Transit leaders don’t pay their way
While some streetcars are comically full, provincial funding remains unamusingly low
It’s TTC budget season, that time of year when the big brains at City Hall get to puzzle out the great mysteries of providing transit service.
More than a quarter of TTC bus and streetcar routes are regularly overcrowded, the Star’s Ben Spurr reported Friday, and any regular rush-hour rider will also be able to report that the subways on lines 1and 2 are regularly stuffed to clown-car capacity.
Meanwhile, in its budget report to the TTC board, the transit service recommends a 10-cent increase in the price of a token — a $4.75 per month hike for a Metropass — and finds it will still be $61million short of balancing its books.
How can you solve a problem like this? Massively overcrowded vehicles and a shortfall in the budget, year after year.
They’ve tried everything: they’ve kept sticking it to riders — prices are up more than $300 a year since 2010 for monthly pass holders — and yet they keep cramming themselves onto vehicles, costing us money.
Under Rob Ford, they tried cutting service to intentionally overcrowd more vehicles, and yet the vehicles remained crowded and the budget remained difficult to balance. How do you figure that? Everyone stands around scratching their heads. Why is it so hard to just keep on cutting the budget year after year while planning to expand the service?
I mean, here the TTC is opening a new subway extension next year, and expanding service 0.4 per cent according to the report, as labour costs are going up, and while introducing a whole new fare-collection system. And yet somehow, they are finding it difficult to fulfil the mayor’s simple demand that they cut their budget by 2.6 per cent over last year. You know, after having their subsidy cut by about 13 per cent after inflation since 2010, while ridership grew about 11 per cent in the same period.
After a certain amount of chinstroking, your typical city politician might conclude, you just need to accept that some problems aren’t meant to be solved. Transit operating budgets must be like that. Might as well go back to planning massive new construction projects.
But wait! What’s this? In an appendix to the budget report, there’s a chart. It’s like a decoder ring that magically solves the mystery.
It shows the per-rider subsidy of major North American and Canadian transit systems — that is, the amount of money per passenger that the government chips in to fund the system over and above what those passengers pay in fares. Chicago’s is $2.04, Boston’s $2.12, Los Angeles’ $3, New York’s $1.52 — and those numbers are in U.S. dollars, so you can bump them up about a third to figure Canadian equivalents. Closer to home, Vancouver’s subsidy is $1.86 per rider, Calgary’s $1.69, York Region’s $4.56. And then there’s Toronto: 90 cents per rider.
OK, it sounds crazy, but hear me out: maybe you don’t get what you don’t pay for. Maybe if you spend less than half what major American cities do on transit subsidies, and spend much less than what other Canadian cities do, you wind up having a hard time providing good service at a good price. Instead of hiking up the price of what is, depending on how you measure and on the exchange rate on a given day, already among the most expensive transit fares of any major transit system in North America and choking off service by aiming to decrease the subsidy further, perhaps the solution is to increase the government subsidy to something closer to what functioning big-city transit systems provide.
Mayor John Tory talks a lot these days, as do many at city hall, about decades of underinvestment in housing and transit construction and other infrastructure. But we don’t hear nearly as much about underinvestment in transit operations. Instead, we hear a call to cut the operating budget further in the hunt for efficiencies to keep property taxes low. It’s not all that complicated: the crowded vehicles, high fares, sometimes unreliable service, and constant budget crunch are all symptoms of a long-standing underfunding of the transit system.
There’s lots of blame to go around here: since the era of premier Mike Harris (before which 50 per cent of the TTC’s operating subsidy was paid by the province), Queen’s Park has kicked in relatively little for operating funding. The provincial government shares some gas tax revenues that in 2015 amounted to roughly 14 per cent or so of the total subsidy. The federal government contributes nothing to operating expenses. In other parts of Canada, provincial subsidies are substantial. In the United States, the state and federal transit subsidies are much higher, and in many states gas and specific sales taxes (and in New York, a corporate tax surcharge) are dedicated to funding local transit operations.
But whether the province or the feds kick in or not, the situation we have is that we expect the TTC to deliver the excellent transit service to Canada’s largest city (as it grows at an astounding rate) with profoundly less money than any other comparable North American transit system. Even as Tory has broken his promise to freeze fares in recognition that you can’t give better service for less money, he’s failed to recognize the equally obvious part of that equation: you need to provide a decent subsidy, not a lower one, if you want service to be maintained, improved, and expanded. His promise to freeze property taxes stands, and unless new revenue rains in from some other source, that dictates everything.
The thing is, as we look at finishing the Eglinton Crosstown and building other new LRTs on Finch, Sheppard, Eglinton East and Eglinton West, SmartTrack, and the Scarborough subway and Relief Line — among other transit construction projects planned by this mayor and council — the operating funding challenges are just going to get more severe. The solution to the problem, it turns out, is no big riddle. The mystery is if — or when — our politicians will decide they have the guts to solve it. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire