A report on the Policy and Finance Committee’s agenda for Tuesday, July 18 goes into the rather dry business of setting up a trustee for the Move Ontario Trust. This creature will be used to hold the moneys contributed by various governments to the Spadina Subway project.
The current project cost estimate, all the way to Vaughan Corporate Centre Station, is $2.1-billion (2006). To date, the Province has contributed $670-million, slightly less than one-third and with no provision for inflation, in the fund. York Region’s share is yet to be determined, and everyone looks with hope on Ottawa for a matching contribution. We shall see.
The report also discusses things like how the City is going to finance its share. There is some hope that levies against new development will pay for some of it. If the Sheppard Subway is any indication, developers will find ways to wriggle out of such levies (or will be exempted by pliable Councils) and any revenue from developments will arrive, if ever, far in the future after the line has opened.
The line is expected to operate at a deficit, and this must be apportioned between Toronto and York Region. Preliminary estimates will be submitted to the TTC and Council “within the next several months”. The report suggests that Queen’s Park should pick up at least part of the tab much as they did for the original Spadina line and the Scarborough RT.
When this estimate comes out, I expect that it will be low-balled, but there will be no easy way to know the truth until the line actually opens and we see its effect on the TTC’s budget. With the Sheppard line, we didn’t know the figure until the year before it opened and the TTC budget included a note about the increased operating deficit. Getting this much lead time for the Vaughan subway is an improvement.
The use of a trust fund as a mechanism up front to grab the money while we have politicians’ interest is intriguing because we won’t have to worry about future governments honouring pledges that may be a decade old before they are called. The downside of this could be that we will have a big nestegg earmarked for specific projects, and governments may ask why we still want more when we have so much already. The fact that this question ignores the basic idea of a trust fund will not challenge the intellect of most politicians, especially if they don’t want to pay us anything.
My nightmare is a transit system beggared for basic costs like buying and repairing buses, paying drivers and building our “Transit City” while untouchable billions sit waiting to fund some long-forgotten political promise.
Steve Munro 
I always questioned the wisdom of building a heavy rail metro north of Steeles. After the extension to Vaughan Corporate Center, another IKEA store will be connected with a metro station. Very few IKEA store in the world can boast about that. It is not the smartest way to spend money.
My dream is for the Spadina line and the Yonge line to make a loop along Steeles. This would benefit a lot more people. Considering that it takes over 150 seconds for a train to change direction at Downsview and Finch, a loop would shorten the time. A loop line means the train is always running one direction. The Yamanote loop line has demonstrated that a train can run every 120 seconds. Bombarider has made several comments about using special controllers to have a train every 90 seconds. This will relieve the overcrowding on the Yonge line considerably.
Steve: The original Yonge line was designed for 120 second headways and could actually operate at that level or slightly better when there was a backlog of service. The problems came with the design of terminals like Finch where there are long crossover approaches. It is physically impossible to operate a 120 second headway there because of the length of time needed for trains to move to and from the station and clear the crossover. The situation gets even worse at a station like Kennedy where, if there is a train stored beyond the station in the tailtrack, there are timed trip arms to further restrict entry speeds.
As for a 90 second headway on Yonge, this is under consideration as part of the planned resignalling of the line. However that is a very big project and won’t be completed for a decade or more. Even with new signals, a major redesign of terminal operations will be required. The loop scheme does avoid turnbacks, but it does not avoid the inevitable delays of crew changes which will be necessary to give operators a break from time to time. This is handled now at terminals through step-back crewing, but if there are no terminals, a new arrangement would be needed.
As for the extension loosing money, I would not lose sleep over it. Very few metro system makes a profit in the world. Hong Kong is a rare exception. Even in crowded Japan, Japan Railway (JR) does not make money all the time. Metro is a good way to get people out of cars. Consider that a car sits idle for at least 20 hours a day, people still spend a fortune on it. Motorists like the car because it is always there. A metro station and 5 minute service gives the same feeling. If the goal is to get people out of cars, we should not be concern about the cost.
Steve: I happen to agree. The problem is that the folks who make up the city budget don’t agree. In particular, if the TTC opens a new line that loses more money than the service it replaced, they don’t get a special subsidy to make up the difference. That money comes from service cuts elsewhere in the system. The Sheppard subway still loses money, and that is made up by many small cuts (or lack of improvement) in the rest of the system.
If we really want to save cost, we should be more creative. Why should we run 6 metro cars together all the time is beyond me. Perhaps, for night times, we can decouple some of the car and run 4 car sets or even 2 car sets. This will reduce maintenance costs considerably. If we can run it with a one person crew, that’s even better. As long as a metro comes every 5 minutes, it does not matter whether it is a 6 car or a 4 car set. This is a good solution while building up a rider base. When the T35A08 arrives (which cannot be uncoupled), there should be enough riders to warrant it.
Steve: The TTC used to run 4-car sets in the evenings and on Sundays. However, it turned out that the cost of breaking the trains apart exceeded any operating savings. The simplest arrangement was on the original Yonge line where trains would run through Davisville Station southbound on the build-up track (the one on the west side of the platform). The back two cars would be cut off, and a six-car G train (or four-car H train) would leave. The remaining two cars would drive into the yard. When the round trip for the subway was less than an hour, this work was all done with quickly.
When they tried to do this on the Bloor-Danforth line, things got trickier because the cutoffs had to be done at terminals. (You can’t take the risk that uncoupling will trigger an equipment failure on the main line.) This meant that two cars would be cut off and driven into the tail track. Then another two from the next train, and so on until there was a full six-car set in the tail track. This would dead-head back to Greenwood, assuming there were no problems with recoupling the cars. All of this was extremely labour intensive and given the length of the B-D line took about two hours to complete. The cost of all of the extra maintenance staff outweighed any possible benefit from the shortened trains.
As for one-man crews, we could have a long debate about the relative merits of various crewing plans. The ATU would not be too thrilled for several reasons, I expect. At one point, TTC management argued the benefit of having the guard at roughly the mid-point of the train because trying to monitor the whole length of the platform from one end was too difficult and dangerous. The whole Designated Waiting Area (DWA) scheme is based on this setup. [Notice how “safety” gets invoked to justify whatever scheme management wants to defend.]
With the new cars (which I have dubbed “Silver Snails”), the guard is at the back of the train, the DWAs are at the extremities of the platform, and the guard is expected to see forward an entire trainlength to monitor door operations.
LikeLike
Re: the answer to previous comment…
I’ve wondered about the DWAs with the new train design. If they move them, then wouldn’t they be in the wrong place for when an older train comes through? Also, in stations where the exits are somewhere in the middle, the ends of the platforms don’t feel like the safest place: you only have one way out, and the further you are from the exit the more likely you’ll be on your own.
As for the guard being able to see all the doors, there’s always London’s trick of using overhead cameras linked to TV screens in the tunnel. But if you do that, you have all you need for the driver to handle the doors (like they do in London).
Steve: The TTC talked about one-man subway train operation many years ago with cameras just as you described. I am surprised that Bob Kinnear has not shown up as a deputant at a TTC meeting demanding that the guards work from the middle of the trains.
LikeLike