Toronto's Transportation Trade is Very Good
Toronto's gives up very little, but gains a lot with this new deal.
The big news of Monday November 27th 2023 in Toronto is that the city and the province have come to an agreement, which should help city finances and also help advance some key priorities (sorry for the political PR speak).
In this post, I’m going to talk about what’s in the agreement and my comments on the various topics!
The first thing to discuss are the “concessions” the city has to make, though they are more like goals the city has to hit. I’ve bolded the items which transportation folks will be most interested in.
What the city has to do:
Toronto and Ontario announced a “new deal” meant to address the cities financial woes, which, to a surprisingly large extent (to the uninformed) revolve around transportation. The city made some commitments to the province, which are frankly mostly things the city should already have been doing; these include:
Meeting or exceeding housing targets as well as increasing density near transit. The city should also pursue more affordable housing projects with the Ontario Infrastructure Bank, and streamline planning processes to accelerate housing production.
Using surplus city lands for creating new housing at high density, as well as working with the province to do this as part of Waterfront Toronto (which is an agency formed of the three levels of government).
Supporting provincial transit priority projects through approvals, working with Metrolinx, and also moving fare and service integration forward (I believe this is a big win for the TTC that they should have pursued long ago — in a city where a lot more people could be getting on transit, a better fare system can help a lot!)
Supporting the major transit-oriented development projects at East Harbour and Woodbine.
Implementing cost effectiveness measures (which funnily enough included helping Metrolinx get more billboards up on their land in the city, which helps them generate more non-fare revenue).
Now, the big thing the city has to basically give up is on pushing back against the province’s redevelopment plans for Ontario Place — this is a pretty reasonable concession to make, because as I understand the city would not have a lot of power to influence the redevelopment anyways. In exchange for this, the province will look at moving the controversial parking structure away from the waterfront Ontario Place site (this is rational), as well as continuing some programming at the existing Ontario Science Centre site “as part of a mixed-use community that would have affordable housing” — which could be pretty minor.
The city also agreed to continue calling on the Feds to help. I always find commitments like this amusing — the city is already calling on the Feds for help, but now it will call on them by some increased percentage because the province asked.
In exchange for this, the city actually gets quite a lot!
What the city gets:
The first big thing is over a billion dollars for operating cost supports, mostly relating to transit.
300 million will go to subway and transit safety, ridership recovery, and operations to help get ridership levels up, with commitments to increase staff and police presence on the TTC, expand cellular and data service, as well as enhancing emergency reporting options for passengers and speed resolution timelines — which should be good for operations that have been frequently disrupted as of late.
Funding will also go to operational support for Lines 5 and 6 — the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West lines — probably in part because the city redirected funding planned to be used for running these lines to restoring more TTC service; hopefully this funding can ease the transition as the TTC gets used to running these new lines, and operations become more efficient.
There is also more funding to create shelter space for refugees and the homeless, as well as homelessness prevention programs.
The Highway Uploads
The other huge thing is that the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway will both be uploaded to the province, to be run by MTO as opposed to the city currently managing them. This has been proposed a lot over the years, and having these highways run and maintained by the province — which has a lot more highways to maintain and also maintains those that feed into the Gardiner and DVP — makes sense.
Unfortunately, Doug Ford used this as an opportunity to say that the province would “never” (doubt this is some irreversible thing) toll these roadways, even if it’s a common sense idea given their restricted capacity and fairly constant congestion, but the city wasn’t already doing this, so it’s hard to feel like its a big loss. The bigger concession here is probably that with the roads under provincial control, a removal is less likely in theory, but since the province can really mostly do whatever it wants with the city anyways it’s not like that is a big change.
What seems likely coming away from the uploading is that other municipalities will also be interested in unloading their highways to the province, but also that the DVP and Gardiner will likely be maintained to a much higher standard, since MTO is both experienced in maintaining highways and flush with cash. It’s also possible that the standards for things like bridges and ramps are upgraded over time to be more in line with other highways in the province.
Of course, “highways being maintained to a higher standard” doesn’t exactly get me excited, but what does is the idea of upgrading the highways with bus lanes. GO buses are constantly getting stuck in traffic on these roads and already move a ton of people; expanding highway capacity and transit reliability on the roadways would be a big win and perhaps now that the province will be responsible for them Metrolinx will have more of a say, although again this should have been done long ago.
If you’ve been following the saga around the Gardiner in particular, you’ll know that it’s been taking up a huge amount of the cities budget. With it off the books, the city will have a ton of money freed up for other things (which the province has said should broadly be infrastructure that supports housing), hopefully including various transit infrastructure upgrades like a resignalling of Line 2 and the extension of the streetcar network into the Port Lands and along Queens Quay east.
New TTC Trains
The last big bit of news from the deal is that the province is committing funding for the TTC to procure 70 new subway trains to replace the current Line 2 rolling stock, and expand the Line 1 and 2 fleets to serve the extensions to Richmond Hill and deeper into Scarborough. The TTC’s previously-initiated procurement was halted because of a lack of funding and this should get it moving again. This is a slight reduction from the number the TTC was previously talking about ordering, which was 80, but this is still 420 cars — and it’s likely there will be options for even more cars at the end of the contract as there was with the “modern streetcar”, contract which could be used for frequency increases on both lines. I wrote an entire article about what these trains will likely be like about a year ago.
While on the face of it the new subway order mostly benefits the city (although that obviously also benefits the province which is why this kind of financial back and forth is silly), it will also mean a large new tranche of cars which could potentially be built by Alstom in Thunder Bay, where maintaining manufacturing is a big priority for the province. Of course, new subway trains would also mean an improvement in ride quality for hundreds of thousands a day, and would mean the average age of a train on the rapid transit system in ten years will be rather young ,which gets me very excited!
I came to Canada in 1988 to work on Fares Integration and Service Coordination for the Ontario Ministry of Transportation as a consultant. Frankly the TTC was the greatest opponent of something badly needed and widely supported in the GTA. I lost count of times that the TTC's repsonse to any proposed change was to bang the table and yell "A dollar ride for a dollar fare!" I did not understand what that meant at the time and no-one seemed able to give me a reasonable explanation. The TTC and GO transit had incompatible fare systems and neither wanted to change. In the end Pat Jacobsen (then Deputy Minister) imposed TwinPass - essentially two tickets in a plastic envelope - with an arbitrary discount that the Ministry would pick up.
Maybe they will do better this time!
I liked what was done on the Gardiner (and I think DVP) with the HOV lanes during the PanAm Games (2015). I always thought it should have been permanent. I would hope Metrolinx would push for these again, especially with both under the MTO. They could be used for both their busses and other vehicles with more than one (maybe 2) driver(s). It wouldn't dramatically increase the speed of the busses, but would help somewhat. Anything else, at least on the old part of the Gardiner and some of the DVP, is hard to do without some serious construction.