Ask anyone who has relied on the King streetcar for their commute: taking the TTC can be a slog. The grinding slowness of public transit on King prompted two entrepreneurs to offer private bus service from Liberty Village to Union station last month. They now pledge to expand their business, LineSix, to other underserved areas of the city, beginning with The Junction. And little wonder: all across Toronto, riders complain about jam-packed subways and erratic busses.

Scrappy startups are hardly going to replace an institution with a typical weekday ridership of some 1.6 million. But the experience of other big cities suggests that the private sector might yet have a role to play in improving the embattled transit commission.

In London, Tokyo and elsewhere, governments have outsourced the operation of buses and subways, often saving money and improving service in the process. Ontario’s provincial government has experimented with the same system, contracting out six of seven GO Train lines to Bombardier in 2008.

In Toronto’s mayoral contest, however, the subject has barely been broached; the issue of featured more prominently in the provincial election campaign this spring. Summing up his philosophy on the issue, then-Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak told a CTV interviewer that he would happily deliver transit contracts to “whoever can deliver the best quality.”

“If somebody, Bombardier or others, can give us better quality at a better price, I’d like to take that deal and I’m sure most people would too,” he said.

Ben Dachis, a policy analyst at the conservative C.D. Howe Institute, has long advocated for outsourcing Toronto Transit Commission lines. He argues that a move toward outsourcing would look nothing like the wild west of private streetcar lines that prevailed around the turn of the 20th century.

His ideal system would see “private companies providing the service on behalf of the government — paid by the government. How much they get paid would be determined by competitive contracting.”

Dachis said such an arrangement would broadly resemble the outsourcing of garbage in Toronto’s west end, which began in 2012 and had saved the city nearly $12 million by December 2013, according to a city staff report.

The most common knock against private companies running public transit routes is that profit-motivated businesses would neglect low-density areas and “cherry pick” the juiciest lines. This is what happened in early 20th century Toronto, when the Toronto Railway Company refused to serve newly annexed areas of the city such as the Danforth and St. Clair Ave., forcing the city to run its own streetcars along the developing thoroughfares. Dachis notes that this scenario could be avoided by paying subsidies to companies that operate low-frequency routes.

And rather than ceding fare revenue to the operators, the TTC could continue gathering three dollars a rider at the fare box, pay the operator a subsidy worth $2.50 per rider, and let the company profit margin by keeping its costs low. The deal would be a “win-win,” Dachis said.

That is, broadly, the system London uses for its lauded bus system, which has become the most frequently cited success story for the contracting-out model. In 1985, the city began placing bus routes up for tender. Now, every bus in the city is operated by a private contractor. A public transit authority, Transport for London, oversees the network and regulates fares, vehicle types, and frequency of service. The result is embodied in the actual buses: most are still red double-deckers, but plastered with Metroline, Arriva, and London United logos.

By most measures, the experiment has worked: bus ridership is up about 60 per cent since 2000, and 83 per cent of bus riders are satisfied with their service.

Parts of the GTA contract out their mass transit, too. Apart from GO, The Miller Group operates more than 150 buses in York Region, although labour strife has plagued the service in recent years.

In Toronto, privatizing parts of the TTC seems like a remote possibility. Few municipal politicians, and no major mayoral candidates, have proposed devolving any TTC operations to the private sector.

Andy Byford, chief executive officer of the TTC, said he doubts contractors could do a better job on difficult routes anyway. “Could Bombardier run a better bus service along Dufferin? No, I don’t see why they could,” he said. “The problems on that route are germane to any provider — it’s a long route, it’s horrendously congested.”

Having lived in London for 19 years, Byford noticed a sharp improvement in the quality of bus service. But he attributes that to greater investment under successive mayoral regimes that emphasized surface transit.

“The bus service has improved exponentially over the years. But I’m not sure you could attribute that to contracting out,” he said.

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Noting that some peripheral operations, like bathroom cleaning and overnight bus washing, have already been contracted out, he dismissed the idea of outsourcing core TTC functions. The transit system runs better under the aegis of a single authority, Byford said. “If we get a big failure on the subway, on fairly short notice we can put together a bus shuttle, because they’re our buses.”

For Ari Goldkind, a mayoral candidate with a wildly ambitious, $57 billion transit plan, the focus should be on improving the current public system.

“I think it’s a testament to our failed leadership that we would even have to consider going down this road,” he said. “To me, we go that route because we’re failing to deliver what government is supposed to deliver.”