Keeping Up with the Commuters

For a city trying to maintain its momentum in becoming a global city, Toronto struggles with one critical issue: public transit. The city’s public transit system is 110 years in the making but most of these plans are never fully implemented and it’s not due to a planning. In fact, many of the transit expansion programs proposed within the past ten years are similar to those documented over the last century. So, what’s the problem?

The issue is funding. Toronto has a long list of priority projects, but these commitments far exceed available funding. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has a capital budget of $49.2 billion over the next ten years but 58% of that is currently unfunded. On top of this, a majority of the money will go towards maintaining the current public transit infrastructure. To be fair, the TTC gets less funding from the government, whether local, provincial, or federal, when compared to any other transit system in North America forcing user fees to support its revenue.

With limited resources, public transit will continue to face hurdles posed by competing responsibilities across different levels of government. The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has a population of 6.5 million people with five regional governments, all requiring a public transit system up to the task of supporting its commuters. While the City of Toronto and the provincial government continue to make progress towards partnership agreements about priority transit project to work through jurisdictional issues, the vision for the GTA’s transit moving forward is up in the air. If it’s true that a city can only be as successful as its transit system, then Toronto has a lot of work to do.