Part I — What’s broken · Chapter 5

Riding While Toronto

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Safety on the TTC is flat where the headlines say it's a crisis and quietly slipping where nobody's counting; crowding standards have been loosened rather than met; and the system will finish making its subway accessible three years after the law required it and twenty-three years after that law was passed.

Start with safety, because the public story and the TTC's own data tell two different stories that are both, in their own way, true. The TTC's Chief Safety Officer ran a formal statistical trend analysis of offences against customers and against employees, covering both a five-year window (2020–2024) and a tighter two-year window (2023–2024), specifically to check for a real trend. The finding, stated plainly in the TTC's own report: no significant multi-year trend, up or down, in either category — and where a movement was detectable over the shorter window, it was downward. That runs directly against the "system in crisis" narrative that dominated Toronto news coverage from late 2022 onward. But that narrative wasn't invented from nothing: a genuine, high-severity cluster of violent incidents in 2022–23 was real, was traumatic for the people involved, and is exactly what triggered the TTC's emergency safety response and the joint program with Toronto Police that followed. Both things are true simultaneously — the underlying rate has not shown a statistically identifiable long-run rise, and a real, frightening spike genuinely happened and reshaped both public perception and institutional response for years afterward. More recent monitored data shows measured improvement: offences against customers down against target and year-over-year, safety-related complaints falling, and rider-reported feelings of safety trending upward from 2020–2023 lows, even though any single month's reading can swing sharply on a small survey sample.

One place the TTC's own numbers do show a real, acknowledged decline sits just below the threshold that counts as a reportable "offence": a broader measure capturing threats and acute emotional incidents against frontline staff — verbal confrontations, aggressive encounters that don't rise to assault — rose steadily from 2020 to 2024, a trend the TTC itself labels unfavourable. Read together with the flat headline offence rate, the honest picture is that the most severe incidents are not trending upward, while a layer of lower-grade hostility toward frontline workers appears to be. The system's current response combines visible presence — special constables trained in de-escalation, expanded station staffing, police patrols — with a social-services track built around outreach workers who connect people experiencing homelessness or addiction to housing and health supports rather than treating their presence on the system as an enforcement problem. That second track lost one of its two dedicated outreach channels in February 2026, when a contracted wellness-check program was discontinued with no announced replacement — a real, current gap in an otherwise reasonably designed response.

Crowding tells a smaller, quieter version of the same funding story running through this whole book. The TTC's own service standard calls for no more than a seated load, on average, during off-peak periods — but that standard was suspended during the 2023 budget process, with interim standards set only slightly below what peak-period crowding already looks like. That is a change transit analysts have linked directly to budget pressure rather than any deliberate service-design choice, and it means the system's own definition of "acceptable crowding" got quietly loosened at the same time the network was under the most financial strain. More recent Board reporting has identified dozens of specific time periods and routes still exceeding even that loosened standard, prompting targeted service additions where the agency can afford them.

Accessibility is the clearest case in this chapter of real, measurable progress sitting next to a real, acknowledged legal failure. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act set 2025 as the deadline for full accessibility across every TTC subway station — a law passed in 2005, giving the system two decades of notice. The TTC missed it, and said so publicly well in advance: as of January 2026, 63 of 70 subway stations are fully accessible, with seven more (Greenwood, College, Lawrence, Museum, Spadina, King, and Islington) scheduled to complete that year, bringing the total to 69 of 70 — 99% — by the end of 2026. The final station, Old Mill, has its contract awarded, with completion now expected in the third quarter of 2028: three years past the legal deadline, and twenty-three years after the law that set it. The TTC's own account attributes the delay substantially to the remaining stations' greater structural complexity and to regional construction-labour capacity constraints — a real constraint, not an excuse offered in place of one, but it does not change the fact that Toronto is asking disabled riders to wait three additional years for a legal right the province set two decades of notice to deliver.

What this chapter cannot yet show. Everything above is institutional evidence — reports, board minutes, trend analyses, program documents. None of it is what a rider actually experiences waiting at a King Street stop at midnight, or navigating a station with a mobility device before Old Mill's elevator is built, or deciding whether to board a streetcar that's already over capacity. This project's corpus does not contain first-person rider accounts or qualitative fieldwork, and this chapter has not invented any to fill that gap — no composite rider, no imagined scene, no borrowed anecdote standing in for evidence that doesn't exist here. That absence is a real limitation of what this book can currently show, not a minor caveat: the institutional record in this chapter describes a system from the outside, and original rider reporting — interviews, ride-alongs, first-person accounts gathered specifically for this purpose — is necessary future work this project has not yet done.