If you work the night shift and usually take the TTC to and from your job, you’re about to learn first-hand whether Mayor Rob Ford was sincere in his campaign promise to decrease taxes and the costs of running the city without making “major service cuts”.
The first lesson is learning how to define “major cuts”. If you think that only means cutting services that don’t affect you personally, you’re in for a surprise: You’re going to have to start planning another way to get around as early as next Sunday, May 8.
Next week, the TTC is decreasing service along 41 routes. Although the changes won’t affect the majority of passengers — most of us ride the TTC during rush hour — if you ride buses weekends and evenings after 7 p.m. these cuts are indeed “major”.
Earlier this year, TTC staff proposed reducing even more service to help balance its budget. It consulted with the public at a series of meetings in January that more than 300 people attended. The TTC says it listened to what to what people said and then reframed its proposals to lessen the cuts’ impact.
Its goal was to decrease the cost of providing service while affecting the fewest number of passengers. The changes are estimated to save the TTC about $4 million this year, while also allowing it to increase service along routes where passengers overcrowd the buses. Since the TTC isn’t getting any more funding from the city and its ridership is at record levels, it needs to ensure it can support as many riders as it can during peak periods, and worry less about people who ride the bus at lower-priority times of the week.
The TTC will re-allocate the resources it saves — by resources, it means the number of buses and people driving them — to improve rush-hour service later this year. That will help most of us who get around town by bus, streetcar and subway Mondays to Fridays during the day.
Whether these changes make financial sense is cold comfort if you work a job that doesn’t fall into the usual 9-to-5 category. You may have to start walking some long distances, or you may need to think about finding another way to get around. For those who can afford it, that may mean driving to work. For those who can’t, well, you’re probably stuck with waiting.
You can see a list of routes where the TTC is reducing service here.
