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TTC's 2025 budget freezes fares, increases service and safety, invests in new vehicles and subway maintenance



Last week, Friday, January 10, the Toronto Transit Commission — the TTC’s board — approved the transit agency’s 2025 operating and capital budgets. According to a TTC news release, the budgets “freeze fares for the second straight year, add the most service in a decade, improve system safety and cleanliness and invest more than $16 billion in long-term capital projects.”

The TTC says, “The $2.8-billion combined operating budgets for both the TTC conventional system and Wheel-Trans represent a 6.5-per-cent increase over the approved 2024 budgets and ensures safe, reliable, and affordable service for TTC [passengers].”

The operating budget:

  • Freezes TTC fares at 2023 prices.
  • Allocates $33 million to preserve and build on service increases that the TTC made in 2024 and address greater demand from passengers demand weekends and evenings and challenges from road congestion. Overall, the TTC says, it’s increasing service hours to pre-pandemic levels.
  • Increases Wheel-Trans funding by $14.2 million.
  • Establishes a pilot project along 11 routes to reduce bunching and gapping of vehicles in real-time by enhancing on-street route management.
  • Funds operating and maintenance costs for the opening of Line 5 Eglinton and Line 6 finch West in 2025 and full-year operations for the Line 3 Scarborough bus-replacement service.
  • Creates a new subway-station-management pilot program to add more staff and improve cleanliness at six priority locations (Scarborough Town Centre bus terminal, and Kennedy, Dundas, Finch, Spadina, and Lansdowne stations).

The TTC explains that the recommended 2025-2034 capital budget and plan of $16.395 billion is $5.1 billion greater than last year’s capital budget and increases funding by the largest amount since 2019. Almost $4.9 billion of the increase supports crucial, previously unfunded state-of-good-repair (SOGR) projects, such as track safety and reduced speed zones, and projects to make all stations accessible.

These investments reduce the TTC’s SOGR funding backlog by almost 50 per cent from $8.2 billion by 2033 to a projected $4.3 billion over the next 10 years.

Highlights of the capital budget and plan include:

  • 55 new subway trains to replace the current trains along Line 2 Bloor - Danforth with $1.5 billion matching Government of Canada and Province of Ontario funding ($2.3 billion total project cost).
  • approximately 700 eBuses and 950 charging systems, totalling $1.2 billion over the next five years, with a total project cost of approximately $2.4 billion.
  • bus, streetcar and subway fleet overhaul programs, directly resulting from the $500 million funding that the City of Toronto has reallocated from the costs it is saving from provincial funding to maintain the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway.
  • critical subway systems infrastructure (signals, electrical, communication) and escalator / elevator overhaul /replacement programs, with $368 million in extra funding.
  • climate adaptation and resiliency, efficiency measures and projects that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, key initiatives of the TTC’s Innovation and Sustainability Strategy, with more than $67 million in new funding.
  • targeted station / transit priority investments of $15 million over 2025 and 2026 to improve station conditions and aesthetics; to pilot a public address system upgrade and station lighting retrofit at six key stations and install red paint treatment on city roads, intersections and TTC stations to improve transit priority and safety and support fare compliance at station entrances.
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