Part II — Who has fixed this elsewhere · Chapter 8

The ROI Ranking

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.

Ranked by return on the dollar, the cheapest fixes available to Toronto today beat the most expensive ones by a wide margin — and the order is almost the reverse of what tends to get announced at a podium.

Every transit wish list eventually turns into a budget fight, and budget fights go better when someone has actually ranked the options by what they deliver per dollar spent, rather than by how impressive they sound. Using the best available evidence — TTC and City reports where they exist, comparable peer-city results where they don't — twelve interventions available to Toronto can be ranked from highest return to lowest. The order holds a real lesson: the cheapest, fastest, most boring items on this list beat the biggest, most photogenic ones by a wide margin.

At the top sits transit signal priority — reprogramming traffic signals the City already owns so buses and streetcars get a longer green or an early one. It costs tens of millions of dollars, not billions, it's already partly funded through Toronto's own congestion management plan, and comparable North American cities have measured typical travel-time cuts of 8–15%, with some corridors seeing signal delay drop by a quarter or more. Right behind it: automated camera enforcement of the lanes streetcars are already supposed to have to themselves. A University of Toronto study found more than 99.7% of roughly 6,800 daily illegal turns and through-movements on the King Street transit corridor go unticketed. The TTC's camera pilot covering five routes cost about $460,000 — a rounding error next to almost everything else on this list — against an enforcement gap that size.

A few spots down, dedicated bus lanes pay for themselves in a way almost nothing else here does: TTC's own Eglinton East corridor delivered measured travel-time savings alongside $2.5 million a year in operating savings and a one-time $6.3 million capital saving, because faster buses need fewer buses to deliver the same service. That's before counting a single minute of rider benefit. A comprehensive bus network redesign — reorganizing routes around where people actually need to go rather than tinkering at the edges — sits mid-table not because the payoff is small (Houston's cost-neutral redesign delivered a 7.5% systemwide ridership gain within a year, no new money spent) but because the political cost of changing everyone's route at once is real, and because Toronto has never actually run one.

Near the bottom, two very different kinds of expensive items land for very different reasons. Completing modern signalling on the subway's Line 2 will eventually allow up to 40% more capacity at peak — genuinely valuable — but it's an eleven-year, $407.7-million project with nothing to show riders for most of that time, so nothing this decade competes with fixes riders will feel in year one or two. And platform edge doors, the barriers that would separate the platform from the tracks on every station, would cost roughly $4.1 billion and up to twenty years to build across all 74 platforms on the older subway lines — a real safety measure, but one the TTC's own board has already pulled back from piloting even at a single station, because the price tag dwarfs the measurable throughput or ridership gain.

Two things are worth saying plainly about this list, because a ranking this clean invites overconfidence. First, several of the strongest-sounding figures come with a caveat attached in the original source — the predictive-maintenance savings are drawn from vendor and trade-press material, not an independent audit, and no Toronto-specific pilot for it currently exists. Second, and more important: nothing on this list includes a timeline for reforming how the TTC's board itself is governed. That reform is real, it's entirely within the City's own power, and it belongs in the "why nothing else moves fast" story elsewhere in this project — but no source anywhere in this ranking puts a number of years on how quickly it would pay off, and pretending otherwise would be inventing precision that doesn't exist. It stays off this table for exactly that reason.

What the ranking actually argues for isn't a single silver bullet. It argues for doing the top five things on this list at the same time, because none of them individually is expensive enough to justify waiting for the others, and because none of them requires anyone's permission but the City's own.