TTC won’t subsidize LRT lines
Stintz warns province it must go it alone if it runs new lines itself
Toronto taxpayers, who paid $500 million to subsidize TTC operations this year, won’t help pay for privately operated transit lines, Toronto Transit Commission chair Karen Stintz has warned the province.
A day after the TTC got word that Metrolinx has decided to privatize operation and maintenance of the provincially funded $8.4 billion LRTs, Stintz took a hard line on the TTC’s contribution to their operating costs.
“If we’re not operating those lines, we’re not paying those costs . . . I don’t know where they’re going to get the money,” she said.
Stintz was responding to a suggestion from Ontario Infrastructure and Transportation Minister Bob Chiarelli that Metrolinx and the TTC are still negotiating an operating subsidy for the new lines.
Chiarelli defended the government’s decision to use a public-private partnership to build, design, finance, maintain and operate the LRTs, saying its Infrastructure Ontario agency had an “almost flawless” record of bringing projects in on time and on budget.
“There have been TTC projects that have been long overdue and sometimes much over budget,” he said.
Like most public transit, the new LRTs won’t cover their costs through the fare box when they open in eight or nine years. “Every transit system in North America has some government subsidies to cover off the operating. That’s not unusual,” Chiarelli said.
“But the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown will save the TTC the cost of buses.”
“It’s the rotten service that drives passengers crazy with frustration.” CHRIS HUME ON THE BETTER WAY, GT8
Perhaps TTC CEO Andy Byford makes senior managers stand during their weekly meetings to give them an inkling of what it’s like to ride the system they run so very poorly.
True, the Toronto Transit Commission has been underfunded for decades and its planning process hopelessly mired in bureaucratic confusion, inter-governmental bickering and political timidity, but for the daily user, that’s little consolation.
It’s the rotten service that drives passengers crazy with frustration — short-turning streetcars, crowded subways, endless delays, mismatched schedules, buses that never arrive. Though Byford has made much of his desire to improve things, it’s hard to take him seriously when you’ve just waited 13 minutes for a 504 King streetcar when four show up, one just metres behind the other. The first is so busy, no one can board. The second, third and fourth are empty. And even the first, the most crowded, has plenty of room at the back. Too bad it’s impossible to reach.
Passengers don’t help their own cause, blocking entrances and exits like cattle refusing to budge.
Most irritating are the shortturns. It’s a mystery how it helps to force 30 or 40 people off a streetcar at the height of rush hour, espe- cially when the next one is already jammed to the rafters. And don’t even mention the buses on Finch, which are overwhelmed by demand. The fact we as a city willingly settle for third-rate service says much about attitudes toward public transit. Despite the pious words spoken by officialdom, we treat it as a good thing, but always for others, the poor, the young and the old, people who apparently don’t matter. Mayor Rob Ford has made no secret of his disdain for transit, unless it’s underground and out of the way. At this point, the TTC has fallen so far behind, it will take decades to catch up. A good example of the commission’s inability to keep up with the city can be seen on the Bay bus, which now serves the new George Brown School of Health Sciences on Queens Quay at the foot of Sherbourne St. Many of the 1,000 to 1,500 students who travel there daily use this bus. Needless to say, the experience isn’t fun. Back when George Brown’s waterfront campus was first broached, almost a decade ago, the TTC promised to run an LRT line along Queens Quay to Cherry St. The route would also handle the residents of the various mixed-use projects planned for the vast precinct. Indeed, the LRT was considered essential to future waterfront development. Instead, we have endless waiting and overcrowded buses. In the meantime, the TTC and Metrolinx, the province’s ghost agency whose voice rarely rises above a whisper, quarrel over who will operate the Eglinton LRT, which may or may not be ready sometime this century.
To add insult to injury, the cost of riding the TTC has grown onerous. The price of a monthly Metropass has hit $126. And at the beginning of each month, long queues appear as passengers line up to buy new passes. It may be time for the TTC to join the computer age.
It all boils down to money, of course. Chronically starved for cash, the commission lurches along from crisis to crisis, delay to delay. For decades, the TTC has been expected to deliver ever more with ever less. Metrolinx, yet to reveal how it plans to raise the billions needed to expand transit, moves slower than a streetcar in rush hour.
Through it all, we’re riding the TTC up to 1.7 million times a day. By any measure, that counts as a success. Too bad riders are the victims of that success. chume@thestar.ca