Transit commission appears to give up on customer satisfaction in Toronto

It’s official. When it comes to customer satisfaction, the Toronto Transit Commission appears to have given up. In the TTC CEO’s latest monthly report, the customer satisfaction target was revised downward to 70 per cent from a previous target of 84 per cent. Yet despite drastically reducing its target, the TTC fell beneath it.

The latest report only covers data up until March (the TTC’s data reporting capabilities are apparently as slow as the transit system itself), and in this first report with the lower customer satisfaction target, the customer satisfaction rate was only 67 per cent.

Yet the breakdown of this 67 per cent is curious. The TTC reports customer satisfaction of 64 per cent for the subway system, 64 per cent for the bus, and 57 per cent for streetcars. If customer satisfaction was between 57 and 64 per cent for each of the three modes of transportation individually, how can the overall customer satisfaction rate be 67 per cent? Maybe there’s a fourth group pulling up the overall average: customers who are satisfied because they didn’t take the subway, bus or streetcar at all.

In addition to missing its customer satisfaction targets, the TTC is also missing its ridership and budget targets. “The year-to-date TTC Conventional ridership and passenger revenue are 6.0% and 5.5% below budget, respectively,” reads the report, “resulting in a $13.6 million year-to-date budget shortfall.” Notably, this budget shortfall is only for the first quarter of 2026. At this rate, the TTC is tracking towards a full year revenue shortfall of $54.4 million.

To make matters worse, not only is the TTC performing worse than its budget, it’s performing worse than last year. In the first quarter of 2026, the TTC’s ridership was down 3.6 per cent and passenger revenue down 2.7 per cent versus the first quarter of 2025.

According to other measures, too, the TTC is performing badly. Its on-time performance target is 90 per cent, but buses in March were only on time 75 per cent of the time, and streetcars only 63 per cent of the time. With regards to the subway, only Line 4—the shortest subway line—met the target, with 98.7 per cent on-time performance. The busiest one, Line 1, was below target at 85.9 per cent and Line 2 was also below target at 87.6 per cent (there’s no longer a Line 3; it was closed in 2023).

In the private sector, consistent underperformance is unsustainable because competition drives firms out of business if they are inefficient and do not serve customers well, but this is not the case in the government sector. Despite its horrendous performance metrics, rather than working to improve service and timeliness, the TTC is dedicating resources to pet projects such as the “Indigenous wayfinding” project, which proposed to use animal icons to identify routes and direction instead of numbers and colours. This would “reduce rider confusion through stress reduction” and “decolonize how people orient themselves.” Councillor Paul Ainslie, who says he has the second-largest Indigenous area in the GTA, said his constituents were not excited by it and a few were actually insulted.

Thankfully, in a rare moment of sanity, Toronto City Council did not agree to make any such changes to TTC signage. Perhaps the TTC can now work to improve its dismal below-target performance on customer satisfaction, ridership, revenue and timeliness. But revising its customer satisfaction target—and still missing it—solves nothing.