The last TTC Metropasses are on sale now. The first one ever was presented to then-Metro chairman Paul Godfrey on April Fool’s Day in 1980, the launch of a pilot project to see if a monthly all-you-can-ride pass would work. They sold almost 700,000 of them in the very first month, at $26 each, and the pass has been a TTC success story ever since. In recent years, Metropass holders have accounted for about 40 per cent of the TTC’s customers and more than half of its rides.

But now they’re being replaced by the Presto fare card developed and implemented by the provincial government. You can get a monthly pass rate on your Presto card. I’ve had mine since the start of the month and it mostly works fine. But the story of its replacement of the TTC Metropass might serve as a cautionary tale for the larger transit debate in Toronto.

The Presto card was forced onto the TTC by the provincial government back around the start of this decade. It is more expensive for consumers than the systems it replaces (requiring them to pay $6 for the card itself on top of fares). It requires consumers, as well, to either register it online or top it up at machines rather than simply buying one at the collector’s booth. It requires a bunch of tapping on at vehicles where the old passes were either waved at collectors or simply held in your pocket on proof-of-payment routes.

As the auditor general of the province and a bunch of TTC reports have made clear, it has been less than smooth on the administrative and operations side of things, too. It has cost well over $500 million to implement on the TTC — including $487 million spent by Metrolinx and $60 million for fare gates spent by the TTC — and its rollout on the TTC has taken years. The gates and terminals frequently malfunction. The back-end software requires frequent cumbersome updates, and checking cards causes lineups in proof-of-payment enforcement situations.

So: foisted on the TTC by the province, more expensive and complicated for users, more administratively complex for the service provider, taking years longer to implement than scheduled, at a cost hundreds of millions of dollars above what was originally projected.

This is a situation we might want to keep in mind. We now have a provincial government that seems set on seizing control of the subway system from the TTC. We also have proposals from helpful outside organizations suggesting more regional control of transit — think “Superlinx,” as a recent Board of Trade proposal had it.

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Final Metropass goes on sale Friday

Legislation for province to take over TTC subway could come in early 2019, transportation minister says

Toronto has ‘alarming’ lack of transit funding compared to other cities, report finds

As all this discussion is going on, a look at Toronto’s transit system and its needs, and how it compares to other transit agencies in North America, was released this month by the advocacy group CodeRedTO. It looks at the funding, growth and performance of the TTC and of the transit systems in a bunch of other big-city systems in North America: Los Angeles, Chicago, Montreal, Vancouver, Boston, Houston, and Washington, D.C. I’d encourage anyone even slightly interested to read it online at coderedto.com.

But a couple of noteworthy things jump out. First of all, compared to most transit systems, the TTC gets astonishingly little subsidy from taxpayers. For instance, Los Angeles’s transit agency gets 79.2 per cent of its budget from subsidies, Chicago gets 55 per cent from subsidies, Vancouver 60.2 per cent. The TTC? It gets only 30.4 per cent of its budget from subsidies. More than anywhere else, Toronto riders pay for transit service through fares.

Correspondingly, the TTC spends way less than most others on providing service. The TTC’s operating budget works out to $2.10 per trip taken on it. Only Montreal ($2.12) is in the same ballpark. Chicago’s system spends $3.18 per ride, Vancouver’s $4.78, Boston’s $6.81, and Los Angeles’ $11.77. Per ride, these other transit agencies are doubling and tripling and even quintupling what we spend on the TTC.

Which leads us to the other fascinating thing: despite the budget implications, the TTC is the ridership king. Chicago is a far larger Metro area than Toronto and has a subway and elevated train network that makes ours look puny. Los Angeles is a city twice as large as we are. But Toronto has more riders than either of them, or any of the others studied, by a margin of hundreds of millions of trips per year.

You can see this in another chart showing that a bigger percentage of the GTA population commutes by transit than in any of the other cities.

I complain about the TTC here all the time, and people across the city are all too aware of the systems shortcomings and overcrowding and problems. But my conclusion looking at this report is that the TTC is working a kind of transit miracle, serving way more people with far fewer resources than comparable transit systems.

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If I were a senior government official looking at this with an eye to helping it do even better, the solution would seem obvious. Give the TTC more money and get the heck out of the way. Because they have proven able to spend money very efficiently to attract riders and provide them with service

And if that weren’t convincing enough, I could just look at the transition from the Metropass to the Presto card to see how provincial improvements on TTC initiatives turn out.

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