Toronto transit is a mishmash of promises and breakdowns

Christopher Hume –

For all his obvious faults, Toron­to’s late mayor Rob Ford got one thing right: he returned phone calls from constituents with a beef. By his own count, up to 100 a day. Dealing with pot­holes, licences, parking fines, speeding tickets and the like was his path to power and pop­ularity.

In other words, he sweated the small stuff big time. In a city like ours, where getting things done seems next to impossible, fixing problems during a complainer’s lifetime counts for a lot.

Though the source of our troubles is often not the city but the province, it’s our mess to clean up. The most glaring ex­ample, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, has been under construc­tion for 14 years and still no one knows when it will open. The fault, of course, belongs square­ly with Metrolinx, the much-re­viled provincial agency. Run by incompetents who confuse liti­giousness with leadership, the organization has made Toronto a case study in how not to build public transit.

This isn’t to say the city is blameless. The Toronto Transit Commission, which will oper­ate the new LRT service if and when it opens, needed five years (2005 – 2010) to complete the seven-kilometre St. Clair street­car right-of-way. The benighted project, halted at one point by a panel of judges responding to a vexatious complaint from a local NIMBY, seemed cursed from beginning to end. Clearly, the 50-odd public consultation sessions hosted by the commis­sion hosted didn’t help. That’s what’s called a failure to com­municate.

These days the service leaves more than ever to be desired. Again, the TTC isn’t entirely to blame, but it certainly doesn’t help its cause. The service it provides is spotty at best.

When it runs on time, you ar­rive 20 minutes early; 20 min­utes late when it doesn’t. Sadly, unreliability is a cardinal sin, a firing offence, for a public tran­sit system, especially one still struggling to recover from the disaster that was the pandemic.

The city’s busiest streetcar route, the 504 King car, pretty much tells the story. Since be­ing loudly proclaimed Toronto’s first “transit priority corridor” back in 2017, it has deteriorated into just another poorly run line that sometimes functions but just as often doesn’t.

In recent years, passengers have had to endure detours, off-route service, inadequate shuttle bus replacement and endless construction delays. In 2023– 2024, service on Broadview Avenue stopped for six months. Although vehicular traffic was allowed on Broadview, the TTC failed to provide even bus re­placement service.

This was an absolute betray­al of the TTC’s mandate. The countless riders who lived in Riverdale and beyond were sim­ply abandoned. Depending on where one started, the closest access to transit was as much as 10 blocks away.

As of this writing, the 504 re­mains seriously dysfunctional. The west-bound streetcar runs from Parliament Street, not Broadview Station. To travel there from the east, it’s a bus. Until recently, the streetcar de­toured onto the Queen Street route between Broadview and Strachan because of repairs at King and Church Streets. In addition to laying new tracks, crews were busy replacing wa­ter mains that dated from the 1880s, a testament to the city’s habit of deferring maintenance.

By the way, whatever hap­pened to the street furniture that appeared after King was made a priority corridor? It has disap­peared.

To be fair, the TTC has been scandalously underfunded since the disastrous premiership of Mike Harris, who in 1998 cut all provincial operating funding to the TTC, about 20 percent of its budget. That shortfall has never been replaced despite years of grandstanding politicians, both provincial and municipal. It has been left to passengers and taxpayers to fill the gap. That’s why fares increase as services decrease.

To make matters worse, the TTC has also become a de facto part of what’s left of the city’s deeply frayed social safety net. It is a refuge for the homeless, the addicted, the mentally un­stable, the old and the infirm. Riding the 505 Dundas street­car is a journey through the in­ner rungs of 21st-century urban hell.

Is it any wonder so many To­rontonians choose to huddle in private vehicles, busy going no­where but protected by locked doors and 1,500 kilograms of steel?