Metrolinx will build, own and operate the service through its GO Transit division.

While the province and the Union Pearson Air-Link Group (UPAG), a subsidiary of SNC-Lavalin, were able to make significant progress negotiating, financial market conditions prevented acceptable terms. The government will continue to work with UPAG to build on the design and development work that has been completed to date.

This long-overdue change in the ARL scheme should bring the project into public view where all aspects of its design, financing and operation will be subject to the same scrutiny and openness as other Metrolinx projects.  Issues such as service levels, equipment provisioning and, most importantly, electrification will no longer hide behind the veil of “commercial confidentiality”.

Fares will be part of the overall Metrolinx/GO network scheme, and the amount of any “premium” surcharge over comparable GO fares will be a matter of public record.  The current one-way GO fare to the airport from downtown is $5.55, far below the $22 figure touted as a possible charge for the SNC-Lavalin operation.  As a matter of public policy, Metrolinx should decide whether the ARL should operate on a full cost recovery basis, or like other transit services, be subsidized for the larger benefits of moving travellers without autos.

This change will affect the design of infrastructure and operational planning.  If the ARL is priced and operates more like a GO service, it will attract riders such as commuting airport workers, and integration with through Kitchener-Waterloo line will be much simpler.  However, the size of facilities now proposed for the ARL may be inadequate to a role as a major airport link.  There may even be an option to rethink the technology choice for this corridor and the details of its connection at Union Station.

Today all we have is a press release, but Metrolinx must truly integrate the ARL planning into The Big Move.  The ARL will not be a separate, privately-owned service whose business might cloud planning and implementation of “competing” routes.  There should be one plan for the airport with regional bus and LRT services including the Eglinton, Finch West and Hurontario/Brampton lines.

The airport is a vital regional hub in The Big Move, and transit service to it must be more than a few lines sketched on a map.  Metrolinx should launch planning — including public participation — for its airport services immediately.

On July 26, I visited the folks at Presto and talked with Ernie Wallace, Executive Project Director, about the system and its plans.  Subsequently, I did some digging of my own, primarily on the Ontario government website.  The information below is organized to keep topics and the logical flow intact rather than to represent the sequence of the conversation.

How does the PRESTO System Project fit with various local and provincial agencies?

Presto started off as a project within the Ministry of Transportation, and a line item for the project still appears within the Ministry’s Budget Estimates.  The contract with Accenture is administered by Metrolinx as an agent of the Ministry.  Wallace himself, and other senior Presto staff, appear on the Metrolinx portion of the “Sunshine List” for highly-paid employees of Crown agencies.

Update: The PRESTO team is made up of seconded Provincial staff, GO employees, hired contract employees and contractors through vendors of record.

Metrolinx does not set policy or general direction for the Presto project.  This function remains at the Ministry.

The contract with Accenture covers the implementation and operation of Presto for a 10-year period for the eight transit agencies who signed on as the original members.  Any expansion of scope such as the now-in-progress Ottawa implementation would be subject to an add-on agreement between the Ministry and Accenture and, of course, an additional payment.

Fare policies remain with each of the local systems for which Presto provides services.  The electronic model (“fare topology”) for each system is built into Presto, including any “co-fare” agreements between operators.  The best-known of these are between GO Transit and some of the local carriers whose bus systems feed GO where the combined Presto fare is lower than the individual fares for each leg of the journey.  Similar schemes can be set up for any of the member transit systems.

The important point here is that a decision to give a combined fare (for example, to Mississauga Transit users who transferred to the TTC subway) is up to the local systems involved (and presumably their Councils for whom any change in fare revenue is of some interest).  Presto does not impose a co-fare on any cross-border travel, and would participate in decisions to implement one only to the point of technical feasibility.

The Metrolinx Board does not set fare policies except for GO Transit which is a division of Metrolinx.

What is the nature of the Accenture contract?

According to Ernie Wallace, this contract is in the public domain except, possibly, for some commercial terms.  If so, I believe that the Ministry could settle some debates about Accenture’s role simply by releasing the main contract and any subsequent amendments or additions.

Most importantly, Wallace challenged statements claiming that Presto’s and Accenture’s business model depends on expanding the reach of the system, particularly to the TTC, to ensure high transaction volumes.  Wallace states that Accenture is providing a specified service (implementation, rollout and support for 10 years on 8 systems) for a fixed price.

Today’s Star reports the scope of the contract this way:

The Ontario government says it has a $250 million contract with Accenture to develop and operate Presto by 2016. That includes the design and the software, the testing, the manufacturing and testing of devices.

This does not include the provisioning of devices for individual transit system stations or vehicles.

Although this may be a fixed price contract, what we don’t know is whether Accenture invested in staff and infrastructure based on a presumed expansion to other, larger systems.  Their pricing for add-ons of smaller increments could be affected by their expectations of future growth and recapture of the investment.

Update:  The following information was provided by Presto to explain the contract and budget arrangements.  In the quote below, “Estimates” refers to the Ontario government estimates, the formal process by which spending is approved by the legislature.  Presto and Metrolinx fall within the Ministry of Transportation.  “RBP” refers to Results Based Planning, and reports for all Ministries are available.  These include information about the previous year’s results and spending.

The contract is a public contract and the overall costs, terms and conditions including deliverable descriptions can be made available but the specific commercial terms and pricing is competitive information and cannot be released.  The planned budget for Ottawa is known but contract amendments have only been executed for initial planning and requirements gathering and specific service provider $ for change cannot be released by PRESTO.

The $14,368,000 is the total all in Operating budget for 10/11 including all operating contracts, program costs both people and administration/facilities etc.

[...] each year a capital allocation is provided (ie $50M) to cover all existing contract commitments, approved changes and capital investment of PRESTO, GO and Service Providers.

Accenture and their sub-contractors do all the software development engineering, manufacturing and maintenance. They operate the backend datacentres, call centre and provide the networks and network management

Both [the downtown Presto System Project office] and GO PRESTO offices are funded by MTO and one third of the SP teams costs as well and are in the estimates.

The annual RBP plans and allocations are all in for PRESTO as it relates to the PRESTO Program and all the related contracts and the GO PRESTO team.

And in a separate note:

I [Ernie Wallace] can discuss and show all the deliverables and total roll ups. We intend to put these up on the web but it will take about a week [...] .

The Accenture contract includes all the device costs for stations buses etc. along with infrastructure costs like networks.

Accenture’s contract is based on payment for deliverables and has no transaction fees or payments based on transit revenues or number of cards or volume devices or traffic etc. Added work is handled through a rigorous change process and is usually fixed price again by deliverable.

What are some of the technical details of Presto’s operation?

Two important components of Presto are the concept of an “electronic purse”, the value of pre-paid fares already in a user’s account, and preloaded “products” on the Presto card.  Each of these products represents one transit system.

This arrangement allows for some decentralization of processing in that a Presto reader on a bus can have a “conversation” with a card used on that bus system without “calling home” to complete the transaction.  This saves on real-time communication delays, and the challenges in some areas of getting reliable, fast cell coverage for the equipment on buses to communicate with the central network.

The trade-off is that this approach doesn’t work if the payment card isn’t “owned” by the system and used to store data.  Credit cards, for example, are “read only” and customer tracking all has to be done in the back office system for co-fare arrangements (or even transfers within one system) to be properly handled.

Presto can support flat fares, zone fares, distance-based and time-based fares and, as mentioned earlier, co-payment arrangements where trips across boundaries between operators trigger a discount fare arrangement.  All fares require that users “tap on” when they board a vehicle to begin their journey, and when they cross into a new transit system.  Zone and distance-based fares require users to “tap out” when they leave that leg of their journey.

Typically, users who fail to tap out are charged a large penalty fare as an incentive to formally complete their journey.  This can be confusing in a multi-carrier system such as we have in the GTA where each trip segment has its own fare rules.

A special arrangement exists for GO customers who can define their “default” trip so that it is deducted as a standard charge when they travel.  This avoids the need to tap out at their destination, but also causes problems for any non-standard trip where a user must indicate a “non default” fare is requested by pressing a button on the Presto reader.

User confusion is inevitable, and this scheme only works because GO Transit is, today, primarily a commuter service rather than an all-day, two-way provider of regional transit where trips will have a much greater variety of origins and destinations.  (See Toronto Star articles here, here and here.)

I can’t help feeling that Presto was build for an age where technical constraints (or budgets) forced choices on system designers that are no longer appropriate, and that the “elephant in the room” of GO and its then-current self view as a commuter system have driven much of the overall design.

Update:  The following information was provided by Presto.

PRESTO was built largely on the latest card technology and security technology and using Microsoft operating systems and COTS software and utilizing a proprietary fare and device management system from Europe, future developments including those proposed for Ottawa and TTC will adhere to open architecture principles and standards and core systems will not be based on proprietary software.

What is the problem with co-payments beyond 35 trips a month?

Presto cannot currently handle co-payments in situations where a rider takes more than 35 trips in one month.  The reason for this lies in the underlying design of the fare calculation and charging mechanism.

In a co-fare situation, when you take a local bus and then a GO train, there are actually three parts to the fare calculation:

• You board a local bus.  At this point the system does not know you are planning to switch to a train, and it charges the full local fare.
• You transfer to the train.  At this point, the need for a partial refund of your local fare is evident.
• The system calculates your train fare and deducts the credit for your local co-fare.  However, if you are on the 36th trip or more in one month, the result of this value is negative.

This possibility was not contemplated when the system was designed, but Presto is working on it.  If the local transit system used the same scheme for fare calculations (free after 35 fares), there would be no problem.  However, the situation is complicated by the possibility that one could take local trips that did not involve GO, and these would be subject to local rules that could involve volume discounts or pass-type fares.  The interaction of co-fares and each local set of fare rules is a challenge for any cross-system fare card regardless of the technology.

What are Presto’s plans for open payment systems?

The Presto readers now in use cannot interact with standard media such as credit and debit cards.  The processes and rules for this are complex, and are the subject of international standards in the payment industry.  Presto is a very small fish in a very big pond, and must adapt its system to meet world standards.  However, Presto plans to install readers capable of handling standard media for its Ottawa rollout in 2012 and will retrofit the existing system.

Note that this only gets us to the point where a credit card is recognized by the reader.  What is still needed is the back-end system to track users, calculate their fares, and bill either a locally-maintained ePurse, or send a bill to the user’s credit card company.  Those who argue for a open payments system design claim that money would be saved on some components of the system both through standardization and by offloading some functionality to the payment system.

One obvious issue is the question of service charges.  If each fare is billed as a separate transaction, one would pay dearly in service charges (and interest if you run a balance on your credit card) for the “convenience” of using your credit card.  This could be avoided if the payment industry adopted a new scheme for “micro payments”, but this requires negotiations between the banks and the providers such as Presto or an independent TTC system.  Large transaction volumes are an important component here.

Presto plans to have open payment capability in the 2014-5 time frame.  Like so many other projects, this is driven by the Pan Am games.  Riders on the Air Rail link should be able to pay for their journey with a credit card directly rather than having to acquire a Presto card for this purpose.

With open payments, Presto hopes to support a “library” of cards that could include a province-wide university student card, a city services card, or any other type of card identifying a large group of travellers.  This could be done strictly as a means of convenience (students could register their cards for transit services wherever Presto operated), or Presto could become a service provider to agencies and institutions outside of the transit field.  My own view is that they should stick to transit and get that working before trying to turn themselves into a bank.

Related to open payments technology is the ability to use a mobile device.  In the simplest implementation, the device’s own identity is registered against “your” Presto account.  Billing would likely be against your ePurse.  However, mobile apps will eventually be commonplace allowing your “phone” to act as a surrogate for a physical account card, and your mobile device could itself become a library replacing physical credit cards.  That’s a future well beyond what is needed for a Presto open payments rollout.

Where does the TTC fit?

It is no secret that the TTC has been dragging its feet on implementation of smart card technology, although the subject has been under discussion for 10 years.  The original TTC estimate of $140-million (2000$) has bloomed to $416-million (2010$ plus escalation) based in part on a better understanding of the needed infrastructure changes.  This amount does not include planned system expansions (which bring the total to the $489-million figure reported by me and others), but it probably does include costs for some system aspects like wiring within stations that could be replaced by wireless communications.  The TTC has quoted Presto a 7-year implementation period which is probably excessive for connection to an existing system where the foundations have already been provisioned.

From the Star:

Presto officials have estimated those costs for the TTC would be about $320 million, including devices, upgrades to infrastructure, wiring, project management, devices and central system changes.

That’s $320m versus $416m, a tidy sum regardless of whose estimate one believes, and this must be funded somehow.

Update:  The following information was provided by Presto.

PRESTO was built largely on the latest card technology and security technology and using Microsoft operating systems and COTS software and utilizing a proprietary fare and device management system from Europe. Future developments including those proposed for Ottawa and TTC will adhere to open architecture principles and standards and core systems will not be based on proprietary software.

The original TTC estimate from a decade ago was only for hard and directly related TTC assets (devices etc) .  No PRESTO systems development was included. TTC’ s scope, business requirements, infrastructure needs and device requirements have increased dramatically.

Presto says that it is prepared to be ready both for the startup of Transit City (the Sheppard line) and for one line (likely Queen 501) on the TTC in time for the new streetcars which will use all-door loading.  However, the time for a commitment one way or another is now given the lead times to finalize the fare structure and build a TTC rollout into Presto’s plans.  This collides with the TTC’s own scheme for an open payments trial rollout in the 2010-1 period.

The TTC claims that banks are prepared to fund a trial installation of an open payment system on the streetcar network, or some subset of it.  That claim needs to be nailed down both as to scope and technology.  Whatever is installed must be the basis for expansion, not a throwaway, and future costs must be clearly understood up front (the banks may be less generous when it comes to a full system rollout) .

John Lorinc has an article in today’s Globe on the current state of affairs in various cities in the USA.

I am not convinced that a trial on only one TTC route will be workable because, unlike riders of GO and a few regional feeder systems, TTC riders have complex trip patterns of which the Queen car is only one part.  The impetus for some form of smart card is driven by the need to shift token users (and later ticket and even cash users) to a fare medium that can be used for travel through the system, including automatic entrances.  A workable transition plan for co-existence of smart cards and existing payment systems must be in place and well-understood when any trial begins.

The Question of Transfers

The TTC must also address its current complex fare structure regarding transfers.  The present rules are just about impossible to define in a way that an automated system can interpret because the topology of the system is so complex.  Defining the point at which one trip ends and another begins for fare purposes requires detailed knowledge of the network, of what a “reasonable” trip might be and extenuating circumstances.  What looks like an out-of-the-way route may simply be a matter of convenience, even an accessibility requirement to avoid using the subway.  A lengthy stopover could be a quick bit of shopping, a longer-than-expected lineup at Starbucks, or the perennial half-hour gap in Queen service.

A pre-requisite for any new payment system will be a change in TTC fares to a time-based system.  Such a move is more important even than the technology debate as it will be the basis of a new fare “topology”.  This will require fundamental changes in TTC operating practices such as how paper transfers will be issued and used during a transitional period, and this should occur well before a smart card rollout.

One could equally argue for a move to a zone or distance based system, but the political upheaval of such a move — the effect on fares for long-haul riders — would be a major barrier to the implementation.  By contrast, a time-based fare would greatly simplify travel, and would reduce costs for some who don’t buy a Metropass but would receive the convenience of, in effect, a short-term pass.

Some at TTC will say “we can’t afford to change fares”, but the simple fact is that the fare structure must change to one that is easy to understand, monitor (electronically) and enforce.  A fare must be based on something easy to calculate — the passage of time and/or distance — not on arcane rules almost unchanged since the 1920s.  A decision on a new fare structure cannot wait until the day before a smart card system goes live because the new rules must be embedded in the new system.

(For the historically minded, here are two rather elderly transfers that have long passed their allowed time of use.  On the left of each pair of images, we have a Winchester car transfer from the Toronto Railway Company on April 1, 1895.  On the right, we have a Bay car Toronto Transportation Company transfer from Nov. 19, 1924.  Parts of the text setting out the transfer rules will sound rather familiar.

(Collectors please note that the words “First day issued” were already on this transfer when I received it.)

The Reality of the Political Calendar

The TTC began to look at open payments as an option for its fare cards in 2009, and this interest escalated in 2010 when a contract was let for a detailed review and implementation plan.  A draft Request for Proposals (RFP) will likely come to the TTC’s August board meeting for approval, and with the lead time for such things, responses are not likely to be back before the current Commission whose last meeting is on September 30, 2010.

Where the proposal will go from there depends on the outcome of the October municipal election, the winner of the mayoralty race, and the makeup of the new Council and Commission.  Many of the initiatives started by the current regime will be suspect, if not outright ridiculed and discarded, for purely political reasons as the new administration beats its chest and sets off in a new, if vague, direction.  This will not be the time for continuing what the Miller/Giambrone regime started, especially a project that won’t yet be launched.

Although the “banking industry” is said to be eager to fund a trial implementation (just as MasterCard has money in the New York City trial), the details of such an arrangement will not be known until the TTC receives and publishes the responses to its RFP.

There are many questions to be asked about any smart card rollout whether it be Presto, a separate TTC system, or some hybrid.  However, we are unlikely to see a strong advocate for a TTC-based implementation, and technically savvy Commissioners/Councillors are hard to find.  Couple this to the TTC, a notoriously technology-averse organization with a reputation for bungling projects, and we don’t have a recipe for success.

That said, Presto has yet to show that it can handle a really big rollout either.  In its early days, the project itself went through upheavals in management and direction.  Any rollout in Toronto will require committed buy-in and participation by the TTC, and this will not come from a contentious us-vs-them relationship.

Presto still only serves a small subset of GTA riders and trip complexities.  We have already heard complaints about usability and customer service, and whether the model will scale up to be a truly GTA-wide medium remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne darkly hints that funding of other Toronto projects is threatened if TTC goes its own way on a farecard system.  Queen’s Park really needs to put its money on the table.  After delaying half of the already-announced spending on Transit City, Queen’s Park should think twice about forcing Toronto to pay substantially for an imposed fare collection system.  I don’t want to hear about all that gas tax — it would take three years of gas tax revenue to pay for a Presto rollout in Toronto, and that money is already earmarked for other transit improvements.  If this is an important regional strategy, then it needs to be funded as a regional service through Metrolinx and its long-awaited “Investment Strategy”.

Metrolinx and Queen’s Park must address local transit funding, fare structures and service.  Local operations, including fare collection, are a vital part of the regional network, and must be well-funded.  Any move to reduce fares for cross-border travel will require changes to subsidies, assuming Ontario will pay any.  Ontario talks about getting people out of cars and reducing congestion, but prefers to cherry-pick the projects it will support and fund, while leaving the rest to local municipal agencies and tax revenues.

Toronto and the TTC must set the stage for a move to smart cards with a fare structure review, preferably as early as the 2011 budget cycle, certainly no later than the beginning of 2012.  If we are moving to a time-based fare, this decision must be taken soon so that it can be implemented before smart cards are rolled out on the TTC regardless of the technology.

Too many candidates waste their time drawing lines on maps when there are operational issues like this facing the TTC and the City.  Fare structures are not just a technology debate for transit and IT geeks, they are basic to transit policy and service.  This issue, together with the need to fund a projected half-billion dollar operating deficit in 2011, is the challenge for the incoming Council and for Queen’s Park.

In What Does Transit Do About Traffic Congestion, he argues that the last claim that should be made for transit is that it will reduce congestion.  Instead, the benefits of a transit-oriented city show up in economic activity, mobility and other benefits.

There is, however, a caveat lurking here.  Dense cities with good transit (or even cities with a good potential for better transit) don’t appear out of thin air.  Once we build sprawl, then the benefits and effects of transit seen in the older, denser cities will not appear overnight even if we run the most intensive BRT, LRT or subway network through auto-oriented suburbs.  Transit can make things better, but it will not reverse the damage and inevitable congestion of decades of bad planning.

By the way, be sure to read the comments.  If you think the threads on this site get out of hand, just try Walker’s blog.  You will see some very intelligent point-counterpoint discussion in some threads.

In If On-Time Performance is 96%, Why Am I Always Late?, Walker discusses the conundrum that transit agencies talk a great line for being on time, but the actual experience of users is much, much, much worse.  Both GO Transit and TTC have a love for patting themselves on the back (although rarely each other’s), and talking about their improvements in on-time performance.

So much of this is relative to the metrics used (how late can a train or streetcar be and still be “on time”) and the lack of weighting of the results to reflect the number of passengers affected by on time (or not) service.  Even in the off-peak, gaps of two scheduled headways or more are common on downtown routes and this drives riders away.  At least with NextBus, it is now possible to know with certainty that there is no car just around the bend out of sight, and if there is, it’s going in the opposite direction.

GO Transit now has schedules that reflect the real world in which they operate, but persists in reporting all-day on-time figures rather than breaking these out to show service quality when most people ride the system.

Finally, in Strasbourg:  You Can’t Take It Home With You, we get a loving overview of both the city and its tram system, part of the renaissance of LRT in France.  The real issues come at the end where we learn about the major changes in street space usage and restrictions on cars that accompanied the installation of tram lines in this very old city.  The moral, applicable to anyone comparing transit systems, is to look beyond just the technology and the scenery, and understand how and why the city streets work (or don’t) as they do.

Any moves to improve “congestion” in Toronto must start with a fundamental debate about what the streets are for, and which existing uses must be reduced (and how) in order to make room for what’s left over.  Ironically, we focus these debates on the heart of downtown, a comparatively small area, when the real problems of transit’s competitiveness and congestion lie out in the suburbs.

The Star reports that the TTC will proceed with a tender for an Open Payment system later this year with the intent of a 2011 rollout.  Mayoral hopeful Rocco Rossi has his own scheme called “Presto Plus”.  Can the TTC actually commit to a new system with the current regime still in office?  Rossi’s campaign confirms that he would cancel the TTC’s scheme if he were to become mayor.

Metrolinx would love to see the TTC sign on to Presto, but many questions remain about just what Presto can do for a truly integrated transit system.

Smart Cards are yet another example of the way that transit technology wars in the GTA get in the way of solving fundamental transit problems.  The technology choice becomes more important than the service it provides.  Here are a few questions anyone with “the answer” should consider.

What Will It Cost and Who Will Pay for the Technology?

Estimates of the Presto implementation for the TTC have ranged well over $400-million, and we don’t have a reliable figure for comparative purposes.  The scheme was originally expected to come in at about a third of that price.  We need a credible implementation cost with no hidden add-ons or scope creep.

The cost estimate has grown over time:

• November 2000 Fare Collection Study:  $140-million
• March 2004 Canada Strategic Infrastructure Funding announced:  $140-million shared between Ottawa, Queen’s Park and Toronto
• June 2007 Business Case Report:  $260-million (2006$) [Full report]
• 2010 Capital Budget:  $416-million plus costs related to Transit City and the two YUS subway extensions totalling $489-million

It is unclear how long the CSIF money will remain on the table, or if it was ever “real” funding.

Queen’s Park wants to pay 1/3 of the cost.  Bully for them.  The last time I looked, Queen’s Park hasn’t got two pennies to rub together and hopes that advisory panels of businessmen, civic luminaries and activists will carry the can for hard decisions on transit funding.  Who will pay the other 2/3?  Depending on the total cost, that’s a lot of money to spend on fare collection technology.

Over at the TTC, advocates of Open Payment systems claim that the implementation will be paid for by the banking system.  I would like to see that in writing, and whether there’s an upper limit to what the banks will invest in this rollout.  Of course, we won’t know this until after a Request For Proposals has made its way through the mill, and the details may still be considered as confidential commercial information.

What Can The Technology Do?

Presto is a stored value system, in the sense that you load money onto your card’s account, and as you travel around the network, Presto deducts the appropriate fare.  Open payment systems track your riding, and bundle this together in a bill periodically charging you (say via credit card or bank withdrawal) for usage.  That leaves a nice “float” in Presto’s hands of all the unspent fares, similar to the value of unused tickets and tokens for which the TTC has already been paid.

Presto has an automatic reload feature, but this presumes that you have an account that can be billed for that reload.  If reloads using cash are to be supported, then the whole infrastructure of add-value machines and cash handling must be added to implementation and operating costs.

Presto operates by deducting the value of “one fare” (whatever that may be locally) from the stored value of the card.  In the case of GO trips, it also calculates the fare appropriate to the distance travelled, and riders can have a “default trip” programmed on their account.  That default allows riders to avoid having to “tap out” at their destination.  It’s a nice idea, but it shows how much Presto is oriented to people making standard commutes, rather than a more complex pattern of travel through the network.

Open Payment systems work on the premise that people already have something that they routinely use, or can use, to identify themselves.  The obvious examples are credit and debit cards which can interact with contactless readers using RFID technology (Radio Frequency Identification).  However, this is also available using cell phones.  Regardless of the medium, a customer registers with the system to permit transit fares to be billed based on their identification.

Fare Policy is Not a Technology

Far more fundamentally, the question we should ask is this:  what types of fare arrangements would each system offer?

A vital question for proponents of either scheme is the menu of fare options that their systems can support.  Already, we know from the FAQ on Metrolinx site that there are some constraints in the fare combinations that Presto can handle.  Are there more?

Presto does not address the fundamental issue of fare policy.  All it does is to duplicate the existing fare systems.  Is this a system constraint, or does the capability of alternate fare models exist waiting only for policy direction to be implemented?

Everyone who crosses the 905/416 boundary complains about multiple fares.  Indeed, one big attraction of subway expansion north of Steeles Avenue is the disappearance of the fare boundary.  This is not a technology issue, it is a policy issue.  How much should we charge people to ride, and should crossing an invisible line incur a completely new fare?

If we give cross-border riders a discount, what will make up the difference in total revenue?  If we change to a zone system or a time based fare, what are the implications for riders elsewhere in the network?

If we attempt to duplicate the TTC’s transfer regulations, the system must track passengers as they move from route to route, and determine when a “new” trip begins.  That’s a lot of effort and infrastructure we could replace simply by moving to a time based fare.

Why is GO Transit a special fare zone?  How does this fit into The Big Move where GO’s rail lines are treated as if they were a regional rapid transit network?  How far out will we push the subway system so that riders can avoid a higher GO fare?

As part of its review of the Open Payment concept, the TTC has asked its staff to report on a variety of fare options so that we can have an informed debate on a future fare structure.  I have yet to hear a word on the issue from Metrolinx even though this is central to fare policy.

These questions are independent of whichever technology is chosen, but they must be answered.  Some aspects of the system implementation cost are directly linked to the fare structure.  A scheme for fare-by-distance, for example, will require that riders “tap out”.  This changes the passenger flow on vehicles and in stations.  Indeed, the “default trip” scheme on Presto was implemented specifically to avoid “tapping out” for the most common trips.

The Fine Print

The Presto system depends on back-end services provided to Metrolinx by Accenture who, as I understand things, bases their fees on transaction counts.  Without the TTC on the system, the potential fees are much lower, and the business model falls apart.

According to the 2007 TTC report, Queen’s Park has already paid $250-million to Accenture for the development of a GTA farecard system, not including any implementation on the TTC, and that contract goes back nearly a decade.  Is there a contractual arrangement requiring Queen’s Park to make up a minimum payment to operate Presto?  How much have we already invested in that system?  Will this be competitive with an Open Payment system?  Is Queen’s Park locked into a high-cost, proprietary technology?

Beyond Fares

If the transit smart card’s use extends to other services, this moves into an area where the banking industry is already well established.

An important difference between Presto and Open Payments is that the latter does not require reinvention of the banking system.  Banks already exist, and they know how to handle payments through a wide variety of outlets.  If Presto is to become a payment standard, then every store, every agency, must support Presto in addition to the standard bank payment systems, or alternately Presto must adhere to payment industry standards.

This is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

A related issue is “the unbanked”, those who operate only with cash on a day-to-day basis.  The banking industry views these people as a large untapped market.  Moving them to a smart card lifestyle is challenging, but it should be solved by the banking industry as a whole, not as a special function of the transit system.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s easy for mayoral candidates and provincial Pooh-Bahs to slag the TTC for its foot-dragging on smart card implementation.  [Yes, I know, "Pooh-Bah" almost by definition cannot be made plural.]  However, the question of “who will pay” has never really been answered, and on that basis the TTC has demurred at each opportunity.

Now with the experience of other systems, notably New York City, in moving to Open Payment technology, the TTC is starting to budge, encouraged by the possibility that they won’t have to pay for or operate a goodly chunk of the system.  I hope that we will see a reworked “business case” soon to substantiate this claim.

Our new streetcars, due to appear in only a few years, will force the TTC to shift away from pay-as-you-enter fare collection.  These cars will load at all doors, and passengers will generally not use a farebox or transfers.  This sets the TTC on a path to a complete revolution in its fare collection, and this will involve some flavour of smart card regardless of which technology is chosen.

Meanwhile, Queen’s Park has insisted that Presto be implemented on the Transit City lines.  The first of these, Sheppard, won’t be in operation until after new LFLRVs hit the city streets, and we will see which fare technology is actually implemented on Sheppard and other Transit City routes.

The TTC and Metrolinx must sort out a viable, common fare collection scheme, but more importantly the entire region must sort out an integrated fare policy.  This brings us directly to the question of operating subsidies from local governments and Queen’s Park, an issue nobody wants to touch.

Battling it out with razor-edged smart cards at dawn is so much simpler, but so much less productive.

The round table added nothing to what we already know on this subject, but did provide insight into public policy debate here in the GTA.  Although this was officially a TCSA event, it was clearly at the service of Metrolinx who had a strong presence.  Rob Prichard, Metrolinx CEO, gave opening remarks.  As I have already noted, John Brodhead, Metrolinx VP of Strategy & Communications, co-chaired the working group behind the TCSA paper.  Other Metrolinx staff were scattered through the crowd, some as facilitators at tables.

Invited participants included activists of varied backgrounds, a few politicians, professionals from government and industry, representatives from various business groups, a few from the media, and others from the collection of “usual suspects” one sees at this type of gathering.  The idea, the hope, was that the collected wisdom of this group might inform future debate and recommendations about how to proceed.

Rob Prichard’s Eight Questions

In his opening remarks, Prichard posed a series of questions that showed the difficulties Metrolinx must wrestle with in developing a funding policy.  Ooops, no, it’s not a policy, it will be a proposed policy, and it won’t be ready for three years because Queen’s Park doesn’t want to talk about new revenue tools while fallout from the HST, the eco-fee and who knows what other schemes and scandals still glows radioactively.

Here, in a paraphrase from my notes, are Prichard’s questions:

1. Should funding just look after capital costs, or also operations?  Should only regional costs and systems be included, or also local ones?
2. Should we build what we need to make up for decades of inaction, or build to shape future travel behaviour?
3. Should new revenues be used to build only transit, or should road projects be included?
4. Should a single revenue source pay for everything, and a marketing campaign focus on getting approval for that source, or should a package of revenue tools be used?
5. How can we engage the public to support paying for additional spending?
6. How can we eliminate the “third rail effect” of any new revenue proposals for politicians?
7. How can the debate be framed as a benefit to both drivers and transit riders, rather than as a competition between the two groups?
8. Should any new revenue stream be subject to a referendum, and, if so, could we win?

This is a very good set of questions, but sadly, like so much “public participation”, the meeting had already been structured to discuss things a different way, and we never really got to most of the hard issues.

Missing in Action

Discussion of the role of the private sector, of outside investment, of possible ownership roles beyond government agencies, has completely vanished.  Our mission was only to debate how to pay for things, not how to finance them.

This is an important distinction.  When Metrolinx first talked about an “Investment Strategy”, the very name of that project clearly implied that money would, possibly by magic, appear to fund massive expansion of transit in the GTA.  A few things quickly got in the way of this something-for-nothing approach to transit.

• The bottom fell out of the financing market, and the house of cards on which so much planning was based collapsed.
• Public sector accounting rules changed, and the idea that one could hide debt in external agencies or private “partners” no longer was acceptable.  If the government has an iron-clad agreement to pay down debt directly or through a leasing arrangement, that’s public debt and must be booked as such.
• The private sector is not quite so awash with cash as it once was, and wants a guaranteed return for anything it might build.  The relatively limited exposure of a design-build contract has advantages over the unknowns of a long-term operating and maintenance contract.
• PPP debacles elsewhere, notably the London fiasco, have alerted the public and governments (at least those who are not ideologically blind) to the concept of risk.  Private companies can and do make business decisions that may not be in the public interest up to and including walking away from their commitments.  The cost and complexity of protecting the public’s need for continuity and quality of service transfers much risk away from the private sector.
• Pay-as-you-play has the attraction of avoiding debt and its long-term costs.  We could build up a mountain of debt, but would then be paying interest on that debt rather than building and operating new transit lines.  The flip side, however, is that we can only build what we can afford from current revenue.  Where is the balance point between how much voters will bear in new fees and taxes versus the frequency of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for politicians?

That we are still talking about an “investment strategy” at this point is almost comic, and only makes sense in a context where politicians recognize that the “investment” is by the public, one way or another.  We are going to build and operate billions’ worth of new transit systems and services, and this must be seen as an investment in the health and prosperity of the region, not as an expense to be deeply buried as far away from public view as possible.

Comments and Contemplation

Each of the many tables held about ten participants.  We listened dutifully as groups of speakers outlined the issues from their various points of view.  The most entertaining of these, and the last, was Peter MacLeod who gave an hilarious talk about how not to conduct public participation.  Sadly, those who designed the event had not been exposed to his wisdom.

The speakers were divided in two groups, and after each of these, we turned to questions that had been set in advance.  The first pair of questions was:

1. What is the best case for investment in transit and transportation infrastructure?
2. What is the best way to communicate it to the various audiences concerned?

It didn’t take long for our table (and others, as I heard later) to veer away from the set questions.  Both the Toronto Board of Trade and the TCSA, itself composed of many business and government and academic notables, have raised the call for more investment in transportation as an essential tool for regional growth.  Transit is no longer something we do for “everyone else”.

Therefore, the “case” for investment and the political message won’t appeal to altruism, to concern for the poor families who have only two cars and are transit dependent for occasional trips, but to fundamental business interests in the future of the GTA.

The implications of accepting that there are limits to car-oriented travel are profound, and yet a critical issue, land use, was not even on the table.  In many ways, we have given up on hoping that land use will ever be directly controlled because too many politicians (and their constituents) depend on a never-ending supply of vacant land for new construction.  We have built the suburbs, and there is as-of-right zoning for lots more of the same.  The challenge now is to provide the means of travelling through this sparsely populated region.

I say “sparse” because, compared to other metropolitan areas with populations over 10-million, the GTA is smeared out over a vast area of southern Ontario.  We like to think of ourselves as a “big” city, but that’s an artificial construct compared with places like New York or Paris.  Toronto could tout a population of 20-million if only its reach extended from the prairies to the Atlantic, but the hubris of such a claim would be obvious even to those who live here.

The case for investment is actually rather simple:  there is no room for more cars in many parts of the GTA, and expansion of road capacity is unlikely.  Those cars are getting in the way of commercial traffic, and congestion is no longer just something we hear about in traffic reports.  It hurts the bottom line.

Moreover, the cost of private vehicle ownership is prohibitive for a large and growing population who cannot depend on high-paying jobs to sustain a late-2oth century boom lifestyle.  We can abandon the city, the region, to its fate, or we can try to improve transportation where this is feasible.

How do we communicate the worth of transit?  For starters, we might actually follow the scheme set out in MoveOntario2020.  Queen’s Park would bravely invest in new transit lines to show people what could be done, and with that solid base of support, we would turn to the question of revenue generation.  Show people that you can build projects they want and need, on time and on budget, and the rest follows easily.  That was the plan.

Queen’s Park got cold feet.  First they discovered that the cost estimates were a tad low, and their seed money wouldn’t go as far, literally, as they had hoped.  Then the bottom dropped out of the financial market, and the idea of new debt as a stimulus, a lure to future spending, was elbowed aside to deal with a recession and widespread concern about Ontario’s ability to pay its bills.  Of course, one reason we can’t pay our bills is that we have told voters they don’t have to pay taxes, and this leaves large-scale new levies for transit projects in a difficult place.

We won’t have anything to show for Ontario’s seed money until about 2014 when the Sheppard LRT opens.  The Spadina extension, not strictly a new project in the MoveOntario context, opens in 2015.  We won’t see Eglinton until 2020.  GO will introduce some new services, such as the St. Catharines extension, but these are comparatively small change in a regional context.  How, meanwhile, are we supposed to drum up public support for new transit funding streams?

Population and auto growth will continue, traffic congestion will grow much worse, and many of the projects now underway will do nothing to relieve this.  Indeed, even if we build transit in the 905, this will at best keep up with growth, and congestion won’t get any better.

The second pair of questions was:

1. Which revenue tools have the greatest potential for funding regional transportation plans AND gaining support of decision makers and the public?
2. What steps need to be taken to engage decision makers and the public in serious and productive discussion of the potential funding sources?

Positions varied at my table, but there was general agreement that we should not waste our efforts on schemes that would bring in small amounts.  We need anywhere from $2- to $4-billion every year more or less forever.  One time revenue sources, and those that generate only tens of millions simply are not going to provide the funds we require.

The arguments needed to engage anyone in this discussion turn on the problem, literally, of the road not taken.  What happens if we spend the next decades hoping that the Tooth Fairy will fix everything?  We certainly know what the past decades of inaction have cost us, and this will only worsen as the surplus capacity, such as it is, of existing networks is consumed while travel demands continue to rise.

The question, then, is which revenue tools are the most suitable and the most acceptable to the task.  Now we bump into philosophical problems.  Some would use a variety of taxes on motorists, highways, cars and parking lots.  This is an odd way to build a transit system — ask your competition to pay for it and expect them to quietly hand over their cash.  This approach is justified by some as a way to influence driving behaviour and shift motorists onto transit.  Hmmm.  What transit?  Transit cutbacks are the news of the day, not transit expansion, and what new lines we have don’t address a fraction of the GTA’s auto demand.

We speak of “investment” in transit as a benefit to the region, and this argues for a broadly-based revenue source, either general revenues (as today) or an expansion of sales taxes.  Something tells me that the 2011 provincial election will not be fought on a pledge to raise taxes, and this discussion will stay in the realm of hand-wringing activists and non-governmental organizations for some time.

(I was unable to stay to hear what, if any, consensus the meeting reached as the TTC’s regular board meeting began early in the afternoon.  I missed the concluding speeches and the sandwiches which, I am told, were rather good.)

Where is the Leadership?

Politicians love programs and schemes that fit neatly into one electoral cycle.  Run for election, get a few promises rolling at least to the point of having a ribbon cutting or two, announce a bunch more plans, and repeat the process.

Transit only works like that when you have many projects in the pipeline and you spend at a rate guaranteed to bring something to completion every year or so.  That costs a lot of money, unless your political ambition is no higher than an endless series of parking lot dedication ceremonies.

Ontario, going right back to Bill Davis, loves to claim that it has wonderful pro-transit policies for the GTA.  From time to time this is even true, but the dedication to transit is uneven and unpredictable.  Funding for local operations has been drying up for years, and our cities are expected to provide service to get riders to and from whatever regional lines Queen’s Park deigns to operate.

Many complain of the Spadina extension to Vaughan (and a complementary plan for the Yonge line to Richmond Hill).  However, the Spadina proposal has been around for a long time, and dates back to an era when GO Transit had no love for vastly improved service.  GO has not exactly rushed to provide frequent, all-day service to Barrie or Richmond Hill, although this is finally part of Metrolinx long-term plans.  If GO won’t rise to demands, then it’s no surprise that people north of Steeles demand subway extensions.

Before this sets off a firestorm of subway vs commuter rail debate, yes, I know that there are different markets.  The problem with GO is that it preferred to operate a network where losses were few, and passengers were already queued up waiting for the first train to arrive.  This skewed political demands to seek alternatives.  Imagine how differently the regional network would have evolved had GO been properly funded and pursued an aggressive campaign to build the network we only glimpse now in “The Big Move”.  Ontario talked a good line, but starved the very system it built and put its name on for expansion and operating funds.  Transit followed development rather than leading and shaping it.

Now the business community awakes to the importance of a transportation network both to move their employees around the region, but even more critically to move their products.  If roads are full of commuters, the trucks (and the factories they represent) don’t work productively.  This brings us to a basic problem — claims that transit will remove congestion from roads are hard to prove, and the time frames are so long that other factors such as population growth and economic cycles will cloud the statistics.

The GTA is growing quickly, and unlike less robust regions, is unlikely to see an immediate effect whenever a new service begins to operate.  The cumulative effect of more transit will be, at best, to keep congestion from getting any worse, and to provide some alternatives for travel within the region.  I say “some” because the current modal share for transit is trivial.  Getting it up even to the level the TTC now achieves in the outer 416 will require a huge shift in transit quality, let alone pushing to the heights achieved in mid-town Toronto.

Many, no most trips will continue to be made by drivers in cars, many with no passengers.  All that transit investment won’t mean much to them, and there’s the difficulty in selling drivers on the concept that they should pay billions to expand the transit riders’ network.

Will Queen’s Park champion spending on transit?  Will they work to convince voters that more spending, and, yes, more taxes or fees, are essential to the economic future of the GTA?  Or will they spend just enough to limp from election to election, the transit equivalent of filling potholes?

Advocacy and real belief in transit is a hard road.  Local transit gets by with whatever funding local councils choose to provide, and only Toronto has expanded service aggressively even as funding dried up.  Voters want lower taxes, and too many see transit as a waste, not an essential part of urban life.  Some voters know they want something better and, thanks to travel and immigration, many have seen what good transit can look like.  A few shiny new trains scattered through the rush hour don’t impress quite the way they did back in 1967.

Ontario must reverse its attitude to transit spending and expansion as something we can only afford when times are good, and then only to the degree needed to polish our pro-transit reputation.  Queen’s Park must actually lead, challenging and difficult though this may be, to inspire voters that large-scale transit spending is essential to the GTA.

Workshops by well-meaning business and community groups may be testing grounds, but they are no substitute for commitment and advocacy in the government itself.

GO Transit’s Georgetown corridor, home to many existing and proposed services, has not been a happy place for the Environmental Assessment process, especially on the southern end of the line.  Officially, this project was the Georgetown South Service Expansion (GSSE), now shortened to the Georgetown South Project.  However, the project has a troubled history thanks to:

• Extreme insensitivity to local concerns about noise and vibration from the West Toronto Diamond grade separation project eventually resulted in a successful appeal to the Canadian Transportation Agency forcing GO to change its construction methods.
• Proposals to slice through Weston with a widened rail corridor, including closing streets that linked the commercial strip on Weston Road to the residential communities to the east, infuriated local residents.  This was compounded by their discovery that, initially at least, much of the additional traffic on the corridor would be for the premium fare airport shuttle from Union Station.

This established a confrontational relationship between GO and corridor residents.  When Metrolinx published The Big Move, it was obvious that vastly expanded service would be operated along this line including:

• All-day service at least to Brampton on the Georgetown line
• All-day service to Milton
• Peak period service to Bolton (a line that now has no GO operations but shares the corridor to the north end of Weston)
• All-day service to Barrie (a line that shares the corridor from Dundas Street south to the rail yards at Bathurst)
• All-day service every 15 minutes on the Air Rail Link from Union to Pearson Airport operating via the Georgetown line and a spur to be built into the airport lands

GO was so preoccupied with opposition in Weston that it failed to take account of the quickly growing population around the rail corridor south of West Toronto Junction.  Aside from the question of daily train movements, GO further alienated residents with a proposal for the Strachan Avenue grade separation that would have created a major barrier within the new King West / Liberty Village community.  This matter was not resolved until intervention by Metrolinx and a compromise solution acceptable to the City of Toronto was adopted.

GO runs popular services, and as a provincial agency it is used to getting more or less what it wants.  Public participation and accommodation have not been GO’s strong suits.

When the Georgetown South project revealed that there would be over 400 train movements per day on the southern end of the corridor, residents were more than a little upset.  Their concerns about noise and pollution were not  helped by GO’s appeal to the greater good with claims that, overall, there would be less pollution thanks to auto trips diverted from highways.  Those highways are not in backyards in Weston, the Junction and Parkdale, and the benefits that might accrue on Highways 400, 401 and 427 were little comfort to those who would see their local rail corridor gain vastly more traffic than it has today.

From this swelling activism came a demand that GO electrify its system to reduce noise and pollution levels in the neighbourhoods through which it travelled.  Electrification had been considered before, but only in the context of the Lake Shore corridor, and only for lower service levels than The Big Move contemplates.  This has always been a “nice to do” that gets shunted aside thanks to budget constraints and a desire to concentrate on building service.  By late 2009, the demand for a detailed study reached a level where Queen’s Park and Metrolinx could not dodge the issue, and GO’s Electrification Study was born.

Although GO had looked at electrifying the Lake Shore corridor, and their studies had been updated a few times over the years, the information in those studies did not speak to a full network view.  Moreover, service plans were based largely on then-existing schedules with modest allowance for growth.  A much more ambitious scope of work was essential, and the Terms of Reference created by an advisory committee laid this out in October 2009.

Stakeholder Workshops

GO Transit engaged a consulting team to conduct the study, and part of this process involves workshops with interested parties from a variety of backgrounds as well as general public meetings.  To date (July 3), there have been two “stakeholder workshops”.  The first dealt with the project overview and structure, and a good deal of time was spent in establishing credibility and trust between the parties.  One outcome of this process was the addition of an extra meeting in the schedule so that the draft version of the study conclusions could be reviewed before its wide release and the inevitable hardening of content that occurs once a document is formally published.

The second meeting was held on June 15, and the overview material at this workshop was substantially the same as that presented to a Georgetown South Open House on May 27th.  Page 10 of this document shows the general outline of the study and an important component in its comparison of options.  There was considerable debate about the assumption that the base case should presume that Tier 4 Diesel technology would be in place before electrification occurs.  In the event that Tier 4 is not available or economically feasible, or that electrification proves more attractive in the short-to-medium term, the base case could well be the existing Tier 2 Diesel operation.

In other words, it is conceivable that at least part of GO’s network could move directly to electrification without going through an intermediate Tier 4 stage.  That’s an optimistic view, but one which electrification advocates advance at least so that the cost of a Tier 4 conversion is not treated as a sunk investment that must somehow be recouped prior to electrification.  Exactly how the study will deal with this situation won’t become evident until the next round of meetings in the fall.

The Rolling Stock Technology and Options Report

The June 15 Stakeholders’ meeting dealt primarily with the draft Rolling Stock Technology and Options report from LTK Engineering Services.  A summary of this report’s findings appears in the overview document linked above starting at page 22.

For those who don’t know them, LTK is a well-established and respected transportation engineering firm who, among other things, were part of the renaissance of Light Rapid Transit (LRT) in the United States.  They are feet-on-the-ground folks who know their way around transit systems and railroads.  This report contains credible information about rail technologies and their application to GO’s network.  LTK is also working on a review of system operations and power supply which is expected this month.  It will deal with important issues such as the level of service planned and possible given network and station capacity, as well as the technical issues related to bringing power to the rail lines.

The scope of the study is the GO rail network including planned extensions to Kitchener-Waterloo, St. Catharines, Barrie/Allandale, Bloomington, Bowmanville and the Air Rail Link.

A long list of technology options was reviewed from the mundane (diesel or electric locos) to the fanciful (maglev or hydrogen fuel cells).  An essential filter on this review was that the technology be proven, commercially viable, compatible with the GO infrastructure and capable of handling projected service levels.

Only a handful of options survived this process:  diesel, electric, or dual-mode locos hauling bi-level passenger cars, or bi-level electric multiple-unit cars (EMU, similar to subway technology).

The scale of investment and the criticality of the GO network is such that this is not the place to toy with whatever untried piece of high technology might have advocates whispering in the government’s ear.  Rail technologies are well-established world-wide, and we can do without yet another Queen’s Park folly in the name of industrial development.

The one exception in the technology list is the Air Rail Link which, due to its much different service requirements from regional GO services, will be operated with single-level cars, either diesel or electric MU.  Indeed, it is unlikely that the structures to be built for the airport spur would be able to support a locomotive-hauled train.

The next step in the study was to identify the appropriate corridors for electrification, at least as an initial subset of the network.  Although the May and June public meetings talked of this as a work-in-progress, comments at the recent Metrolinx Board Meeting showed the self-evident conclusion that the Lakeshore and Georgetown corridors would be the first round.

Some have remarked that we have paid quite a lot of money and taken a lot of time to reach the obvious conclusion.  Sadly, they are correct, but I must challenge the sense that the process is worthless.  GO/Metrolinx is learning a lot about rail technology and the implications of technology choices.  Things that may be “obvious” to advocates sometimes take time to seep into the official world view, and a well-documented study puts to rest many of the diversions and erroneous assumptions that have clouded debates on future GO operations and technologies.

A parallel study now in progress will address capacity issues at Union Station.  Growth in inbound capacity to Union is limited by track layout, signalling, platform dwell time and passenger volumes.  Trains have grown to 12 bi-level cars, and this creates platform and stairway demands, especially if GO, like the TTC subway, starts to carry significant counter-peak loads that will compete with peak-direction travel for platform space (think of Bloor-Yonge Station for a worst-case example).  Train length is also constrained by the ability of locomotives to accelerate and haul fully-loaded trains.

From time to time, I hear rumours that Metrolinx is considering an underground expansion option at Union.  This would be quite an engineering feat given the need to provide a lengthy approach ramp and to build a new station under a busy working operation in land that is below the water table.  Any such scheme necessarily will use electric trains, likely EMUs, to deal with ventillation and gradients.  As an aside, if Metrolinx cannot figure out a reasonable way to expand Union’s capacity, this will seriously compromise plans for frequent, high-capacity service on GO’s major corridors. 

GO is even studying the possibility of offloading demand at subway interchanges so that all trains would not have to run through to Union Station.  How the TTC is supposed to handle such demands on top of existing riding and expected growth is a mystery.  Bad enough that GO does not want anyone in Toronto thinking of the commuter rail network as an optional way to get people downtown.  Now, they want to dump GO passengers onto the TTC subway.  That GO is even considering this option shows how out of touch they are with the larger network context in which they operate.

Chapter 3 of the Rolling Stock Technology report includes a detailed technical description of the characteristics of various types of propulsion.  This shows the tradeoffs and limitations between locomotives and self-propelled cars, as well as diesel vs electric power.  Some things simply do not scale up to bigger and faster trains because of physical limits on engines and the way that power is transferred between wheel and track.

Diesel MU trains, a technology often proposed for GO operations, are practical only for shorter consists.  In theory, one could operate a 12-car train of DMUs, but at a substantial additional cost for equipment, operations and maintenance thanks to the duplication of propulsion gear on every unit in the train.  An alternative would be to use sets of cars with powered and unpowered units, but this drives up the requirements for the powered cars.

Demand on all of the GO corridors is such that full-sized trains are required at peak times, and the smaller trainsets would mainly be for off-peak services.  They could be coupled into longer consists, but the additional cost of making and breaking trains for the period between the peaks would limit their usefulness.

I will leave interested readers to digest all of the details in the report.

Concluding Thoughts

One intriguing point not mentioned in the report, but likely to show up in operational projections, is the question of line capacity and technology.  Metrolinx’ own Benefits Case Analysis of the Lakeshore corridor claimed that diesel technology could not handle the demands foreseen in The Big Move.  However, these demands and future projected service levels have been ramped down, and GO now holds that the service they are likely to provide will not demand electrification.

However, the same BCA calculates that the electrification project (based on the BCA’s methodology) would have a benefit:cost ratio greater than 1 for all scenarios.  This is an amusing example of how the Metrolinx BCA methodology does not always produce the “right” conclusion to fit Metrolinx’ political objectives.  Moreover, the assumptions used in the BCA are considerably different from those in the Rolling Stock report, notably demand levels and train lengths.

Some at Metrolinx have made unfortunate remarks about the viability of electric trains such as a claim that they encounter problems in cold weather.  When one considers the widespread use of this technology, including in countries with climates at least as challenging as that in southern Ontario, one wonders about the “expertise” leading this study.  Thank goodness we have real experts among the consultants who know what electric trains can do.

Over coming months, we will see the first truly thorough examination of the electrification question GO/Metrolinx has produced, and with luck the findings will not be rewritten to suit a political objective.  This won’t prevent them from being ignored, but at least the information will be available, and wild claims that electrification is too expensive or impractical will have to contend with the study.

Metrolinx spent a lot of time drawing lines on maps without considering how it would actually provide the services its plans imply.  Now that we’re into the technical details, Metrolinx is on a steep learning curve.  Of course, one might wonder why this ever-so-expert organization had so much to learn in the first place, and how much time was lost to its biases and ignorance.

Delicious is the irony that this education comes courtesy of citizen activism and political pressure, the very factors that Metrolinx and Queen’s Park so roundly rejected.

Among the items of interest:

Proposed extension of the Sheppard LRT to the UofT Scarborough Campus

The line would run south on Morningside from Sheppard and terminate at one of three options available:

• The Aquatic Centre
• The main UTSC campus
• Centennial College campus

Because UTSC has a master plan that conflicts with the approved Scarborough-Malvern LRT alignment in its Environmental Assessment, the cost of the extension is about 10% higher than originally thought.  One might ask why the EA didn’t take UTSC’s master plan into account.

New funding for this extension would be required, and this could not be justified for a two-week event.  However, building this connection will provide an eastern anchor for the Sheppard LRT and connections to other services focussed on the UTSC campus.

This would make a nice pre-election goody in the 2011 budget.

Benefits Case Analyses

Four Benefits Case Analyses have come forward for approval:

• Dundas BRT
• Hurontario LRT
• Durham-Scarborough BRT
• GO Stouffville Full Service

In addition to the report linked above, there is a presentation deck in pdf format.

For some time I have been planning to comment on the Metrolinx BCA methodology, but other things have distracted me from this (and many other) task.

Three major complaints I would make about the process are that:

• The BCAs treat the economic activity of building a new line as a benefit, but do not consider this in relation to what might be generated by another project.  In effect, expensive projects are rewarded with higher standings on this count than cheap ones.
• The BCAs treat the monetized value of avoided auto trips at a fully-allocated price per kilometre rather than a marginal cost.  Early BCAs used the marginal cost and, therefore, presumed that trips diverted to transit would save only the cost of operating an existing vehicle for the full distance of a commute, not that they would eliminate the cost of the vehicle.  However, much of the GO/Metrolinx plan presumes that people will still make a car trip to reach transit, and therefore the cost of owning the car will not be avoided for all of the new transit riders.
• The BCAs look at projects in isolation rather than considering the combined effect of multiple implementations.  The best-known example of this is the trio of Richmond Hill GO and Subway projects as well as the Downtown Relief Line and capacity expansion on the existing subway system.  These must be reviewed as a package, not in isolation.  In the case of the two Mississauga services reviewed here, it is obvious that a Mississauga LRT network would have an economy of scale — only one shops and carhouse, not two — if both the Dundas and Hurontario lines were built as LRT.  There would also be routing options for service using both of the routes depending on demand patterns.

The Big Move 2.0

Metrolinx has come to recognize, like many outside of the organization, that The Big Move was a good first step, but even when it was published it needed work, and leaving a review for a full five-year cycle is impractical.  Many factors including the economy, a recognition that some of TBM’s assumptions were faulty (for starters, a demand model unconstrained by the inherent capacity of network elements), and the need to integrate GO Transit’s own 2020 plan lead to a need for reworking “TBM 1.0″.

Metrolinx will launch a “2.0″ version with a draft version this fall and a final version in late 2012.  This work ties in with the need for a funding mechanism that actually matches the level of spending Ontario needs to provide if we are to achieve the hoped-for modal shift from auto to transit travel.

Consultations on TBM 2.0 are planned following release of the draft.

I hope that there will be a better understanding of the options available in producing a regional plan, and a realistic appreciation of the cost of diverting trips to transit over coming decades.  Also, this time around, transit advocates might be regarded as potential allies rather than as enemies to be neutralized.

Project Prioritization

A related report to TBM 2.0 talks about prioritization of projects.  Despite all the fine words in Move Ontario, GO 2020, and other pronouncements, it is clear we cannot build everything at once.  A mechanism to prioritize is needed.

However, what bothers me is that this could become a de facto way to delay projects indefinitely, or prevent their even getting into TBM 2.0 just as many projects in early drafts of TBM 1.0 never saw the light of day in the public reports.  If we are to rewrite TBM, we need to know what has fallen off of the table, what we have conciously decided not to build because, it will be claimed, we cannot afford it.  Those decisions should not be taken as a prelude to publishing a draft plan, or at a minimum, the “nice things we can’t afford” list should be an appendix to the draft so that everyone can debate what’s in and what’s out.

The appendices to the report show clearly how GO and Metrolinx have their own set of projects.  Some of these are common to both plans, but many GO projects are system expansions (additional tracks, for example) that would not show up in capital planning for TBM.  Similarly, the TTC has a huge capital budget for maintenance and replacement of older equipment and plant.  These projects compete with new builds for money at all levels, and too often, the prioritization exercises forget that keeping the wheels turning and the lights on is an integral part of running a transit network.

Metrolinx recognizes that “State of Good Repair” takes priority, but it will be interesting to see how they weave this into their overall plans.  In particular, one must ask why SOGR on GO should be able to compete for funding on a Metrolinx list when even larger TTC projects go begging.  Regional planning should include regional capital planning regardless of who operates the service.  Even if Queen’s Park on contributes part of the cost, that’s money from provincial revenues than could be crowded out by a shiny new project, or GO’s special relationship as an operator within Metrolinx.

Electrification Study Update

This report is an overview of the current status of the process, and it’s already out of date.  For full information, please go to the Electrification mini-site.  That site includes the recent Technology Assessment report that was discussed at a few recent public meetings.  I will comment on that report elsewhere, but in brief, find that it is a level-headed document giving a realistic view of what is and is not possible with various real and hypothetical rail propulsion technologies given the corridors to be operated and the service designs proposed.

• The Board Speaks!
• The Managing Director Reports
• We Have A Vision, We Just Don’t Know What It Is Yet
• Achieving 5 in 10, or Transit City Rescheduled
• GO Rail Service Expansion Benefits Cases
• A Question of Advocacy

The Board Speaks!

Probably the most astounding thing about this meeting, the first anniversary of the “new” Metrolinx, is that the Board members finally found their voices.  I was beginning to wonder if they were ever going to show some indication of earning their keep and actually asking hard questions of staff in public.  We’re not quite there yet, but at least the discussion gave an indication that the Board is thinking about its role.

As regular readers will know, I believe that organizations such as Metrolinx should be publicly accountable through an electoral process and through direct access to one’s representatives.  Boards that answer to nobody but the government which appointed them, and entertain no criticism from the public, can leave much to be desired.

To be fair to Metrolinx, even when it had a political board, much of the “public participation” was managed to achieve concensus with, more or less, what Metrolinx planned to do anyhow.  That other well-known transit board, the TTC, is elected, but has succumbed to the disease of being cheerleaders for the organization right-or-wrong.

Metrolinx has not had to actually do much (as opposed to GO Transit which was simply merged into its new “parent”), and we have yet to see how the Board and the Government will react if Metrolinx badly fouls up any of its projects.

The Managing Director Reports

GO Transit’s Managing Director, Gary McNeil, presented his regular public session report.  There is another one on the agenda in private session, but we don’t get to see that one.

GO is quite proud of improvements in its on time performance.  The information shows up in the Quarterly Customer Service Report also on the public agenda.  The report neglects to mention schedule changes implemented over the past half year so that published times better reflect actual conditions on the line.

Don’t mistake me, having trains and buses show up when advertised is a good idea, but it is odd that GO wouldn’t mention this as a reason why their stats have improved.

Riding is up on the system, moreso on buses than trains mainly due to capacity constraints.  This table of current demands on major corridors at Union Station is taken from the Benefits Case Analysis report on GO expansions discussed later in this post.

Over the summer, GO will review its priorities for future service expansion.  To what extent this might be constrained by funding cuts or deferrals is unknown as the GO side of the house appears to have come through the budgetary process unscathed.

Board member Joseph Halstead asked what the TTC is doing on fare collection.  McNeil replied that the TTC is looking at a parallel “open payment” system, and is working with the Province on integration of these systems.  Those of us who follow discussions at the TTC might think this a slight exaggeration.  On the TTC side, the grave concern is that by the time Presto is rolled out across Toronto, it will be “yesterday’s technology”.  This matter will, no doubt, reappear for debate before both Boards.

Presto readers are installed in 12 subway stations which have been identified as the origin of 80% of GO’s commuter market for the 905.  This allows the lion’s share of GO Presto users to board the TTC for their commute trips to and from Union Station.

We Have A Vision, We Just Don’t Know What It Is Yet

The Metrolinx Board gave some thought to a “Vision and Mission Statement” during a private meeting earlier in 2010, and a first cut at this showed up in a report on the May agenda.

Flame on.  As someone who worked in management of a very large public sector agency for a quarter century, I have seen my share of “Mission Statement” proposals and they are without exception steaming piles of equine effluvia, management games replacing productive work with the illusion of motion, and an absolute boon to consultants and facilitators.  Flame off.

The purpose of the exercise, I am told, is to aid in the unification of GO Transit and Metrolinx behind a common goal, mission, vision and set of corporate values.  In furtherance of this marriage, a separate set of statements was proposed for each organization.  This is rather like a marriage where each partner is reading from a different text.

• For Metrolinx
  • Vision: Transforming the Way the Region Moves
  • Mission: To Champion and Deliver Mobility Solutions for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA)
• For GO Transit
  • Vision: To Be the Preferred Choice for Regional Travel across the GTHA
  • Mission: To be a Customer-First Regional Transit Service

The Board was not overwhelmed by this proposal, and sent the whole thing back to staff for another go.  CEO Rob Prichard suggested that they would try to come up with some corporate “values” that would support their mission(s).

Although Metrolinx has a mission to “champion and deliver”, I am unsure whether a sense of “advocacy” forms any part of this concept.  I will return to this later.

Meanwhile, if I am waiting at a streetcar stop for a “mobility solution” to appear, I will remind myself that Metrolinx’ mission is for regional travel, and that for the Queen car I must complain elsewhere.  Some day, Metrolinx will embrace the idea that regional journeys include local components that do not involve a private auto and a parking garage.  They don’t have to own and manage the local component, but they need to acknowledge and fund it.

It is rather quaint that Queen’s Park wants everyone to use its standard fare collection system, Presto, but has little interest in funding the local service improvements the growth of transit riding will require.

As I was making notes about the debate, I wrote “how long will they talk about this versus the substantive reports on project funding”.  Clearly I have sat through too many of this type of meeting.

Achieving 5 in 10, or Transit City Rescheduled

Just as the GO trains have been rescheduled so that the advertised times match typical day-to-day operations, Transit City and VIVA have been rescheduled to fit within Queen’s Park’s constrained budget.  I have written at length elsewhere on the new rollout plan for Transit City and will not duplicate that discussion here.

CEO Rob Prichard observed that Councillor Lindsay Luby had thanked him for the delay to the western end of the Eglinton LRT project as this will allow more time to sort out its design.  If every Councillor were so fortunate in having projects delayed indefinitely, we would never get anything done.  Oddly enough, the Councillors and MLAs who object to the proposed design in Mt. Dennis are not cheering about the new Transit City schedule, nor are they being consulted regarding alternate designs.

The Finch West and SRT projects, now scheduled to begin in 2015, York VIVA Phase 2, and the Transit City carhouses (Conlins Road and Norfinch) will be reviewed as possible “alternative financing” projects by Infrastructure Ontario.  I can only hope that “IO”, as it is called, and the whole PPP fetish held so dear by some will be much better understood by the time any contract must be signed for these lines.  How many more failed partnerships and horror stories such as the demise of London’s PPP must we hear of?

Rob Prichard observed that one problem with AFP is that liabilities accrue regardless of who builds the project.  Even if a private partner builds you a carhouse, for example, you are contractually obliged to pay for it.  From an accounting point of view, that’s a debt from the moment you sign the contract.  We can thank Enron and other scandals for changes to public sector accounting that prevent (or make more difficult) the hiding of public debt and future obligations through leases and third party transactions.  This makes IO’s work a tad more difficult when the announced Provincial policy is to limit the growth of debt.

The revised rollout plan includes purchase of cars for the four lines.  The total fleet, 182, is smaller than original plans because, of course, the full routes are not (yet) part of the grand design.  The contract is expected to be signed before the end of June 2010.

During the presentation, Metrolinx Vice-President Jack Collins mentioned that the projects already in hand will keep the project team at the TTC extremely busy.  This led to a question from Board member Peter Smith (formerly Chair of the GO Transit Board) asking whether the original scope of transit construction could have been achieved.  This was quite transparently a gambit to suggest that even if more money became available, TTC and Metrolinx would be unable to ramp up additional projects.

That begs the obvious question of how Metrolinx itself planned to spend $2-billion a year or more if the Transit City project office will be hard-pressed to spend less than $4-billion from now to 2014.  The obvious answer is that project offices scale depending on the amount of work.  Other teams are today looking after the Spadina Subway and many GO capital projects.

Collins observed that the construction industry is hungry and capacity is available in the industry because the private sector has pulled back on major investments.

Board member Paul Bedford (former Chief Planner for the City of Toronto) asked about the Pan Am Games and service to the Aquatic Centre at UTSC (University of Toronto Scarborough Campus).  Rob Prichard replied that the so-called “Morningside Hook” would cost about $165-million, but as it was not part of the original Sheppard LRT scheme, it would have to be dealt with as an “extra”.  In due course, he agreed that staff would report back in June on this option, and there appears to be strong support among the Board for this.  This is an obvious add-on to the Sheppard line not just for the Games, but as an eastern anchor for the line much as York U will be for the subway extension now under construction.

Note that on Page 16 of the presentation material, the location of Morningside Avenue is mistakenly shown as west of the interchange with the Scarborough RT when it is, in fact, somewhat to the east.  This explains the corresponding error in the map published with the Star’s background article.  It’s so nice to know that both our planners and our media are so well-informed on the geography of the city.

The Board has a short discussion on that difficult question “What Is LRT?”.  Collins was prepared to talk for an hour if he had to, but gave a thumbnail sketch setting out the major differences between the St. Clair and Spadina lines (which are much closer to “streetcars”) and the Transit City lines (which are a hybrid between fully grade separated rapid transit and street running, the latter to have better priority and more widely spaced stations than “streetcars”).

On the subject of capacity, Collins stated that Eglinton would be capable of 12K/hour.  To put this in context, that is 200/minute, or a three-car train (service design capacity, say, 450) every 135 seconds.  (The 450 number is derived by taking the design capacity of the CLRV, 74, doubling it and rounding up to 150, and then multiplying by 3.  This is a conservative value, and has plenty of headroom for surge/peak loads within a peak hour.)

To a question about the Air Rail Link (ARL), Prichard replied that this was a joint project between SNC-Lavalin, Ottawa and Queen’s Park.  GO Transit will charge the ARL for use of its tracks and for support services such as dispatching.

GO Rail Service Expansion Benefits Cases

As part of the review of the “Big 15″ projects within Metrolinx’ “Big Move”, the Board considered a compendium report on four proposals:

• Barrie Corridor
• Milton Corridor
• Richmond Hill Corridor
• Bowmanville Extension

This Benefits Case Analysis (BCA) report is summarized in the presentation given at the meeting.  I will deal with this report and related reports about the proposed Peterborough service (here and here) in a separate post.  Also, a report on the Stouffville Corridor is expected at the June Board meeting.

Among important points noted in the presentation:

• GO already has major capacity problems during the peak period and future service will outstrip the capacity of even the expanded Union Station.  A separate study about rail terminal options is expected to report in the fall of 2010.
• Rail corridors are limited in their number and capacity, and another rail yard will be needed to service trains.
• The service levels proposed for Milton, Barrie, Richmond Hill and Stouffville are a huge increase over today’s operation with all-day 30-minute headways in both directions and 10-minute peak direction service.
• Diesel Tier 4 technology is assumed, but this matter will also be picked up by the Electrification Study.  Indeed, the design of additional terminal capacity at Union may force electrification if the platforms are underground.
• All but the Bowmanville extension scored well on the cost/benefit analysis.  These numbers are always suspect at Metrolinx, but I will not comment on the information in the BCA report until I have fully digested it.
• The Richmond Hill corridor still scores over 1 (at 1.1) even if the Richmond Hill Subway is included in the network.  A full BCA for that subway proposal has not yet been published, but the numbers are rumoured to be quite uncomplimentary for this project.

A Question of Advocacy

Earlier I talked about the Metrolinx Vision and Mission statement which includes the concept of “championing” better transportation systems.  To that end, Metrolinx needs to move beyond a meek, “yes Sir, right away Sir”, response to Provincial funding cuts into an advocacy role.  Indeed, this is the heart of the cultural divide between Toronto politicians and Mayor Miller and those at Metrolinx and Queen’s Park.

Without question, it is the Government’s prerogative to set fiscal plans, and its agencies must live within them.  However, it is also the duty of agencies and Ministers to advise the Government on the implications and alternatives available for future budgets.

In particular, the transit funding cut has been justified as a necessary step to limit the growth of Provincial debt.  I will take the Government at their word that this is true, but if so, then the justification for withholding funding evaporates if the economy recovers more quickly than projected in the 2010 budget.  World events are uncertain, although there are indications that Ontario is in better shape now that it had planned to be.  Whether this holds remains to be seen.

Suppose there is more headroom for debt in 2011 than had been planned.  What Metrolinx projects should benefit from the ability to move back toward the original “burn rate” of the budgets for the “Big 5″ projects?  The time constraints on the SRT project likely prevent its being moved back to a pre-Pan Am schedule, but Finch West is a simple project independent of timing constraints.  All it needs is funding.

Metrolinx needs to embrace an advocacy role for transit — its funding, construction and operation — and this must include better funding for local operations.  Imagine if GO does operate half-hourly service all day on its major routes.  How will people reach their destinations if the train serves only a gigantic parking lot full of cars awaiting homebound commuters?  Metrolinx may think of local transit as “something we don’t do”, but its Big Move is doomed if local transit isn’t funded and operated at a level that complements much more extensive rail operations.

Funding is a big issue now both locally and regionally.  Funding needs its advocates, people who will take the political heat for new taxes and fees, people and organizations who can see, who have a vision of what transit will look like when it really is the preferred choice for travel.

“This is about working with the community and repairing any damage that has been done and building a good relationship,” said Ontario Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne.

“These transit projects are going to be going to go on for a number of years, as they should be. That means there will be disruption in the communities,” she said.

But the government is committed to working with residents to make the process as comfortable as possible, said Wynne.

Updated February 3, 2010:  Metrolinx, continuing in the friendly tradition of GO Transit on this project, appealed for a stay of the order of the Canadian Transportation Ageny claiming that their project would be unreasonably delayed.  Today, a court ruling denied the Metrolinx appeal.  When more information about this ruling is available, I will link it here.

Updated December 11, 2009:  On December 7, the Canadian Transportation Agency issued its final order requiring that GO Transit implement measures to correct noise and vibration problems at the West Toronto Diamond project.  This is an important victory both for the community and against the arrogance of GO who record of community involvement and sensitivity in the Weston corridor leaves much to be desired.

This will also set a precedent for the coming grade separation project at the Davenport Diamond, the crossing of the CN Newmarket Sub (the Barrie GO line) with the CP North Toronto Sub.  This work will be part of a larger upgrade of the Barrie GO service.

The original post from October 9 follows:

The Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled that GO Transit’s pile driving activities at the West Toronto grade separation project breach their duty to cause only reasonable disruption to the community around the work site.

The Canadian Transportation Agency finds that GO Transit is in breach of its obligation under section 95.1 of the Canada Transportation Act to cause only such noise and vibration as is reasonable, in relation to GO Transit’s pile-driving activities at the West Toronto Diamond. The Agency found that, in the circumstances, the prolonged exposure of the local citizens to the noise and vibration generated at that location is unreasonable.  [From a summary of the CTA ruling of October 8, 2009.]

The full order is not yet final because GO Transit has been given 14 days to respond, following which the complainants (a local citizens’ group and the City of Toronto) have a further 5 days to counter whatever GO may file.

Among the salient findings:

• Noise measurements by all three parties to the complaint show that people around the work have been subjected to ongoing noise levels well above those that, in a workplace, would require hearing protection under health and safety legislation.
• Although GO has made attempts to reduce noise, the CTA believes that GO is not fully implementing all reasonable measures possible considering the nature of the noise and the neighbourhood in which it is created.
• “The Agency is of the opinion that the speed with which the project can be completed should not be the determinative factor in the method of construction given the nature of the noise and vibration caused by this project and the impact on the community.  The Agency also notes that GO Transit has failed to provide any commercial feasibility arguments or financial impact analysis to support its position that extending the completion date of the project would be unreasonable.”

The CTA requires that GO:

• Use an alternative pile driving technology and noise containment measures that reduces noise levels to reasonable levels wherever possible.
• Restrict their hours of work to the period between 0800 and 1600 on weekdays.
• Provide weekly noise and vibration measurements.
• Develop a website, to be updated daily, to
  • communicate project status and notice of changes including current pile-driving activity, projected activity for the next two weeks, and any projected periods of inactivity; 
  • have an email and phone line “both to be answered by a person knowledgeable about the project and its schedule” with 48-hour investigation and response time; and
  • host the weekly noise and vibration reports, an assessment of any mitigation measures, any complaints received including the response and resolution, and any changes to the project schedule.

At this point, the order is at the “show cause” stage where GO must submit any arguments as to why the order cannot or should not be implemented.

This decision relates to the same Weston Corridor that is under dispute between various community groups and Queen’s Park.  GO’s treatment of the neighbourhood around the grade separation project  is an example of the poor “corporate citizenship” shown by that agency, and has contributed to the distrust in which any dispute between the wider public and GO is held.

Fortunately, the Canadian Transportation Agency’s job is not to make GO and Metrolinx look good, but to address the facts of a valid complaint.  We must now await GO’s formal response and the final form of the CTA order.

[I have not linked the full 24-page letter containing the CTA's findings because it is a PDF of a FAX, and is extremely large.  When a smaller online version is available, I will link to it.]

Pity poor Metrolinx, and its Board who are about to embark on their annual retreat.  This will be no wine and canapés in the woods outing, but some very hard slogging for “Metrolinx II”.  This is a Board that did not work through the creation of The Big Move, and many members are short on local planning and political experience.  All the same, it’s their job to sort out what is to be done.

I’m not a Metrolinx Board member.  I wasn’t even on their Advisory Panel.  But if I were, here’s the advice I would give.

Metrolinx is stuck in a policy vacuum.  Queen’s Park claims it has not lost interest in transit, merely that it wants to hold off a while to get the financial house in better order and concentrate on portfolios more demanding of short-term spending.  We have to take them at their word, but this doesn’t really tell us what support for transit will look like whenever it will materialize.

Any program that assumes one specific level of support is doomed to irrelevance on two counts:

• If spending priorities change for any reason, the program will be out-of-step with available funding and we will be back to the familiar position of waiting for yet another proposal while the clock ticks away.
• A single program without alternatives includes many assumptions and tradeoffs that may be hidden in private discussions, and which preclude vital public debate on what role transit should have and how it will be financed.

Queen’s Park has announced that it will produce a 10-year fiscal plan in 2011.  That plan necessarily will include (or omit) whatever funding for transit, including Metrolinx projects, that will take us to the next decade.  Metrolinx’ job is not to produce one scenario, but a range of options that can inform the creation of that plan.

For obvious political reasons (the coming provincial election), debate on these options may happen in private, and that would be quite sad.  The future of the GTA’s transit network is far too complex and far-reaching to appear as a fait accompli by way of a pre-election announcement next year.  Moreover, if the Liberals were to lose power, a single program embedded in an election platform would almost certainly be discarded as a product of the ancien régime.  You need only look to the treatment accorded David Miller’s Transit City to see what the future might do to a Liberal transit plan.

Here, Board members, are your assignments.

What Will Transit Do?

I have written about this question at length elsewhere and won’t repeat those posts here.  Metrolinx needs to craft a range of “transit futures” from at worst a small growth of the existing systems to an aggressive plan for improvement of transit across the region.  This sort of thing happened in the development of The Big Move, but you will need better granularity in your options for several reasons.

• Will transit continue to primarily support commute trips into the core (the “radial” option of early versions of the Metrolinx network), or will it provide a grid of services addressing travel demand and congestion for a wider range of trips both by time of day and location?
• Will transit’s use of road space be constrained to whatever leftovers can be spared on existing streets, or will there be an active program to convert road space to surface rapid transit regardless of the technology?
• What role will local transit operations play in the regional scheme, and what funding demands do these drive out in the larger plan?
• What alternative scenarios will exist depending on population and economic growth in the GTA, and on changing price and availability of fuel for automobiles?  We may not agree on whether peak oil is upon us, but we need to understand the implications if there are major, permanent shifts in the cost of fuel.
• For each scenario, what are the implications of what you have left out, the cost in broad terms of “the road not taken”?

If you begin your discussions by wrangling about whether Queen’s Park should commit $1-billion or $5-billion a year to transit, and how they might raise it, you are already on the wrong path because you won’t yet know what you want the money for.  First you must know the range of options, the future scenarios for transit growth (including none at all), then you figure out the price.

The original Metrolinx work came up with a network costing close to $90-billion, and this simply did not fly at Queen’s Park.  Even today, I have doubts that there is any real love for a $50b program that would add $2b annually to capital spending plus future operating costs.  All the same, the public deserves to know what the costs and effects of each option will be so that they can decide whether to support transit spending.  Politicians deserve this information too so that they can lead the GTA into a transit future knowing that the costs and outcomes are defensible and worthy of their own political capital.

I won’t go into every possible issue here, but a few must be on the table.

The Validity of The Big Move

A central premise of The Big Move is that it will divert millions of trips that might otherwise travel by auto to transit, and this will generate widespread benefits in reduced congestion, lower pollution and other personal and societal costs related to supporting a rapidly growing fleet of autos in the GTA.  However, many of the demand projections in The Big Move are suspect because they assume a level of service in some corridors that simply will not exist and, in many cases, cannot even be built.

Already we know that GO Transit’s plans for the Georgetown corridor are much less aggressive than the service levels contemplated in The Big Move, and moreover capacity constraints in the rail corridors and at Union Station are major problems in attaining the proposed capacity.  The clear split between what GO thinks it can run and what Metrolinx claims it will build must be resolved so that we have a credible plan.

This will require a complete rethink of the regional plan both for the achievability of its goals and the alternatives that must be contemplated.  Sitting on The Big Move as an untouchable transit bible is not an option, and such action would abdicate the very purpose of fiscal review and planning.

The Role of GO Transit

The merger of Metrolinx and GO appears smooth on the surface, but many questions remain.  We already know that GO’s projections of future demand and the service they plan to operate are much lower than the figures cited in The Big Move.  Moreover, GO’s service and planning territory extend well beyond the GTA limits of The Big Move.  Indeed, some proposals such as rail service to Kitchener-Waterloo and Niagara, part of early versions of the regional plan, were taken out because they lay outside of Metrolinx’ planning scope.

Now that GO and Metrolinx are one agency, both sets of plans need to be consolidated.  We need to know how much additional capital and operating funding is required for GO expansion beyond the original Big Move territory.

GO’s bus network is growing both to meet travel demands across municipal boundaries and to cope with the disappearance of private carriers.  However, GO may not be the appropriate agency to deliver these services.  As we have already seen in York Region, where GO duplicates the local service, it may be more appropriate to cede operation to that level.  On a general note, the same issues of cross-region operation so often cited as a shortcoming of the TTC need to be addressed among the 905 transit services.

If these boundaries disappear, and if service at the local level improves, what is the remaining role for GO buses?

Fare Integration and Collection

Nobody wants to talk about this, but the creation of a regional transit system demands that fare issues be addressed.

What is an “integrated” fare?  How much will people be expected to pay for transit travel?  Should there be different fare structures for express services, and how is “express” defined?  How much will fare integration cost both to riders who may pay greater fares (for example, long-distance TTC riders if that system switches to fare by distance), or in greater subsidy (either to mitigate fare increases, or to offset the effect of eliminating existing fare boundaries)?

What is the real status and future cost of Presto?  What are its capabilities and, more importantly, its limitations?  Do these dictate specific fare structures and payment models?  The GTA hears a lot about the wonders of Presto, but we also know that full implementation is an expensive, as-yet unfunded project that must be integrated in future spending plans.

The Role of Local Transit

GO is already well aware of the need for local transit to supplement its parking lots for commuter travel.  Future parking growth cannot possibly accommodate the volume of riders projected by either GO or Metrolinx, and parking is not an option for riders arriving at a GO station from elsewhere in the network.  Local transit is the vital collection and distribution mechanism for regional travel.

What service levels should Metrolinx advocate to support its future network?  How will this be funded?  What will the fare structure look like?

The Technology Debates:  Is There A Role for LRT?

A great deal of time was wasted in the lead-up to support of the Transit City Light Rapid Transit (LRT) network because many people simply do not believe this is a viable technology.  This debate is clouded by a complete lack of LRT experience on the ground in Toronto despite worldwide implementation of many forms of LRT that are popular, integral parts of their local transit systems.

LRT debates in Toronto are futher compromised by the less-than-stellar implementations brought to us by the TTC.  These are the very low end of LRT, basically streetcar lines running in their own lanes, and even these have been compromised by deferral to other road traffic in their design, and by the recent construction foul-ups of the St. Clair project.

All the same, LRT is not just a “Toronto” proposal, but exists with plans for Hamilton and Mississauga, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa, not to mention York Region if VIVA ever moves beyond its BRT implementation.  Metrolinx as an agency and especially its Board need to understand what this technology can achieve as well as its limitations, neighbourhood effects, and tradeoffs against other modes including both Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and full-blown subways.

We cannot afford to have debates about Metrolinx proposals mired in uncertainty over technology.  If Metrolinx can build a “good” LRT line, then please do it and show the GTA what is possible.  If Metrolinx does not want to build LRT, then say so, and explain what alternatives will address future travel demand.

How Will We Pay For This Network?

If you have come this far, you will probably have at least a dozen scenarios with combinations of future designs, system ramp-up rates, service qualities and fare structures.  There will be a lot of rolled up papers littering the floor, or the electronic equivalent in many trash folders.  Now, at least, you know the range of costs and possible revenues you are looking at, and you have to pay for it all.

There is no easy way to say this:  Any large new program requires new sources of revenue.  Nibbling around the edges with small reallocations or efficiencies in current operation will not produce the capital needed for system expansion and operation.

Putting this in a simple context, the entire TTC operating budget is $1.4b for 2010, and its ongoing capital needs are about $400m excluding any expansion.  The Big Move requires at least $2b annually just for construction over the next 25 years, let alone future operating and maintenance costs.  Even if one could shave 20% from TTC operating costs ($280m), this wouldn’t come close to paying for the new transit network.

I’m not saying “ignore efficiency”, but recognize that this is not a pot of gold that will provide frequent transit region-wide with no additional spending.  The overall level of transit spending will rise very substantially and this means new revenues must be found.

For too long, the debate on revenue was dominated by the “no new taxes” brigade.  Bluntly, this must stop.  We know already that people in Toronto are willing to pay more if they can be guaranteed better, faster transit service, not just piles of studies of routes they will never be able to ride.  People will choose transit over their cars if the service is reliable, reasonably fast and comfortable.

Also for too long, the emphasis has been on publicising the TTC’s screw-ups of which the St. Clair project (a joint cock-up of various City agencies and the TTC) is only one.  Bashing the TTC may be politically useful for those who would shift the power in transit planning, spending and operations elsewhere, but it has the side effect of undermining transit of any flavour.  GO thinks it has a better reputation, but much of that comes from having the comparatively easy projects and services.  As we have seen in the Weston Corridor, GO’s sensitivity to neighbourhoods is little better than the TTC’s.

Raising support for new revenue streams requires that all agencies including Metrolinx wrestle with and win the battle to improve public perception of transit as a real alternative, as services and facilities that can be built and operated well.

Several revenue tools are available, and I’m not sure that Metrolinx’ role goes beyond identifying what these are, how much they can raise, and the implications of the costs of future network scenarios.  A decision to implement any of these rests with Queen’s Park, but it would be founded on a strong, credible set of options for transit spending.

• Road tolls:  A perennial favourite in some quarters, this would penalize road users who might not benefit from transit improvements especially if their travel does not correspond to trips that transit will serve well.  They will neither be able to use new transit lines nor see much benefit from reduced congestion.
• Fuel tax:  This is simpler to implement than a toll because the collection machinery is already in place.  All that is needed is the will to charge the tax.  However, this again affects all road users including those whose benefit from transit spending is dubious.
• Congestion tax:  Any scheme to limit access to the core ignores the basic fact that most of the traffic is not downtown.  There is no reason the comparatively small amount of traffic in central Toronto should underwrite the construction of a regional transit system.
• Local property tax:  To the degree that increasing scope of local transit operations is driven by the growth of a regional network, local property taxes will be affected.
• Regional sales tax:  If we regard transit as a general social good, then it should be paid for from a broad-based revenue source like the sales tax.  In the short term, while the public digests the HST implementation, talk of bumping the sales tax may be unwelcome.  However, for purpose of debate, we must know what could be raised by such a tax.
• Income taxes and general revenue:  Short of creating a separate transit surtax in the manner of the Ontario health tax, the problem with income taxes is that they flow to general revenue rather than being earmarked for any program.  If Ontario does entertain a tax increase, I suspect this will be aimed at higher profile spending areas such as health care or deficit/debt reduction.

“Alternative Financing”

When MoveOntario was announced, the financing scheme involved deferred recognition of the cost of assets until they were in operation, followed by a 50-year amortization period.  This is akin to the scheme used for power generation plants, and we all know the financial mess Ontario Hydro got into by pushing costs off into the future.

Queen’s Park is now clearly treating capital spending for transit as an ongoing, debt-financed process, and wants to constrain future spending to stay within deficit/debt targets in coming years.  “Free” transit construction is an accounting bubble that has burst.

Alternative schemes have been proposed for the creation of transit infrastructure.  One way or another, all of them require that somebody borrow money, and somebody else pay it back.  One might argue that a non-governmental provider would do so more effectively (whatever that might mean), but they won’t do it for free.  In the best possible scenario, there will be cost savings in the short term (primarily construction financing and project management), but these will be offset in the long term when the operating agreement or lease for the finished facility kicks in.

A $2b/year program might, just might, shrink by 10%, but that’s still $1.8b of new money to come from somewhere.  If you want a lot more transit, be prepared to pay for it.  Toronto isn’t Singapore, or Hong Kong or Tokyo where riding demand and real estate development can support the construction of intensive transit services.  We have built our low density city, and now we have to pay to travel in it.

I won’t go into the many scenarios for alternative schemes of service provision as these really cannot be discussed until we know what quality of service and scope of operations we want.  Metrolinx has more than enough on its plate already.

I was not able to attend, but Robert Wightman sent the following report. 

I was at the meeting at city hall tonight and a few interesting things came up.

1 Prof. Christopher Kennedy, Civil Engineering U of T, said that far side stops on centre reservation LRT lines were a bad idea.

2 The number of 480 trains per day is only valid if GO gets every commuter to take the train downtown. They are only going to run an extra 10 to 15 GO trains per day. They were designing for the “worst” or “Best” case scenario. Gary McNeil from GO/Metrolinx said they did not have the capacity at Union for this many trains, no kidding.

3 Gary McNeil gave the impression that GO/Metrolinx really doesn’t know where it is going or what its real direction is. He did say that GO is inter regional as is not interested in providing service within the 416, but if the TTC wants to build a rapid transit line up the corridor they could tunnel under the rail right of way. GO is unwilling to consider anything that is not mainline railway compatible even if they own the entire corridor and have enough tracks to keep regular freight and passenger equipment off them.

4 SNC Lavalin is looking at a mainline version of the Ottawa Talent cars instead of recycled Budd Cars.

5 The Air Rail Link must be running for the Pan Am Games.

6 GO transit has NOT bought the Oakville Sub or any other tracks along the Lake Shore from CN but they are in negotiations for any and all lines that CN or CP will sell them. The guy beside me told me this. I think that his name was Bob Prichard.

7 McNeil said the electrification study should be done by December and that GO and MPI will have a tier 4 version of the MP40 Locomotive ready in about a year for testing.

The crowd was remarkably civil considering the fact that 99% thought that GO Metrolinx had been treating them like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them manure.

If anyone else wishes to contribute observations, please do so in the comment thread.

As expected, the Metrolinx Board approved the proposed increase in GO Transit fares at its recent meeting.  The contrast with the debates about TTC budgets and fares was quite striking.  The greatest potential for discord came with the presentation of an anti-increase petition.

The bottom line for this increase is “to ensure fiscal responsibility and meet the needs of a growing market of commuters” (presentation to the Board, page 2).  That’s shorthand for keeping the subsidy requirement under control, paying for the operations we have now and giving us some headroom to do more.

GO customers are, after all, from a very different market than the TTC.  Their median family income is $100k, they live well outside the core, and auto travel is already an established part of their lifestyle.  85% are fully employed, 9% are students and 1% are seniors.  They are travelling on GO overwhelmingly by choice and good service, in all aspects, matters.

40% of GO riders use monthly passes and another 40% use 10-trip tickets.  This is not unlike the TTC where the monthly pass accounts for over half of the adult trips, and a large majority of those remaining use token fares.

The purpose of the fare increase was to raise revenue by $14.6m in fiscal 2010.  Provincial subsidy will also jump for 2010 from $52.6m to $72.1m, but over half of this changes adjusts for one-time revenue in 2009/10 that allowed for a lower subsidy in that year.  GO’s total operating budget is $386.7m, and they expect to carry 56m rides.

By comparison, the TTC’s fare increase is project to raise somewhere between $36m and $50m depending on which figures you believe.  In 2010, the City will carry the entire $430m TTC subsidy while Queen’s Park spends its way through this budget cycle propping up Ontario’s economy.  The TTC’s proposed total operating budget is $1.37b, and they expect to carry 462m rides.

GO’s workforce, including contract staff, is 1,938.  The TTC’s proposed “conventional system” workforce for 2010 (as discussed in another thread), excluding contractors, is 10,491.  This number omits Wheel Trans, Capital Projects and Toronto Coach Terminal.

The TTC’s budget is only 3.5 times GO’s, but there are far more staff (5.4:1) and riders (8.2:1).  The subsidy per rider on GO is $1.29.  On the TTC it is about $0.93.

Earlier, I mentioned the potential for discord at the Metrolinx meeting.  The protocols for these meetings accept the public’s presence only grudgingly, unlike meetings for municipal agencies such as the TTC where in camera discussions are allowed on only a handful of grounds.  There are no deputations at Metrolinx, unlike the City of Toronto where a long history of public involvement would be impossible to silence.

The Directors, with few exceptions, ask no questions in the public session, and everything has clearly been worked out beforehand.  They’re just one big happy family.

Alas, thanks to an email slip-up, Metrolinx’ attitude slipped into view.  An internal email from Rob Prichard, Metrolinx CEO, was cc:ed to the petion’s originator in error.  From this, the clear intent was to give the petition as little exposure at the meeting as possible and assume that the Board would ignore it.  They did.

The original article from February 12 follows the break.

The Metrolinx Board will consider a GO Transit fare increase proposal at its February 19 meeting.  This increase is proposed to take effect on March 20, 2010.

The fare increase would, generally speaking, involve an across the board 25-cent increase in all single ticket fares.  There would be a ”top up” fare of up to $3 for the Niagara Falls excursion service.  It is unclear what would happen to this once rail service to Niagara Falls becomes part of the standard schedule.

The proposal will also standardize the relationship of the various discount fares to the single ticket rates.

• 10-ride tickets will cost 9.25 single fares for adults, 8.5 single fares for students
• monthly passes will cost 33 single fares for adults, 26 single fares for students

The fare bylaw also includes provisions for various special cases such as group rates as well as for ticket refunds.  The contrast with the TTC, where management invents new rules with every fare increase, is quite striking.

Such are the joys of an unmoderated forum.

Some have proposed a public debate, possibly televised, which I flatly reject.  First off, the issues are more complex than can be properly handled in that forum, and it certainly should not turn into a mayoral candidates’ debate on transit.  I do not know any candidate who could debate the details of either commentary.

Second, the lynch mob mentality of some writers on UrbanToronto is utterly inappropriate to “debate”, and this poisons many of the discussions on that site.

Recently I was asked by the authors of the Move Toronto proposal to respond, and this article is an attempt to start that dialogue in a forum where civility occasionally breaks through the diatribes.

To begin with, there are areas where SOS and I agree strongly, notably on the need for the Downtown Relief Line (at least the eastern side of it).  I’ve been advocating this for years at the very least as a high-end LRT line, more recently as a full subway as that technology fits its location in the network better and is well suited to the likely demand.

Where we part company is the premise that we have to give up big chunks of Transit City to pay for the DRL.  This sets up a false dialogue where TC lines are portrayed as overpriced and underperforming, denigrated at least in part to justify redirecting funding to the DRL.  That is an extremely short-sighted tactic and harms the cause of overall transit improvements.  It takes us back to the days of debating which kilometre of subway we will build this year.

I don’t intend to repeat my three long posts about Transit City here, but anyone who has read them knows that I do not slavishly support everything in that plan.  If anything, the lack of movement on some valid criticisms people have raised regarding TC sets up a confrontational dynamic.  Instead, the City/TTC could have been seen as responding to concerns.

Now, with the mayoralty campaign, attacking TC has become a surrogate for attacking the Miller program and the candidacy of Adam Giambrone.  These need to be disentangled if we are to have any sort of sensible debate.

My greatest concern is that whoever is the new mayor, the issues will be so clouded by electoral excess, by positions taken as debating points, as sound bites to attack an opponent, that we won’t be able to sort fact from fiction afterwards.  If, for example, George Smitherman winds up as Mayor, he will need a reasoned program, likely a mixture of some old, some new, not a “throw it all out and start over” policy.  People will have different ideas about what that new program might be, and that’s a valid debate.

Whether Steve Munro is an arch villain (SFX: maniacal laughter) plotting the end of civilized transportation is quite another matter.  To some, I have a vast reach through the political machinery of the GTA, while to others I am irrelevant.  I am not the issue.  Transit is.

These comments are organized roughly in the sequence of the Move Toronto paper (6mb download).  Although variations and alternatives have appeared in other locations, notably threads on the UrbanToronto website, I have not attempted to address these as they are (a) a moving target and (b) not necessarily the formal position of the Save Our Subways group.

I believe that Move Toronto contains many flaws arising from an underlying desire to justify a subway network just as critics of Transit City argue against its focus on LRT.  Among my major concerns are:

• Subway lines are consistently underpriced.
• LRT is dismissed as an inferior quality of service with statements more akin to streetcar lines than a true LRT implementation.
• Having used every penny to build the subway network, Move Toronto proposes a network of BRT lines for the leftover routes. However, this “network” is in fact little more than the addition of traffic signal priority and queue jump lanes (“BRT Light”) on almost all of the BRT “network”.
• Parts of the BRT network suggest that the authors lack familiarity with the affected neighbourhoods and travel patterns.
• There is no financial analysis of the life-cycle cost of building and operating routes with subway technology even though demand is unlikely to reach subway levels within the lifetime of some of the infrastructure.

That’s the introductory section.  The full commentary is available as a pdf.

In this, the final installment of my review of Transit City, I will look at the unfunded (or underfunded) TTC transit projects.  Some of these spur passionate debates and the occasional pitched battle between advocates of various alternatives.  There are two vital points to remember through all of this:

• Having alternatives on the table for discussion is better than having nothing at all.  It’s very easy to spend nothing and pass the day on comparatively cheap debates.  The current environment sees many competing visions, but most of them are transit visions.  The greatest barrier lies in funding.  Governments love endless debate because they don’t have to spend anything on actual construction or operations.  Meanwhile, auto users point to the lack of transit progress and demand more and wider roads.
• Transit networks contain a range of options.  They are not all subways or all buses or all LRT.  Some are regional express routes while others address local trips.  Most riders will have to transfer somewhere, even if it is from their car in a parking lot to a GO train.  The challenge is not to eliminate transfers, but to make them as simple and speedy as possible.

I will start with the unfunded Transit City lines, and then turn to a range of other schemes and related capital projects.

Don Mills LRT

Original proposal:  Steeles to Danforth, route south of Eglinton to be determined, surface operation except possibly at the BD subway connection, $675m (2007) including vehicles but excluding inflation.

Revisions to date: 

• Queen’s Park, in announcing funding for the Finch LRT line, also included an easterly extension to Don Mills and south to Don Mills Station.  This would both prebuild 2km of the Don Mills LRT and likely shift the Sheppard Station on that line underground for easy connection to the subway and the Sheppard LRT.  The surface connection between the two LRT lines would no longer be part of the scheme.
• A Don Mills line would not have its own carhouse, but where it will be based will depend on what other parts of the Transit City network exist by the time Don Mills opens for business.
• York Region is considering a northerly extension of the route.

The Don Mills line’s design suffers from its origin in the Don Valley Transportation Corridor Study, a scheme to add bus lanes to the DVP.  The proposed routes are bus-based and included possible subway connections at Pape, Broadview or Castle Frank.  The latter required a new road to be built linking Millwood to Bayview south of the CPR corridor in Leaside, as well as a new access to the DVP’s Bayview offramp that would allow buses to reach Castle Frank from Bayview.

The LRT scheme is proposed to run through the middle of Thorncliffe Park via Overlea Blvd., and then turn south across the Leaside bridge.  This bridge was originally only four lanes wide with extra structural support for a streetcar extension north from Pape and Danforth.  That support was substantially consumed by the bridge widening to six lanes.  The TTC is looking at a special lightweight trackbed as a means of staying within the bridge’s capabilities.  However, this does not address the severe problems of surface operation through East York to reach the Danforth subway.

The TTC has quite pig-headedly clung to the concept of LRT on a narrow right-of-way (both Pape and Broadview are only four lanes wide with buildings at the sidewalk line), and has wasted a lot of time and effort on fitting in a surface design.  This undermines the credibility of the whole proposal, and an alternative scheme should have been part of their studies long ago.  (Similar problems afflict the Jane proposal discussed below.)

The Leaside bridge alignment is also affected, I understand, by curve radius problems at the south end where the line would swing southwest onto Pape.  At some point, the more credible exercise would look at alternative alignments south of Eglinton and their implications for network design.  Yes, any new crossing of the Don River will cost money, but a better network may be money well spent.

The Don Mills line crosses a proposed new GO service on the CPR north of Eglinton.  It is unlikely that the GO service would stop to connect with both the Don Mills and Eglinton LRT lines (the latter at Leslie Street), and the real question is how useful either of these connections will be.  GO has already bought the Don Branch which links the CPR’s main line to Union via the east side of the Don Valley below Leaside, and downtown-bound passengers are unlikely to transfer to the LRT routes.  The transfer, instead, would primarily benefit those bound for non-core locations.

Wherever the Don Mills line intersects the BD subway, there will be a large volume of transfer traffic and with the extra capacity of an LRT route, this will be considerably more than the combined volumes on the bus routes passing through Thorncliffe Park.  An underground interchange will be required, and given the depth of Pape Station, one might hope that it would fit between the existing subway structure and the surface.

A new off-road alignment south of Eglinton (or at least south of Overlea) brings us to the question of the Downtown Relief Line.  A new tunnel and bridge could carry either the Don Mills LRT south, or the DRL north to a major transit hub at Don Mills and Eglinton.

I will return to the DRL later in this article.

Jane LRT

Original proposal:  York University to Jane Station via Steeles and Jane, all surface operation, $630m (2007) including vehicles but excluding inflation.  This line would operate from Black Creek Carhouse and does not require its own maintenance yard.

Revisions to date:  None.

Problems with right-of-way width on the southern portion have led to speculation about tunneling, but the larger issue is whether the route south of Eglinton needs to be built as LRT at all.  Where are riders from the north end of the Jane route going?  Do they want to go to Jane Station, or does that simply happen to be where the Jane bus takes them?  Would they be better served if the Jane LRT were operated as a branch of the Eglinton line?

We know that demand on the western end of Eglinton will be lower than other parts of the route (indeed this was proposed as a BRT corridor in an earlier plan because of projected demand), and trains from Jane Street might do better heading east to Eglinton West Station.  Such an operation would require that Eglinton West be configured for frequent turnback service to the west.

The south end of Jane Street is under 30m wide except for a short section immediately south of Eglinton, and fitting a surface operation here would be challenging, similar in places to problems getting a Don Mills line through East York.  Underground construction is possible, but this begs the question of how much demand would actually go to Jane Station if some other connection to the rapid transit network were available.

Yet another connection option for the Jane LRT is the Weston rail corridor, GO Transit and a possible west branch of the DRL.  These connections could occur in Weston, although the grade separation of the rail lines and Jane, plus the short distance from the proposed rail station at Eglinton, make this a difficult proposal.  If the Jane route turns east on Eglinton, it could share any new connection at Weston/Eglinton.

Between Weston Road and Black Creek Drive, Jane Street is only 27m wide, 3m narrower than St. Clair.  It includes both the overpass at the rail corridor and the interchange with Black Creek.  Fitting in this part of the route will be a challenge, and the standard Transit City road treatment will not work.

Scarborough Malvern LRT

Original proposal:  Kennedy Station to Malvern via Eglinton, Kingston Road and Morningside, all surface operation, $630m not including inflation.  This route would not have its own carhouse, but would likely share facilities with the Sheppard East and/or Eglinton lines.

Revisions to date:  The north end of this route into Malvern has been dropped in favour of the proposed S(L)RT extension.  However, that extension is itself on hold and it is unclear which, if either, service to Malvern will survive.

This route has an unusual (for Transit City) side of the road operation south of Ellesmere where it serves the University of Toronto and runs alongside the Highland Creek valley.

Between Sheppard and UTSC, the line would cross Highway 401 and would only have one intermediate stop.  As I discussed in the previous post, building this northern link would allow Sheppard East trains to reach UTSC directly from Don Mills Station even before the southern part of the Scarborough Malvern line is in operation.

Waterfront West LRT

Original Proposal:  As an extension from the existing Harbourfront 509 streetcar route west from Exhibition Loop, this line would run through southern Parkdale, along the existing Queen 501 route to Long Branch Loop.  $540m not including inflation.  This would be a “city” streetcar route operated from existing facilities rather than part of the Transit City network and its fleet.

Revisions:  This project has seen so many revisions since its original 1990 version that it is almost unrecognizable.  The most recent changes include:

• A revised alignment east of Exhibition Loop via Fort York and Bremner Boulevards to Union Station Loop.
• Various proposals for alternative connections through the Sunnyside area and the Queen/Roncesvalles intersection.
• Right-of-way treatment issues on Lake Shore Blvd.

In the 2010-2019 TTC Capital Budget projections, this line is shown as opening in the late 2020s, over 35 years after its original Environmental Assessment.  This would beat out the lead time for the Spadina streetcar (1973 proposal, 1997 opening) by a decade.  This is hardly a project aimed at current road or transit congestion problems, and the ad hoc way in which it has been planned leaves it always controversial, always on the back burner.

Lake Shore Boulevard West is an Avenue in the Official Plan, and a small amount of redevelopment has already taken place.  One might hope that transit improvements beyond the occasional Queen car would happen here long before 2029.  Parts of Lake Shore are not wide enough to accept the standard Transit City right-of-way treatment, but it is unclear whether this is an absolute necessity given the traffic levels.  The real problem is the absence of service, hardly a good advertisement for a future LRT line.

At Sunnyside, there are four major families of proposals to connect from The Queensway to a line west from Exhibition Loop.  From west to east, these variants are:

• South via Colborne Lodge Road (the signalled intersection east of Grenadier Pond) to a reconfigured Lake Shore Boulevard, then east to serve the western beaches and connect into the new route south of Parkdale.  A new connection into The Queensway opposite Roncesvalles Carhouse linking south and east via a ramp to the new south Parkdale route.  This scheme has severe problems with traffic operations at the nearby Queen/Roncesvalles intersection and has, I understand, fallen out of favour.
• A new connection into King Street through Beatty Parkette linking south and east via a ramp.  This scheme is not quite as messy as the second variant above, but adds all of the Lake Shore LRT traffic to existing movements at Queen and Roncesvalles.
• Using the existing tracks on Dufferin to King Street.

The first of these alignments is preferred by the Mayor’s office, but whether this will survive the change to a new regime in 2011, let alone the long wait to actual construction, remains to be seen.

East of Exhibition Loop, the original alignment for the WWLRT was to follow the 509 route to Union Station.  Indeed, part of the rationale for rebuilding Fleet Street from Bathurst to Strachan was to provide one more small piece of the WWLRT right-of-way.  However, traffic operations at the Fleet, Bathurst, Lake Shore, Queen’s Quay intersection pose challenges to frequent services turning south into Queen’s Quay.  Operations on Queen’s Quay itself are not exactly speedy thanks to frequent stops and less-than-helpful “transit priority” signals.

An alternative alignment was proposed by the TTC via the abandoned rail spur which lies just north of Exhibition Loop and connects through to Fort York Boulevard.  The route would run east via Fort York and Bremner into Union Station Loop.

This scheme ran headlong into the planned renovations of the Fort York site including a new visitor centre.  Fort York Boulevard west from Bathurst was never intended for LRT and the right-of-way provision extends only east from Bathurst to Spadina.  East of Spadina, there is some question about whether a frequent LRT service can co-exist with activities at the Rogers Centre (aka Skydome).  There is provision for an underground path from Simcoe Street into the Bay Street LRT tunnel.

The entire WWLRT scheme needs complete review including the issue of how the redeveloping lands at Exhibition Place and Ontario Place will be served with a good transit link to downtown, one of the original purposes of this line lost in the many revisions.

Union Station Loop

Union Station Loop has been an embarrassment since it opened in 1990.  It is too small, and its capacity was vastly overestimated by the TTC.  The following changes are in the pipeline:

• When the new second platform of Union Subway Station is built, the existing passageway to Union Loop will connect directly onto that platform (roughly where the bottom of the escalator is today).  This will eliminate the up-and-down transfer moves at least to/from the northbound-to-Yonge platform, but will do nothing for the loop itself.  This work is funded, and construction gets underway this year.
• The TTC has proposed to expand the track structure in the space under the rail viaduct from two to four tracks.  The existing tracks would be the inner pair, and new outer tracks would be built to serve new platforms roughly under the teamways used by GO Transit at street level.  Part of this work will be funded within the Harbourfront East LRT project by Waterfront Toronto.
• The Bremner LRT connection (see WWLRT above) would connect into the tunnel just south of the rail viaduct and at the the point where the new four-track section begins.  Bremner tracks would lead to the new outer pair of rails on Bay.  The junction at the south end of the rail viaduct would not be grade separated.
• Union Railway Station will undergo substantial changes by the City and GO Transit creating a new concourse at a lower level than the existing GO ticket area in the east wing of the railway station.  The TTC had not, as of summer 2009, produced any updated plans for Union Loop to connect with this revised GO layout.
• Any changes to Union Loop must be co-ordinated with construction within Union subway and railway stations.

At this point, it is unclear which portions of the expanded loop will be built when.  The current proposal is for the new west track and platform to come first thereby providing additional capacity for Waterfront East.  The east track and platform would follow when the WWLRT connection is added, or possibly in the more distant future for capacity when the Port Lands extension of Waterfront East comes into play.

One important design change the TTC does recognize is the need for more and better platform access.  This may be simplified with the planned move to smart card fare collection over the next few years because the concept of a “paid area” may not require as strict access controls as today.  Access to the new platforms will be provided at the south end and this will greatly simplify traffic between the Air Canada Centre and the streetcar loop.

St. Clair Extension to Jane

This extension was proposed as part of Transit City to connect in the Jane LRT route, to serve new development on St. Clair itself, and to provide the option of running the 512 St. Clair route from Black Creek Carhouse.  (Note that this is not its official name, but in lieu of anything better, that’s what I am using.)

With the decision by Metrolinx to build Transit City as standard gauge, that connection is no longer possible, even assuming the south end of the Jane LRT is ever built.

I suspect that the dust will have to settle on the St. Clair right-of-way operation before there is any consideration of extending the route westward.

Kingston Road BRT

An original proposal for LRT on Kingston Road, not part of Transit City, has morphed into a BRT proposal with service running east along Danforth from the BD subway and out Kingston Road to an eventual connection to the Scarborough Malvern LRT.

This project is not funded.

Sheppard Subway Extensions

Many pro-subway folks want to see the Sheppard line “completed” with a western extension to Downsview and eastwards to Scarborough Town Centre.

On the eastern side, one of the major advantages claimed is the elimination of the transfer at Don Mills.  However, the trade off is that people who don’t want to go to Scarborough Town Centre will be forced to travel there anyhow, and the bus services will be gerrymandered to serve that terminal.  The intent of the Official Plan is to develop Sheppard Avenue, and this cannot happen if the major transit link is south of Highway 401.

On the western side, the demand level projected for the link from Yonge to Downsview is quite low due to the land use in the area.  Even allowing for potential transfer traffic to/from the Spadina subway, this segment will never achieve subway-level ridership.  However its projected cost is now on the order of $1bn.

In both cases, the issue is the same as for many subway proposals:  does the potential demand justify the investment?  My opinion is, no, it doesn’t and I have yet to see a compelling argument to the contrary. 

Ideally, the Sheppard LRT would run through the subway tunnel to Yonge, although that would require an unheaval during conversion few are likely to accept.

Transit City Bus Plan

The Transit City Bus Plan proposes to establish a network of routes where servive would be provided at all times (except the Blue Night period) every 10 minutes or better.  This is a laudable idea, but there are a few implementation issues needing serious rethinking.

• Routes that are destined to be LRT lines are not included.  The premise is that the TTC cannot guarantee good service while construction is underway, and so should not advertise it.  That avoids the obvious question of why the very routes on which we will spend billions in LRT improvements don’t deserve guaranteed service levels now.
• Many of the future LRT proposals are not yet funded.  Should riders on the affected routes put up with lesser service levels while they wait?
• Lake Shore Boulevard West is a proposed LRT route, but as it is a streetcar line, it’s not part of the “Bus Plan”.  This has to be one of the more bone-headed decisions by the TTC, and it shows the length to which the TTC will go to avoid providing good service in southern Etobicoke.

This plan needs some tweaking, but in an example of the Commission’s blindness to problems with TTC staff proposals, it has been left untouched.  Whether it comes into play starting in fall 2010 depends on the outcome of the City’s operating budget debates starting in mid-February.

I gave a detailed review of this plan in an earlier post.

Yonge Subway Richmond Hill Extension

The Richmond Hill subway was included in MoveOntario2020′s list of projects, but no funding has been announced for the project.  The scheme triggered a wave of objections from Toronto Council which, finally, woke up to the fact that we cannot keep expanding the subway without compromising the capacity of the existing system.  Several related issues emerged:

• The TTC proposes a massive reconfiguration of Bloor-Yonge Station to handle more frequent service and to speed transfer flows.  Whether this project is technically possible, operationally feasible during construction, or will only shift capacity problems elsewhere (including onto the Bloor line) have not been addressed.
• The existing block signal system on the Yonge line is being replaced in a multi-year project aimed at completion in time for opening of the Spadina extension into Vaughan.  The new Toronto Rocket trains will be equipped with ATO controls so that they can interact with the signal system.  However, the TTC does not have enough trains on order to operate the entire line, and a supplementary order is planned for this year.  Additional cars would be needed to extend the route to Richmond Hill with an all-TR fleet.
• It is unclear what target capacity the TTC has in mind for the Yonge line and how this will interact with terminal configurations and major stations where more frequent service will strain existing stair/escalator capacity even when all of them are open and working.
• Capacity on the BD subway, which must accept transfer traffic from YUS, will be constrained by its signal system (among other factors) until that is replaced likely in the 2020s.
• If very frequent service is needed at a peak point, the fleet must grow to provide that headway over a considerable territory where it is not required.  This contributes to capital costs for trains as well as maintenance and operating costs.

All of this leads to consideration of the Downtown Relief Line (DRL).

Downtown Relief Line

The DRL has two components, one with a longer history than the other.  An east leg would run from downtown to somewhere on the Danforth subway, nominally Pape or Donlands station.  The alignment of a west leg is less certain, but commonly it is proposed through the Weston rail corridor.

As I have described here many times before, the DRL in an earlier incarnation actually began at Don Mills and Eglinton.  This arrangement was proposed by the TTC back in 1968, but opposition to additional downtown rapid transit construction and the cost of the line put the scheme out of action for decades.  It enjoyed a brief appearance as a possible ICTS line running from Pape Station to Union via Eastern Avenue (complete with an elevated structure on Front Street in front of the railway station).

Among the benefits of a DRL East are:

• If we accept that the Don Mills LRT cannot reasonably use an on-street alignment from Thorncliffe Park south, then a separate structure could be used either by an LRT or a subway line.  The only debate is the capacity required and the logical point where a change of mode, if any, would occur.
• If a Don Mills LRT ends at the Danforth Subway, it will impose a substantial transfer load of core-bound traffic at a point where the line cannot now accept many more riders, and this traffic will contribute to congestion at Bloor-Yonge Station.
• If a DRL East continues south into downtown, it will provide an alternate path for passengers who would otherwise travel west to the YUS via Eglinton or the BD subway.

The alignment of a route through downtown will be difficult regardless of which street is chosen.  Some prefer an existing streetcar route, while others look to streets like Richmond, Adelaide or Front/Wellington.  All of these need careful consideration as part of a DRL study to be done this year by the TTC.

A DRL West is quite another matter.  First off, the Weston Corridor is already rather heavily spoken for by GO Transit and by the Airport link.  A DRL could travel underneath the corridor, but station arrangements would be extremely difficult since they could not simply be excavated near the surface as one would do on a “normal” line.

The real issue here is the role of the Airport link.  As long as this is treated as a separate, premium fare, private sector service, it will have limited value but will consume resources (space in the corridor) disproportionate to its benefit and ridership.  If the Airport line is operated as a semi-local service stopping, say, at major concession roads (Queen, Bloor, St. Clair, Eglinton, etc) and priced as part of the local fare structure, it could provide a good alternative to GO for local service, intercept some of the downtown-bound traffic from the west, and give good, frequent service to the airport.

Alas, that is precisely what Queen’s Park vehemently opposes, and any attempt to open up or undo the private sector agreement for the airport service runs into a brick wall.  This is a triumph of ideology over good planning.

In this discussion, you can probably see that I do not argue for a through DRL East-West service.  I believe that attempting such a configuration would seriously compromise alignment options through downtown.

The TTC has a tender call closing on February 16, 2010 for a consultant to study “Downtown Rapid Transit Expansion”.  Many firms have already picked up tender documents according to the TTC’s website.

And So To Conclude

At the end of these three long articles, I do not plan to give my own definitive proposal.  Indeed, there are probably multiple credible schemes, and some of the options depend on decisions made at other levels (notably the role and pace of expansion of GO Transit rail services).

The fundamental issue is that there are issues to be discussed both in Transit City and The Big Move, but simply stopping is not a reasonable approach.  Some in Toronto argue that LRT plans are a waste of time, and that we are underbuilding for the future.  I strongly disagree especially when the alternative is vastly overbuilding a subway network.

Since the late 1980′s, the TTC and GO have contemplated a direct link at this location, and provision for this was included in the property deal between the City of Toronto, the TTC and what became in time the Crossways Development.  Nothing ever came of this in part because service on the Weston corridor was peak-only, and the cost was considered excessive for the potential use it would see.  This situation is no longer true because there will be all-day service at least to Georgetown plus the Airport link, however it is implemented.

A preliminary design for the connection was done by TTC in April 1987.  This design would require some revision today both to provide full accessibility (elevators) and to fit with the planned new platform arrangements at Bloor station on the rail corridor.  In the interests of informed discussion, I have scanned the 1990 report on the history of this connection as well as the 1987 plan.

The report has been reformatted slightly, but the text is unchanged.  The drawing has been split apart from four separate images on one large page for ease of viewing online.

TTC GO Connection Report
Key Plan of Stations
Subway Platform East End
Control Area of Connection
Section View of New Connection

Notable in this report is the acknowledgement of the effect of this extension on the existing subway system and especially Bloor-Yonge Station.  There are conflicting remerks in the BCA regarding the degree to which improved service on GO Transit to Richmond Hill can divert riding from the subway line.  A major issue here is that the implementation of very frequent all-day “Express Rail” GO service to Richmond Hill is not contemplated in the Metrolinx plan until 2031, long after a subway extension would open.

Detailed work on a number of related proposals will continue, and Metrolinx expects that a full evaluation will be available in late 2010.

Here, with my comments, are the replies.  The questions have been slightly reformatted so that they can stand outside of the context in which they were written.

1. What is the proper procedure in the case of a fare dispute or other disagreement with an operator? At Exhibition Loop where the TTC Times Two rule would apply, cars have time to kill and a discussion with the operator would probably not hold up service.  If you’re sitting in traffic at, say, Queen and Shaw, things are a little trickier.

• Proper procedure for the customer, as with all fare disputes, is for the customer to pay a fare, retain their original proof of payment (Transfer in this case) and contact Marketing and Customer Service after the fact.
• It would have been prudent for the operator to contact CIS to determine whether the transfer was valid or not, the operator did not and apparently chose to delay their trip and then drop the issue.
• A reminder notice will be posted, and ensure all Supervisors are aware of the policy that allows such transfer use.

2. Is there a generic requirement on all routes for operators to carry passengers around the loops? In many cases there are loops that have stops on them.

• At night after subway closure, we do not allow customers to stay on vehicles as they enter subway stations i.e. 306 night cars into Dundas West/Main and cars into Broadview after closing or before opening, etc.
• We also stop taking customers into High Park after 9:00pm (This is printed on the stop card WB on Howard Park at Parkside Drive).
• All vehicles (Bus and Streetcar) are required to service all stops on ‘On-Street’ loopings. This is sometimes an issue for some operators’ interpretation on Transfer Validity i.e. is it valid only for travel around the loop or for the following trip.
• The customer issue on the 507 (Queen to Parliament) branch of Queen is that cars have layovers NB on Parliament at Shuter. Of course, any customer normally wishing to transfer to a 504 car to get north on Broadview would want to stay onboard and transfer to a Dundas or King car NB at Dundas and Broadview.
• The customer issue on the 500 (Queen to Shaw) branch of Queen 501 is that cars have a layover on Dufferin North of Queen.
• The operator issue on either the 500 or 507 branches of the 501 route is that having customers onboard their vehicle during a ‘recovery’ layover is not desirable, particularly during the evening.

I will give Brad Ross the benefit of the doubt and assume he means that “500″ cars lay over on Dufferin north of King.  If they are laying over north of Queen, Adam Giambrone has started to build the Dufferin streetcar without telling anyone.  There’s also a rather thick wall in the way.

The issue about operators having people on vehicles while laying over is inconsistent with previous statements that people could ride around the loops.  Either they can or they cannot, and the TTC needs to sort this out.  Also, there are many locations where vehicles routinely lay over with passengers onboard — every subway station for example.

I can understand the premise at work here, but it doesn’t hold up to a very basic issue — that the TTC exists to provide service, and designing routes so that people are kicked off before major transfer points is incredibly bad customer service.  If the TTC or Local 113 is really adamant about this, they should reverse the direction of the loops so that passengers can travel outbound as far as possible before the cars turn back toward downtown.  For cars turning at Shaw, the layover is after they reach Dufferin, and there is no reason passengers could not be carried to King and Dufferin where they could connect with the bus.

Brad Ross acknowledges that the two policies (no layovers with passengers on board vs. carrying people around loops) are inconsistent, and that the TTC needs to sort this out.

3. What is the policy for vehicles going out of service on carhouse trips? It is extremely common for cars running to and from Spadina to run in service, and a similar arrangement applies to other routes. Is there a different policy for bus garage trips which run clearly marked “Not in service”?

• As long as the vehicle is fit for revenue service (Not disabled; carrying a farebox and transfers with a transportation operator), the vehicle remains in revenue service while running into or out of service. One of the reasons for this is that, since they can not pass an ‘in service car’ there is no advantage to the commission of operating out of service – No trip time savings.
• Buses used to be in service while entering or leaving service. That changed in either the late seventies or early eighties. They ‘deadhead’, thus the commission saves some running time on the ‘deadhead trips’ because the buses can operate with no interruption to/from the garage.

4. If a vehicle is on diversion, is it supposed to serve all stops it encounters enroute, not just the ones on its “home turf”?

• Yes, Streetcars are always in service on diversionary routings, whether the diversion is planned or not. Again, there is no real advantage to ‘deadheading’ as the can neither pass a car on its own route nor be passed by a car on their home route. The critically important issue is for the streetcar operator to ensure any boarding customers are aware that it is a diverted car and also to announce any turns off of the diverted route, and to issue transfers to customers who might have neglected to get them on paying their fares.

This doesn’t address the issue of bus diversions, and I’ll leave that for a future response from the TTC.

To clarify what was said, I sent followup questions to GO/Metrolinx.

First, I asked about service expansion.  Gary McNeil appeared to say that there were no plans to add more trains in the next six years, only more trips with existing equipment.  There has been considerable speculation about new services such as a Kitchener-Waterloo extension of the Georgetown service, a Cambridge extension of the Milton line, and service beyond Hamilton into the Niagara region.

GO responded:

There is a distinct difference between new service outside of our current service area and adding to the existing service. GO Transit is constrained by the capacity of our transit hub, Union Station, to add many more peak period trains. As a result, we add shoulder peak period trains where we can. In the meantime, we are consistently working to identify discrete opportunities to add more peak period rail service whenever possible.

For example, March 2, 2009 was the first day of service for GO’s new extended train trip, from Hamilton Station to Union Station. This new extended train trip, the 7:32 a.m. weekday eastbound train from Aldershot GO Station now starts at the Hamilton GO Centre, leaving at

7:17 a.m. This trip now makes all regular stops from Hamilton to Oakville and then operates express to Union Station, arriving at 8:32 a.m. This was the first new rail service Hamilton received since 2000, made possible by the recent completion of the Hamilton layover site.

Previously, trains had to be taken to Hamilton as out-of-service, empty trains because there was no room to store trains in Hamilton. That 7:32 a.m. weekday eastbound train from Aldershot was the most logical trip to extend in terms of equipment cycling, because the train equipment used for this Aldershot trip is its first run of the day and we are now able to store it in Hamilton.

Our service expansion plans, by bus or train, for St. Catharines/Niagara Falls, Brantford, Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, Guelph, and Peterborough were all detailed in GO Transit’s Strategic Plan – GO 2020, a document which contains GO’s vision, goals and objectives, and service strategy to the year 2020.

These potential service expansions will depend on various factors, such as fleet availability, reliable and adequate source of capital and operating funds, and supportive business partnerships with the railways.

During the Oct. 20 meeting, Gary McNeil stated that GO has no plans to add more service on the Georgetown South line until 2015, because the corridor construction will cause severe restrictions on our ability to provide more services.

The Environmental Assessment looking into rail service expansion for the Georgetown corridor from Georgetown to Kitchener-Waterloo is complete, the Environmental Study Report was filed for the public review period, and based on the study’s results, GO Transit is now awaiting the final decision from the Government of Ontario. The go ahead for expansion of GO Train service to Acton, Guelph and Kitchener is subject to funding approval by the Government of Ontario. In the meantime, the new GO Bus service to Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge will begin this Sat. Oct. 31.

At this time, there are no immediate plans for rail expansion to Cambridge. However, according to GO’s Strategic Plan, our vision includes the possible service extension, by bus or train, to serve travel demands throughout the day to Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge by the year 2020. Plus, the new GO Bus service to Cambridge will begin this Saturday.

For the Niagara Region, GO Transit launched seasonal weekend and holiday GO Transit train service to Niagara Falls from June 27 to Oct. 12, 2009 as a pilot project. Expanding this service would need to be the subject of a study because year-round service would require infrastructure upgrades on this rail corridor. In the meantime, the new year-round — weekday, weekend and holiday — bus service to and from the Niagara Region began on Sat. Sept 5, 2009.

For other rail corridors, we may expand as required and as possible based upon the various factors, such as fleet availability and funding.

GO receives operating funding on an annual basis so we cannot guarantee when new services will be available. Also, the levels of service for the Georgetown South service were greatly overestimated, instead of underestimating the service levels, which means careful due diligence was used to model the most extreme service levels to determine maximum levels of impact.

The map on page 20 of the Strategic Plan shows GO’s plans for its network in 2020, and if we see this implemented, it will mark a major change in the role of GO within the GTA.  However, it is clear that GO (and by implication Queen’s Park) does not intend to embark on major expansion of peak services between now and 2015 due to various constraints, some operational, some fiscal.  This leaves much to be done in the five years up to 2020 if the Strategic Plan will be fulfilled.

I also asked GO about their fleet plans for expansion, renewal and replacement.  GO responded:

GO Transit has a locomotive fleet strategy that is guiding us through the transition from our F-59 to a core MP40 locomotive fleet. We’re now waiting for recommendations of the Electrification Study, scheduled to be complete in December 2010, before revising our locomotive strategy.

For bi-levels coaches, we are matching supply to anticipated demand looking out 2 to 3 years, subject to funding availability.

Our bi-level maintenance strategy is geared to developing an East GTA maintenance facility and expanding the maintenance capacity at our Willowbrook facility (West GTA).

We will bridge the 3 to 4 year transition period by expanding use of third party rail maintenance facility capacity.

This confirms that GO will wait out the year-long electrification study before making decisions on its locomotive fleet.

Electrification was part of the GO 2020 plans as reflected in this statement: 

Introducing electric trains on the Lakeshore corridor, and the Georgetown corridor if appropriate, will offer travel time savings and environmental benefits.  [Page 33]

Considering some of the bilge that came out of Metrolinx during the Georgetown electrification discussions, that’s an amazingly succinct, reasonable position leaving only the questions of timing and financing.  Indeed, at the press conference, Gary McNeil quite candidly stated that he wished GO had been electrified decades ago, but the benefits of service expansion always took precedence.

While the thought of limited expansion of GO’s peak capacity before 2015 is troubling, GO’s approach to planning is refreshing by contrast to Metrolinx.  GO has always operated with limited financial resources, and even their 2020 plan is a huge leap in the rate of system growth.

The GO plan is a fascinating contrast to the Metrolinx “Big Move” in that GO looks at services that might reasonably be operated within the growth opportunities available to it, while Metrolinx took a much more aggressive approach placing very frequent services on a number of corridors.  The final paragraph above notes that service levels on Georgetown South were “greatly overestimated” and delicately explains that this was done for worst-case modelling.

That’s a polite way to put it, but what we really are looking at are two quite different views of how transit services will evolve in the GTA.  Part of the mandate of Metrolinx was to produce a plan that would substantially divert traffic from autos to transit, reduce pollution and address gridlock problems.  Metrolinx claims for the “success” of their plan rests on the same extremely high ridership (and trip diversion) figures that GO now describes as merely “due diligence” for purposes of evaluating the effect of service buildup on Georgetown South.

Those ridership numbers have other implications beyond GO, not least for the debate over the effect of a Richmond Hill subway extension and alternative ways to handle demand in the Don Valley corridor.

Both sets of figures cannot be correct, and this major divergence must be addressed by Metrolinx to bring its regional plan into line with the outlook of its major agency, GO Transit.

The proposed Terms of Reference (ToR) for this study are now available online.  They will be discussed at a meeting of the Metrolinx Board on Tuesday, October 20 at 11:45 am.  If approved, they will form the basis for the RFP.

My comments about the ToR were added here at about 6:30 pm on October 15.

Overall, the Terms of Reference are thorough and address many of the issues raised by the community.  Indeed, it is odd that Metrolinx was so defensive about its Georgetown South EA and associated claims regarding emissions considering the breadth of issues that will face the electrification study.

[Note that some remarks here duplicate replies in the comments thread which were posted before I updated the main article.]

The document linked here includes a covering report and the recommendations of the Community Advisory Committee created to advise Metrolinx on the ToR.  That Committee received input from, among other places, a “stakeholders meeting” in which I participated.  Some, but not all, of the issues raised by participants at that meeting have found their way into the ToR, or were already present.

I cannot help being amused (ROTFLMAO), but also dismayed by the following comment:

The GO System Electrification Study is a critical next step in the implementation of the Metrolinx regional transportation plan. It is a timely and important step in advancing the expansion of the GTHA regional transit network. In the continuing Metrolinx tradition that values community and stakeholder input, the Community Advisory Committee enhanced and enriched the quality of the work.  [Page 3]

There are a few community groups who would beg to differ with the claim that Metrolinx has a tradition of valuing community input.  This insults the many people who worked to raise important issues on the Georgetown South study, but for their pains were dismissed as NIMBYs while Metrolinx spun the issues to favour its own position.  Metrolinx is better known for secrecy and isolation than for community involvement.

The ToR are quite clear in requiring input from a broad range of interested and affected parties, and this will be a welcome change if there is no attempt to manage responses to fit a pre-determined conclusion.

A few broad issues are worth mentioning before I review specific sections of the proposal.

• The study will review diesel and electric options, as well as two as yet unnamed alternative technologies.  Such alternatives have to be possible, realistic and viable, although how a study ending in 2010 would establish that capability for, say, a decade in the future is beyond me.  The last thing we need is another proposal based on a technology that’s just out of reach, or one where the GTA would become the guinea pig to demonstrate a new system. 
• The distinction between the Union-Pearson Rail Link (UPRL) and Metrolinx/GO is becoming ever more difficult to discern.  For all practical purposes this service is being designed by GO, its infrastructure is built and paid for by GO, and all of the legal processes including Environmental Assessments are handled by GO.  There is little or no public participation by the so-called private partner, SNC-Lavalin, and recent press reports confirmed that a contract does not yet exist with that partner.  Given the level of public investment and involvement, the time is long past that SNC-Lavalin should abandon this scheme so that it can be properly integrated with GO’s plans and operations.
• The methodology for evaluating environmental effects is much changed from the system used in the Metrolinx EA.  Rather than considering the airshed as a whole and trading off alleged reductions in pollution on the 401 for increases in Parkdale, the study must look at local effects related to distance from the rail corridor.  Of course, when the alternatives under comparison are trains-vs-trains, the concept of displaced trips fades in importance except for situations where technology “A” can carry and attract more riders than technology “B”.

Comments below are keyed to specific numbered sections within the ToR which form Appendix A of the linked document.

1.3 Relevant Previous Studies

Previous studies released by Metrolinx have provided much fodder for the “how much will electrification cost” debate.  Here, they are dismissed with the comment:

These studies, however, did not take into account the scope of this Study and did not provide for impacts on Union Station, joint use corridors, etc.

The technical studies were prepared as background information for GO and the recommendations and costs identified in the studies were established in the context of the economic climate, technology and public priorities relevant at the time the studies were commissioned. 

In other words, GO did a bunch of studies, but we really should ignore them because they’re not relevant.  Sorry, Metrolinx, that won’t wash and at a minimum the public is owed an explanation of why past studies were so inadequate and why their findings, some of which informed a Metrolinx report published in 2009, should be ignored.

With respect to Union Station, one cost, that of revising the train shed roof for overhead clearance, is included in work to be undertaken by GO in the near future as part of the Revitalization project.  Complete replacement of signalling systems at Union is already in progress, and I can only hope that GO has specified that the new systems can tolerate electric operation and close headways.

GO has often cited Union Station work as a major cost impediment to electrification without acknowledging that some provisions have been made in work already in the pipeline.  The study needs to distinguish between net new costs and the generic costs of electrification.

1.6 Metrolinx Project Management

Metrolinx will provide the Consultant with travel demand forecasts and ridership numbers – based on the Regional Transportation Plan developed by Metrolinx – to be used in the Study. The Consultant may refine these forecasts as necessary to incorporate the additional considerations of the Study.

The scale of projected demand on the GO network is intimately linked to information in the Regional Transportation Plan, also known as “The Big Move”.  Some agencies, notably the City of Toronto’s Planning Department , take issue with these projections, but even allowing for this, the numbers are well above current-day levels.

If Metrolinx refines its projections, this revised information should be posted online so that everyone knows what the new targets for service are, and what might have produced any changes.  This has implications beyond the electrification study for projects such as Transit City as well as the various alternatives to serving the Don Valley corridor to Richmond Hill.

2.4 Overview of GO’s Commuter Rail System

The capacity of Union Station is a major issue for growth of the GO rail network.

Located in downtown Toronto, Union Station is the hub of GO’s commuter rail system and is also a primary hub for VIA Rail. The two organizations share facilities at Union Station. Union Station is also used by other inter and intra-city operators such as Ontario Northland and the TTC subway system. All rail lines and 96% of train ridership is either to or from Union Station. The varying and unique operating and service demands of these users, combined with rapid demand growth and the historic nature of Union Station, have constrained GO’s ability to expand rail, bus and customer service capacity at Union Station. Work is currently underway to revitalize Union Station, including improvements to the train shed roof, stair and elevator access; and track and signal improvements. GO and the City of Toronto are the primary sponsors undertaking the major improvement work on the concourse levels.

…

Union Station is the hub of regional transit in the GTHA and is where most rail and bus service for the GTHA converge. The planned regional transit network for the next 25 years, as outlined in the Big Move and the GO2020 strategic plan, will require that Union Station’s capacity be almost quadrupled from current levels. Consideration of the impacts that the various technology choices will have on Union Station will be a key factor into this Study. GO is currently in the process of engaging a consultant to determine options to double Union Station’s capacity over the next 10 years. A second related study is also being commissioned to address the need to quadruple capacity at Union Station by 2031 as identified in The Big Move.

GO and the City of Toronto are also currently developing plans for revitalization at Union Station. It is anticipated that these plans will be completed by 2015.

In correspondence with the Project Director of the electrification study today, it was clarified that the references to doubling and quadrupling the capacity of Union Station refer to its ability to handle train movements.  The joint City/GO work for the revitalization project already projects a doubling of the station’s passenger handling capacity.

Information about other aspects of GO’s operations including plans for expanded infrastructure will be included in the full RFP.

3.2.1 Analysis of Technologies

The study is to review non-traditional railway technologies:

In addition, the Consultant will also assess the feasibility and staging of each technology using both FRA compliant and non-compliant vehicles. In assessing the feasibility and staging the Consultant must also consider the use of dedicated tracks and or dedicated Rights of Way (RoW) and their impacts on the technologies under study.

“FRA” refers to the United States Federal Railroad Administration which sets rules for vehicle strengths to ensure that any operation on rail corridors can survive, within limits, the effects of a collision or other accident.  If lightweight and heavyweight equipment operates in the same corridor, the lightweight equipment (typically passenger cars) would not be able to withstand impacts from the heavier equipment.

This issue has come up in various LRT proposals as well as schemes to operate railway vehicles based on the less stringent European standard.  Solutions to the problem include both physical separation (an independent right-of-way for the lighter vehicles) and temporal separation (freight operations at specific hours, usually overnight, when passenger trains do not operate).

Realistically, this is only applicable to a service such as the UPRL which is comparatively short and where the right-of-way might accommodate a dedicated set of tracks.  Reaching further out on the rail network brings more contact with freight operations and constrained rights-of-way.

3.2.2 Environmental and Health Impacts

Any technology is to be evaluated on a “net gain” basis in the sense that some areas may experience poorer conditions as a result of the technology, and others may see better, but on balance there is an improvement.

Offsetting this, however, is an important caveat:

The analysis should consider the magnitude of the human health impacts and exposure levels as a function of proximity to a corridor or corridors, including the social and economic impacts (such as the cost impact to Ontario’s health care system), on system workers, riders, local and regional residents and governments. The Consultant is to identify any groups that are particularly susceptible to these exposures and assess the order of magnitude of the impact of the technology(ies) on these groups.

This guards against proposals that would claim to divert thousands of cars from the highway system (leaving aside the question of whether the resulting capacity would backfill) only to add large numbers of trains, particularly during peak periods, to the rail corridors.  Averages across the GTA are meaningless if local emissions along rail corridors are dangerous.  (That approach is rather like saying that, on average, it is safe to stand on a tidal flat all day long.)

3.2.3 Community and Land Use Impacts

A subtle but important aspect of the ToR lies in this sentence:

An analysis and assessment of what the social behavioural impacts have been of well established systems in other jurisdictions, including, but not limited to, the correlation between the use of technology alternatives and traveler behaviour with respect to commuter rail or other forms of public transit.

This recognizes that different technologies, and the service qualities which they might bring, can have different effects in the communities they serve.  Effects could include:

• Better acceleration allows more frequent stops while keeping long-haul travel times acceptable.  This could bring more service within an attractive distance of residential communities.
• Reduced noise and emissions would allow more service to operate in a corridor relatively close to surrounding land uses such as residences and schools.

3.2.6 Risk Analysis

The study will review the risks inherent in any technology including existing or pending legislative issues, staging problems for construction and implementation, and longer-term effects of climate change, energy availability and population growth.

This is an important part of the study because, traditionally, transit proponents who advocate recognition of future environmental and energy market problems are given little notice.  If the study produces a robust evaluation of these factors, including a sensitivity analysis of alternative scenarios, it will be an important contribution to transit and environmental advocacy in general.  This would be a major change for Metrolinx.

3.3 Assessment of Net Impacts

One issue missing from the overall framework is the question of local transit service to feed a much-enhanced GO rail operation.  If there are major differences in the possible service levels, this will affect the quantity and quality of local service needed.

For most if not all GO corridors, parking is not a viable solution to this problem at the demand levels projected.  Moreover, there will be considerable reverse peak commuting into the 905, and such riders must have good local transit service between the GO stations and the concentrations (such as they are) of work sites in the 905.

The cost of improving local transit is an important, but usually overlooked, part of Metrolinx projections.

3.4 Implementation Scenarios

The study will examine, at a minimum, three scenarios:

• Partial conversion to a technology other than diesel
• Full conversion from diesel over an extended period (10-20 years)
• Conversion to multiple technologies over an extended period

Depending on which, if any, “alternative technologies” pass the study’s viability filter, the third bullet may drop out of consideration.

3.5 Consultation Requirements

This section requires the study to include substantial involvement by many types of affected and interested parties.  This will be important not just to make we who are “on the outside” feel wanted, but to give a window into the study’s progress and the options it considers and rejects.  This is far better than waiting impatiently for a final report in late 2010, and being told there is no opportunity for comment or amendment.

This study is vital to the future of commuter rail service in the GTA, and we can’t afford to have “results” than strain credibility in the manner of the Georgetown South EA.  Vastly increased transit service is needed region-wide, and it must be welcomed wherever it happens.  A good, open study can support that goal.

My position is quite clear in two previous posts:  the numbers used by Metrolinx to substantiate their claims about comparative pollution of auto and train travel are seriously flawed to the point that claims made by Metrolinx and the govenment are simply not true.

One additional problem came to light earlier today.

On its website, Metrolinx characterizes the decision as follows:

Trains operated by GO Transit on the Georgetown rail corridor and the Union Pearson Rail Link service must use Tier 4 state of the art engines when the service expansion begins or as soon as the technology is commercially available.

However, the order actually reads:

2. All trains utilized for GO Transit that travel to, from or through Georgetown along the Georgetown South Corridor shall be Tier 4 compliant when service begins or when Tier 4 compliant technology becomes commercially available.

3. All trains utilized for the Union-Pearson Rail Link in the Georgetown South Corridor shall be Tier 4 compliant when service begins or when Tier 4 compliant technology becomes commercially available.

The wording of item 2 above is curious.  Only trains that “to, from or through Georgetown” are subject to the order.  This omits the following services from the scope of the order:

• Proposed frequent short-turn service to Brampton,
• Trains to Milton which use the corridor south of West Toronto diamond,
• Trains to Barrie which use the corridor south of Dundas Street, and run parallel to it for some distance to the north,
• Trains to Bolton, a proposed new peak period GO line, which uses the corridor to the point where it turns west over the Humber River.

However, Metrolinx has no compunctions about including these trains in its calculations of diverted trips, saved emissions and, of course, the benefits of Tier 4 diesel technology.

Either the order is oddly and badly drafted, or there is a deliberate attempt to limit its scope while giving the impression that all new trains will have the latest in pollution controls.  The former would be mere incompetence.  The latter casts both Metrolinx and the Government’s position in a much darker light.

The Minister of the Environment owes everyone a clear statement regarding the intent of his order.  If it applies to all trains that will operate on the rail corridor beginning roughly at the Strachan Avenue grade crossing and ending at Georgetown, then say so.  If not, then explain why the frequent services planned for the heavy Milton (future Cambridge) and Barrie routes will operate with Tier 2 diesels.

This error — assuming all trains would be completely full, all day, both ways — dilutes the pollution per trip assigned to each passenger, and also inflates the pollution “saved” by auto trips that are diverted to transit.

A comment in that thread came in from John Galeazza:

Re. Pearson traffic growth.

Come now are we saying that Pearson has not seen a 4 fold increase in traffic over the past 20 odd years? Take a look at Pearson’s reports (they’re available on the GTAA’s website) in both passenger volume and aircraft movements there has been a steady increase.

To say that we shouldn’t use a piece of infrastructure because it has steadily fallen into disuse is farcical in my humble opininion. If that were the case GO would never have gotten started on the old freight/passenger lines that became “useless” with the arrival of the airplane and the car.

In my original reply (which has been hidden from the thread), I questioned the estimated ridership in the corridor for the air-rail link. Thanks to an arithmetic error (yes, even I make them, but at least I admit it when they happen), my comment would up addressing a false premise. That’s why I pulled it.

In a second comment, Mr. Galeazza went on to say:

Come now are we saying that Pearson has not seen a 4 fold increase in traffic over the past 20 odd years? Take a look at Pearson’s reports (they’re available on the GTAA’s website) in both passenger volume and aircraft movements there has been a steady increase.

To say that we shouldn’t use a piece of infrastructure because it has steadily fallen into disuse is farcical in my humble opininion. If that were the case GO would never have gotten started on the old freight/passenger lines that became “useless” with the arrival of the airplane and the car.

My comment wasn’t in respect to potential ridership on the UPRL. It was to previous posters (michael) who had claimed that expansion plans along this stretch of rail are unseen elsewhere (be it in other rail or other modes of transit). The idea that the airport has not seen an increase in aircraft and passengers is absolutely false, the fact is that the airport has seen traffic nearly double every 20 years. How should Malton residents who moved there in the 70′s feel about a quadrupling of the traffic at Pearson?

The passenger and aircraft statistics are available on the GTAA website.  Between 2000 and 2008, passenger traffic went from 28.8 to 32.3-million.  Aircraft movements went from 429 to 431-thousand, dipping to 371-thousand in 2003.  This is not a fourfold increase, and the trend seems to be at best for modest growth.  Stats for earlier years are not visible on the site, at least not on the “statistics” page.  If, in fact, traffic has grown fourfold since 1989, that may have been a cause for concern by Malton residents (and others living under affected flight paths), but this does not excuse what is proposed for the Georgetown corridor.

If we look at the pollution calculations provided by Metrolinx (I am not making this stuff up), you will see on page 3 that the calculated pollution from the UPRL trains for CO2, NOX and PM are all higher than for the road traffic they replace.  When these figures are corrected to allow for Tier 4 rather than Tier 3 specifications used in that table, the PM values fall below those for autos, but NOX is still higher.  CO2 is unaffected by Tier 4 and so remains higher than the auto trips.  [That correction is shown in my first post on this issue.]

All of this depends on assumptions about ridership versus the level of service.  Metrolinx projects an average of 56 passengers per trip for every trip, all day, even though the airport has peaks and valleys in demand.  That 56 may seem low, but the reconditioned RDCs for this service will be outfitted with generous seating space as a premium fare service, and that number represents a good portion of a two-car train’s capacity.  That this space would be well-used on every trip is not credible.  Any reduction in the projected ridership increases the pollution per trip because the same trains are serving fewer passengers.

To put the UPRL in context, Pearson handles about 32-million passengers a year.  Some of these are actually transfers between flights and they generate no external transportation demand, but I will not attempt to correct for that.  From other sources, we know that only 17% of Pearson’s demand comes from downtown, or about 5.4-million trips.  Now that Bloor and Weston stations have been added to the proposed UPRL operation, the possible market may be bigger, although why someone who is already on a subway or LRT line headed west would transfer to the premium-fare UPRL defies logic.

Metrolinx projects 7840 riders per day times 365 days, or about 2.9-million per year.  Depending on the assumptions we make about the enlarged catchment area of the UPRL, it would only be handling a small portion of the potential airport-bound traffic.  Conversely, if a change in service design or fare levels makes the line more attractive, then more and/or longer trains would have to operate and this would change the base for pollution calculations.

To be fair to Metrolinx, one big problem here is the assumption of 2,000hp for “locomotives” on the UPRL.  The ratio of horsepower to passengers is immense compared with the numbers used in the GO calculations.  For the UPRL, the value is about 36hp per passenger (2000hp/56), while for GO (where ridership is inflated as noted above), the value is 2.6hp per passenger (5000hp/1900).  No wonder the calculated emissions are so bad for the UPRL.

At this point, I don’t really know which numbers to believe, but it is clear that none of them makes any sense.  This has not prevented various Poo-Bahs from dishing out all sorts of misinformation based on this faulty data.  Public officials frequently are not in full possession of the facts, but when erroneous information is used to rebut legitimate community concerns, we have a problem.

It is entirely possible that there are credible figures, coupled with a reasonable rollout plan for service in the Georgetown corridor, that would address both the buildup of new service and a transition to a different technology.  That’s not what we are seeing from Metrolinx, and they do us all a disservice by clinging to a badly flawed position.

Much of the spin cites the air-rail link, likely because a decision on the Pan Am Games bid is due on November 6, 2009.  If Toronto gets the nod, many projects will go into overdrive to support this event.  If Toronto is not selected, then the pressure to have an airport link running by 2015 evaporates, and the issues can be reviewed without the artificial crisis atmosphere of “supporting the bid”.

I do not counsel infinite delay, but equally do not believe that major policy and spending decisions should be forced to meet the deadlines of an ephemeral event.

In brief, Metrolinx assumes that every GO train trip, both ways, every day, all day in the corridor will be completely full of passengers, all 1,900 of them (a fully seated load on a 12-car train).  This absurd premise overstates the likely ridership by a factor of at least 4, probably greater (details follow later in this article) with the following effects:

• Pollution caused by the trains is a fixed number determined by how many trips they make.  If there are fewer passengers, the pollution per passenger trip is much larger than claimed by Metrolinx.
• If there are fewer passengers, then fewer auto trips are diverted to rail.  This does not affect the pollution saving per trip (presuming that one even agrees with this premise), but the total saving is greatly reduced because so many fewer trips are diverted.

Opening day (2015) traffic projected for the corridor is 184 GO trains and 140 UPRL (Airport) trains.  The total trips calculated by Metrolinx for the corridor GO services is 349,600 per weekday.  To put this in context, the entire GO rail system carries about 180,000 passengers per day today.

In practice, the trains will carry nowhere near 1,900 per trip on average.  Peak travel will be heavily inbound in the AM and outbound in the PM, with lightly loaded trains in the counterpeak.  During the off-peak, loads will be much lower than at peak, and some trips (notably inbound late evening runs) will be almost empty.  The same patterns can be seen on the Toronto subway system.

I am inserting the break here for those who don’t want to read the gory details, although the conclusions are down at the end.

The source material from Metrolinx on which this discussion rests includes background material on the calculations of emissions.

What is the All-Day Demand?

At this point, I must engage in some “back of the envelope planning”.  Transit lines have a fairly predictable demand curve through the day, and this can be used to extrapolate from peak period demand projections to all day loads.

Peak hour demand generally represents half of the peak period demand given that the shoulder peak hours carry fewer passengers.  A three-hour peak can be estimated at twice the peak hour.  Double this to get both AM and PM peak demands.

The off-peak service on a well-used line (such as urban routes in Toronto) carries about half the all-day ridership provided that the service is reasonably frequent.

If we have a peak hour ridership of 1,000, then the all-day number will be somewhere around 8,000.  (Double the peak hour to get the peak period, double again for AM and PM, double a third time to include off-peak riders.)  The 8:1 ratio will be lower if the service and/or travel demand is strongly skewed to peak travel due to other factors such as an inability to reach the line thanks to poor feeder services or full parking lots.

Note here that I am trying to be as generous as possible in adjusting the Metrolinx figures to avoid overstating my case.

If GO will be carrying 1,900 per train at peak on a 15-minute headway, that’s 7,600 per peak hour.  The corresponding all-day ridership would be 60,800.  This number could be affected by various changes in the assumptions:

• If peak service runs at 12- or 10- minute headways, and off-peak demand stays at the same ratio, then all-day ridership would go to 76,000 or 91,200.
• If off-peak demand behaves more like commuter rail as we know it rather than like a heavy urban line, then the all day riding will be substantially lower.  A fifty percent reduction in projected off-peak demand would reduce the ratio from 8:1 to 6:1 and the figures above would scale accordingly.  This would reduce the 60,800 number to 45,600.
• Some counterpeak demand will exist (again by analogy to the subway system).  However, counterpeak riders will almost certainly need frequent local transit at the outer end of their trips.
• The ability of GO to attract riding strongly depends on good transit service at the outlying stations and  intensive development within walking distance of them.  This is vital for counterpeak trips as well as for eliminating the need for parking for all inbound riders.  (Again, compare to the subway network.)  Nothing in Metrolinx’ plans suggests that this will actually occur or be funded, but it should be an integral part of their plans.  They talk about “Mobility Hubs” but don’t make any provision for actually bringing them into existence.

This gives us a range of all-day demand between roughly 45,000 and 90,000 trips, not 349,600.  Therefore demand-based calculations are off by a factor somewhere between 4 and 7.5.

By contrast, the demand modelling backgrounder to “The Big Move” projects much higher peak hour demand on lines in this corridor.  However, this could only be achieved with headways in the 5-6 minute range (10-12 trains per hour per direction) which is substantially more service than the model parameters for the emission calculations.

Those 184 GO trains are not all destined for Brampton and beyond, but would also run on the Milton and Barrie lines (all day) and the Bolton service (peak).  If the Metrolinx demand estimates are believed (many planners feel they are exaggerated), then the combined peak point demand for the peak hour is about 55,000 passengers.  This is considerably more than the subway which strains at much above 30,000.  At 1,900 per train, this would require one full GO train every two minutes, or 30 per hour.  Clearly, the opening day 184 trains will handle far fewer passengers.

Adjusting for Demand Levels and Tier 4 Diesel Standards

For the sake of argument, I will take the base data used to calculate emissions at face value and will not challenge the calculation of pollution outputs from the diesel trains nor from the autos they might replace.  The real issue here is the overstatement of demand.

• The NOX per passenger trip (see page 2 of the document linked above) for GO trains is shown as 5.71 grams versus 6.61 for autos.  However, this is for a Tier 2 diesel.  If we adjust for Tier 4, the train value drops to 1.14.  However, correcting for the actual demand places the per passenger value at between 4.56 and 8.55.
• Particulate Matter (PM) per passenger trip is shown as .20 grams for Tier 2 diesels and .56 grams for autos.  Tier 4 diesel is expected to drop this by 90% to .02 grams.  Correcting for the demand level gives a range of .08 to .15.
• Carbon Dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is shown as .51 kg per passenger for diesel (the engine tier has no effect on CO2) and 6.08 for autos.  Correcting for demand raises the diesel value to a range of 2.04 to 3.83 kg.

In brief, PM and CO2 are still better than autos, but not by as much; NOX may be better or worse depending on assumptions regarding demand.

Pollution from the Airport Link

The Airport service is in a much worse situation because the ratio of horsepower to passengers is much higher and, with that, the pollution per trip.  Metrolinx uses Tier 3 ratings for their calculations.  Even without adjusting for possible overstatement of passenger volumes, the UPRL figures (page 3 of the linked document) are sobering.

• NOX for airport trips is 77.54g by train, but only 6.61g by auto.  Adjusting for Tier 4 only reduces the train value to about 15.5g, over twice the auto value.
• PM values are 1.41g and 0.56g respectively.   Correcting for Tier 4 (roughly 20% of Tier 3) brings the PM value for trains down to .28g.
• CO2 numbers are 6.93kg versus 6.08kg.

For NOX and CO2, the airport service, even at Tier 4, will generate more pollution than the auto trips it replaces.  This directly contradicts claims that the airport route will reduce pollution.

Metrolinx assumes that every trip to and from the airport will carry 56 passengers.  This doesn’t sound like much, but is in fact a seated load for the cars that will be used in their new configuration.  Any decrease in the average load per trip raises the emissions per trip accordingly.

Diverting Auto Trips to Reduce Pollution

Now we must turn to the auto side of the balance sheet.  I will take the calculated emissions per trip as given by Metrolinx, but of course the number of trips diverted to trains will be much lower than claimed.  Therefore, the emission reduction due to this diversion (assuming you accept the premise of such diversion) will be much lower than claimed by a factor somewhere from 4 to 7.5.

As an example, total GO CO2 emissions (which are not affected by Tier 4 standards) are given as 46 kilotonnes per year for rail and 553 kt for auto, a difference of 507 kt.  Once the demand correction is applied, this falls to a range between 68 and 127 kt.  There is a saving, but not as much as claimed.  This will be offset by the higher pollution from train operations on the airport service.

It’s important to remember that this “reduction” is in the airshed of the Barrie/Georgetown/Milton corridor while the new pollution due to the trains is concentrated along the rail lines themselves.

Conclusion

The calculations underlying the Minister’s approval of the Metrolinx proposal are deeply flawed to the point of invaliding claims made about environmental impacts.  The Minister and the Government have committed to a major policy decision that is not supported by materials filed by the proponent.

Whether this is an error of oversight (nobody recognized the flaw in ridership estimates) or an error of misrepresentation (someone hoped that this flaw would go unnoticed) is not for me to say.  Either way, this shows extraordinarily poor analytical skills in Metrolinx and in the Ministry that this was not caught.

To reiterate (for those who scrolled all the way down to skip the details), correcting the Metrolinx data for Tier 4 emission standards and for their overstatement of riding in the corridor:

• For GO services:
  • NOX emissions per passenger trip will lie in a range straddling the projected emissions for cars.
  • PM emissions per passenger trip will be much lower for trains than for autos.
  • CO2 emissions are lower for trains than autos, but the difference is much less than claimed.
• For Airport services (with no adjustment for possible overstatement of demand):
  • NOX for train passengers will be over twice that for auto users.
  • PM per passenger trip will be half that of autos.
  • CO2 per passenger trip will be greater for trains than for autos.

Because the demand in the corridor is overstated by a factor of at least 4, claims of pollution reduction due to diversion of auto trips to rail are similarly inflated.

Metrolinx and the Ministry of the Environment owe everyone an explanation for this situation.  Community groups have worked tirelessly in support of electrified transit and endured much criticism rooted in the belief that any trains, no matter what their technology, were vastly superior to auto travel.  Electrification was something for tomorrow, something that needs a two-year study, something about which oddly little was known beyond its being “too expensive”.

Do the study, but structure it so that important information — basics like a validation of capital costs and operating savings — are available to guide policy decisions as soon as possible.  If past studies (some as recent as Metrolinx own evaluation of the Lake Shore proposal in 2008) are wrong, explain why we should believe a new set of consultants more than the old ones.

We have already had one ministerial resignation this week in Ontario, and the Minister of the Environment would do well to encourage Metrolinx’ participation in reviewing the validity of their environmental claims.

Toronto Councillor Michael Thompson, who could not possibly be labelled part of Council’s left wing or a Miller loyalist, has written to George Smitherman, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, urging that he pursue electrification immediately.  Many of the arguments in this letter echo those of critics of the Minister of the Environment’s approval of diesel operations in the Weston Corridor.

This places Smitherman, a possible mayoral candidate in Toronto, in an intriguing position.  Does he take a Queen’s Park view and parrot the standard line “clean diesels now, but electric maybe, someday”, or look to the election campaign and move to support Toronto Council’s view of the issue?  Thompson himself could be a mayoral candidate.

Updated October 6 at 10:35 am:

Interviews with Keith Brooks of the Clean Train Coalition are available online from CBC (select the item “Diesel Not Good Enough”) and from AM640 (select the item “Keith Brooks — October 5th”).

Updated October 6 at 10:10 am:

John Gerretsen, the Minister of the Environment, seems unable to stay “on message” when discussing electrification with the media.  On CBC and in the Globe, the Minister is quoted as saying that electrification is “too expensive”, and yet in a letter to Keith Brooks of the Clean Train Coalition, the Minister states:

“Many requests were made to require Metrolinx to electrify the Georgetown South Corridor. Metrolinx has committed to conducting a study to look at the best technology for the entire GO Transit rail network of the future, which is required before electrification of the corridor can be considered. I have reminded Metrolinx of its commitment to further study the possibility of electrification for the entire GO Transit rail line, which includes the Georgetown South Corridor. If the study results in information or recommendations that could have positive impacts on the environment, I expect Metrolinx to implement the recommendations as expeditiously as possible.”

Either electrification is too expensive, and should not be considered now, or it will magically become acceptable following the study.

If the Minister is making soothing statements to community groups, why doesn’t he make the same statements to the media?  Possibly because the “too expensive” excuse wouldn’t wash if there’s a study whose outcome may show that electrification is cheaper and better?

Updated October 6 at 6:55 am:

Brodie Fenlon at The Globe covers this story including comments from several of the community and government folks involved in this issue.

Tess Kalinowski at The Star has a short piece, and The CBC reports on the issue.  CBC radio coverage notes that John gerretsen, the Minister of the Environment says the approval will allow the diesel connection to the airport to open by 2015.  This is clearly in aid of the Pan Am Games bid, and an unanswered question is “what happens if we don’t get the bid”.  Has this project approval been railroaded [sorry about that] to sustain Toronto’s bid credibility?

The Minister is also quoted by the Star and CBC as saying that electrification is too expensive.  Does this prejudge the outcome of the very electrification study Metrolinx is about to undertake?  Why study a technology we have already rejected?  Are we seeing the real face of Queen’s Park’s “public consultation” here?

Original post: 

This evening, Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment announced that the Georgetown South GO project has been approved, but with conditions required to ensure that it meets claims for environmental improvements and mitigation, if needed, for any harmful effects.

The press release and detailed announcement of terms are available online.

In brief, the Minister requires that GO Transit and the Union-Pearson Rail Link abide by several conditions.  It is noteworthy that the UPRL is explicitly included because through much of the discussions, it has been treated as an off-limits deal between the federal and/or provincial governments and a private company, SNC-Lavalin, who would implement and operate the service.

The major points in the decision are:

• Metrolinx shall follow its own Environmental Plan, and shall ensure that any other party involved in the implementation shall do so.  This places the onus on Metrolinx regardless of who actually performs any part of the work.
• There is no mention of alignment issues, specifically with respect to the question of grade crossings or underpasses.  By implication, the Metrolinx proposal is approved as is.
• All GO and UPRL service in the corridor shall be Tier 4 compliant when service begins or when Tier 4 diesel technology becomes commercially available.  Rules in the United States require Tier 4 locomotives to be available by 2015.
• Metrolinx shall continue to investigate commercially available alternate technologies.
• Several conditions apply to ongoing monitoring of emissions in the corridor including the scenario that would apply before Tier 4 locomotives are in use.
• Metrolinx shall propose a mitigation plan to deal with emissions.  Notably, the conditions do not explicitly mention noise, but this could be presumed under “human health risks”.  Metrolinx and the Ministry should confirm that they include noise and vibration within that category, not just diesel emissions.
• The study and mitigation plan must be completed before commencement of operations on the Georgetown South Corridor and the UPRL.  This is tricky considering that service already runs here.  It is unclear whether the effect is to prevent any additional service in the immediate future.
• Metrolinx is required to set up an air monitoring plan for selected sites in the corridor.  Again, noise is not mentioned and this is a significant oversight because base line data for current operations are needed along with future readings and possible mitigation.
• There is a requirement for ongoing involvement by the public and by relevant agencies such as Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health.  Metrolinx would do well to embrace this as an opportunity rather than doing the least possible to meet the Minister’s terms.

On balance, I would say that Metrolinx more or less got what it wanted, at least in the short term.  The project will continue unimpeded in the hope that technology will catch up with requirements for the corridor.  The Minister did not rule on the specifics of whether diesels are “good”, only that Metrolinx needs to do more work in that regard, aim for the best, and be prepared to conduct further monitoring and planning to minimize the effects.  By assumption, Tier 4 diesel is considered an acceptable implementation once it is available.

The Minister is silent on electrification (for which a system-wide study will begin early in 2010), but speaks of alternative technologies that ”become commercially available”.  This could include trains run on hydrogen, but only if they are “commercially available”.  This is a fascinating statement because it implies that there is no other commercially available technology today.  I cannot help remembering back decades to an era when the Government of Ontario steadfastly denied that LRT existed even while Alberta was building lines in its two principal cities.

Metrolinx must not be allowed to claim that electrification is not “commercially available”.  “We don’t want to do it” and “we can’t afford it” have nothing to do with whether it’s available for purchase, but are common excuses to avoid the question.  The Electrification Study will determine what can and should be done, and Metrolinx should not prejudge the outcome with biased claims against electrification.

Although the detailed conditions are technical in nature, the press release itself shows the spin Ontario is putting on the approval.

When planned transit improvements to the current GO system are complete and the system is operating at a maximum level, we expect decreases in emissions that are equivalent to removing tens of millions of car trips a year from our roads. For example, greenhouse gas emissions (in the form of carbon dioxide [CO2]) could be reduced by over 100 kilotonnes annually.

The calculations underlying this statement are deeply flawed on two counts:

• Trains are assumed to be full of passengers in both directions on all trips.  Clearly, the average load on counter-peak and off-peak trips will be much below actual train capacity, and the number of passenger trips will be corresponding smaller.  Assuming that each GO train will carry 1,900 passengers bothways at 11 pm is ridiculous.
• Any travel removed from expressways will backfill with latent demand.  Some of this will be travel now made on congested local roads, and some will be net new trips made because roads are thought to be less congested than before.  While GO service may produce more capacity in the overall transportation network, it’s a big jump to expect that pollution will go down.  All that is avoided is future growth that would occur without the new GO services.

Also, current riders have already been diverted from autos to rail travel, and GO cannot count them as net new customers for pollution savings.

The obvious shortcomings of the Minister of the Environment’s order (no mention of electrification as an available technology; no discussion of noise and vibration; no acknowledgement of existing operations) show that the Minister does not fully comprehend, or chooses to ignore, significant matters raised in objections to the Metrolinx proposals.

This decision will do little to placate the many groups who have been active in the Weston Corridor debate.  There’s a lot of wiggle room in the conditions Metrolinx must meet, and Metrolinx has a sorry reputation of responding to criticism with inaccurate and misleading statements.  Indeed, a recent household flyer distributed in the Weston Corridor continues to misrepresent the Medical Officer of Health’s stated position on the diesel vs electric debate.

To put it graciously, bias is unseemly in a public agency, and it undermines confidence in Metrolinx and transit proposals overall.  The statements may play within the government, but they don’t play on the street.

Metrolinx can regain the high ground easily by making up for the Minister’s shortcomings and announcing that it will go the extra distance to do what was not explicitly asked.  Electrification is the easy one — the study is already at the Terms of Reference stage, and Metrolinx already has a Benefits Case Analysis for the Lakeshore Corridor.

At a minimum, an interim report should be available early enough for a go/nogo decision on electrification before the planned service start on UPRL and significant additions to GO.

Noise and vibration are an obvious “oversight”, and Metrolinx should simply include them in their work plan.

Metrolinx and GO have spent years fighting the community on these issues.  Activists were dismissed as NIMBYs when they had valid concerns, and this poisoned the dialogue.  A new attitude from Metrolinx may not convince everyone, but co-operation and honesty would be refreshing.

This afternoon I received a note from the Project Director of the Electrification Study, Karen Pitre.  She concurs that the confidentiality agreement goes beyond what is necessary, and is preparing a revised version.

I hope to be free to report on the dialog at the workshop.

Original post:

Today, I received the agenda for an upcoming ”stakeholders’ workshop” regarding the GO electrification study.  In the same email, there was a gentle reminder that I must sign a Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality Agreement to participate. 

(The term “reminder” is amusing, but condescending, considering that this is the first time I have received this document.)

Metrolinx wants to make sure that I don’t tell you anything that has not already been released to the general public unless they authorize such release, and that if I do tell you, then they can come after me legally, although with unspecified effect.  Also, I agree not to create a conflict of interest by being involved in some work that may benefit from the outcome of this study.

This is obviously a boilerplate agreement used for all sorts of consultation with external bodies, but it is entirely inappropriate here.  This is, for all practical purposes, a public consultation session not unlike many that Metrolinx has conducted for individual projects and for “The Big Move”.  Indeed, this exercise is so far removed from real policy and budgetary decisionmaking as to be laughable.  Is this the same organization that commissioned the creation of the Metronauts?

• The stakeholders will make suggestions to the advisory committee.
• The advisory committee may or may not heed our advice, and will write terms of reference for the study as they see fit.
• Metrolinx consultants and staff will conduct the study.  I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they will actually follow the terms of reference faithfully, without omission or artificial misconstruction of their intent.
• A report will be prepared for the Board.
• The Board will make recommendations to the Government of Ontario.
• An announcement may, or may not, be forthcoming.
• The study may, or may not, be published in whole or in part.

This entire study arose in response to strong community and political pressure in favour of electrification.  Leaving aside the specifics of that debate, it is a travesty that Metrolinx would consult with representatives of the broader community but wouldn’t allow them to actually tell people what was discussed.  This reinforces the impression that Metrolinx does not want real debate, real input, because whatever is discussed can be denied or represented as Metrolinx sees fit.

Maybe we will spend a few hours in what diplomats call “full and frank” discussions, only to read in The Star that we all happily ate our cookies and drank our tea and went home satisfied.

This is no way to build trust with communities and faith in the results of the study.

Subsequently, the MOH issued a revised critique in response to updated information from Metrolinx.  In this, he retracted three claims made in his original letter:

• Unacceptable lukemia risks are no longer predicted.
• Although local concentrations of some contaminants are predicted to rise, the MOH no longer feels that Metrolinx is underestimating the local outcomes.
• Similarly, acute health risks are predicted to rise, but the increase is not underestimated my Metrolinx.

However, the MOH goes on to say:

Notwithstanding the above, I remain concerned about the air quality impacts and increased health risks predicted for the immediately adjacent communities as a result of the proposed diesel expansion.

In the “Information Clarification” Metrolinx has described potential air quality and health impact mitigation measures, including improvements to locomotive stock. While these mitigation measures would reduce emissions, it is not clear what level of reduction will be achieved in local ambient air concentrations of the respiratory irritants for which increased risk is predicted.

On its home page, Metrolinx lists the three bullets above, but without the qualification.  Metrolinx goes on to claim that the MOH’s revised opinion includes:

As an alternative to electrification, other mitigation measures proposed by Metrolinx may, subject to demonstration, be acceptable.

In fact, Dr. McKeown’s letter actually says:

In its additional information Metrolinx also indicates that it is exploring alternatives to diesel train technology, including electrification. In my view, electrification is the option that most clearly addresses the air quality and health impacts predicted from the proposed project for populations adjacent to the line by ensuring that any emissions (due to electrical power generation) are regional in nature. Whether other measures proposed as part of a comprehensive mitigation strategy could reduce the predicted air quality and health impacts to an acceptable level remains to be demonstrated.

Metrolinx not only misrepresented the MOH’s position, but blanketed the Weston Corridor with flyer reiterating the claims made on their website.

Today, as part of the Clean Train Coalition‘s protest march, Dr. McKeown took the unusual step of attending a public rally.  At that rally, he said:

What we know about air pollution in Toronto is that any proposal now should pass a very stringent test before it goes forward. This proposal has not passed that test in my view. The study, conducted by Metrolinx itself, indicates clearly that there will be impacts on air quality as well as health risks for those that live close to the line.

Additional information on the rally can be found at the Star’s website.

Metrolinx really needs to stop spinning this issue.  They have created an electrification study, an advisory committee to recommend terms of reference for that study, and are about to have a “stakeholder consultation” where folks like me can contribute their input to the advisory committee.  Electrification of the Lakeshore corridor is already part of the Premier’s announced plans for GO Transit.

Why is Metrolinx trying so desperately to win a battle between the community and the Minister of the Environment?