[URBAN NOTE] "On transit, Toronto’s leaders refuse to pay their way"

[rfmcdonald]

Edward Keenan's Toronto Star article makes perfect sense. The TTC's budget woes can be explained only by Toronto's tradition of sustained underfunding, a new tradition that serves no one well.

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 1 and 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 $61 million 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 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 fulfill 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 chin-stroking, 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.