The Toronto Transit Commission advertises itself as “The Better Way.†Dutiful urbanists that they are, Torontonians are taught to believe this, or certainly to say it. Indeed, a strange cult surrounds the system: there are websites devoted to it, a magazine, clubs. One particularly dedicated transit fancier spent the summer photographing every one of the city’s 69 subway stations.
Their actions belie them. Transit worship may be at an all-time high, but transit ridership is still below where it was 15 years ago. What no one is allowed to say, but everyone secretly knows, is that riding the TTC is not a terribly pleasant experience: slow, crowded, slow, inconvenient, and did I mention slow? And so anyone who can avoid using the TTC generally does.
For those who see the TTC as the answer to the gridlock that now holds much of Toronto in its grip, this presents a conundrum. The traditional solution to the problem of how to get more people out of their cars and onto the buses is more subsidy. But you could give the tickets away -- you could pay people to take them -- and a great many commuters still wouldn’t choose the TTC. Not so long as the private automobile alternative remains as (relatively) fast (Statistics Canada figures show it takes a transit user an average of 41 minutes longer to get to and from work than a car user), pleasant, and cheap as it does. And not so long as the TTC remains so institutionally unconcerned with the needs and desires of the travelling public.
Simple arithmetic would dictate that more passengers per vehicle equals fewer vehicles on the road equals more road space per vehicle. But while mass transit is obviously part of the solution, it’s not so obvious that mass transit has to mean the TTC, or at any rate not the TTC as it is currently structured. Put it this way: if we were really serious about transit, if it is as vital as we all say it is, if we wanted to make riding the bus such a delightful experience that passengers would give up their beloved cars for it, is this the model we would choose -- a monolithic, state-owned, vaguely Stalinist monopoly? Or if we did, would we let a bunch of politicians run it?
The TTC has many problems. It is notoriously underserviced: just three subway lines, 52 years after the first was opened, for a city of 2.4 million people. Where there are surface routes, service is haphazard and brutish, designed more to make life easy for transit employees than the people who use the system. The commission’s continuing love affair with the streetcar, decades after most other North American cities abandoned them for the bus, is a mystery, given their obvious limitations: not only are they slow and ungainly, even by public transit standards, but by taking up so much of the road they slow everyone else down to their pace. To say nothing of their cost, frequent breakdowns, damage to roads, unsightly wires, and so on.
But the bulk of the TTC’s drawbacks are less owing to particular mistakes of implementation than to its very position as a state monopoly. Though the TTC is not heavily subsidized relative to most other transit systems, it is still expensive: at $300 million annually, its operating subsidy is the second-most expensive item in the city’s budget, after the police. (And that’s just the explicit, on-budget subsidy -- never mind the exemption from corporate income taxes, or the effects of the city’s underwriting of the cost of capital, among the usual peculiarities of public-sector accounting). Strikes, given the double monopoly position its unionized workforce enjoys, are a recurring event -- though, as it has been observed, in Toronto, as in no other city, the traffic generally moves faster during a transit strike.
And of course, there’s the political interference. The model of the independent, professionally run Crown corporation, insulated from meddling politicians, is not one with which Toronto’s city council seems familiar. The chairman of the TTC is in fact a member of council: since 1998, it has been that most political of politicians, Howard Moscoe. The result: tired of having their decisions over-ruled, their positions (in labour negotiations, notoriously) undermined, the TTC’s last two general managers have both resigned in disgust. Meanwhile, city council has just awarded a $700 million contract for 234 subway cars to Bombardier, without considering other bids, on the novel grounds that this would create jobs 900 miles away, in Thunder Bay. Is that really the responsibility of the TTC?
So perhaps the time is ripe to look at alternatives. At a bare minimum, it is remarkable that Toronto has not considered reform along the lines many cities across North America and around the world have adopted, that is of making the city not the provider of transit services, but the purchaser. Instead of one giant public sector monopoly, routes are put out to competitive tender, on a mix of price and performance criteria. The commission would remain responsible for the overall transit grid, but the operation of the component parts would harness competition and private sector flexibility in an attempt to find ways to deliver better service at lower cost.
The savings can be impressive. London Transport, for example, the world’s largest urban transit system, reduced costs per vehicle kilometer by 51 percent from 1985, the year Britain launched its ambitious transit reforms, to 2000. Once freed to think outside the TTC box, private entrepreneurs might decide it made more sense to use nimble little minivans on slightly used routes, rather than bone-shaking, half-empty buses. They might rethink the present uniform fare scheme, charging more for longer distances, less for shorter. Or not: the point is to try different approaches, and compare the results.
Still, this remains a limited form of competition: the criteria for assessing performance would remain those that occurred to transit planners, rather than passengers, who would remain in the grips of a local monopoly, albeit one that had been competitively awarded. The more full-throated form of competition, as Britain opted for in cities outside London, would allow competing bus services to ply the same routes. The advantage: entrepreneurs would have even more incentive to dream up new ways of attracting passengers. Perhaps comfier seats? More flexible routes? On-board ice cream vendors?
The disadvantage: it’s not as simple as that. The experience in Britain has been decidedly mixed. While cost savings were achieved, these were not always passed on to passengers. Instead, companies have seemed to compete on frequency of service, swooping in at a given stop just ahead of their rivals, or flooding routes with buses to ward off such predation.
Does that make the whole idea misguided? Not necessarily. The American economists Daniel Klein, Adrian Moore, and Binyam Reja have proposed auctioning “curb rights,†granting companies the exclusive right to pick up passengers at a given stop for a given period of time. A company that had invested in attracting passengers to its stops would no longer have to suffer a competitor reaping the rewards.
Whichever model is adopted, the point remains the same: it is competition, not subsidy, that is the way to revitalize transit. Subsidy, in fact, has the opposite effect. Entrepreneurs will only lie awake at night thinking of how better to serve passengers when their entire livelihoods depend on it. To the extent that they are instead compensated by the state, that incentive is reduced.
In any event, it’s unnecessary. Put tolls on the roads, as proposed elsewhere in this series, make drivers pay the full cost of their filthy habit, and taking the bus will suddenly look a lot more attractive.
