For the last 20 years, the TTC was supposed to have been building a world in which, by 2025, 65-year-old retiree Jane Field wouldn’t need to worry about getting the wheels of her power wheelchair stuck in the gap between the subway car and platform. She wouldn’t need to depend on the kindness and strength of strangers to move her to safety. And she certainly wouldn’t need to read a lengthy manual on how to navigate Toronto’s transit system as a disabled rider.

But that promised future has been delayed.

“Who else has to study a 44-page textbook before they take the TTC somewhere to a doctor’s appointment, or a movie night with a friend?” she asked in an interview from her home in early November. “That right there is a big red flag for me that says something’s not really accessible here.”

By January 1, 2025, every single TTC subway station is required to be compliant with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). In other words: fully accessible. That means having Braille and tactile pathways for visually impaired riders, closing the gap between a subway platform and a train for safe boarding, and, perhaps most critically, adding functional elevators to all stations instead of stairs or “out of order” signs.

The TTC has had 20 years to meet this goal, and for most of that time, it has insisted it was on track. As recently as last year, the agency told The Local that 55 of the system’s 75 stations were already accessible, and the rest would be in time for January 2025. But suddenly, this year, the TTC announced it wouldn’t make that timeline.

In September, TTC staff admitted in a report to the agency’s board that at least a dozen subway stations would not, in fact, finish elevator construction by the AODA deadline. Downtown stations like King, Spadina, Museum, Christie, and College are on the list, as are Islington, Warden, Lawrence, Old Mill, High Park, Greenwood, and Rosedale. (Summerhill’s completion date, according to the September update, is listed as “Q1 2025”, which may mean it hits the deadline).

“It’s very disappointing to sit here and bring this news to this board. We know the commitments that were made over the years,” TTC CEO Rick Leary told the agency board in September. “We have to be realistic with ourselves now that we’re not going to meet that mandate.”

According to the new timeline given by the TTC, nearly all of the outstanding stations will likely be finished between the spring of 2025 and the winter of 2026. The exception is Old Mill, where work on a major redevelopment project hasn’t even started. In a series of emails to The Local, as well as agency documents, the TTC blames a combination of poor capital funding, the COVID-19 pandemic, and difficulty finding skilled workers (and keeping them on the job), all coming to a head in the last few years.

For anyone who has difficulty navigating steep stairs, escalators, or ledges, these reasons are cold comfort. Anyone can be disabled, of course, but the likelihood of having a disability grows exponentially as people age. Nearly 500,000 seniors live in Toronto, according to city statistics, and in less than 20 years, that population is set to nearly double. In a rapidly aging city, missing the AODA deadline on Canada’s largest transit network means elderly and disabled Torontonians, who’ve waited two decades to freely enjoy their city, are forced to wait even longer.

The TTC’s accessibility efforts go as far back as 1990, and its current bundle of plans involve 47 different initiatives ranging from overhauling elevators at subway stations to installing tactile surfaces for visually impaired riders at bus stations. Between all of its upgrades, the TTC expects to spend a total of $1.6 billion by 2032. These include the $1.1 billion Easier Access Phase Three Program, started in 2007, to refit subway stations with elevators, alter station architecture, and replace mechanical and electrical connections.

Ron Buliung, a University of Toronto professor specializing in disability and transportation geography, says that for the most part, the TTC has put its money where its mouth is, and shown its work through publicly accessible documents. “It represents a serious commitment to accessibility retrofit,” Buliung says.

No construction project, particularly above the billion-dollar mark, ever runs exactly according to schedule. But what makes the failure to meet the 2025 deadline so striking is how long the TTC had to implement it—20 years—and that the agency seemed to have known problems were brewing long before publicly acknowledging them.

For the first seven years of this phase of the Easier Access program, the TTC seemed to make good progress. In fact, the original plan was to complete improvements by 2020 and leave five years of wiggle room between then and the AODA deadline. But the TTC’s capital budget for 2014-2023, negotiated a decade ago during Mayor Rob Ford’s term in office, cut $190 million from the project, as well as hundreds of millions for other TTC spending. In budget documents from the time, the TTC described the accessibility improvements as “very costly and mostly funded by debt.” The agency’s plan, the documents say, was to secure future funding from the Ontario government to support it.

It took two years for the TTC to receive enough money to get the Easier Access plan back on track, and staff warned the AODA deadline needed to be a priority for the agency’s capital spending going forward. But despite the apparent resolution of the funding crisis, several monthly reports from the agency’s CEOs, Andy Byford in 2017 and Rick Leary in 2018, indicated the TTC could miss its AODA deadline by nearly a year. Then, in 2019, Leary changed his tune, reporting to the CEO board that the agency was on track to hit its 2025 deadline—perhaps reflecting natural progress on the project, and attempts by the TTC to speed up its construction.

In the agency’s capital budget for 2020 to 2029, an additional $1.7 billion was set aside for infrastructure projects, including $528 million for phase three of the Easier Access project. However, the capital budget from 2020 shows the project was still missing a total of $280 million in necessary funding over a 15-year period. All of that money was expected to come after the 2025 deadline.

The lack of transparency, of answers, and the sudden announcements going back and forth on the deadline, hasn’t inspired confidence among disability advocates. David Lepofsky, chairperson of the AODA Alliance, a disability consumer advocacy group, remembers listening to a 2017 presentation by Byford in which he declared the TTC would be fully accessible by 2025, garnering applause. That statement seems suspicious to him now. “So the question is—were they lying then?” Lepofsky says. “Or did something happen between then and now? And if so, what was it?”

What makes the failure to meet the 2025 deadline so striking is how long the TTC had to implement it—20 years—and that the agency seemed to have known problems were brewing long before publicly acknowledging them.

In a statement from the TTC to The Local, a spokesperson for the agency pointed to a number of snags that forced it to miss the AODA deadline. “As most people will appreciate, what we’re undertaking is a large and complex task,” they wrote.

Most of the early stations to receive upgrades were simpler than the ones the TTC are undertaking now, with the spokesperson pointing to the complexity of the grade-separated bus bays at Warden and Islington as an obstacle to elevator upgrades. But TTC staff had warned about backlogging complex projects as early as 2016, saying in a report that the budget for this phase of Easier Access was based on “less complex earlier projects,” and that the actual costs would be much higher due to access and property rights issues.

The TTC also didn’t have enough money, despite the hundreds of millions committed in 2016. “Prior to 2020, we simply didn’t have the capital funding in place to complete the program,” the statement said. The pandemic didn’t help, affecting material costs and the capacity of city bureaucrats to approve building permits. Neither did the rise in construction material costs and labour strikes in the years following, according to the TTC statement and public documents.

The result, unless construction timelines improve dramatically, is a blown deadline in contravention of provincial law.

“That’s why we’re here today, giving you 16 months, not showing up last minute,” Leary told the TTC board in September. “We’ve tried to give advance warning.”

Given that this phase of Easier Access launched in 2007, and that the TTC reported it still had 20 stations to go as of last year, The Local pressed the TTC on when they realized they wouldn’t be able to hit the deadline. The spokesperson simply replied: “This year.”

The TTC’s September report promises to start an “interim service” plan for all TTC stations that remain accessible beyond the AODA deadline date. That may include bus service to and from nearby accessible stations, a stopgap that simply may not be tenable for many elderly or disabled people given the state of TTC delays today, as well as Toronto’s infamously bad traffic.

At the provincial level, there are no apparent consequences for missing the AODA deadline, which calls into question the efficacy and point of the deadline altogether. We contacted Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation for comment. It declined, but recommended we contact the Ministry for Seniors and Accessibility, which is responsible for enforcing accessibility laws. No one responded to multiple emails requesting an interview about the TTC’s admission it would miss the AODA deadline.

Activists on the frontlines of the accessibility movement have also been shut out. Lepofsky—who is also a lawyer, and the reason there are audio announcements on subways and streetcars—hasn’t heard anything. The AODA Alliance used to have extensive dealings with past Ministers of Seniors and Accessibility. Since Premier Doug Ford’s last election, the organization has heard nothing. “The minister’s office does not answer emails or letters from us,” Lepofsky says.