“Getting information out of Metrolinx is like pulling teeth”: Blogger Steve Munro has been calling out Toronto’s transit problems for 20 years

With his leather jackets, long white hair and Santa Claus beard, 77-year-old Steve Munro has gained a reputation as the friendly punk wizard of Toronto transit nerdom. This month, he celebrated 20 years of his blog, stevemunro.ca, where he’s been diligently crunching the numbers on the TTC’s performance, recording bunched-up streetcars, delayed subways, sluggish lines and equipment failures all across Toronto’s sprawling transit network. A firm but fair commentator, the retired TDSB IT operations manager has become respected by professionals, reporters and activists for his unsparing critiques of the TTC, which are tempered by his obvious love of the city’s transit network and sincere hopes for its success. We caught up with Munro to reflect on two decades of transit-watching, his read on the internal machinations of the TTC and whether he accepts the title of Toronto transit Yoda.

Congratulations on 20 years of TTC blogging. What does that anniversary mean to you? I’ve written over 3,000 articles in that time, which works out to one every other day. It’s a lot. When I first got involved in politics in the 1970s, the press corps was much bigger than it is now. At the same time, there was this renewed interest in cities and how they worked. That’s a big part of the reason I started the blog: there was all this interest, but not enough reporters were covering it. Over 20 years, it’s been great to see a whole new generation of city activists come up. I remember when Councillor Gord Perks was a long-haired, wild-eyed hippie Greenpeace activist. Like many of us, he’s aged and evolved. But I’m happy the tradition hasn’t died.

When did you first discover your love for transit? As a child, I was a real rail fan. I mean, I still am, but I was then too. I liked streetcars and trains and all that. One of my regular treats was going out riding the streetcar system with my dad. I was born in 1948, so we’re talking about the system as it was in the ’50s. I got a real sense of the city beyond my own neighbourhood, at Mount Pleasant and Eglinton.

How did all that riding around transform into activism? In 1970, the TTC proposed converting the St. Clair streetcar into a trolley bus—an electric bus that gets power from the overhead streetcar lines—despite not having enough buses to service it, meaning the quality of service was going to go way down. At the time, there was a sea change going on in Toronto politics: David Crombie became mayor in 1972, and there was the whole movement to stop the Spadina Expressway. The TTC had planned to remove all the streetcars downtown by 1980, which was when a Queen Street subway was supposed to open. Plans changed for that, but the TTC started nibbling at the streetcar lines anyways. My dad was always politically involved, and so I helped create a group called Streetcars for Toronto. Some people mistakenly say I formed that group myself—I didn’t, I just helped.

Related: Toronto drivers blocked streetcar tracks over 300 times in just 11 days this winter

These days, the streetcars you fought to save are a source of controversy: they’re being criticized as slow and unreliable. Is that accurate? And what’s going on? It’s valid, but things have evolved over time. When we were fighting for the St. Clair streetcars, service was much, much better than it is today. Even the “old” CLRV streetcars, which were retired in 2020, were good and fast. But the new cars have some problems. One is that they’re slower to load: they have lots of doors, and each set opens and closes quite slowly. You lose a bit of time at every stop.

The operators also drive them more conservatively. There are videos of the old streetcars just flying through downtown. Back when we were fighting to keep them, the TTC didn’t have this ridiculous policy of tiptoeing through every intersection. That’s a result of bad maintenance of the tracks: the system that operates the electric switches at each junction has been unreliable for decades. The TTC has had a project to replace it for ages, but it’s only partway done. As a result, there’s a system-wide slow order on every intersection: the driver has to come right up to the stop, look to see if the switch is set right and then proceed at a walking pace through the intersection. They’re also now stopping to look out for left-turning cars. And they’re running streetcars less often. It’s been a death by 1,000 cuts.

With all that said, are streetcars even well-suited to Toronto anymore? It’s been extraordinarily frustrating to watch a good system get run down like this. There are streetcar lines all over the world, and new ones are being built all the time, and they don’t seem to have these problems. Those are cities and transit systems that want the streetcars to work. Here, though, the TTC always comes up with excuses: “They’re stuck in traffic! Woe is us!” But these things are manageable. It’s not magic. I started doing detailed analyses of TTC service back in 2007 because I had a gut feeling that the TTC’s excuses were a load of bunk. And sure enough, even the buses are screwed up just as badly. It’s not just a streetcar problem: everyone knows the Dufferin bus is a mess, but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of buses.

Related: A timeline of every single Eglinton Crosstown disaster, from 2010 until today

One of the unique things about your work is how often you take aim at the TTC’s internal culture. What’s the problem there? There’s a very strong tendency within the TTC to say, “Whatever happens, it’s not our fault.” It’s as though a plague of locusts had descended on Yonge and Eglinton and delayed the subway for three hours. But many of the things they claim to be unable to control are things they just haven’t bothered to control. They could space streetcars out more evenly, but they don’t. It’s also a very siloed organization: different groups don’t talk to each other. I spoke with Andy Byford about this when he was TTC CEO, and he was wrestling with it. Unfortunately, I feel that his successor, Rick Leary, let a lot of that work fall to the wayside and cultivated a culture of blaming employees for problems. That led to a real distrust of management, which is reflected in foot-dragging among staff when it comes to implementing big changes.

These days, the TTC isn’t the only transit organization in town: Metrolinx is building lines like Finch West and Eglinton and then handing them off to the TTC to run. How does that change the game? Getting information out of Metrolinx is like pulling teeth—your teeth, not theirs. It’s a very secretive organization, and anything they say has to have a positive spin. Even when a train derailed at Union last week, they called it a “signal problem.” Of course there’s a signal problem—a train crashed into it! It’s also a very political organization. When Doug Ford was first elected premier, he did all this sabre-rattling about Metrolinx being a cesspool of Liberals that he’d clean out. So they made themselves Dougie’s subway consulting company, and now his construction management company. Of course, they don’t build anything themselves: they contract that out to construction companies, which they then fight with over money. And frankly, there are some people at Metrolinx who have an extremely arrogant attitude toward the TTC. It’s like, “We know how to build subways and you don’t, so bugger off,” which doesn’t help matters at all.

Related: A behind-the-curtain look at the insatiable political ambitions of Doug Ford

The Eglinton Line is now, at long last, open. Have you had a chance to ride it? I have. Overall, it’s not bad. The trains are reasonably reliable, though they tend to run two at a time, which is disappointing—and classic for the TTC. It means the first is packed to the roof while the second is half empty. That’s something they should know how to fix. The stations themselves are unbelievably boring—compared with what it cost to dig them that far underground, adding some more art would have been peanuts. They’ll need to make the trains run faster and give them transit signal priority, which the city says will happen by May. Once it does, the line will be considerably better than it is right now. But why do we have to wait? It’s not like they just finished this thing last week.

In your work, you’ve become known as a tough but fair critic of the TTC: you clearly love the city’s transit, but you don’t pull your punches when it’s lacking. How do you balance those two impulses? It’s tricky. I can be a bit more acerbic on Twitter or Bluesky, when I’m down to just a 220-character limit. While I don’t see myself as a journalist in the traditional sense, I do have a certain sense of responsibility to write fairly. But, if there’s an issue, I’m going to say so. The city painted Bathurst with this terrible red paint. If I think it should be green, I’m going to say, “Here are the 5,000 reasons why.” By doing that, I think I’ve gained the respect of most people on the professional side. They’ll ask me my opinion, I’ll lay it out and they’ll take it. It’s the same with the media and members of the public. They have reason to believe I’m not going to screw them around and give them the verbal equivalent of clickbait.

In your opinion, what’s the most important thing the TTC should do to get itself out of its current slump? If the quality of service sucks, it doesn’t matter if the fares are frozen of if there’s some whiz-bang line coming in 10 years—the system has to work well now. No excuses. I want the Queen car to run well now, not 10 years from now. So the TTC has to work on service quality, and that means grabbing hold of the system and asking, “What do we need in order to fix this?” Aside from that, the city has a plan to reduce emissions by 2040. Well, that means buying a lot more buses and streetcars, which will need new garages and so forth. To figure all that out, the city has to start now. So plan for the long term, but in the meantime, figure out how to improve the TTC with what we’ve got—because that’s all there is.

The TTC is mired in a budget crisis that has left maintenance issues to pile up across the system. How is it supposed to find a way out? Oh, man, how to talk about this briefly? A big chunk of the TTC’s operating budget got taken off its hands once the province took over the Ontario Line and Finch West and Eglinton LRTs. But the capital budget, which is for big overhauls and expansions, is full of projects showing up faster than the TTC can pay for them. The subway is old and needs a new signal system. We’re on our third batch of new trains. They want to put doors on subway platforms to keep people off the tracks. But we can’t afford to do everything, and that means prioritizing, which the TTC has been bad at. Their strategic planning committee isn’t looking at the big picture, and the board doesn’t have input into all of the decisions made by management. The result is that they never sit down, put all the options on the table and decide which ones to actually do.

You’ve been called the Yoda of Toronto transit nerds. Do you accept that title? Let’s put it this way: I can’t cause streetcars to levitate merely by closing my eyes and using the Force. If I could, I’d have helped GO Transit put that train back on the tracks. But it’s funny—if you’ve been around for as long as I have, doing this activism for 50 years and the blog for 20, you come to know where the bodies are buried. When Andy Byford was TTC CEO, I’d be sitting in the gallery of TTC board meetings at city hall, and they’d be trying to remember how something happened in the TTC’s history. Andy would look over to me and say, “Steve, do you remember?” And I would! It’s the same with people in community groups: being able to remember things that happened before they were born gives me this grand old man reputation. Someone will pose a question, and I’ll be able to answer. I’ll sound absolutely brilliant, and most of the time, it’s not BS.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.