Part V — The fix · Chapter 18

Now, Next, Later — The Program

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.

Toronto already has the fix on paper; what's been missing is sequencing it by who actually has to say yes, not by how ambitious it sounds.

Every item on this program sorts into exactly three groups, and the sorting rule has nothing to do with cost or how big the payoff is — it's which government has to approve it. A surprising number of the cheapest, highest-return moves need nothing from Queen's Park or Ottawa: a City Council vote is enough, and several are already partly funded. A second group needs the province's active cooperation, because a law it has already passed put the decision in provincial hands. A third group needs the Ontario Legislature to repeal or rewrite a statute outright, or to create a taxing power that doesn't currently exist. Toronto's transit debate spends most of its energy on the third group — road pricing most of all — while the first group, fully within the City's own reach today, sits underused.

Now: City Council and the TTC Board, alone

This is the longest list, and the one requiring no one else's permission. TTC board reform tops it: the board's size, composition, and mandate live in Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 279, a City by-law Council wrote and can rewrite. Two changes rank highest — extending the citizen seats' ten-domain skills matrix to a published, seat-by-seat disclosure, and adding staggered terms so the board doesn't turn over all at once. Unlike the operational items below, no study puts a number of years on how fast board reform would show up in a rider's commute, and this program doesn't invent one.

Next is the fix Toronto has never tried: a comprehensive network redesign. The first, low-cost step is a systematic route-overlap and trip-matrix audit — the kind Boston's MBTA ran — ahead of choosing between a cost-neutral redesign (the Houston/Columbus model, reallocating TTC's existing service hours, delivering +4–11% ridership in peer cases) and an invested one (the Auckland/Richmond model, adding 5–10% new service hours, delivering +17–25%). Both stay inside TTC's existing budget authority; Toronto's specific opportunity is a missing orbital layer connecting the inner suburbs, the same gap Dublin and Auckland each closed.

Behind those two structural moves sits a cluster of operational fixes with real, documented timelines. Transit signal priority's full build-out — 244 locations, mostly already inside the City's $299.4-million 2026–28 Congestion Management Plan — cuts bus and streetcar travel time 8–15%, with benefits showing up in 1–3 years. Streetcar right-of-way camera enforcement, already piloted on five routes, targets a corridor where more than 99.7% of documented violations currently go unticketed, and this one pays back faster: under 2 years. All-door boarding, extended from streetcars (where it's already universal) to the bus network (where it's largely absent), cuts dwell time 28–51% elsewhere. RapidTO lane expansion and off-peak frequency increases round out the list, alongside four near-zero-cost administrative moves: a commercial parking levy already legal since 2006 ($100–108 million a year), fare-evasion enforcement scale-up, a curb-and-mobility-data governance framework adopted before any more AV or delivery-robot pilots (not after), and starting to archive the TTC's own GPS data today, since no copy older than about 60 days currently exists anywhere.

Next: needs the province's cooperation

Bill 98 is now law — the Minister of Transportation can set TTC fares, discounts, zones, and service standards — but the regulations that will actually define those numbers are still being written, and TTCriders is right to call that the real fight the bill's passage didn't settle. Protecting the One Fare regional-integration program, funded only through 2026, sits in the same column. So does restoring the federal Canada Public Transit Fund, cut 17% before its first full year, and pushing Metrolinx away from the single, multi-billion-dollar, thirty-year contracts behind three Crosslinx lawsuits and a Finch West LRT suit. Ontario's general AV Pilot Program is scheduled to sunset on October 13, 2027, and the Minister was required to complete an evaluation before January 1, 2026 whose outcome isn't public yet — a live regulatory deadline, not a someday issue, and one that will shape any future Toronto AV posture whether or not the City is ready. Sequencing transit-oriented upzoning to precede, not follow, transit-funding announcements, and deciding whether to fund platform-edge doors (roughly $4.1 billion for full build-out), round out this tier.

Later: needs new law

The largest single lever in the whole program, congestion or corridor pricing, is blocked by two separate statutes — the City of Toronto Act's 2006 toll ban and the 2024 Get It Done Act's ban on tolling provincial highways — and both need the Legislature to move, not Council. If that ever happens, Toronto's own trip data argues for pricing corridors and highway segments rather than a downtown cordon, since the fastest-growing, most car-locked travel is suburb-to-suburb and never crosses a cordon line. A dedicated municipal sales tax or HST share, a genuinely regional GTHA governance authority, a Verkehrsverbund-style fare-and-schedule merger across TTC, GO, and the 905 operators, and land-value capture at anything like Hong Kong MTR's scale all sit here too — each real, each costed or at least sketched somewhere in this book, and each waiting on an order of government that hasn't yet acted.

Reading the three tiers together is the point: Toronto isn't short on evidence, and it isn't short on money in some absolute sense — the money that used to cover about two-thirds of what it costs to run the TTC simply hasn't come back since the pandemic. What it's short on is doing the first tier at the pace the evidence supports while it fights for the other two.