The Toronto Model for Transit
Induced demand is real for transit too
From the end of the Second World War to 1970, every major transit system in North America lost riders, except one. While Chicago lost 38% of its ridership, Washington 40%, and Philadelphia 41%, the Toronto Transit Commission somehow managed to grow.
What’s most striking is that throughout the 1950s, including after its first subway opened in 1954, Toronto was following pretty much the same trajectory of decline as those American cities. But then something happened to change the story entirely.
On Finch Avenue East in the postwar suburbs of North York and Scarborough, a bus (both express and local) is scheduled to come better than every three minutes during rush hour, every four minutes through the middle of the day, and about every six minutes even at 11 at night. Of course it’s not always right on schedule, but even when buses bunch, there’s almost always one every few minutes. Even after midnight, it’s every half hour. It runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on a road lined with the backyard fences of bungalows and the parking lots of strip malls selling discount furniture and bubble tea. On an average weekday, about 38,700 people ride it, which is considerably more than any bus route in New York City.
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According to conventional planning wisdom, this bus should not exist. A 2012 Ontario Ministry of Transportation report defines a minimum density of 50 jobs and residents per hectare as the threshold required to justify basic bus service every 20 to 30 minutes. The density along much of Finch East is well below that. If that standard had been applied in 1963 when the Finch bus was created, it never would have been more than a limited service for people with no alternative. And yet here it is, carrying more riders daily than entire light rail systems in American cities that spent billions building them.
Finch East isn’t unique. Wilson, Steeles West, Don Mills, Jane, Lawrence East, and many others all run through neighbourhoods that look, to any honest observer, pretty much like the suburbs of any other North American city, with strip malls, cul-de-sacs, and garages. They’re predominantly middle-class communities with high car ownership, and while they have some high-rise apartments, those came after the transit success. The transit that shouldn’t attract many riders has attracted an awful lot of them.
Toronto’s historic transit success has a mythology, and like most mythologies, it’s mostly wrong.
The standard version gives credit to Jane Jacobs, who arrived in 1968 and helped stop the Spadina Expressway in 1971. Toronto chose people over cars and transit over highways. The rest followed naturally. It’s a good story and it no doubt helped, but the problem is that Toronto’s transit revival began a decade before Jacobs arrived. The year the TTC broke away from the continental pattern of collapse was 1963, when Jacobs was still in Greenwich Village and Spadina was beginning construction.
The key event of 1963 wasn’t a highway cancellation. It was an expansion of the TTC’s suburban bus service as a political sop to suburban elected officials who really wanted the elimination of the double fare outside the old City of Toronto, a move that the TTC leadership long resisted. The 1963 service expansion created a grid of routes along the old concession roads of Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke, putting a bus within walking distance of nearly every new house on a cul-de-sac in the fast-growing new suburbs.
Nobody expected it to work. The TTC’s own staff were certain it was a financial disaster in the making. Everyone knew that bus routes into undeveloped suburban territory were an inevitable money-loser. But within six months, the new services were astonishingly covering their costs. Within a few years, they were among the most financially productive in the system. Consultants had projected 8% ridership growth between 1962 and 1972; the actual figure was 28.7%.
The people who moved to the suburbs for a house with a big yard turned out, in enormous numbers, to be willing to walk out to the main road and catch the bus, as long as the bus came often enough that they could count on it.
That’s the Toronto model—it’s not about multibillion dollar megaprojects. Everyone knows Toronto’s subway map is much less impressive than Washington’s or San Francisco’s, but Toronto has far more riders. The Toronto model is simply a grid of frequent buses running along the old concession roads, built not from visionary planning but from political compromise and institutional necessity, succeeding far beyond anyone’s expectations. The lesson isn’t complicated: If transit is frequent and convenient enough—even if it’s slow and sometimes unreliable—even many people who can afford a car will choose to use it. It’s not a complex lesson, but it’s one that much of North America needs to learn.
The bus story is great. But Toronto also has some really good bus-metro suburban interchanges, so it's the smooth modal transition as well