Part II — Who has fixed this elsewhere · Chapter 9

The Redesign Toronto Never Tried

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.

Cities that redrew their entire bus network from scratch, instead of tweaking it route by route, got ridership gains Toronto has never chased — because Toronto has never actually tried it.

To be precise about what that means: the TTC redesigns routes constantly. Every year it reviews poorly performing lines, merges a few, tweaks a few more. What it has never done is what Houston, Dublin, Auckland, and a growing list of other cities have done — throw out the whole map and start over, evaluating every route against one consistent standard rather than nudging pieces of an inherited network at the margins. That's not a rhetorical flourish; it's the conclusion of transit analysts looking at the TTC's own planning documents, which describe its annual process in exactly those incremental terms. The distinction matters because the evidence says incremental tweaking and comprehensive redesign don't produce the same result, and Toronto has only ever tried the smaller one.

Here's the idea a real redesign is built on, and it's simpler than it sounds. Every transit agency splits its budget, whether it admits to doing so or not, between two goals that trade off against each other: coverage, meaning every neighbourhood has some bus service nearby, and ridership, meaning service is frequent enough on the busiest corridors that people actually choose to use it instead of driving. Spend on one and you're not spending on the other. Most agencies make this trade-off silently, one small decision at a time, over decades. A real redesign makes it explicit — a transit board formally decides "60% of our service hours go toward ridership, 40% toward coverage," and then draws the entire network against that rule at once, rather than discovering the split by accident.

Toronto's own geography is actually well suited to this. The city's major arterials — Bloor, Dundas, Queen running east-west; Yonge, Bathurst, Dufferin running north-south — sit roughly two kilometres apart, a grid inherited from an eighteenth-century colonial land survey, not a planning decision. TTC already runs its busiest routes on exactly this skeleton. What Toronto lacks isn't the busy spines — it's the crossing routes. Toronto's transit works well for trips downtown, where it captures roughly half of all commutes at times of day, but on trips that go from one suburb to another without passing through downtown, transit historically has carried only 1–2% of trips, and two-thirds of every car trip longer than 16 kilometres in the region still goes by car. That's not a low-density problem transit can't solve; it's a missing-orbital-route problem, the exact gap Dublin and Auckland closed by adding frequent cross-town service to feed their existing frequent spines, rather than trying to make thin suburban service frequent everywhere at once.

The honest range of what a redesign delivers depends entirely on whether new money comes with it, and the two tracks shouldn't be blurred together. Redesigns that reallocate existing service hours without new funding — Houston's 2015 overnight relaunch of its entire network is the cleanest example — have delivered ridership gains in the range of 4% to 11%, concentrated disproportionately on evenings and weekends, which happens to be exactly where Toronto's own ridership has been softest lately. Redesigns paired with real new investment go further: Richmond, Virginia paired a network redesign with a new rapid-bus line and saw system-wide ridership climb 17% to 25% against a national ridership trend that was falling — though that number is worth reading carefully, because it bundles the redesign together with the new rapid-bus capital spending, and there is no clean way to credit the redesign alone for the full gain. Auckland's more gradual, decade-long push toward doubling its ridership shows what the top of that range can look like when a region commits to the investment path for years, not just one budget cycle.

None of this comes free of risk, and the cities that pretended otherwise paid for it. New York's redesign of Queens' bus network drew opposition from every single city councillor representing the borough after its first draft, forcing an eighteen-month pause and a rewrite; even the final, heavily consulted version was later found to have made access measurably worse for some neighbourhoods while improving it for others. Dublin's redesign, still rolling out after nearly a decade, widened its own scope from a 27% service increase to 40% specifically because the public consultation showed the original plan cutting too much. The pattern across every documented case is the same: a redesign survives politics by engaging riders on the trade-off honestly before drawing a single line, and by staying willing to spend more if consultation shows real losers — not by holding a fixed budget and hoping objections fade.

What a realistic Toronto program looks like, based on how long every one of these took elsewhere, is three to five years from a decision to launch one to the first phase actually running on the street — closer to Dublin's and Queens' timelines than Houston's fast two years, given Toronto's larger network and more layered approval process. That's a real cost in time. It's also the honest reason the fastest wins in this project's fix belong to cheaper, narrower interventions that don't require redrawing the whole map — while the redesign itself stays the single highest-ceiling move nobody in Toronto has yet chosen to make.