Amid the storied history of horrific Toronto transit tales, there is the experience of Asmait Abraham and her 12-year-old son Simon.

On a frigid morning in February, Abraham left Simon waiting for the 59 Maple Leaf bus to take him to school. He waited and waited, but unbeknownst to him bus service had been disrupted. For two hours Simon stood in the cold with a crowd of other passengers, Abraham says. When he finally got to school he collapsed. She says his feet had turned blue.

Simon recovered, but his ordeal is only an extreme example of a common hardship faced by residents in many parts of Toronto. Abraham, who lives near Weston and Lawrence, spends a lot of time waiting for transit. It takes her three buses and a subway ride to get to her adult education class each morning, and two buses to get to the grocery store. The service is supposed to be frequent, but it isn’t always. “When they come, they come two, three, four buses together. If you miss them, you have to wait I don’t know how long,” she said.

Abraham and her family are among the many who daily navigate the city’s “transit deserts” — pockets underserved by public transportation. Measuring the frequency and capacity of transit service across the city, researchers have mapped these deserts, which largely correspond to the inner-suburb neighbourhoods populated by low-income families. According to the Martin Prosperity Institute, areas of Toronto with the fastest growing incomes have almost four times the amount of transit service seen in neighbourhoods where incomes are declining.

In these areas, rapid transit is nonexistent and residents must rely on bus service that is often late. (The latest figures from the TTC show that only 68.1 per cent of its buses arrive even close to on time.)

To the authors of a new study out of the City Institute at York University, these facts expose “transit inequity” in Toronto: the people most dependent on transit, who pay a higher portion of their income to ride it, also get the worst service. The report, titled Switching Tracks, suggests ways the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area can achieve greater “transit justice.”

Among its main contentions is that, historically, major transit projects exacerbate social inequality. “The majority of infrastructure investments in the modern city have privileged the rich,” said Roger Keil, a co-author of the report. This is not only because wealthier citizens tend to wield more political clout, but because conventional planning wisdom dictates that major rapid transit lines should connect areas that are already thriving: dense residential zones, booming commercial areas, and transportation hubs.

“Prime spaces are supported through investment, but the capillaries of the system … are left to waste away,” the report says. In Toronto this has played out through transit projects along corridors such as Yonge St. and the new rail link to Pearson International Airport, while the inner suburbs have been neglected.

The pattern is difficult to break, because over time the link between transit investment and privileged groups only becomes stronger. Anywhere a rapid transit line is built, property values tend to increase and lower-income residents are gradually squeezed out by wealthier ones. As Keil put it, in Toronto, “the subway system is a fairly good indicator of wealth.”

TRANSIT DESERTS have a more serious impact than merely leaving riders stranded at the bus stop. A lack of access to transit can also severely limit people’s economic prospects, and drive a cycle of poverty.

For four years, Cherilyn Horne had a job at a grocery warehouse in Vaughan, where she commuted from her home in Jamestown. She worked the evening shift and says she finished just in time to catch the last bus home. But her manager often asked her to work overtime. She feared losing her job if she refused, but if she stayed late, she had to take a long, expensive cab ride home, effectively negating the money she earned over her shift.

Finally, after one late-night taxi cost her $50, she quit. Employment agencies have since offered her jobs near the same warehouse, but she’s had to turn them down. “I told them no, as long as it’s over there, no,” she said.

In this sense, transit deserts are as much about the suitability of the service offered as the number of buses on the road. Toronto’s transit system is based on surface routes feeding subway lines that converge downtown, and it runs more frequently during morning and afternoon rush hours. That doesn’t help the growing number of people like Horne who need to commute from one part of the suburbs to another, often at irregular hours. The TTC needs more buses and needs to have them “run later than how they run,” Horne said.

Karin Meinzer, who works at the Pathways to Possibilities adult education centre in south Etobicoke, says it’s common for her clients to turn down job offers because of poor transit connections, or because they can’t afford a Metropass. “When we sit down to map out what it’s going to take for them to get there, it’s just not worth it,” she said.

CHRIS UPFOLD, the TTC’s Chief Customer Officer, is skeptical about the term “transit desert.” Asked if they exist in Toronto, he produces a map that shows 99 per cent of residents live within a 10-minute walk of a transit stop. “There are no arterials that we aren’t running service on.”

“The way we plan our service is 100 per cent related to the observed number of people that are taking it,” he asserted, and the TTC is constantly monitoring and updating its bus routes to meet changing demand. He argued that Toronto’s transit system is simply “based on where people are going to. And that is why there is more transit in downtown.” While he’d like to add more buses to improve riders’ experience in underserved areas, “that isn’t the funding situation that we find ourselves in.”

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According to the authors of Switching Tracks, transit inequity will persist unless those in charge make deliberate interventions on behalf of the underserved. Instead of planning routes based on economic return or existing demand, the “explicit intention” of new transit investment should be to connect underserved areas to jobs and services, said Sean Hertel, who co-authored the report.

That doesn’t mean building rapid transit lines into areas that can’t support them. “It’s not about a subway to everywhere,” said Hertel. “We’re saying the right service, the right technology, the right price to cater to the needs of those who need it the most.”

Keil hails the original Transit City network proposal, now politically moribund, as a “strong statement” about reducing transit inequality. Successful examples from outside Toronto include Bogota, Colombia, where the TransMilenio bus rapid transit line was built to connect poor residents on the outskirts to downtown. It now carries 2.2 million passengers a day.

In Denver, Colo., officials are crafting planning tools to protect affordable housing developments that fall along planned transit lines from gentrification, while Frankfurt, Germany, is contemplating a suburban peripheral line to connect outlying residential areas to employment zones.

The authors suggest transit planners in the Toronto region learn from these examples, and quickly. Over the next two decades the province’s Big Move plan is set to create 1,200 km of rapid transit in the GTHA, a generational investment the report says could represent our best, “perhaps last,” chance to build a more just transit system.