If a city can only be as successful as its transit system, Toronto had better start to pay attention to what’s going on at the TTC.

It’s not just that the subway breaks down so often, as it did last week, twice. That buses are routinely crammed beyond capacity or that streetcars are slow and getting slower. The Bloor subway station can be so crowded during rush hour TTC personnel are stopping people at the turnstiles — and Eglinton, St. George and Union Station aren’t much better.

Public transit has never been so expensive, so unreliable, inconvenient or difficult. Suddenly, it seems, our decades-long failure to invest in maintenance and update the system has caught up with Toronto. Can we make up for those lost years? Do we have the political will reach that deep?

To be fair, the blame lies not only with the TTC, however poorly run it may be. The real problem is the refusal of government — civic, provincial and federal — to provide adequate funding. Indeed, the TTC gets less funding from the public purse than any other transit system in North America. Fully two-thirds of its revenue comes from fares.

So it’s no surprise that TTC service is so spotty and tickets are so expensive. No surprise either that last week the TTC board approved a 10-cent fare increase, the seventh fare hike in the last eight years. If it passes through council, it will take effect this year, appropriately, on April Fools’ Day.

Interestingly, a report released late last year by public transit advocacy group CodeRedTO pointed out that, “The TTC’s adult cash fare rose 20 per cent faster than inflation from 1998 to 2018.” In a city whose mayor’s most heartfelt election promise was that he would keep property tax increases to the rate of inflation, this says a lot about his real priorities. While John Tory frets about whether seniors will be able the pay their municipal tax bill, he does little to help transit users who pay some of the highest ticket prices on the continent. It is another reason Toronto, now among the most expensive cities globally, is losing a generation of younger people who can’t afford to live here.

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This is not the way to ensure a prosperous future. The bias against public transit that informs civic decision-making has been overt since the 1990s when then-premier Mike Harris cut provincial operating and capital funding of the TTC. At the same time, under a series of post-amalgamation mayors, Toronto has consistently misread the signals about the changing nature of 21st-centry urban mobility. For example: While cities from New York to Boston, Seoul to Madrid have torn down elevated freeways, Toronto plans to enlarge the east end of the Gardiner Expressway against the advice of city staff.

While cities from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, San Diego and Bogota have created full bike networks, Toronto still refuses to take cycling seriously. Though polls say 80 per cent of Torontonians support protected bike lanes, two years into its 10-year program to install 560 kilometres of bike lanes we have built less than six per cent of that.

While cities lower speed limits and ban cars from whole neighbourhoods, Toronto has avoided measures that would inconvenience drivers. As a result, pedestrian and cyclist deaths here are on the rise.

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City attitudes to TTC changes remain deeply ambivalent. Toronto’s cop-out council delayed the vote to make the much-lauded King St. Pilot permanent though it’s been in operation for more than a year.

In the meantime, transit has been beggared. The TTC needs $33 billion in capital spending over 15 years to continue operating at its current level. And by the way, the upcoming fare hike will raise about $26 million.

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On top of that comes Premier Doug Ford’s decision to “upload” the subway — not the TTC, just the subway. He claims the province could do a better job. New York City’s experience says otherwise. The Big Apple’s state-run transit system is in such bad shape, it will cost billions and take decades to rescue.

No wonder we carry on as if it were still 1974. Back then, the TTC really was “The Better Way” and Toronto “New York run by the Swiss,” or as Harper’s magazine put it, “A City That Works.”

That was then, this is now. Toronto now ranks among the world’s most successful cities — the question is whether it can avoid becoming a victim of its own success.

Christopher Hume is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @HumeChristopher

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