The TTC has ambitious plans for service improvements it says are required to meet growing ridership over the coming years. What the agency doesn’t have is any clear plan to pay for them.

At a meeting at city hall Thursday, the TTC board debated a report on its first five-year service plan, which lays out the agency’s needs from now until 2024.

It shows the TTC requires $779.5 million over that time to purchase new buses and streetcars, build new vehicle maintenance and storage facilities, institute bus priority lanes, and other items aimed at improving service capacity and reliability.

Of those costs, the vast majority, or $745.5 million, are currently unfunded. The remaining $34.1 million will be requested in the TTC’s 2020 capital budget submission to council, which the agency plans to publish Friday.

TTC CEO Rick Leary said the five-year plan was aimed at “initiating the discussion” of the transit agency’s needs.

“Our intention will be to have a lot of discussion with the board about how we can get funding to move forward with it,” he said.

But the TTC already seems certain to miss out on at least one key aspect of the five-year plan.

The document says that starting in 2022, the agency will require 60 additional streetcars at a projected cost of $414.5 million, plus $85 million for a new maintenance and storage facility. The cars would be used to provide “more frequent and reliable service,” particularly on the busy 501 Queen, 504 King and 511 Bathurst routes.

Leary said Bombardier, which is supplying the TTC’s current order for new streetcars, is the only company in a position to deliver the additional cars by the target date. But he acknowledged the TTC would have to place an order for the vehicles soon to get them by the time they’re needed, and it has yet to do so.

“Knowing there is no funding ... it would be hard to say we’d get them” by 2022, he conceded.

Coun. Gord Perks (Ward 4, Parkdale-High Park), who doesn’t sit on the board but spoke at the meeting, claimed it was disingenuous for the TTC to present a service improvement plan and then not request funding for it.

He argued the TTC should ask council to find money to pay for the vehicles in its 2020 budget submission.

“By approving a service plan that they can’t possibly deliver, the TTC is lying to transit passengers and giving them a much rosier future than what they will actually get,” Perks said.

Bombardier is close to delivering the last of the current order’s 204 new cars, having supplied 199 so far, according to Leary. After well-documented delays that plagued earlier phases of the $1-billion vehicle contract, the company looks close to meeting the year-end deadline for delivering all of the cars.

A potential source for at least some of the five-year TTC plan’s required funding is the substantial property tax increase Mayor John Tory proposed last week.

The hike to the levy for Toronto’s city building fund is projected to raise about $6.6 billion to pay for housing and transit. But because the city has so many competing unfunded priorities, it’s not clear whether the increased revenue could be used to pay for the entirety of the TTC’s five-year plan. The tax hike is going to council for approval next week.

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Don Peat, a spokesperson for the mayor, said Tory has been clear that some of the additional tax revenue “will go toward tackling the TTC’s state of good repair backlog, which includes buying new subway cars, streetcars and buses.” But he didn’t say whether the mayor would support using it to pay for all of the TTC’s stated needs over the next five years.

Although TTC ridership has decreased since 2016, the transit agency expects that trend to reverse — and projects demand will grow by five per cent by 2024. The anticipated additional 35 million trips per year would increase ridership to about 560 million.

To keep up, in addition to the new streetcars the agency will also require about 140 new buses, which would bring the size of the bus fleet to 2,190. The additional vehicles would cost about $164 million.

Also included in the five-year plan is about $48 million to install priority bus lanes on up to five busy routes, $15 million to improve amenities at surface transit stops, and $58 million to implement bus queue jump lanes and transit signal priority at intersections.

In addition to those capital costs, the report says the TTC will require an additional $174 million in annual operating costs by 2024. The TTC’s requested budget this year was about $1.9 billion.

Ben Spurr is a Toronto-based reporter covering transportation. Reach him by email at bspurr@thestar.ca or follow him on Twitter: @BenSpurr

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