Passengers won’t get a free ride on the new Toronto-York Spadina subway extension, but it seems contractors and bureaucrats and their masters will. That was the only possible conclusion when word came down last week that the cost of building the TYSSE — as it’s now called — has risen $400 million. And so a project originally pegged at $2.6 billion will now cost $3.2 billion. Given that there’s still at least a year to go before opening day, set for early 2017, there will further opportunities for increases.

Excuses abound: Work began 18 months late, the design was changed, contractors performed poorly . . . the usual stuff. Usual, that is, in Toronto, a city where public projects routinely go over budget and take longer than promised. Indeed, the TTC and the public sector in general as an appalling record of building and delivering on time.

Little wonder that people — taxpayers — have grown so cynical about government and its agencies. Politicians haven’t helped much, either. When they’re not pandering, they’re prevaricating.

Clearly, Toronto has a problem. Actually, it has a number of problems starting with a tendering process that encourages and rewards lowballing estimates. Figures are chosen, announced and duly carved in stone. They become the benchmark by which success is measured. Often, though, they are largely notional, a starting point, an amount below which the price will never dip.

In some jurisdictions, bids are chosen from the middle of the pack. The most expensive proposals are discarded, but so are the lowest. The idea is to avoid the cheapest-is-best mindset that prevails close to home. There’s also a better chance, however marginal, that these estimates will be closer to the mark.

In Toronto’s case, estimates aren’t taken seriously, except by the public. But because they represent little more than an opening gambit, they rarely reflect reality. Cost overruns are as inevitable as the perception of failure.

When those overruns are caused by the public sector, whether political and/or bureaucratic, people respond, understandably, with anger. The St. Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way, though transformative, is still thought of as a fiasco because its botched construction lasted fully five years.

When philanthropists Judy and Wilmot Matthews gave $25 million last year for a uniquely innovative scheme to turn space beneath the Gardiner Expressway into a multi-faceted urban destination, they made one stipulation: it had to be done by July, 2017. In other words, the city has no choice but to get its act together, or else.

Political interference, however well intentioned, can be a huge obstacle. In Toronto, where transit plans come and go with each passing mayor, chances of getting anything done are low to nil. The process unfolds in a state of permanent flux. Light rail becomes a subway; a subway becomes light rail. Much-needed subway lines are dismissed for political concerns; lines through low-density neighbourhoods are preferred for the same reasons.

In a system where political expediency takes precedence over policy, it’s easy to forget the passengers in whose name our time and treasure are squandered. As David Quarmby, “designer” of Transport for London, that city’s super-transit agency, explains it, though the mayor chairs and appoints the organization’s board, the focus on passengers keeps players on the same page.

“The whole ethic of the TfL is built around passengers,” he says. “It eliminates the squabbling; the results have been spectacular.”

It helps, too, that TfL has sole responsibility for London transit. As the agency’s history proves, a single authority with a strong governance structure can survive even the transition as dramatic as the one from Ken Livingstone to Boris Johnson. As Toronto’s experience makes clear, that could never happen here.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca