Toronto’s Transit Future
But beyond increasing the current level of service, the ATU strongly believes that the TTC needs to actually upgrade the quality of service to meet riders’ rising expectations, and guarantee a less congested, more reliable and faster ride than is now on offer. In this vein, we support augmenting existing services with more express buses, new 20-minute maximum headways (vehicle arrival spacing) and other ideas the TTC has suggested in the past, and is currently proposing. We detail some of these in Section 3. The combination of maintaining current service for more passengers, upping the level of service, and accommodating inflationary pressures will be a very expensive proposition.
WHY COST CUTTING ALONE WON’T SOLVE TTC’S BUDGET PROBLEMS In our survey of possible revenue sources, we’ve looked at more government support, increased per rider subsidies, and fare increases. But where do efficiencies fit in the search for more transit funding?
28
The TTC can be said to be the largest single expenditure by the City, even larger than the police, once the capital budgets are factored in. (The police have a large operating budget, but small capital budget, whereas the TTC has both). The fares the TTC collects represents around 10% of the City’s entire operating budget, although this is not very transparent since they are lumped into the general “user fees” category of the budget. The TTC has taken many steps to reduce costs, and the result is that according to international benchmarking, our transit system remains one of
AMALGAMATED TRANSIT UNION LOCAL 113
the lowest cost multimodal operations in the world. TTC employees, many of them ATU members, have helped in creating this climate of efficiency. Comparing costs between transit operations can be misleading without extensive data standardization. There are problems with the comparability of data sets, issues of purchasing power parity, discrepant regulatory regimes, and differences in the design and running of the systems. But the independent organizations CoMet and Nova, coordinated by the Imperial College London’s Railway and Transport Strategy Centre (RTSC), have worked to get around these difficulties and to accurately and neutrally present data comparing transit properties around the world. They cite the TTC’s subway system as having the 3rd highest employee productivity level of over 20 metros in
Canada is the only major developed nation that does not have a predictable, annual and ongoing transit funding strategy. Torontonians of all political stripes must come together to make permanent federal transit funding the number one issue in the 2015 Federal election.
the same class, and the 6th lowest overall costs among the top 30 metros over the last few years.4 The same studies note that the TTC’s subway has low administration and operations costs, along with “very high driver productivity” although they do not address the surface system’s cost effectiveness. While the push for added efficiency needs to continue, it’s time to recognize that the major problem plaguing the TTC is low government funding. As we have noted, TTC riders pay around 68% of the cost of operating the system, a higher percentage than any other multimodal transit system listed above, or otherwise. To attempt to deal with this shortfall, the TTC has initiated cost-cutting moves over the last few years, such as using vehicles that carry more people –