Appendix · Appendix A6

Further Reading: the best of what this research stands on

Part of Why can’t Toronto move? — every item below was actually used by this research; nothing is recommended sight-unseen. How we check our own work: the receipts.

These are the books, reports, and live sources this project leaned on hardest — the shortest honest path from “curious” to “can hold their own in a transit debate.”

Start here (for any citizen)

Human Transit by Jarrett Walker (revised edition, Island Press, 2024) is the single best first book: it explains, in plain language, the handful of geometric trade-offs — frequency versus coverage, ridership versus access — that decide whether any transit system works. Once you’ve read it, every Toronto service debate becomes legible.

Better Buses, Better Cities by Steven Higashide (Island Press, 2019) tells the real stories behind bus-system turnarounds in Houston, Boston, and Indianapolis — the same Houston redesign this report treats as Toronto’s most copyable precedent — and shows why buses, not megaprojects, are where most riders’ lives improve first.

Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar (Penguin Press, 2023) explains how parking policy quietly shapes everything else about a city, including why so much of Toronto is built for driving.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs — written in 1961 — remains the classic case for streets designed around people. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, helped lead the Stop Spadina campaign that ended expressway-building here in 1971, and lived in the Annex until her death in 2006 — the fight Chapter 2 begins with.

Go deeper (for candidates and policy readers)

Two more books anchor the land-use half of the argument: The Transit Metropolis by Robert Cervero (Island Press, 1998; global case studies — Stockholm, Singapore, Tokyo, Vancouver — arguing any city can build good transit if land use and service align) and Order Without Design by Alain Bertaud (MIT Press, 2018; why planning that ignores land markets fails).

The rest of the candidate shelf is free, online, and is what this report actually cited:

• The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario’s Transit Subsidies report (2024) — the provincial numbers behind our funding chapters.
• TTC Board item TTC2.13 (February 2025) — the TTC’s own record of the surface-speed decline; the single most quotable primary document in this report. Find it through the City’s council agenda system.
• The TTC 5-Year Service and Customer Experience Action Plan (2024–2028) and the 2026 Annual Network Plan — what the TTC itself says it will do, against which everything else is measured.
• CodeRedTO’s Mixed Signals — the plain-language comparison of Toronto’s transit funding and governance against eight peer cities.
• NACTO’s Houston network-redesign case study and Better Boarding report — the mechanics behind Chapter 9 and the all-door-boarding evidence.
• The Transit Costs Project (transitcosts.com) — why Canadian rapid transit costs multiples of European builds, with Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown as a named case.
• The Toronto Region Board of Trade’s Breaking Gridlock (2026) — the business community’s congestion case, quoted in Chapter 10.
• TCRP Report 95 — the research synthesis behind our service-frequency arguments.

Follow the live sources

Three ongoing sources will keep you ahead of most of the people you’ll debate. Steve Munro (stevemunro.ca) has analyzed TTC operations in public for decades — much of this report’s Toronto detail traces through his work to TTC primary documents. Human Transit (humantransit.org) applies the frequency-and-network lens to live controversies. Pedestrian Observations (pedestrianobservations.com) is the research home of the construction-costs question. For primary data, bookmark the TTC’s Operating Statistics and Boardings pages (ttc.ca) and the City’s council agenda system (secure.toronto.ca/council) — where documents like TTC2.13 surface first, before anyone summarizes them for you.