If you look at the way transfers are printed, you can still see where the zones were delinated. The old Zone 1 stretched roughly from the lake to Eglinton, and past the Don and into Mimico. Once you went north of Eglinton and past St. Clair, you hit zone two (a holdover from the boundary with the Township of York railway, which ran Weston, St. Clair, and Oakwood streetcars prior to 1921). The other zones were past Mimico (New Toronto), Township of Scarborough, and York (encompassing North York and up to Richmond Hill for the old North Toronto radial cars). So zone fares were well-known to Torontonians. There is no reason why they can't be brought back right now. The transfers are still printed that way, the fareboxes are the same as were used prior to 1970-1971, and everything else is in place to implement it.
The problem is, the Commission is now a political beast, which means it won't confront people in this city about the true cost of transit because we've become so weaned on the idea, solidified over the past 35 years, that you are entitled to pay one fare to travel from Scarborough to downtown, as you are to go from Pape and Danforth to Yonge and Bloor. This is the fundamental issue behind the lack of expansion over the past 30 years. It is a fantasy that is ruining the TTC. We became spoiled when Bill Davis began the practice of paying half the TTC's operating costs, and 60% of capital. Prior to that, it was the riders, in the form of zoned fares, that payed the freight. It was a frugal, self-sustaining system. This should have continued, even after the TTC became solely responsible for providing transit into the suburbs in the 1960s. If further zones were implemented during this period, say from St. Clair to Lawrence, and then Lawrence to Steeles, we could have had enough money raised to have subways along Bathurst or Dufferin, and perhaps Eglinton by now, or a DRL, or PROW streetcars out to Malvern and Weston again.
*warning, rant ahead*
This money would have been the TTC's money, just as the money raised to build the Yonge subway was its own money as well. Back then it paid its own way. By doing so, it allowed the TTC to operate largely free from political interference, with the ability to design and build subways as it saw fit. Look at the consistency in design from 1954 through to 1966, same font, same clean, minimal layout of stations. Try to think of this occuring today, with politician x whining about "bathroom stations", and politician y blabbering about "public art, and why can't our stations look Montreal's" etc, to say nothing of all the ridiculous environmental assessment hoops we have to go through to build a subway through already-established areas, as though we're building it through virgin forest. Somehow building all those subways in less than twenty years didn't ruin the city back then, but of course, those EA and management consultants have to be paid, right?
The Toronto that built the Yonge, University and Bloor lines was one, I think, that was more grounded in common sense and frugal, efficient practicality than now. It would have been aghast at the notion that stations are anything other than for moving people from a to b, and rightly so. The TTC then would have, quite properly in my opinion, politely told such critics to go fly a kite. They're not running a railroad. And so what I consider to be the clean, perfectly functional and still-efficient and modern station designs from that era hold up as well as they do for that reason. This is the result of the TTC having the ability to have its own in-house design and development team. It's amazing that from 1948 (with some wartime restrictions still in place) to 1966 (and 1968) , that such an enormous amount of rapid transit was built, constructed by and large by the TTC alone, with minimal fuss. And how did it do it? Because it was run frugally and with the notion that you can't get something without paying its full cost. The TTC did that for years, and took pride in it, with good reason. Look at the photos (when that site is up again) from that era. The stations are spotless. The trains and streetcars gleaming, even the men wearing crisp uniforms seemed to take pride in the system, as did the passengers, unlike today who treat it like a dump. It was a virtuous cycle, and the TTC was truly revolutionary and well-known around the world for this.
And what do we have now? What do we have to show for thirty years of avoiding the elephant in the room, which is the craven politicking to riders' cheap, shallow interests that the TTC is now afraid to tell people: you want to pay the same fare to go from Bathurst and Sheppard to Union, as to go from Queen and Church to Bloor and Dundas? No, sorry, that's just ridiculous. This delusion has to end.
And now look what we have. A once proud organization, that once built its dreams, reduced to little more than a panhandler because the politicians that run it think in three-year election cycles, and are afraid to tell the people in this city that if you want a great transit system, you have to be prepared to pay for it. But that can't happen now, can it? And so we keep going through this kabuki theatre every year of fare increases, threats of cuts, back-and-forth accusations and mindless "cut the fat from the TTC" mantra from ignoramuses who wouldn't know how to run a model railroad, much less a real one. And for what? How much money are we talking about here? People who spend their money on endless, useless junk can't even gather enough intelligence to realize that paying a little more would provide us with a system that, over the long run, would bring benefits to the city of a magnitiude that would far outstrip whatever measly additional costs they would incur? Such selfish, short-sighted, stupid people citizens in this city have become.
Looking at those archival photos really made me wistful, and angry. I wish I was alive then. You can see the pride, the hope in the city when the subways were built, with the parades and the slogans and the "Moving forward" and "Wheels of progress" banners everywhere. People knew back then it would take some sacrifice to do all of this, many of whom had gone through the Depression and the war, and the era of crowded Witt trains (now THAT was crowding!). To them, the idea that you couldn't spare a few extra cents in the form of an extra zone fare to pay for it would have struck them as the height of frivolity and selfishness.