Unfortunately that corridor wasn’t planned to have any service increases anyway. The only web-posted map of proposed service increases based on the “reallocations” is here on Steve’s site.

Lawrence East isn’t unique. I know that in the AM peak (say around 8:15 AM) it’s to be expected that an eastbound Queen streetcar at will leave people at the stop between Roncesvalles and Bathurst.

While it sucks to be left at the stop during peak period, you have to wonder how reallocating a late-evening bus will help, as it’s probably already out in rush hour somewhere. Taking a bus off Evans at 10PM on a Sunday won’t result in extra peak Queen cars (there are insufficient ALRVs to begin with).

While the TTC (and Councillor Stinz) are making this an “either-or” proposition, I don’t see that we should have *either* people left on the curb in rush hour by overpacked vehicles, or service disappearing at “low ridership” times in various fairly large swaths of the city. Asking which one I’d prefer is like asking which kind of unpleasant disease I’d prefer. “Neither” is my answer.

Looking at a few routes, the revenue per rider varies in the $.60-.75 range somewhat whimsically, although the Queen car apparently gets over ninety cents per rider (as do the Kingston Road cars).

I wonder about how the cost per day is calculated. Operating a streetcar line appears to be much more expensive than a bus line. For example, the Finch East bus costs $61,300 to run 8,000 miles/day, 470 hours/day with 52/41 buses AM peak/PM peak, while the King(1) car costs $81,000 to run 4,200 miles/day, 480 hours/day with 47/33 streetcars. Of course Finch has higher average speeds so the miles/day will be higher, but there must be capital/depreciation costs for tracks blended into King’s cost.

The document does not explain how revenue per day, nor cost per day, is calculated. This does not inspire confidence in the usefulness of the numbers.
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(1) Grouping the Lake Shore car with the King car is strange. Lake Shore is more like a Queen tripper, and would be a Long Branch tripper if that line still existed. (I think you can only have a “tripper” in relation to a regular route. A tripper can’t exist by itself.)

Steve: I have been transcribing the annual (at least until recently) stats on route performance into a spreadsheet since the TTC started publishing them in 1976. Here are the 2004 figures as published in the 2005 report.

It is worth noting that for some major streetcar routes like Queen, the ridership numbers were not updated for several years and the ridership recovery of the mid 2000s did not show up in the “economic performance” numbers because streetcar routes were not credited for the riding they actually carried.

Much of the time I just give up and walk from Lawrence Station, which is frequently faster than the bus, although it certainly shouldn’t be. And much of the rest of the year I cycle because it takes about 5-10 minutes less for me to cycle from College & Beverley than it does to take the TTC, it’s free and it’s healthy. I did start cycling out of mixed motives, but one of the biggest was the dispiriting nature of the Lawrence bus (and the endless subway delays.)

I do find it a bit puzzling that many people seem to be more interested in gearing TTC service to “potential” customers than improving the service to the customers that they do have and are in the process of losing. Anyway, not trying to be snarky, just wondering if the greater good hasn’t trumped the merely good in this case.

You claimed that subways cost a lot to operate, therefore losing a lot of money every year. As an example, you said the Sheppard Subway loses about $8 million/year net, while only carrying about 30,000-40,000 riders/day (approximately, can’t remember the exact numbers).

A look at these reports shows that some streetcar routes lose even more money than the Sheppard Subway. For example, the 504 King car has a daily revenue of $37,600 but a cost of $81,400. I concluded the net daily loss was $81,400-$37,600 = $43,800 /day (in 2005).

$43,800/day means about a net loss of $13 million/year, more than the Sheppard Subway, while carrying only 48,400 passengers/day. The same trend shows for other streetcar routes too.

How can you justify the claim that subways will lose much more every year than Light Rail?

-Stangry

Steve: You are comparing apples and oranges. The figure for the Sheppard subway was (some years ago now) the difference between the cost of the subway operation and the bus system it replaced. In other words, it was the marginal added cost of opening the subway. This is the net added cost after revenue from new passengers is taken into account.

It’s also worth noting that in the TTC’s method of allocating costs and revenues, the subway started out roughly breaking even in the early 80s, then dropped to a loss of 8 cents/rider by the mid 80s, then rose again to roughly break even a few years later. Changes in methodology along the way make comparisons difficult, and show the effect of assumptions in formulas that are never examined by decision-making bodies.

So when these cuts go into affect, the 9 Bellamy for example will stop operating earlier than it did in the 1980′s.

I think this is very troubling from a transit access point of view. I in fact just did a talk at a planning conference about transit access.

And it is interesting to note that Toronto and Ottawa are both chipping away at transit access. To save money, Ottawa’s mayor wants to cut routes, because Ottawa having 99% of residents within a 500 meter walk of a bus stop, means that they have higher transit access than almost every other city in North America. And that somehow is seen as bad to the mayor. I really hope we don’t get to the American model of transit planning, where whole swaths of cities have no access to transit.

Anyone living downwind of all the pollution caused by Toronto gridlock will benefit by having more transit service here. Therefore, we’re justified in asking for more of their tax dollars.

Steve: When asked to explain how the counts were done, TTC management explained that they are careful to avoid unusual days (Mondays and Fridays) and seasons (summer and winter). Nobody was quick enough to ask the obvious question of what else the 28 passenger checkers do as they obviously only work three days a week, for half of the year.

To be fair, I assume they actually work Tuesday-Thursday, Saturday, Sunday so they would still be out there five days a week.

But as far as doing route counts, I can’t see how it will result in something even remotely accurate or up-to-date. I know you generally get fewer people working on Mondays and Fridays and in the summertime, but that means you need to separate that data out, not that you don’t need to collect it.

What other assumptions did they make? With 28 staff, they might just have two people (in separate buses) on each of 7 lines riding in circles all day, who then assume that there are no headway variations for any other buses affecting the number of riders, and that their bus never misses a bunch of transferring passengers.

You’d need to do each route a lot more often than once or twice a year to average out those errors.

LOL — that’s why we need somebody as sharp as you on the Commission. Something to consider if they change the makeup later on to allow non-politicians … and don’t give me that “I’m more effective from the outside” bunk. This was before you started attending meetings in ’72, but I heard there used to be some real passionate yelling matches at the Commission meetings in the 60s. I think that’s what we need now.

Worse, when you’re dealing with small numbers of passengers and small numbers of vehicles you expect a high variability. In other words, flipping a coin five times and getting five heads (100%) is unusual but not unbelievable (it happens just over 3 out of 100 times you try it.) Flipping a coin 100 times and getting 100 heads (100%) means you’re cheating or the coin is weighted – the larger sample size let’s you draw that conclusion because that happens once in a hundred thousand billion billion billion times you try it.

Ask any statistician to look at these numbers and she will likely tell you that even if we assume that these routes conform to a regular distribution with low variability, it’s extremely likely that at least a couple of these cuts are on the block based only on pure chance (ie, natural, random variation – akin to flipping a coin a few times and not getting about half heads and half tails). I’m not a statistics expert so maybe I’m missing some step they took to wash the data, or maybe the TTC has vast experience estimating ridership with confidence. But if that’s not the case I move to go ahead with the cuts and “reallocate” the money to a special remedial stats course for all city staff and politicians.

Steve: When asked to explain how the counts were done, TTC management explained that they are careful to avoid unusual days (Mondays and Fridays) and seasons (summer and winter). Nobody was quick enough to ask the obvious question of what else the 28 passenger checkers do as they obviously only work three days a week, for half of the year.

As I said in an earlier post, it’s very easy for us or critics like you to sit back and say “transit service must not be cut”. It’s quite another task to do that when funding is limited and the voter mandate is to not increase fares or taxes. When you were working, did you rebel against your superiors? Is that what you expect Karen Stintz to do? … to tell Ford where to go? If the Commission voted for a fare increase to reduce overcrowding and not cut any service, how many deputations would they receive in protest under that scenario? Would you be there complaining?

Steve: I have two criticisms of Stintz, and they are as much political as they are technical.

As for “rebelling against my superiors”, I was well-known for taking a strong stand for what I believed, based on professional experience and judgement, to be correct. However, I was willing to discuss matters, and as a public servant, to come to an accommodation between what was practical and what was politically desired. One cannot always agree with a policy, but it is one’s job to do the best one can in implementing it. TTC staff failed in that regard, and the Commission let them get away with it because “cuts” were more important than “common sense”.

I don’t agree with these cuts either (as I am a firm believer in 24 hour service and that transit service should always be available, just as my car is always available), but these service reductions are not catastrophic.

As far as knowing which battles need to be picked, I would have let this one go. You’re got going to make any friends on the new Commission with articles like this, and if you want to be an effective advocate, you cannot constantly slag the TTC on every minor issue and then expect them to listen to you on the matters that count. Try the soft sell — the hard sell obviously doesn’t work with them.

Steve: This is not a minor issue. My central concern is that they are making up a response to a budget problem on the back of a very tattered envelope, and we are not having a public discussion about what standards should be applied to service. Next year, we will be back looking at the same problem but on a larger scale. This is a matter of policy, and the Commission is ducking the issue by painting this not as a “cut” but a “reallocation”. The person whose bus doesn’t run any more will take cold comfort from knowing that if they tried another route half-way across the city, or at another time of day, they would find their “reallocated” ride.

As for slagging the TTC on “every minor issue”, there are so many major ones I don’t have time for the small change. Oddly enough, a lot of this comes down to poor management (and I will leave your interpretation of “poor” to your imagination) more interested in preserving the status quo, their reputations and their pet projects than in making better transit in difficult times. If the Commissioners and the Ford regime, elected to “clean up City Hal”, cannot see how they are being misled, then nothing will have changed from Lastman to Miller to Ford. I will return to examples of this in coming articles.

When you take a look at the 199 service in the context of the justifications the TTC used for service cuts to 48 other bus routes chopped at the budget meeting, problems pop up quickly. The TTC claims that the 48 routes they identified for service cuts are not “productive” because they have low ridership. When you take a look at the 199 service when it reaches McCowan and Finch, on average about 10 people get off the bus at this stop and wait for the 39 so they can travel further east. Meanwhile, 2 people are left on the 199 as it turns south at the McCowan and Finch intersection to head to Scarborough Town Centre.

Ogthedim, I do agree that commuters with a Metropass (or those without can get transfers) can get off the 199 bus and wait for the 39. However, here are some problems I have identified with the new service.

The problem is sevenfold.

1) The ridership on the 199 between Scarborough Town Centre and the McCowan and Finch intersection doesn’t warrant a separate bus route especially since the McCowan bus runs frequently (e.g., every 5 to 6 minutes). People who want to go to STC can get off the 39 Finch bus and transfer to the McCowan bus.

2) More people are traveling east to Neilson than are traveling south to STC. The 199 bus service does not reflect where people are actually traveling.

3) When these service changes were first implemented the 39 would run every 17 minutes on paper but more like every 45 minutes in reality. This means commuters heading east of McCowan who get off the 199 are faced with long wait times for a 39 bus. Thankfully, the 39 service is a bit more frequent now so wait times range between 5 to 15 minutes.

4) Service changes on Finch Ave. East has lead to overcrowding on the 39. The 39 bus (heading westbound to Finch station) is typically full when the bus reaches Markham Rd. or Middlefield. This type of overcrowding typically did not occur at this point in the route before the service changes.

5) Service changes on Finch Ave. East has also increased the commuting time for commuters east of McCowan.

6) When the 199 is heading from STC to Finch station it needs to make a left turn at McCowan and Finch which delays the service at the traffic light between 2 to 4 minutes as it waits to turn (depending on how much traffic is making a left turn).

7) The TTC has changed the stops without notifying commuters. Many commuters wait for the 199 bus at a certain stop only to be told by a 39 bus driver that the bus does not stop there and that they must cross the street to wait for the 199 and vice-versa. The entire service change has caused much confusion among many transit riders.

As for the subway to York University, that particular extension will not be useful for everyone living in Toronto. It does not make sense for those living along Steeles Ave. East in Scarborough for example to travel to Finch station and take the subway around the entire Yonge-University-Spadina loop to get to York U.

Instead of service cuts that pit one neighbourhood against another in regards to who deserves scarce transit dollars, City Hall and the TTC should build a transit network across the entire city that serves as many residents as possible. We already have a plan in place, Transit City. It’s already funded by the Provincial Government. All that’s needed at the Municipal level is political will from our elected representatives to build it.

Classy. Maybe we should start saying that to the people who insist on living in the farthest reaches of Scarborough and Etobicoke and driving downtown, crosstown, etc. to get to their work, instead of pandering to their needs and biases. Or do they get a pass from this line of thinking because they aren’t graduate students?

If anything, this goes to show just how important budget balancing exercises, like those pointed out by Jarrett from humantransit.org are important in engaging the public and elected officials in solving transit funding woes. This way, it won’t be a horse and pony show next year when the hard cuts are coming to the TTC.

Steve: Let citizens design their own transit system! Are you mad? Whatever will the “professionals” do with their time?

Following management’s advice blindly is dangerous because that advice is not necessarily unbiased nor well-reasoned. We know that there were problems with the first set of proposals, and changes were made in response to public feedback. The Commission entertained hours of deputations from people hoping for a similar reception, but were frozen out “for the greater good”. If Karen Stintz had tried that at one of the “consultation” sessions, she would have a less than warm reception.

Let’s see. that’s 200 stuffed buses per day, 100 going to school and 100 going home, right?

Was there a deputant pleading the case of 6000 plumbers?

And, having the inconvenience of the 199 compared to the 39 (I’m trying to understand what the problem is with that … take a 39 to a 199 stop, get off, catch an express – that is the beauty of the Metropass) doesn’t quite match with a massive block of the city receiving no service.

Steve: The York students who are complaining are at Glendon Campus on Bayview and Lawrence. They will lose the connection westbound to Lawrence Station when the 124 Sunnybrook and 162 Lawrence Donway are not running, albeit only on Sunday nights after 10 pm. I suspect that they thought the cut would be more severe and affect them on nights when the campus is busier. The 11 Bayview runs every 26 minutes late Sunday nights and goes to Davisville Station.

The solution should be obvious even to someone like you: provide better transit to every part of the city. Not every person in Toronto can live downtown. The downtown core is already crowded and the number of people living there will only increase in the future with the amount of development happening. Many of the routes downtown such as Queen, King and College already suffer from overcrowding. Not everyone in the city who lives in areas of poor transit can move downtown because (a) they may not be able to afford to live there which is why they live elsewhere in the city or (b) the downtown core cannot accommodate everyone in the inner-suburbs if they were to move downtown.

“6000 Graduate students can’t speak for themselves? BOO HOO”

You expect all 6000 graduate students from York to sit in a meeting at City Hall from 1 pm to 10 pm when many have to teach or conduct research during that time period. There were a couple of hundred people presenting deputations and the meeting lasted 9 hours. If you would like to hold a meeting where thousands of people speak for themselves then go ahead. You can quit your full-time job to hold the hearings which should last quite some time.

How about actually adding something substantive to the actual discussion rather than making condescending comments that make little sense.

1) Buses run on diesel. The TTC expects that oil prices will rise at a faster rate than electricity. Maybe that is why they will be cutting those poor performing routes, in anticipation of higher fuel costs. Of course, if the TTC will be paying higher prices, so will the automobile drivers, who might switch to to the TTC as an alternative. Another reason NOT to cut services.

2) If we give the last commission (with Adam Giambrone at the helm) a starting grade of C, I would give the current commission (with Karen Stintz at the helm) a D-. Denzil Minnan-Wong performance so far at the commission gets an E, which is why the overall is not a D.

Steve: Fuel is only a small part of the total cost of bus operation. The reason the cuts are all on bus routes is that the routes with very low ridership are all operated by buses.

“I spoke on behalf of 6000 graduate students and how these service cuts adversely affect their day-to-day lives.”

6000 Graduate students can’t speak for themselves? BOO HOO

Yes, Don, I see your point; it would be much preferable to have each student speak for his or her self. After all, with a 5 minute limit for each person, this wouldn’t take long. Of course, if the politicians limited the sittings to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it would stretch out for about 12.5 weeks, but why would they do that? If they kept the meeting going 24/7 the graduate students would be finished in under 3 weeks (4 hours under, to be precise), and the next group, perhaps nurses who may work late, could start their comments.

Steve: And the last time I looked, we have a Mayor who claims to speak on behalf of millions of Torontonians. Maybe he should let the rest of us speak too. The whole idea of representation is to allow a group to speak with one voice, but if you would prefer that we have thousands rather than hundreds at public meetings, all the more to show how little they are listened to, be my guest. At some point the crowd will outnumber the politicians by a ratio that cannot be ignored.

I miss David Gunn. Those of us who took the very earliest of subways in the morning when he was in charge (5:45AM), always saw him get on every morning at Sheppard Station. He always went to the car where the whistle blower was and talked to everybody everyday on their way to work. Many on those trains knew him as David and not Mr. Gunn (or some stranger). He was in amongst us experiencing everything we were, the good and the bad.

Steve, you mentioned the area of Yonge, Bloor, Bathurst,and St.Clair will have no service in that area after 10PM. Funny, I remember taking the 77 Spadina bus when it ran all night up to Dupont. I know you’re old enough to remember that. Also, after reading about the meeting, do we now have all transit meetings conducted in Wongspeak or Stintzspeak? Meetings like that are in most cases a waste of time because they have already made up their minds and it is too far along in the process for anyone to listen with an open mind. Keep up the good work!!!

Steve: The meeting was at City Hall. No services in the immediate area will be cancelled, although 6 Bay was originally on the chopping block.

It’s too bad that there is a shortage of money to run things – hmm but we ‘must’ afford a $433 million new light rail storage facility. (Even if no-one up until now really looked at an alternative.)

Just looking at the TTC financials on its website, the operating cost per rider seems to have gone up by 26% from 2005 to 2009. That’s over 6% a year. Inflation has been around 2% a year (other than in David Miller’s mind.) So – hmm – maybe the problem is not that the TTC isn’t being give enough money, but rather that it has not (up until now) been held to account. (By the way, it IS the role of a governance organization to grill the heck out of management about expenses.)

Steve: There is more going on here than meets the eye, at least in your analysis. Total operating expenses rose 38.4% from 2005 to 2009 ($960.2m to $1328.7m), but in the same period, the amount of bus service rose by 20.2% (102.9m km to 123.7m km). Passenger counts went up by only 9.3%, and the spread here reflects the fact that during this period service was increased at a rate faster than ridership to reduce crowding and to extend service hours. This explains part, but not all I agree, of the 26.5% increase in the cost/trip.

If making people walk further and wait longer for transit service is bad, we should kibosh the transit city plan right away – because that will be the result for many customers.

Steve: If that is our criterion for measuring the effect of new services, then the subway plan is even more harmful to would-be riders. Just ask the folks who live on Sheppard west of Don Mills, or Yonge north of Eglinton, what their service looked like before the subway arrived.

6000 Graduate students can’t speak for themselves? BOO HOO

“I made no specific mention of the fact that the TTC arbitrarily, largely replaced the reliable 39 bus with the useless 199 “Rocket” to Scarborough Town Centre which immediately made my commute unbearable. A 90 minute trip to work now takes 2 hours (one-way). Because of that decision I cannot leave my house without getting a ride to areas that are better served by transit. As a result, I largely switched to GO Transit and will eventually abandon transit altogether in favor of driving.”

The solution should be obvious even to a graduate student. Move.

The 84 suffers badly from poor scheduling as it is; the route between Downsview and Sheppard-Yonge Stations suffers from severe overcrowding and lousy service, it does not have the benefit of the 106 or 108 to take up some of the slack that it does west of Downsview Station. Routing through Downsview Park would be a disaster for that route.

The service through the Park (at the time the CFB Base) was stopped in September 1996.

Steve: This is a case where the TTC’s analysis says that taking people out of their way through the base “inconveniences” more through riders than the benefit of providing service. However, given the off peak headways on the 84, I have a hard time believing that this is a huge problem, especially given the expected and growing uses of the site.

I spoke on behalf of 6000 graduate students and how these service cuts adversely affect their day-to-day lives. I made no specific mention of the fact that the TTC arbitrarily, largely replaced the reliable 39 bus with the useless 199 “Rocket” to Scarborough Town Centre which immediately made my commute unbearable. A 90 minute trip to work now takes 2 hours (one-way). Because of that decision I cannot leave my house without getting a ride to areas that are better served by transit. As a result, I largely switched to GO Transit and will eventually abandon transit altogether in favor of driving. This is one of the effects of arbitrary service cuts or service changes without doing the proper research. I tried to get this point across to the commission. In addition, my deputation was not serving my own self-interest but it is now clear that Karen Stintz was not listening to a word anyone in the room was saying.

Steve: Hillcrest isn’t just the maintenance shops. It is also the main bus shops for engine work (relocated many years ago from Parkdale Garage to the Duncan Shops). It is also Transit Control and a few other departments. Yes, some redevelopment would be possible, presuming that this does not actually wind up being the site for the new LFLRV shops instead of Ashbridge (article pending on that issue).

The 84B and 84C did loop through Downsview. They stopped doing so some time between 1993 and 1998, looking at maps on Transit-Toronto.

And apropos of 72A Pape via Commissioners:

“Winter service through the eastern portlands, the Distillery District and the St. Lawrence neighbourhood will end at 7 pm on Sundays. This is a situation where the more populated area west of the Don River is penalized for having a service through an industrial area as part of its route. Would its stats look better as a bus that only served the residential communities?”

I took the 72A once as a DRB (Downtown Relief Bus) — I was starting from downtown, was heading to the Ontario Science Centre, and had time to explore. The bus left Front and Bay with people standing, around 6 PM on a weeknight. Most got off at various stops along the Esplanade, and by the time we reached Cherry we were down to a handful. Some workers got on along Commissioners.

Note that the nearest route to Esplanade, the King car, isn’t accessible. I wonder if the St. Lawrence neighbourhood may have higher needs for accessible service than average. Absent the 72A, the accessible approach to St. Lawrence from downtown would involve a trek north, east, and then south on Sherbourne or Parliament.

I expect that the first time that someone who requires accessible service is left stranded by these cuts and makes a public fuss, the Councillors on the commission are going to be left in a tough spot.

Finally, I have often wondered why any smart, ambitious Councillor would take on the kinds of jobs that taskmaster Ford is handing out. There’s dirty work to be done to meet Ford’s off-the-cuff statements. It was funny listening to the interview Metro Morning did shortly after the election with Doug Holyday, deputy mayor. Holyday sounded bemused when asked about Ford’s programme, and was pretty non-commital about what was actually going to happen; and I haven’t noticed him take a lot of public positions in various subsequent foo-fraws. Other Councillors may not be that smart?

My thanks to you for offering the wider public a more fullsome report on the discourse of TTC-related matters (otherwise people’s knowledge would be limited to “Readers Digest” versions on Facebook or Twitter. I can attest to the fact that our City, transit and all, is better because of you. It is extremely frustrating to sit on a Board and feel as though you are the sole defender of a certain right or the sole promoter of a certain philosophy. I am grateful that we can work together “for the greater good”.

Maria

This exersize is just begging for some sort of computerized fare system (i.e. Presto) to give the most accurate picture of what ridership these routes really carry, imo.

If the service is bad, you won’t see many passengers, because they are acting rationally not to use the service. That could mean no-one wants to catch it, or it could mean that no-one wants to catch it at that level of service it offers currently because it is too long a wait, inconvenient, doesn’t connect where they want to go.

Simply looking at fare data does not show something very important- the people who do not take public transport, and ultimately those are the people who would be the most valuable to gain for the system, not the people who already are converts.

Many years ago we upgraded service on certain bus routes, including evenings and the weekend when “no-one” would catch the bus. Immediately following the upgrades, ridership started going through the roof, we are talking typical increases of 100% overall and 200% on evenings/weekends (as measured prior to 4 years earlier). Sunday patronage on many routes reached levels equal to or higher than their weekday patronage just 4 years earlier!

Service quality and frequency is a big influence on whether people will catch the service.

Steve: I rode the King car down Broadview this morning at 8 am. We stopped picking up people before we reached Gerrard, and I suspect that by the time we got to Queen, we had left the equivalent of a seated load at various stops. Part of the problem was that half of the service was being short turned eastbound via Broadview, Dundas and Parliament. This means that the headway from Broadview Station was at best 4 minutes rather than the scheduled 2, and with the merge point for short turns westbound at Parliament, many people would not be served. However, the cars would be “on time”. In the AM peak, they should short turn the other way around to re-enter service from Dundas southbound, but that is probably too challenging an arrangement.

Steve: Actually, Presto may not give you all the info you need. Unless you force everyone to tap every time they change routes, or use proximity readers to scan crowds for cards, you will not get all of the trip segments. Imagine trying to have everyone who is carrying a “pass” equivalent on their card having to tap as they come through, say, Finch Station. Even Presto has recognized the problem of forcing a tap in and out for every trip by allowing users to register their most common trip. This is not practical in the much more complex trip pattern of TTC riders.

The TTC will be installing passenger counters on a subset of its fleet over the next few years, and for the purposes of riding counts, these are accurate enough. Lower tech solutions are sometimes preferable.

“There hasn’t been a debate about what “waste” means because there doesn’t need to be. The elected representatives of our city were chosen because the voters believe they will choose appropriately.”

That’s not how our representative democracy works. It might be in the dreams of many a politician forced to deal with people questioning them.

But, like it or not, we do not choose our representatives and then let them go on their merry way deciding things without input before the next election. We ask them questions. We badger them. We do what Rob Ford said we should do, and call them. If we didn’t, we’d be following Denzil Minan-Wong’s approach of trusting management, which would have gotten rid of even more lines then this flawed attempt to discover waste has done.

As for defining waste, yeah, there better be a discussion. Otherwise we end up with things like Walkerton or Ipperwash, or Rae Days, or eco-fees, each cases where our elected representatives, PC, NDP or Liberal, didn’t think through the ramifications of their actions.

Or to put it into transit terms – what’s to say this set of politicans knows better about wasting TTC money then the group who thunk up the SRT or stuck us with the extension to York University? City building is a long term project. Actions done 10-15 years ago, like Mel Lastman applying the North York approach of no tax increase while giving generous union agreements, still have reverberations today.

So, yeah, given the track record of city politicians getting it wrong, regardless of political stripe, darn right I’m going to ask for a debate about what waste means. Because what they are deciding today means something.

Example – the Ombudsman’s office says it can reduce waste by helping city departments find out where people see problems. But, the current administration calls adding two people to that staff waste because the culture of customer service, however that is defined by management/council, will make that unnecessary.

That is a debate that needs to happen – is two staff members on the Ombud team going to get more savings then not having them? I’m not sure, but lets talk about what that culture of customer service means.

But, if we use your approach, we don’t debate that and do what? Trust management/council when through the haphazard cutting of excess routes debate, they have already proven they are behind the taxpayers in the statistics, let alone how to interpret them? Not likely.

I may not like the thoughts of people like Steven Cheung on here, but I would rather he be talking about his opinions then we blindly trust management and the politicians, regardless of their political stripe.

Wonderful idea.

I was thinking along the same lines myself, but for a different reason. I was wondering how the deputations have any weight at all in the public record, if they aren’t recorded along with the votes they precede. And if they aren’t officially recorded, doesn’t that speak to just how significant (or not) they are considered in the TTC meeting and decision process? It’s easy to justify a Commision vote when all the dissenting opinions and supporting arguments are effectively off the record after the fact.

As for your “instant democratic feedback” point – I think that’s a great idea, that perhaps needs some refinement to work as intended. Unfortunately, online tweeting/feedback is as easy to hijack by ‘interested parties’ as are the current meetings. At least in this case we’d have IP’s/tags/etc.. to log and trend on. But I imagine just having the whole thing on the public record for the public to comment on – even after the fact – might be enough to make a change for the better.

My comment that building a 120 km light rail network makes more sense than building a gravy train to Scarborough Town Centre got a few laughs from the crowd at the Mayor’s expense even though that was not my intention. I wanted to show how wasteful it is to build a subway to Scarborough Town Centre when we have a cheaper plan to build a light rail network that will put 630,000 Torontonians within walking distance of rail-based transit.

Steve: I have not yet written this up, but late in the meeting (around 10 pm), Stintz had a motion asking for the TTC to work with the city on a “skills-based Commission”. That’s a non-elected Commission of “experts”, possibly with some sort of citizen oversight body. That’s the sort of model where Council would completely lose control of transit to the bureaucrats and their “expert” friends.

The TTC’s problems go beyond funding, the root, the cause, the source is the design of the commission which is under direct political control. This is the model that allows populist fare cuts and then starves the TTC of funds to do things, the model that starts with the answer (subways) first and then reverse-plans them to create ex-post justifications for them.

Change the structure of the TTC.

Before our version of Metrolinx (TransLink) took over planning, funding and other high-level strategic functions of public transport in our city, Brisbane City Council (our council) ran our buses, and they separated the bus operations and planning from the council itself by turning it into a business unit at arm’s length.

I see that as the problem- there is no separation of power here. And to compound it, there are no funds either! It seems like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic when it is sinking!

We never have this problem, it is unheard of over here. No Australian city council would be expected to run the entire transport system on its own and fund it- And Toronto runs and fund the whole caboose- streetcar/bus/subway.

In order to keep the integration and cross-subsidy and single agency oversight, the only thing I can see that will save the TTC is for MetroLinx to be absorbed into the TTC (easy- MetroLinx is tiny in comparison) to combine into one organisation, to pay operators on a per-km basis, and to have a mixed funding stream where contributions money is matched from the City of Toronto and Ontario.

There are all sorts of arguments for retaining the TTC wholly within City of Toronto powers, but in 10 years time, will you even have a public transport system left if it keeps going this way? The root of the problem, I feel, is the politicised commission structure.

“you cannot condemn the basic issues regarding service”

I in no way said that. What I did say was that people who were primarily there to depute against the service cuts ALSO deputed against MM’s Ashbridges Bay motion without having adequate knowledge of what they were deputing. I will go further to say that they were put up to it.

Over the course of the afternoon the people seated around me ebbed and flowed such that by the time it came for deputations on AB I was surrounded on three sides by people all with handouts that appeared to come from the Toronto Environmental Alliance website.

They each had well-written clear instructions on how to give their deputations re: the service cuts. More than one ALSO got up to depute against AB, including the person sitting beside me who, I would imagine, didn’t realize that I wasn’t part of his group. When he sat back down afterwards I asked him “Do you know much about this issue?” A: “Not really.” “Then why on earth would you go up to depute against an issue you don’t understand?”

I fail to understand WHY the AB issue was, or at least appeared to be, used as a political football to further someone’s TC agenda. That’s way below the belt, if you ask me.

Or is just that some TC enthusiasts are keen to make enemies out of former supporters? MM campaigned on a platform supporting TC after all. I’m doubting she’s feeling all that warm and fuzzy about it after yesterday’s meeting.

I see only one “service in the heart of the city” that had faced a cut without other options at least 5 minutes away: 5 Avenue Road. There’s a good reason that it faced the chopping block: The Yonge subway line is 500m to the east. It’s the same distance as the whopping 7 minute walk from Osgoode station to Queen station. Even with a bus on the street they live, Avenue Road residents choose to book it to Yonge to exploit its frequent, dependable, faster service. Improving service where subways aren’t nearby would be better appreciated.

There hasn’t been a debate about what “waste” means because there doesn’t need to be. The elected representatives of our city were chosen because the voters believe they will choose appropriately. If the citizens of Toronto disagree with the mayor’s take on the word, the ballot boxes will be open October 27, 2014.

Steve: I will be dealing with the Avenue Road cut in a pending update to this article. The problem is the combined effect of cuts to 6 Bay, 5 Avenue Road, 26 Dupont and 127 Davenport is that there is no service anywhere within the block bounded by Yonge, Bloor, Bathurst and St. Clair after 10pm on Sunday evenings.

As for people walking to Yonge, there are many who cannot walk that distance, and they are effectively cut off from transit service. Don’t forget that a walk to Yonge may also involve a walk back from Yonge for a trip between points on Avenue Road, and the subway stops are further apart than the bus stops. Geographic barriers such as hills, valleys and railway lines (past and present) also block some of the “crow fly” routes, especially for people who have mobility problems. The TTC often misses basic points like this in their analyses.

Are there any hard numbers on how much of the RGS additions were kept? %
of board periods … % of buses … something like that.

Certainly all the ones I use were kept. I don’t think leaving the perception that RGS was a failure is a good idea. Perhaps the topic for a separate article …

Steve: I did a chart on the overall RGS adds in my original article on this topic. I have to update it for the revised cuts, and calculate the percentages. Stay tuned.

1) Televise and/or web-stream the proceedings so that more people can ‘attend’
2) Have a big projection screen as a backdrop, so that as someone is talking, Twitter/chat reaction to their comments (through pre-arranged hashtag) piped behind them
3) Result – instant democratic feedback! Perhaps knowing what ppl really thought of the proceedings, WHILE IT’S HAPPENING, would help our public officials from making asses of themselves, and prevent a few shrill ‘selfish’ types (if they indeed exist) from hijacking the discussion

Too crazy?

Steve: Shrill, selfish types? Oh yes, they do exist.

I was not at the meeting yesterday so I cannot comment on the speakers or the commission, or the behavior of people and respecting different points of view. Sounds like it was not a good day.

However, the notion of City Hall ignoring public input unless in sync with the current ideology is not new, and is not limited to Rob Ford or a right wing/left wing thing.

It is precisely how I felt under David Miller’s regime, and especially at the Transit City and Kingston Road EA session I attended. Basically we were being told to take it the way the masters had planned it, no changes, as it was “better urban planning”

Better than what? No other options, or even modifications were even being considered.

Two wrongs do not make a right, but don’t assume that Rob Ford and his team have a monopoly in not listening to dissenting views. That was perfected under David Miller.

Steve: Actually it was perfected long before Miller under various regimes of the old Metro Toronto government. One of my greatest disappointments of the Transit City “consultations” was that they fell victim to the standard TTC/City approach of telling us what we need and not entertaining alternatives even though TC had problems worth fixing. Miller had a naive faith in the expertise of staff, and their openness to considering alternatives. We are seeing this already in the Ford era even though they claim to be on a hunt for badly managed departments.

LMAO….er, I mean: Uh-oh. Looks like TTC mandarins are going to be forbidden to talk to a certain transit advocate in the not-too-distant future, lest they loose their herring quota.

Steve: Not amazing. Simply ambitious. The problem is that the Eglinton line isn’t part of Ford’s plan, and we’ll have to see what political horse trading, if any, Queen’s Park does with the Mayor to produce an new transportation plan.

How telling it is that your new mayor’s given name is “Rob,” as he and his minions commence to ‘rob’ Peter to pay Paul, as evidenced by these TTC service cuts, announced as being made “for the greater good”.

His name is purely happenstance coincidence, I know, yet in the circumstances ‘Rob’ is so prognosticative of what’s he’s likely to do to basic public services during his four-year term.

It was ever thus. I believe we’ve heard this song before:

“They’re saying in June that we’ll get to submit deputations, but you people (city staff) are being commissioned to make a plan when the site has supposedly not been decided upon. Are we as citizens so powerless?”

Interesting that one of the reasons for voting against MM’s motion was that “there had been extensive consultation with the community”.

The process is broken. The process is broken. The process is broken.

Steve: Regardless of where we may stand on various aspects of the issues, I agree that “consultation” as defined by the TTC leaves much to be desired. It is also flawed because the Commissioners always defer to the “experts” on staff, and presume that the consultation was fair and open.

The bizarre icing on the cake was the last deputation on Ashbridges Bay by the “architect” (heaven help us if this is what architectural schools are producing these days) who spoke for more than her 5 minutes about being a “tree-hugger”, meeting David Miller, family “drama”, being an avid supporter of Miller and Transit City, and never got to her point even after being given an extra minute. But when I heard someone from the panel congratulate her on her presentation and saying that we need architects like her – well I knew I’d had enough of the dog and pony show and that this had devolved to the level of farce.

The speaker should be responsible for making sure that the deputations are on topic, and if not, asking those speakers to either speak on topic or sit down and stop wasting everyone’s time.

Steve: While there was an overlap on the speakers’ list, you cannot condemn the basic issues regarding service simply because some of those people did not support your cause at Ashbridge. By the way, some of the people appeared on both lists in error, and in fact spoke to only one of the two subjects. Those who spoke about Transit City did so in the overall context of cutbacks in the scope of the transit system, and of proposals to spend billions on a dubious subway plan while shuffling a few millions around between bus routes.

Cllr McMahon did herself no good with a counter proposal that is a moving target — the scheme for using land at Hillcrest Yard had completely changed between the version at Budget Committee and at the TTC. Her position is scattershot, and there are enough gaps in her arguments to undermine the credibility of the whole. I will be writing about the Ashbridge debate in a separate article.

This is not promising at all.

To provide “access” to every home and workplace 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, guess what we’re going to get: More transit-hostile neighbourhoods.

How about we assume that the residents of the city are fully capable of choosing where they live and work? If access to dependable transit is important to them, then they can pick to live and work in places where transit will obviously be dependable. Major arterials, subway lines, high-rise apartment buildings. We’re not going to get a city with better density and livability by sending buses to every nook and cranny on the map.

Another mark of a civilized city is one that respects democracy. A man who campaigned on tax-cutting and “waste-reducing” was just elected mayor by the citizens of our city. You disagree with what is considered “waste.” Fine. But elections have consequences. And to say that Councillor Stintz is planning a picnic so she can enjoy some neighbourhood warfare is a bit much.

Steve: I didn’t say anything of the kind about Cllr Stintz. The election was about reducing “waste”, but the meaning of that term has never been debated. TTC staff cooked up a formula, then applied it with many errors, then cooked up a revised formula (which still has problems), but we have never actually debated what constitutes acceptable service. Moreover, people have made decisions about where they live, work or go to school based on services as they already exist. It’s not as if someone plopped York University at the edge of the universe and said “build me a subway”, and students made their choice to enroll at York knowing that they are at the mercy of TTC bus service. The TTC will lose $14-million a year the day that line opens. Whose service will we “reallocate” to pay for this gift to York U and York region?

Some of the areas that will lose service are in the heart of the city, and could hardly be called “transit hostile”. As for democracy, Ford was not elected dictator, and he got barely half of the votes in the election. Democracy works best when the winners don’t stomp all over the losers, let alone tell the losers that they are responsible for their own misfortune.

“The TTC, on the other hand, is overseen by a commission of elected city councillors directly responsible to the people of the city. It’s a model that ensures that the riding public has avenues to bring up concerns and suggestions. “

As long as the ‘avenues’ don’t include Avenue Road in the evenings, where there will no longer be service.

Steve: I have not yet written this up, but late in the meeting (around 10 pm), Stintz had a motion asking for the TTC to work with the city on a “skills-based Commission”. That’s a non-elected Commission of “experts”, possibly with some sort of citizen oversight body. That’s the sort of model where Council would completely lose control of transit to the bureaucrats and their “expert” friends.

You made a good case for Stintz’s behaviour, although I found the behaviour of Denzil Minnan-Wong to be much much more disgusting. I’ve watched him in the shadow of the TTC during the last regime always criticizing the actions of the Commission as not being fiscally responsible. Besides for constantly grilling Webster during the last two meetings about budget items line-by-line (including salaries of cleaners and their unionization), he was notably absent for over half the meeting, and for hours at a time (most specifically during the public deputation portions). The biggest slap in the face came not from Stintz, but from Minnan-Wong during his soliloquy at the end of the meeting by directly addressing the remaining crowd and telling them that after spending 8 hours at the meeting and speaking on behalf of the service to be cut was causing a disservice by taking improvements away from the riders who “need it the most” on the most crowded routes, and their actions were taking a step backwards in advancing transit in Toronto.

The only commissioner who actually listened to the public was Commissioner Kelly, who after deputations noted the large number of deputations for the 116A/E and 162 buses (as well as the reasonings behind them, service to the UofT campus and the very long walk respectively) begging for service to be reinstated. After his movement to retain service on these two routes was defeated, he supported the retention of all the routes.

Steve: I am going to include Minnan-Wong’s little rant in an updated version of the article. It was a long day yesterday, and I wanted to get the most important part of the story out first. I know at least one person in Stintz’ office is already miffed. Too bad. If you’re ambitious enough to take a high profile job, it’s not all going to be puff pieces in the media.

The commissioners should be happy I didn’t include any reference to trained seals.

Given the current record with public meetings, I think it’s a better use of my time to send e-mail, snail-mail letters and phone calls to my councillor and the mayor rather than attend meetings where I can be easily brushed off.

Phil