Toronto is on the precipice of a transit death spiral, but it’s not too late to steer us in a better direction

Decision makers can make capital investments in bus transit infrastructure that will make operating buses far more cost effective and attractive.

Thestar.com
Jan. 18, 2023
Steven Farber

What exactly is a transit death spiral? In the world of transit, the more services we offer with low waiting times and high reliability, the more agencies are able to attract and maintain ridership. Conversely, when service quality erodes, transit loses its attraction power, and riders start looking for alternative options.

For those with resources, they turn to the car, but for those at the margins, we find that people forgo trips altogether if they become too inconvenient or costly to make on transit. In both cases, when services are reduced, transit ridership drops

At the surface, it may seem like responsible management to cut services during an economic downtown like the one we’re experiencing in Toronto today. The issue is that the TTC has an extremely high reliance on fare box revenues to pay for its operating expenses.

So, when ridership drops, this has an outsized effect on the TTC’s bottom line, putting further fiscal pressures on the TTC to reduce services and increase fares, causing further reductions in ridership, less revenue, more service reductions … and the downward spiral takes hold.

A fiscal crunch foregrounds the decision to reduce spending on transit in Toronto, but this in no way a forgone conclusion. Increased funding from the provincial and federal governments are long overdue for the Toronto agency, which has largely been left unsupported by higher levels of government since the Harris years.

Failing this, the province needs to grant Toronto the ability to raise revenues in novel ways, with parking levies and road tolls the most obvious new funding streams that would be synergistic with increasing transit use in the city.

Operating bus services is a costly endeavor, hence the TTC’s recent announcement to reduce service frequencies across the bus network in an effort to cut costs. But rather than cutting services and leading us into a transit death spiral, decision makers can make careful capital investments in bus transit infrastructure that will ultimately make operating buses across the city far more cost effective and attractive.

One of the main reasons that operating buses is so expensive in this city is that they spend too much of their operating times stuck in traffic, leading slow speeds and lots of uncertainty in how long it will take for a bus to complete its trip. To account for this, the TTC has to put more buses on each route to maintain a reliable service with desirable wait times for passengers.

Improving the speed and reliability of bus routes across the city would have the double effect of improving customer experience and attracting more riders, while also reducing operating expenses by cutting the number of buses needed on each route. It sounds like a paradox, but it’s one of these little nuggets of well-known transit magic, improving service conditions actually makes operating buses far less expensive.

What types of investments can we make, and where should the city make them? The most effective ways of improving operating conditions of bus routes is to put the bus in its own lane and give buses priority to move through intersections, especially ahead of turning traffic. We have seen this type of low-cost magic work wonders already on King Street, where improved service quality resulted in massive jumps in ridership

We also see nascent efforts in the city’s RapidTO program to start building more transit corridors for buses in Toronto’s suburbs. It is important to remember that several of Toronto’s suburban bus routes each carry more passengers per day than entire transit companies across North America, including those with light rail lines running in separated rights-of-way.

It is high time for passengers on these corridors to be provided the operational conditions they deserve, all the while improving service levels and reducing operating expenses.