TTC Faces A Forced Reset

It was 18th century Scottish poet Robbie Burns who wrote, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.” This line, which is generally translated today as “Often go awry,” was aimed at an unfortunate mouse whose winter nest Burns had destroyed while ploughing.

Had Burns been living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2019, he might have addressed these lines to the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and its CEO Rick Leary.

The reason: Like Burns’ mouse, the TTC has seen its multi-billion expansion plans upended; in this case not by a plough but by the new Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) government and its populist leader Premier Doug Ford. A former Toronto city councillor and unsuccessful mayoral candidate, Ford’s unexpected rise to leading the PCs and then winning the provincial election in 2018 has given him the power to shake up Toronto mass transit.

On April 10, 2019, he delivered this shake-up – big time.

On that day, Premier Ford announced a C$28.5 billion (about US$21.7 billion) Toronto area transit expansion plan. "Our government is investing in transportation to bring relief and new opportunities to transit users and commuters," said Ford. The government news release that accompanied his announcement billed the transit plan as “the most money ever invested to get shovels in the ground and get new subways built.”

(Actually, Premier Ford is putting up some of the money. In the Canadian system, mass transit expansion costs are typically shared between the city, the province and the Canadian federal government. In this case, Ford is offering to pay C$11.2 billion, which is about US$8.32 billion.)

The problem for the TTC? Premier Ford’s unexpectedly sweeping plans substantially disrupt subway expansion projects that the TTC has underway.

“The TTC has already received direction from Toronto City Council to build three projects; the first being the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension (TYSSE) followed by the Relief Line and the Scarborough Subway Extension,” said TTC CEO Rick Leary. “The TTC is well advanced on those projects, with the intent of putting RFPs on the street in the near future. We are now assessing the province’s proposals, to see where the direction will go.”

That’s not all that Leary has to contend with. Premier Ford’s “Getting Ontario Moving Act” – which was introduced in the Ontario Legislature on May 1, 2019 – wrests the power to select and execute subway expansions away from the city of Toronto (the TTC’s owner) and gives this power to the provincial government.

The government has also said it plans to transfer the TTC’s existing subway system and rolling stock to the province; leaving the TTC to run it and collect fares, plus retain ownership of its buses, streetcars and light-rail transit (LRT) trains next year.

It isn’t clear yet how Premier Ford’s takeover of the TTC’s expansion projects and existing subway system/trains will play out in practice. That’s the new problem facing Rick Leary, who was busy remedying the old problems of congestion and aging infrastructure before Ford announced his plans.

“We need to know more about what this entails going forward,” Leary said. “There’s a lot of details to go over.”

What Has Changed

The changes imposed by Premier Ford’s mass transit plan, which hearkens back to ideas he espoused while in Toronto municipal politics, affect four major Toronto-area projects. Three of these – the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension (TYSSE), the Relief Line and the Scarborough Subway Extension – are being built by the TTC. The fourth, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (light-rail transit) Eglinton West extension, is being built by the provincial transportation agency Metrolinx with the equipment and stations to be operated by the TTC.

Ford’s biggest change is to the Relief Line, which is meant to ease traffic on the already overloaded North-South Line 1 subway along Yonge Street. Now renamed the Ontario Line, this new subway will be extended beyond the Relief Line’s planned route to the Ontario Science Centre on Eglinton Avenue in the north, curving southwest to run through the existing Queen and Osgoode stations before going west to end at Ontario Place on Toronto’s waterfront. It will cost C$10.9 billion (US$8.1 billion). According to media reports, this line may use automated trains or some other form of LRTs, rather than traditional human-controlled subway trains.

Meanwhile, the six-station TYSSE will extend Toronto’s Line 1 subway along Yonge Street from its current termination at Finch station northwards into Richmond Hill Centre, above the City’s boundaries into York Region. Priced at C$5.6 billion (US$4.16 billion), the TYSSE would be completed “soon after the Ontario Line,” said an Ontario government news release.

The three-station Scarborough Line 2 subway extension, which replaces the single station extension planned by the TTC to replace the aging Scarborough RT LRT line, is priced at C$5.5 billion (US$4.08 billion) and will be ready by 2030. This is four years later than the TTC’s single station extension, which was to be in operation by 2026.

Finally, the Metrolinx Eglinton Crosstown LRT Eglinton West extension will cost C$4.7 billion (US$3.49 billion) and be "delivered before 2031".

Leary’s Dilemma

The TTC’s various expansion plans have served as political footballs for decades, with municipal and provincial politicians spending time booting them around rather than providing the TTC with consistent, adequate funding.

The result? A 1950s-vintage subway system of sufficient capacity that never seemed to break down during rush hour in the 1970s (based on this writer’s personal experiences) is now increasingly overloaded and prone to constant failure. There are millions of dollars of repairs, maintenance work and necessary improvements waiting to be done, and not enough money to do them.

(Note: 1990s-era provincial funding cuts by the Mike Harris PC government put the TTC's previously healthy finances in a bind, from which it has never recovered. The TTC is now reliant on farebox revenues and municipal grants, and this amount of money is never enough.)

A case in point: A cascading system failure that began at the Line 1 Museum station early January 24, 2019 brought Toronto’s morning commute to its knees. “At the peak of the chaos, trains were taking two hours and 20 minutes to travel from Vaughan Metropolitan Centre to Union Station,” reported CBC News; “a journey that normally takes 45 minutes.”

Rick Leary and his team are doing their best to make the TTC ‘The Better Way’ for commuters, as its one-time advertising slogans claim.

“It’s a challenge to move 28,000 people per hour on Line 1's aging infrastructure,” he said. With the limited funds the TTC has at hand, “we have to balance investing in new signal systems, upgrading our track and power, replacing tunnel linings, making sure ventilation and drainage is appropriate, and moving the amount of people that are required -- while at the same time looking to the future knowing that we have to keep up with the growth that is occurring.”

It is growing demand on the TTC – which already has more traffic than it can handle on Line 1 during rush hours – that is making life difficult for Leary. He would prefer not to spend money replacing the 1954-era signalling system on Line 1, but that system “can only handle 26-28 trains per hour at Yonge and Bloor South, and we know that we have to get to 32-34 trains per hour in the future. Aging infrastructure and older signal systems don’t accommodate that type of throughput, so we’re upgrading now to be ready for the future.”

Rather than simply giving the TTC a much-needed cash influx and letting Leary and his people get on with the job, the Ford government has thrown the situation into confusion and delays with the Getting Ontario Moving Act. 

Of course, the Premier’s decision to recommit the provincial government to supporting mass transit directly could prove to be good news for the TTC. (Reviewing the funding legacy of Ford’s 1990s predecessor Mike Harris, the Globe and Mail newspaper noted that “The transit systems that make the cities work are crumbling for lack of funds.”) But there is also the danger that the TTC’s expansion plans, and day-to-day subway operations, may be delayed and impaired in this latest round of provincial/municipal financial football.

If this happens, Rick Leary’s plans to make the TTC run better today and be ready for growth tomorrow may indeed “gang aft a-gley,” as Burns wrote.