In the 2012 budget, we were challenged by the City of Toronto to reduce our budget by 10%. That means our subsidy is to be cut by 10% in 2012.
That's at a time when our ridership is growing at 3%, as I mentioned. In order for us to cut 10% from our budget, we first had to address the $20 million increase in our costs by having additional ridership. The bottom line is that we had to cut $85 million from our budget. We did that by reducing our staffing. We're going through a downsizing at the Toronto Transit Commission as we speak. We are cutting service, and we will make a fare increase proposal to our board in December.
So we are going to meet our 10% reduction. It's clearly not intuitive. Most big cities around the world would be thankful for an increase in ridership. Every small city in the world would want that as well. Clearly, we can't afford it, and some people have said that our success is killing us. It is expensive and 70% is a reasonably high revenue-to-cost ratio. We were at over 80% 10 years ago—and I won't tell you that story. But clearly we are challenged with cutting our budget. We have done so and it really is cutting our staff, cutting service, and raising fares. So, effectively, our customers are going to get less service but pay more for it.