hawks who see transit as a drain, not as an investment. This is an argument the Mayor must champion: transit provides a public benefit to the city’s economy.

I have no illusion that Mayor Chow will shower the TTC with new money, in part because she (or any other Mayor) faces the imminent expiry of the Ontario “New Deal” funding that pays for operation of Lines 5 Eglinton and 6 Finch. There is talk of a “New Deal 2.0”, but nothing definite yet.

But transit service – quantity and quality – must improve, and that is a challenge for the Mayor and Council. The next TTC Board must demand that management provide clear information on system performance and real improvement riders can see in their daily travel.

Chow will not find this easy, and her priorities for housing and social services may well trump new transit spending. However, Bradford’s priority for transit does not lie in service, but in massive spending on security. Yes, there is an issue with unsocial behaviour on the TTC, but it must be addressed by more than a large police presence. It is also, I believe, over-hyped for political reasons, a common problem not just in Toronto’s transit debates.

There is no point in having a heavy police presence if people still cannot get on the Dufferin bus.

The choice of TTC Board members is key, and we need aggressively pro-transit Commissioners who will hold management to account for system performance and advocate for real improvements, even if this cannot be achieved in one year. I believe that Chow will drive for such a Board, while Bradford would focus on penny-pinchers whose relationship to transit lies mainly in complaining about being stuck behind a bus or streetcar.

Toronto’s election and its future turn on two contrasting views of our city. One assumes that tax cuts will solve everything and public services should be farmed out to private ownership and management. The other believe in public service and the good local government can provide to a wide range of its citizens.

My vote’s with Olivia Chow.

by

How Can We Increase TTC Service?

Much discussion in the current election campaign targets TTC fares and proposed changes in 2027. Depending on which candidate you trust, they might go up, selectively, be frozen, or even go down with the effect of future changes to fare capping rules.

Many surveys, including a recent one from Liaison Strategies, show that the key factor in retaining and attracting riders to transit is not fares, but service reliability, frequency, and comfort. This includes many factors, and the “fixes” do not lend themselves to simple campaign slogans.

Drawing lines on maps is a favourite pass-time for politicians and the consultants who feed off their desire for a credible plan. We went through that with John Tory’s ever-vanishing SmartTrack scheme, then later with Doug Ford’s subway plan. They share one thing: nothing needs to be done today, and come tomorrow the plan might shrink thanks to technical challenges and limited financing. The Ford plan survives because of spending (and borrowing) at a level that would never occur without a generous infusion of political ego. Planned spending on the provincial subway plan is on a par with the TTC’s entire state of good repair backlog.

Fare schemes, be they new concession rates, discounts or regional amalgamations, can be quickly implemented at comparatively modest cost, but they do little beyond, possibly, generating added ridership which might, or might not, be translated to added service and capacity. With fare revenue covering only 40% of the operating budget and none of the capital, it is impossible for fare cuts to generate enough new riding and income to pay for service increases.

Toronto has a long-term plan, TransformTO, that seeks “net zero” transportation emissions through complete electrification of transit by 2040. That is comparatively easy to achieve because it is the path the TTC is on already. However, a more ambitious plan originally aimed at a major shift away from autos to transit by 2050, but now has a 2040 target. There is no sense of how Toronto will achieve this.

A technical backgrounder to the 2050 plan proposed, among other things, that Toronto:

  • Convert one lane of traffic to exclusive bus lanes on all arterials.
  • Increase service frequency on all transit routes:
    • bus by 70%, streetcar by 50%, subway off-peak service increased to every 3 mins.
  • Tolls of $0.66/km on all arterial roads.
  • Free transit. No transit fares.

In the current political climate, it is easy to guess the fate of exclusive bus lanes and road tolls. Free transit would cost over $1-billion annually before accounting for the cost of the additional service.

The TTC Capital Plan includes a long-range, unfunded provision for TransformTO:

  • Vehicles (added buses and streetcars): $3.51-billion
  • Infrastructure (2 additional garages, upgrades to existing garages and carhouses, expanded terminals to handle higher service levels): $3.82-billion

There is no mention of operating costs for the larger fleets and all of the added service nor is there even an outline of a plan to get from the transit system of 2026 to the hoped-for 2040.

Somewhere in between the aggressive goals of TransformTO and current service levels is likely what riders will actually see. The TTC has not published a detailed analysis of options, and the Board, in spite of having a “Strategic Planning Committee”, has not asked for one.

Any plan to improve transit service must look at the network as a whole, at how routes in many parts of the city can provide better service. This will require decisions about the size of the transit system, growth of the surface bus and streetcar services, and tradeoffs needed in the use of road space.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Service Standards Consultation Round One

The TTC is reviewing its Service Standards with consultations of interested groups and the general public. The first public survey is now online until Sunday, October 11, 2026.

The goals, as stated in the introduction to the online questionnaire, are:

  • bring more transparency to how we plan, deliver, monitor, and evaluate service
  • support better service planning and delivery
  • make sure our standards better reflect the perspectives and experiences of customers and front-line staff

Full disclosure: I have participated in earlier reviews of the Standards through the TTC’s Planning Advisory Committee.

This round does not cover all aspects of the Standards, but seeks to gain feedback on some key issues and options:

  • Streetcar stop spacing
  • Service reliability
  • Vehicle crowding

A second round in the Winter (date TBA) will present findings and recommendations, and may address other topics. This process will not reach the point of new standards going to the TTC Board for approval before the 2027 Network Plan or the 2027 Budget, but could affect in-year service changes either as a goal or a constraint.

Although the TTC hopes to develop new or refined metrics by which service could be analyzed, there is little of this in the survey. A challenge with metrics is the need to understand how they work, and in particular what opportunities they provide to “game the standards”. In effect, are gold stars rewarded for indifferent work because the questions and marking scheme are skewed?

Even with its shortcomings, I urge readers who care about TTC service to fill out the survey.

The main part of this article reviews the questionnaire and some of the assumptions behind the options offered.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Announces More Streetcar Diversions

In addition to the Queen West diversion I wrote about yesterday, the TTC has announced other changes affecting streetcar routes. These are hidden on the “Construction Notices” page which does not automatically link articles to the route schedule pages. Riders used to looking under “Service Changes” would not find these.

501 Queen Update

While the Queen cars are diverted to King for Hydro work in Parkdale, track repairs will occur on Queen at Brock and at Sorauren during the week of September 21 to 28.

Effective November 1, 501/301 Queen cars will divert both ways via Coxwell, Gerrard and Broadview for rail and water main reconstruction on Queen between Leslie and Vancouver (west end of Russell Carhouse, east of Greenwood).

512 St. Clair Update

The Metrolinx work on the rail bridge at Keele Street is complete, streetcar overhead restoration is in progress.

Track repairs on St. Clair between Bathurst and Vaughan will require a complete replacement of streetcar service for the period from September 28 to October 3.

From September 28, buses will operate on 512/312 St. Clair from Gunn’s Loop to St. Clair Station streetcar platform.

Streetcar service over the full route will resume on October 3.

The 512B shuttle from Gunn’s Loop to Lansdowne Station, and the extension of 340 Junction to Oakwood Loop will continue to October 31.

506 Carlton Update

Track repairs on the Gerrard Street bridge at the Don Valley will run from 11pm on Thursday, October 8 for about 10 days (to the weekend of October 17/18).

506/306 Carlton shuttle buses will continue to run on Gerrard.

This effectively extends the Carlton diversion around work between Yonge and Church east from Parliament to Broadview via Dundas.