When I was a kid, I loved to get off at every subway station on the Yonge subway line (what is now the Yonge-University-Spadina line) and run up to the gate to get a transfer from the machine. Then I’d go back downstairs, get the next train, and proceed to the next station, returning home with a pocket full of station names.
This, for the youngs, is an artifact of an era long past: not just the era of paper transfers at TTC stations (and not just the era of paper transfers that were printed on paper, not heat-transfer paper which, like Shoppers Drug Mart receipts or my opening-day tickets for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, fade over time).
It also, I was realizing recently, probably the last time I thought the TTC was kinda neat.
(Exception made for the day I took my student card photo in ’93, above.)
Grown-ups who use the system nowadays would probably reach for other words to describe the TTC. Many of them, I suspect, would find words which lie somewhere in the spectrum between nuisance (at best) and colossal clusterfuck (at the other end).
Now: by any reckoning, the TTC as it stands today is a manifestly more useful and impressive thing than it ever was when I was twelve years old, punching that satisfyingly crunchy Big Button on the transfer machine. The system is huge now — the subway even goes to York University, a prospect that seemed like science fiction when I, also in an era long past, went to York University, suffering on the Steeles bus twice daily for what seemed like half a life sentence in outer Siberia.
But with scaling come challenges, as we all know, and a lot of those challenges are now past their breaking point in the minds of the ridership. It’s just so unappealing to rely on the TTC now, which is a shame, because this is absolutely the era in which we should be relying on it more than ever.
As readers know, I’m freshly back from Tokyo. And you also know I’m all starry-eyed about it, so I was going to write a screed here, given how much I love Tokyo’s rail system, as opposed to ours.
But I’m not actually going to do that. I am, instead, only going to compassionately suggest that we’ve become acclimatized to a lot of rationally unacceptable deficits in the way we run our transit in Toronto. This speaks to how badly we undervalue — or under-imagine — a positive civic experience in Canada, in North America, in the West.
Can we imagine a better city by imagining services that puts real, diligent effort into improving against these deficits?:
The communication problem. This is the big one: the TTC is awful at providing information to the ridership, before and during rides. Information on where a vehicle is going is erroneous or outright missing, an unacceptable portion of the time.
As mentioned, I’ve just come back from Japan, and if there is one thing a Torontonian can marvel at on the various Tokyo train systems, it’s this: absolutely nothing happens without clear communication. In two, sometimes three, languages! Tokyo is a warren, gigantic, hard to navigate; but if you have even a baseline understanding of where you’re going, the advice freely offered by signage and voice announcements, on every single vehicle and at every single platform, will help you get there.
Contrast that to Toronto, where announcements are random, and frequently made over speakers that do not operate in the human audible range; where signage on both the vehicles or at the stations is either wrong or missing altogether; and where operators are more likely to pretend nothing is wrong than announce a problem or a change.
The reliability problem. Here’s why the communication problem is the big one: TTC vehicles miss their mark all the time around here. In fact, in the fall of 2025, it would not be unreasonable to say that any time you board a train, streetcar or bus in Toronto, you are basically rolling the barrel of a Russian roulette pistol and blind-firing at the distant corners of the city, with no idea where the bullet will land.
This Toronto Star headline actually outlines the unholy circle of the problem: TTC streetcars don’t get where they’re supposed to go on time, amid below-budget ridership.
I cannot imagine why “service paid for does not deliver service required” might equate to “below-budget ridership,” but I bet someone smarter than me can figure it out. In the interim, I have a fun suggestion in the next section.
The rolling homeless shelter problem. There is no way to call this one the TTC’s fault, except tangentially; this is a top-to-bottom failure of an entire municipal system: the thing where every streetcar and subway is now a mobile shelter for Toronto’s catastrophically large unhoused population.
I’m not remotely qualified to weigh in on that catastrophe. I’ll only note that the city’s seeming inability to move in a direction that makes it substantively more likely that a TTC vehicle will be clean, safe, and free of disruption, is yet another reason that riders are simply going to choose any other option available, especially in the downtown core.
To extend the point: government action really, really matters here. The “my taxes!” brainrot we’ve caught from the United States is shameful. And maybe it’s time we made resisting that thinking part of our national defense.
The lost Eglinton line problem. Let’s never listen to a Ford again on the subject of creating tunnels. ‘Nuff said.
In the meantime, though… the idea of transit expansion across the city is fairly inspiring, to me. It takes forever to build, unless it’s the rip-roarin’ Ontario line which I got some kind of extreme judicial exception to, as my old music teacher used to say, “go like stink.”
But anytime I take the train up to the Vaughan terminal and ride the Zum Queen to the Colossus, I’m still capable of thinking back to how my younger self would be thunderstruck that any of this was even possible. I want to feel like that, more of the time, about transit in my city, and my city in general.
An insane solution
This all can, should, and deserves to be better. Sometimes, in lieu of coming up with ways to actually make that happen (what am I, a policy wonk?) I like to fantasize about a really stupid way to handle things in the meantime:
Instead of paying for the ride at the beginning, what if we paid at the end?
Look, there’s no refund mechanism for the TTC that I’m aware of, which is kind of nutty. If I go to a movie and the projector breaks at the 40 minute mark, there are staff members waiting outside the theatre (at the Lightbox) or hiding sullenly behind the Managers’ desk not making eye contact (at Cineplex), giving out vouchers for a future screening.
If one of the teenagers at Best Buy sells me headphones and they catch fire on my way home, I can generally go back, show my scorched ears at the desk, and get the charge back on my credit card.
Absent a similar mechanism when the TTC eats our fare and then proceeds to not give us the thing we paid for, how about we flip the proof-of-payment system on its ear?
We all make a little deal with ourselves: no one pays at the beginning of a ride. If the TTC gets us where we intended to go at the time we expected to arrive (+/- 15%, let’s not be crazy), we tap off, and they get the fare. If they don’t, we don’t. Easy peasy.
I know, I know. Fantasy baseball. Accountability and all that. I know it doesn’t work! I guess, failing this, we’ll all just have to call upon our governments, and our fellow Torontonians, to imagine the value this system actually provides, and could actually provide, if it had the tools.
More from me
I want some new reading. Since scrubbing my life of Substack I’ve been low on good newsletters. If you have any non-‘stack recos, please do leave them in the comments below. I like strong writers who muse about arts, politics, weird hobbies, and so forth.
Here’s what else has been going on:
- I spent the last couple of months thinking “what do I have to say about Eyes Wide Shut that hasn’t been said for chrissakes??” and it turns out, rather a lot (Screen Anarchy)
- I’m pretty happy with my lightsabre but the folks from Xtra Life Sabers swung through the 4th Moon last weekend to celebrate Life Day with theirs, and may I say… mighty tempting. If you’re in the market, can I recommend them? They’re Canadians! And it was lovely to meet a second, huge Acolyte fan.
- As a person on psychiatric meds with a history of addictive tendencies in the family, this piece about Ozempic and diminished desire was a gold star read. (The Cut)
- What baffles me about the “Accept All Cookies” dialogue that pops up on every single website on the internet is that, if you do accept all cookies, the website does not set a cookie along the lines of “this user accepted all cookies,” and instead will ask you to Accept All Cookies in perpetuity, every time you visit, forever. This thought doesn’t really go anywhere.
- I just love Rian Johnson so much (and Wake Up Dead Man is very good), I don’t even care that he’ll probably never do a Star War again (IndieWire)
- On a related note: any outlets want to commission a 5,000 word memorial, on the tenth anniversary of The Force Awakens next month, maybe something along the lines of “The Force, Awakened: The Enshittification of Star Wars”? Beep me.