You didn’t want to be riding the Toronto subway system on Tuesday morning. Breakdowns, signal problems and dangerous overcrowding at the Bloor/Yonge and St. George transfer stations. Even the Toronto Transit Commission called the service “abysmal.”

Wednesday morning brought fresh problems. A cracked rail at Bloor station forced trains to slow to a crawl, making thousands late for work.

This is what you get after years – decades, really – of underfunding Toronto’s transit system and a collective failure to build subways where they’re needed most.

It’s what you get when politicians make low-taxes-at-any-cost their top priority and all levels of government fail to come up with the money to pay for first-class transit in a fast-growing city.

The TTC went out of its way to stress that the problems that hit the system during the Tuesday morning commute weren’t a result of lack of money. A “perfect storm” of breakdowns crippled the Bloor-University line, it said, resulting in masses of riders abandoned on packed platforms. It was ugly.

But step back a bit and the picture becomes clearer, though no less ugly. It’s more than a couple of bad days. Over-crowding at the subway’s choke points is chronic, and it will only become worse as more riders pour in from the newly opened stations on the Spadina line extension to Vaughan.

It’s obvious that the much-discussed Downtown Relief Line, which would let subway riders bypass Bloor/Yonge on their way to the central business district, is badly needed. It would ease the crushing pressure on that one crucial transfer point.

Everyone agrees – in principle. The mayor and city council support it. Andy Byford, as he bade farewell to Toronto and the TTC last month on his way to tackling New York City’s transit problems, said providing relief for the Yonge line must be the commission’s “top priority.”

But, hey, why rush? The politicians and planners have been debating some form of a relief line to downtown for fully a century. Since at least the mid-1980s they’ve been drawing up detailed plans (one was called Network 2011 – on the rosy assumption that it and other lines would be in place by that year, now well in the rear-view mirror).

Instead, the TTC has been opening beautifully designed new subway stations in the suburbs while the relief line to downtown, the line transit users need most, is still a distant dream.

At the moment, the official goal is to get it done by 2031 – the year when the experts predict the Yonge-University line will be full to capacity. Judging by this week’s mess, they are being very optimistic in putting the coming crisis so far in the future.

More to the point, the only money now committed to the line is $150 million from the provincial government for planning and designing it. There’s no actual government funding in place for building the project, which has a price-tag estimated at between $6.2 billion and $8.3 billion.

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And that’s for a line that would come south from the Danforth and stop at University Ave. A more complete plan would extend it westward to accommodate the increase in commuter traffic that’s now being dealt with from those neighbourhoods by such catch-up measures as the pilot project that’s getting streetcars moving faster along King St.

Transit riders shouldn’t put up with the kind of shoddy service and dangerous over-crowding that we saw this week. Tuesday’s breakdown gave us a glimpse into the not-too-distant future, and it’s not pretty. City council should make sure the TTC has the budget it needs to make improvements. And most importantly, governments need to make the downtown relief line a real priority – complete with dedicating the money to actually build it.