Updated March 5 at 16:50: An interview done in association with this article is now available.
Starting today, I will be publishing a series of articles both here and on The Mark, a public affairs blog. There is a Toronto section of that site with issues specific to our city, and that’s where my pieces will appear.
Candidates for public office, especially the Mayor, should understand what they’re talking about when they prattle on about public transit. It’s a big part of Toronto’s municipal budget, and easily the largest of our municipal agencies.
Politics by sound bite is no way to run a railway. In the interest of educating would-be office holders and encouraging them to broaden their views of the subject, my own Transit 101. The first article asks many questions, and in coming instalments I will address many of these topics.
No, I am not running for Mayor, or Council, or Traffic Warden, but could be tempted by a fleet of Swan Boats.
The article itself follows the break.
Congratulations! You’ve decided to run for council, maybe even for mayor. You hear that public transit is a hot item these days, something worth learning about. Transit is a big portfolio, an area of complex issues and big, big spending.
Knowing a little might get you through one press conference, but you need to know a lot and think hard about your positions.
The first, most important question, is this: Is public transit something for “us” or for “them”? Do you use it? Would you use it? Will you fight for and represent those who want more and better transit?
When you say you “support public transit,” what do you mean? What is transit? What does it do? Will it have priority in your budget?
Does “better transit” mean getting people off the road so that there’s more room for you to drive? Do you like “transit” as an idea, but want to rein in spending? Do you know where the money comes from, where it goes? Do you have an alternative model good for the long term, or only a quick fix good for a sound bite?
Public transit does not just move people around the city. Everyone knows that commuters, especially those on the subway and GO Transit, love a quick, traffic-free ride to work. There’s also big savings in avoided pollution and fuel consumption. But that’s not all.
Over half of the trips on the TTC are outside of the peak periods, and even in the peak, many people are not going downtown. All that transportation capacity avoids the space needed for cars – storage, driving lanes, and parking – plus the expense of owning them. That’s a huge public and private benefit all over the GTA, even if the auto industry might prefer that we all drive.
Will traffic congestion ever go away? Not likely. At current levels of transit market share (well under 10 per cent outside of the 416, and nowhere near 50 per cent inside of it), we would have to provide vast new transit capacity to make a serious dent in traffic. Much of the congestion is for travel that isn’t well-oriented to a transit network – the typical everywhere-to-everywhere suburban commuting pattern. Some of this can be captured for transit, but not all of it.
The real challenge is the growing demand for travel as the GTA population grows. New homes, offices, and industrial centres pop up everywhere, but not in a way that is easily served with transit. Try to constrain or redirect development, though, and you will meet howls of outrage from developers and politicians who want more of the same.
Toronto has the advantage of an Official Plan, presuming that council sticks with it and the city’s goal to increase density along major streets. However, many 416 residents, not to mention those from the 905 who travel through the 416 on their way to and from work, have a very road-oriented view of travel – it’s the only option that works for them.
Transit solutions that work within the 416, especially in the central area, are less viable the further out we go. If the reach of good transit expands, that boundary between inner and outer cities will move.
Do we let this boundary drift outward with small transit improvements here and there, maybe a new subway line every decade, or do we actively push it outward expanding the range of communities with good transit options?
Transit is all about choice – the ability to leave the car at home or to get by without one much of the time – and this choice only works if there is good service. Many of Toronto’s transit riders could drive, but don’t. Force them away with service cuts in the name of economy, and you may never get them back. You will, however, get the added congestion they bring to the city.
As the balance shifts, transit, pedestrians, and cyclists will take the lion’s share of road capacity and motorists will have to make do with the leftovers. That’s a very hard message for many to swallow.
Road space is finite. What do we use it for? In built-up areas where wider, let alone new roads, are out of the question, any improvement for one road user is at the expense of another. Even where space remains today, there will be no room left tomorrow.
Should transit get priority, and what, exactly, does this mean? Should half of the space on major roads be dedicated to parking? Where do bicycles fit? What happens in areas where “minor” roads for a parallel bike network separate from the arterials don’t exist? Should wide, fast streets be redesigned, “calmed,” or “tamed” to improve the lot of pedestrians?
As a candidate, do you look forward to see how the city would address limits on road space, or do you look back to an era when we could pretend car use would grow forever, and everyone else would just get out of the way?
Steve Munro 
Good article. This could apply for anyone running for Council in any of the GTA municipalities.
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I ran in the last election, but am not running this time – due to paperwork confusion, I actually can’t by law 😦
Either way, for fun, I’d like to take a crack at this, and answer it as though I were running for Mayor! I am far more blunt than your average politician though.
Is Public Transit for “us” or “them”? I say it is for us. It is an option for all of us, but a requirement for some. If elected Mayor it will not be a requirement for me, as I will have the salary to purchase and operate a vehicle, however it will remain an option for me, and an option I will exercise. Do I use transit? Yes. Would I continue to do so? Yes. In fact, I commit to not purchasing a vehicle during my term. I wish to build a TTC we can all trust, and prove it by trusting it to get me from A to B every day. Will I fight for those who want better transit? Yes, certainly.
Does better transit mean more room to drive? Well yes it does. As you say yourself in this article, some people are not going to change their routines. We should not punish them for not choosing the better way. The core of freedom itself is the freedom to make mistakes, to make the wrong decision, and if someone who has clear, easy, and convenient access to public transportation decides to not use it for whatever reason, then we must accept that. To suggest that we should purposely create traffic to aggravate the person, with the desire to make them so frustrated as to force them on transit is not a good option.
This is the politics of negative. I prefer to work with the politics of positive. Rather than make driving harder, we need to make taking the TTC easier, so that more people ride it as an option, not because they feel forced to. People make the decision to drive for many reasons, but one key reason is social. Driving looks “better” and is “cool” to do. If we want to get people out of their cars, we must change this key attitude. Neither the Municipal nor any level of government has the power to change the way people think by passing simple laws, or worse, trying to force them to think this way. If we do intend to change that – and if we want better transit I contend we must – we need to convince these people to make the change themselves. This is only done though positive means. None of this is a sound bite, it is a complicated issue that requires a complicated fix.
You contend that people love a quick “Traffic-free” ride to work, and thus, they take the TTC and GO Transit. I contend that the TTC is not “Traffic-free”. On the road, traffic is made up of other vehicles, but on the TTC, traffic is made up of other passengers. Squeezing onto a crowded bus, and being pushed into a corner where you cannot reach a stanchion, then being squished into a crowded subway train is not going to make a person feel “Traffic-free”. If we intend to truly build a transit city, we will need to work to create alternatives to the most busy routes so that people who desire a crowd-free ride can take an alternate route, and only lose a small amount of time.
This leads me to the answer of your next set of questions, which is somewhat vague; I can however see that you are hinting at LRT. When I look at roads like Don Mills, with multiple lanes, no parking, and large commercial properties on the side with ample “front yards” I can see a working LRT line. There are no space limits here. When you get into other areas, however, you see major problems. St. Clair and Spadina should have never had surface streetcar lines. It pains me that the TTC can take an idea as great as LRT and find a way to screw it up. It is analogous to putting ketchup on your breakfast cereal – you ruin a good thing. The issues we face on St. Clair and Spadina will not be repeated elsewhere in the city.
Sadly, however, the TTC seems hell bent on building lines like Sheppard and Finch first. These LRT lines will only serve to funnel people into the already crowded Yonge subway line. As more and more people use that option, they will only be met with larger and larger crowds, and thus, driven away (literally) from public transit. We need to start with Don Mills, and even Eglinton. I would put the other LRT lines on hold until we complete these two lines, as without them, the entire network will fail.
You ask what we should do with our road space. You mention Parking, and this is one of my pet peeves. Go to major cities in Europe, or even many in the United States and you see roads used for driving. Here, however, we seem to use half of them for parking. Part of the reason is that there are so few parking options in this city. We need to work to eliminate parking on our most crowded routes, and make this happen as a positive by creating more off-street parking opportunities in these areas. You ask what of bicycles? Once you remove Parking and open car doors, you can add more bicycle lanes to existing streets – Bloor for example.
You ask what we should do with large, wide, fast streets. Should we slow them down? I say no. We can increase sidewalk space where we have room, but to slow the entire city down from 60kph to 50kph is not something I will support. This will cut all traffic to 80% of current speeds, private cars, trucks transporting goods, and buses alike. While we can certainly look at certain roads in certain areas (I have my eye on Yonge and Bay streets in the core) applying this kind of thinking “city-wide” is not going to work. One-size-fits-all plans will not help either the Core nor will it help Eastern Scarborough. These are two different areas that need two different solutions to the problems they face. A good mayor can recognize that and act pragmatically – independent from ideology – to solve the problems that Toronto faces.
Lastly, you ask about the future. You make a valid point that we cannot just dump an endless stream of vehicles on to our roads. Canada has a vast expanse of arable land. We could theoretically support over 100 times our current population levels; this means the number of cars that can be out there is in a way, endless. Bay street, however, is not getting any wider. We cannot stop every 50 years to knock down every tower along every major road to add an extra lane. We need to find better ways to move people around, and that means better public transit. That also means better use of our road network; there are areas that could benefit from fixes, extensions, widening, and new routes, however a good mayor needs to recognize where these areas truly are, and not destroy the entire fabric of the city attempting to do the impossible.
In the end we come back to options and freedom. Traffic and crowds do not allow ‘free’ movement. If we want a city that is truly free, in every way, we need to solve our transportation problems, and that can only be done with a transportation grid that supports every single mode of transportation to the absolute fullest extent possible.
Thank you
Steve: Now if only we could hear from the major candidates!
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Steve wrote:
Kevin’s comment:
Traffic congestion will inevitably go away as we go over peak oil. Compared with cars, so many more people can use the same road on bicycles and public transit. Dutch and Danish cities with high bicycle mode share do not have congestion on their dedicated bicycle infrastructure.
For example, when Nørrebrogade Street in Copenhagen was closed to through car traffic and became bus and bicycle only, congestion vanished. Congestion vanished permanently. even at peak hours. It now has daily traffic of 38,000 people on bicycles and 65,000 bus passengers. With zero congestion.
For more information, see here.
In many ways, I look forward to peak oil. The adjustment will be difficut, but Toronto will become a far more human and livable city. A city for people, not cars.
Of course, the same effect will happen tomorrow if there is a revolution in Saudi Arabia.
Steve: I agree that peak oil will have a big effect on congestion, but in the meantime, anyone who claims to have a plan to make congestion go away, even with transit, let alone road construction, is being, to use parliamentary language, misleading. We need more transit, and there are even small changes we can make to improve the operation of roads at a micro level, but free flowing road traffic with current fuel pricing and availability is a total fantasy.
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Fantastic article! Definitely belongs in your hall of fame. Through poor media reporting, I think we lose track of what the role of transit in a metropolitan area. We have far right wingers that feel it is a pseudo social service, only for poor people. We also have far left wingers who believe that everyone must take public transit, and that driving or owning a car is a sin. Both viewpoints are counter-productive. In a dense urban area, there is only so much road space available and therefore we need to create attractive alternatives to driving.
On a similar note, yesterday I had to make a delivery at Keele and Steeles and then another one in an office next to Empress Walk/North York Center station. From Keele and Steeles, I figured it would be a good move to park at Finch and take the train down. Well, while double checking the best entrances to the parking lot, I noticed that free parking is only after 3PM, not 9AM like before (surprised with the bulls-eye the media has placed on the TTC in the past few months, this was not front page news).
While my company pays for 407 usage, since it is not often that I drive into dense areas any transit comes from my own pocket. I personally felt that in the left’s way to punish drivers, they had me driving into a dense area adding to congestion. Likewise, I felt that by discouraging mixed-mode transportation that included the car, I began to feel that transit was a social service for those who could not afford a car. So in a way, both far left and right policies towards transit discourage its use in favour of ideologies.
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Steve wrote:
Kevin’s comment:
I will agree that free flowing car traffic is not going to happen. But road traffic includes streetcars, busses and bicycles. And those can be made to flow freely with dedicated lanes for their use.
Steve: Ah yes, but that’s not what the politicians (or would-be politicians) are telling people. They are playing to motorists with dreams that they will be able to drive to work at 8 am just as if they were driving through the city at 3 am. Anybody who talks about taking away road space for transit or cyclists is pilloried as an enemy of civilization.
I am looking forward to the installation of the long-promised proper Dutch-style bicycle lanes on University Avenue. With curbs or other physical barriers to keep the cars out and proper intersection treatments to protect bicycle traffic through intersections. The King and Queen streetcars could also be protected from car traffic. What is particularly absurd is seeing 60 people in a streetcar brought to a stop by one person in a car making a left turn. That’s insane.
Protected bicycle and public transit lanes can be done relatively cheaply and easily throughout Toronto. Then these forms of road traffic will move freely. All we lack is political will to make it happen.
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I’d like to add a link to a set of pictures from the suburbs of Prague.
There are two provocative pictures in the set – one in the row 5 (five) second from right and the other is in the row 7 (seven) second from left. As a mayor are you even willing to look at the pictures? Are you horrified? Do you run for the hills? Or do you dismiss these shots as sort-of-xenophobic fantasy? Please notice that the tracks are not even fenced-off.
Steve: You must be careful with photos like this. People will accuse them of being nothing more than the products of photoshop and a fevered imagination. This sort of thing could not possibly be real.
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Why do Toronto taxpayers subsidize transit riders from the 905 and tourists? Has the TTC ever count the postal codes in their Metropass Discount Plan (MDP) just to see where they send them to (inaccurate because could be sent to an office address, but a good starting point).
Steve: Yes, in effect, Toronto does subsidize people from outside of the 416. However, it is in our interest to do so for two reasons. First, there’s a lot of provincial money in the capital assets of the TTC, and the province does contribute to the operating budget now and then. Second, it is our own interest to encourage people to ride the TTC into our city rather than drive. If giving them cheaper transit will get them to leave their car at home or at a distant suburban location, that’s one less car we have to make room for downtown, and one less supporter of political yahoos who simply want to rebuild the road system exclusively for cars.
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Steve,
It’s too bad you don’t have your transit radio show! I think this article needs to be heard by every citizen in Toronto and in the GTAH, and not just the mayoral candidates. It is excellently written.
Steve: Thank you. I’m on CBC Radio 1 from time to time, and occasionally CIUT, but don’t have my own show.
The intent is that this is the kickoff for a series of articles on many of the questions raised here. Whether mayoral candidates, present and past, actually learn anything or at least make a coherent stand, is quite another matter.
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Hello,
As one of the most recently registered candidates I don’t believe it should be of our opinion alone. We need to consult with specialists like yourself to ask questions and understand as best as possible the transit system of not just Toronto, but other cities as well.
Until then no candidate should be saying what’s best for Toronto, and if they do, have the research available immediately there after to show why.
Unfortunately it’s fairly difficult to consult with the experts, and most research is being done haphazardly. Even though it’s fairly early, some candidates are ready to push with whatever they have.
You’ve had my ear for quite some time Steve, and I’d appreciate any time you have to spare to discuss some of these area’s with myself. I’ve tried to reach you for over a month but my emails might be getting lost in the spam filter.
I look forward to hearing from you, and if you are unavailable I thank for you at least publishing these articles on an incredibly frequent basis.
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Steve wrote about politicians who:
Kevin’s question:
Does anyone really think that is going to happen? Does anyone really believe that, for example, if a new City Council were to go completely insane and build the Spadina Expressway that it would not be congested to parking lot status on the day it opens?
The increase in population in Toronto over the next 20 years is not going to be met with any significant increase in roads. There is nowhere for them to go without tearing down and paving over a lot of neighbourhoods — which is not going to happen.
What this means is that 100% of the increase in population over the next 20 years is going to get around by bicycle and public transit. There just isn’t any road space for them to get around by car. And 20 years from now we will be so far over peak oil that cars will be the playthings of the wealthy.
Steve: You may well say that, but some politicians are playing to an audience that only wants to hear a message that they can drive in comfort forever if only those pesky cyclists (and probably some transit vehicles) would just get out of their way. It’s an outright lie, there is no other way to put it, but politicians are not noted for being remarkably well informed or accurate.
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Another reason to serve those outside of a city and tourists: the fares they deposit in the farebox. Hey, every little bit helps, doesn’t it?
Steve: When this type of rider fills in capacity that would otherwise go empty, then their fares are found money. However, peak period 905 commuters can add to the capacity the transit system must provide, and given the length of their journeys, this will probably be at a loss. My point about avoided costs (roads, parking, etc) still remains. The problem with too many financial analyses is that they consider the TTC’s books in isolation from the benefits to the wider city that the TTC provides.
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Hi Steve,
Speaking of the mayoral candidates’ platform, one candidate claims that Toronto may not have enough money to run new Transit City lines once completed. I always thought streetcar/LRT lines were cheaper to operate than heavily used fossil-fuel buses due to:
-electric vehicles being cheaper to maintain and having a longer lifespan than their fossil fuel counterparts
-fossil fuel costs being eliminated
-vehicles being less prone to traffic delays if ROW’s and signal priority are used (side question: are there costs for service disruptions?)
-less operators required per passenger, as LRT vehicles can carry 4 times as many passengers than buses (less labour costs)
-Less strain on road system, as LRV weight is transferred through tracks and trackbed instead of the road pavement itself (maintenance savings for the City of Toronto itself)
Are these points valid? Would LRT lines save the TTC money on operating costs than if they kept their existing bus routes?
Steve: As with many bus/LRT comparisons, the answer depends on the nature of the route. The greater the demand, the lower the additional capital costs of rail systems on a per passenger basis. There is also the matter of infrastructure maintenance which, for traditional bus routes, is simply part of road repair budgets. Only if we build a dedicated busway does the road maintenance show up as a cost specific to the transit service.
The issue about having money to run Transit City is a bit more complex. First, by way of counter example, we already know that opening the subway to Vaughan will add over $10m annually to the TTC’s operating budget. Either this will require a special subsidy, or we will have to find cutbacks elsewhere in the system to pay for it. One of the goals of Transit City is to provide additional capacity in corridors where growth will outstrip the ability of buses (or would create such dense bus traffic as to serious interfere with other uses of the street). That capacity, that capability is a benefit of the more expensive technology, but we don’t count it on the TTC’s books.
One big debate about TC centres on the “vision” for what suburban streets will become. If nothing changes, if the streets remain pedestrian-hostile environments where travel is primarily to go somewhere else, then we would build a very different transit network. If we believe that the role of transit is to enable people to travel vast distances, but not to serve the communities through which routes pass, we get a network of express routes with widely spaced stops. That’s the 401 model of transit planning. The real question is what we want the city to be in thirty years, and what sort of infrastructure and services we will build to reach that goal.
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Three questions I’d like to see answered by all candidates:
1) Given that the TTC budget rose by three times the rate of inflation and that there is no transparency in the budget document do you support the Toronto Board of Trade’s call for an audit of the TTC?
2) Given that TTC chair Adam Giambrone received campaign donations from the TTC union, has refused to cross union pickets and has made at least one notable public decision based on it being “political” should we be revisiting all of the decisions he has made as chair to determine if they were in the interest of the city, the union or Mr. Giambrone?
3) Do you have a strategy for restoring balance between city interests and union interests?
Steve: Your first point misrepresents what is actually happening with the TTC budget. Total operating expenses are going up by 5.6% (about which more below), but revenues are growing by only 4.1%. The subsidy required goes up by 9.1%.
Looking first at expenses, these rise from a combination of a 3% increase in wages (granted by arbitration from the last contract round) as well as other cost increases (some from inflation, some from improvements in a variety of areas). The wage increment accounts for $31.1m of the total increase of $72.6m. Diesel fuel costs go up by almost $6m due partly to service increases and partly to supply costs. It is important to remember that the TTC negotiates long-term arrangements for fuel and works to optimise its costs depending on short and long term market conditions. Their costs do not go up and down with the same pattern and magnitude of commercial prices seen by motorists. You can read more of the details in the City Budget Analyst Notes from which I am quoting here.
Note that 2010 is the last year of a three-year labour contract which expires at the end of March 2011. The rate of future increases in labour costs will depend on the terms of the new contract, and it’s obvious that there will be strong pressure for lowering the rate of increase.
On the revenue side, the projected growth is $36.8m on a base of $904.3m, or 4.1%. Although some additional revenue comes from the fare increase, this is partly offset by revenue losses in other areas. If revenue had grown at the same rate as expenses, the total 2010 revenue would have been $50.3m. To achieve this would have required a fare increase at least 1/3 greater than what we actually saw, probably a jump of 35 cents rather than 25 on the adult token.
As a matter of City policy, there has been an attempt to reduce the proportion of expenses born from the farebox while continuing to improve service. We can have a debate about whether this is appropriate separately, but in that context, the subsidy must grow by more than the overall rate to cover the costs that fares do not. Because the subsidy is smaller relative to overall costs, the percentage increase caused by a specific dollar jump is much higher.
The subsidy rises by $35.8m on a base of $420.5m (9.1%). If the increase were only at the 5.6% level, the dollar value would be $22.0m.
The larger context, of course, is whether the 5.6% increase is “justified” and this brings us to a variety of philosophical and policy issues I’m not going to get into here. In any event, stating that the TTC costs have gone up 9% is simply not true.
There is a parallel with claims that “taxes are going up 4%”. Well, no they are not. The overall tax rate is going up by 2.5%, but the load is placed disproportionately on the residential tax in order to continue an ongoing program of reducing business taxes. We could have a lower residential tax increase if only we stopped listening to the constant whines of the business lobby about high taxation. Strangely, nobody shows up demanding that we tax businesses more so that we can tax homes less. That’s a policy decision just as much as the desire to reduce the proportion of total costs born by fares and, by extension, raising the deficit higher than overall cost growth.
With respect to Adam Giambrone’s association with unions, I have to point out that although he is chair, he is only one member of the TTC. Large procurement contracts which are subsidised by the City have to be approved not just by the TTC but by Council. It would be useful for this debate if you were more specific about which “notable” decision you refer to. Some members of Council are closely identified with property developers or other business interests. If we are going to knock Giambrone for his union alignment, we need to hold the right wing’s feet to the fire too.
Contributions by unions and businesses to election campaigns are now banned in Toronto.
As for the balance between union and city interests, at the risk of sounding evasive, I’m not sure what is meant by “balanced”. As I wrote in another thread, one problem the ATU has is an uncertainty in the public mind about its specific issues requiring attention as well as a combative presence by the local’s president. If the message that is perceived is one of intransigence by the union, calls for “balance” tend to be more draconian than might be the case otherwise. On the city/public side of the debate, does “balance” mean widespread cuts in union wages and/or outsourcing? Comments in some quarters suggest that nothing short of pounding the union into the ground will be acceptable. That’s not “balance”.
To put this in context, we know from the city analyst report that the 3% wage increase translates to a $31.1m bump in costs. To completely eliminate the TTC’s deficit ($420m) through wage cuts alone would require a 40% cut in the pay schedule. This is unlikely for many reasons.
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I’d like to ask the candidates:
“Do you want to lower taxes, or keep tax increases within inflation? If so how will you pay for services like Transit that rely on costs (Gas prices, Wages) that increase above inflation?”
Steve: Be careful what you mean by “increase above inflation”. Another source of cost increase is service improvements to handle increased demand. Unless we are going to demand that all new riding be carried at 100% recovery, costs will go up when we get more riders even if the ratio of service to demand stays the same.
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I’d like to “hit” on an ever-present business myth – the increased costs of growth will be sustained/paid for by the growth and as such there is no need for additional money.
I come from a city that has about 100K people. By looking back, I wish that someone had the extra money and their streetcar(LRT) route could be changed to a mini-subway in the city core.
As there is no new money and the volume of “thru” traffic increases, the result is a slowly growing gridlock.
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Steve said:
But, do you expect that a sizeable proportion of riders will only need local commute? In other words, work or study in the vicinity of the same suburban street (with good LRT or BRT service) where they live?
If not, then we still have to emphasise the long-range or medium-range components of the network (subways, GO trains, or fully grade-separate LRT lines).
Steve: They may need a longer commute, but not necessarily on their own route. We cannot provide one seat, high speed access from everywhere to everywhere, and a long-range commuter may start with what looks like a “local” trip.
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Hi Steve,
So would the “operating costs” for an LRT line be affected mostly by the initial capital costs? I thought that the existing priority lines have already secured funding from province and federal. Since the capital costs are covered, I fail to see how the operating costs for LRT would be higher than buses. Could there be loss in revenue due to stops being further apart maybe? What other factors are involved?
Steve: The issue with LRT is that there is infrastructure to maintain that has no equivalent for a bus system — tracks and their roadbed, special signal systems, stations, tunnels (for the underground sections). This is a common problem for any transit mode that moves away from sharing roadways and sidewalks for their rights-of-way and “stations”.
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Maybe a question about the role of the city in operating the transit system in the city is worth putting in, now that the privatization of bus routes has been mused upon by one of the more publicly known candidates within a day of the city council executive resisting a call to add non-councillors to the commission?
Steve: The questions of non-Councillors on the Commission and private operation of services should be discussed separately. First off, many of the proposals and statements for the next eight months will focus on elctoral advantage, on scoring points on groups of opponents. Whether these translate into real policy after the election is less certain. The future of the transit system is too important to reduce to this sort of polarized, 10-second sound bite level.
On the question of private operation, what has not been discussed is just what “operation” means. One model many point at in Europe involves private ownership of bus fleets and garages as well as provision of drivers, mechanics, etc. In effect, a bus company bids on running “the Finch bus” to a specified standard of service, but takes the risk of owning the assets needed to do so itself. The winning company may get to keep whatever revenue the route generates (assuming you can come up with a way to assign this in a free-transfer and pass-based system), or the revenue may be kept by the City to offset the cost of paying the bus company to operate the service. In another model, some or all of the infrastructure remains in public hands, but is maintained and operated under contract by a third party. For example, VIVA’s buses were bought with public funds, and no private company had to risk its own capital to create the fleet. Things get even more complex for modes that have dedicated infrastructure because the service and the infrastructure might be operated by different companies. This sort of arrangement can lead to companies optimising their actions to suit whatever performance clauses are in their own contract even if it degrades service provided by another.
Projects requiring large infrastructure investment (subways, commuter rail, LRT lines) will almost certainly not be attractive to the investment community, and governments can borrow money to build them at rates no private builder can match.
There is also the big question of where the staff to run the privatised systems would come from. We are not talking about generic skills sitting out there in the community, but very specialised knowledge. Moreover, if the planning and design functions remain in the same hands as today, then whatever problems these areas might be perceived to have will not go away.
This is a complex problem, and Toronto deserves a fully thought out discussion. It’s easy to say “privatization” will solve all our problems, but things are not that simple.
As for non-Councillors, from my own personal experience as a one-time candidate for a citizen position on the TTC, I know that what actually happens is that the “citizens” wind up being cronies of the politicians, and de facto control remains at the political level. If that’s what will happen, then the TTC should be run by elected members of Council who have to explain their actions.
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Transit is rarely profitable even in the densest cities. Even in Hong Kong, the MTR lease the tunnel structures and guideways from the Hong Kong government to operate their service. Also, the Hong Kong government gives them air rights over stations, depots so that they can build residential and commercial properties. In a way, residents subsidize their metro operations through property prices and not taxes.
There are private operators in Japan where they built their own tracks and run completely without public subsidies. Keio, Kintetsu and Keikyu comes to mind. However, when these companies built these lines, they intended to feed businesses to their hotels. In essense, the Japanese government gave them land grants to build hotels and commerical properties around the stations. One can argue whether land grants are direct subsidies or not.
Toronto does not have the densities to support private transit. Who will bid on the Sheppard East tram line when it does not make money? Will the City of Toronto use emminent domain laws to evict people around the new tram stations so that private companies can build condos? And then they will operate line.
One way or another transit costs money. When will we have the courage to discuss funding methods for transit? Why do we look to the Province of Ontario or even the Government of Canada? Can we not look for ways here in Toronto to pay? I support the building of many Vegas style gaming facilities to help pay for transit. How about installing VLTs inside stations?
One last point, TTC drivers do not make too much money. People driving the coaches to Rama makes at least $25 per hour. They also receive tips from the passengers. There is really no customer service to speak of since their job is to deliver the passengers to Rama fast. I suppose the Rama and Fallsview coaches are the best example of privately run bus service in Ontario. They are fast, frequent and have stops all over Toronto.
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Steve, You really said it well in the interview you did on The Mark. The ignorant Torontonians don’t realize that Light Rail is in fact being utilized in many other metropolitans throughout Europe and North America (except for New York, I haven’t heard about any LRT there). I wonder if any of those cities, say Calgary, faced the same kind of criticism and opposition against their LRT as we have in Toronto?
Steve: Calgary was copying what Edmonton had already done, but on a bigger scale. Unlike Toronto and Ontario, Alberta realized that subways were far to expensive for what they needed, that they had surface rights-of-way that were suitable for LRT (including a street mall downtown in Calgary), and they didn’t have a pesky provincial government touting a high tech transit “solution”. BC almost had LRT too but for the interference of the Ontario government there too.
Having said that, I will agree that the Skytrain system was much more a “mini subway” than an overbuilt LRT, and the Vancouver folks did a good job of using the technology to its best advantage.
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Maybe you should change the title of your blog ‘abandon hope all who enter here’. If I had to write a precis of what you and some other commenters are saying or implying.
1. There is no hope of curtailing TTC operating cost (per unit) without ‘pounding’ the union into submission.
What you gloss over is that, while it may not be realistic to get all of the money back from the union – even half would give about $100 million a year. (Operating cost per passenger has grown at about 1% over inflation per year over the last 15 years.)
Steve: I have never said that we should not seek savings in costs. However, there are some basic points that need to be answered. What is a “reasonable” rate of pay for TTC staff? I believe that I mentioned elsewhere that it would take a very large wage cut (about 40%) to bring wages down enough to eliminate the operating deficit. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we could claw back 10% somehow. That’s about $100m/year. Assume that the union accepts this and that the labour market is such that the TTC can get workers at the lower rates. Fine. Now it’s 2011. Where are you going to get the next $100m?
There’s a point at which the price of just about everything is going to rise, but many people (including those who ask for fare freezes in hard times) seem to talk only about current budget problems, not long term issues.
2. There is a compunction to take road space from road vehicles – including for commercial vehicles, city vehicles etc. We must spend billions on this – even though it won’t meet transportation needs of most people. This will somehow make the city attractive to live and work in.
Steve: Yes, there is only so much road space to go around, and some of it is very badly used including for cars. As the city grows, much of its road network cannot be expanded to handle added demand, and the only way to deal with this is to reapportion space. Much has been made lately of Jarvis Street and the cycling lanes. In fact, the original proposal was to widen sidewalks, and this was highjacked (oddly enough not by the cycling lobbyists, but by a misguided local Councillor) into a cycling expansion. Traffic studies show that the middle lane adds little to Jarvis Street’s capacity and that the world will not end by removing it.
I can at least have conversations about the issue of road space in the suburbs where the transit/auto mode split is much more heavily weighted to autos, but the folks who expect to be able to drive into the core get no sympathy from me at all. You may not like that, but it’s my position. We need better service on the surface routes downtown so that people don’t assume that they can walk to their destination long before a TTC vehicle appears.
3. People in Toronto are ignorant because they question Transit City.
That’s pretty insulting. It’s actually irrelevant what is happening in specific cities around the globe. However, it might be instructive to consider the two cities people like to bring up as examples — Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Copenhagen removed its tram system completely and has been building a metro system. Amsterdam replaced many tram lines when it built its subway system.
Steve: And other cities have robust tram systems or are reintroducing them — notably London and Paris. My understanding of Copenhagen is that they regret the decision, but it dated from an era when trams were thought to be out of date. Toronto like Amsterdam replaced some trams with subways, but that does not lead to the conclusion that either city would replace all of its tramlines with subway operations. The issue in every city, in every route, is to look at the demand for the route, the cost of providing various types of service, and the appropriate technology. There is no one formula that says “streetcars are bad”.
Closer to home, its practically assured that Montreal will extend three of its Metro lines. (The order for new Metro vehicles is being doubled.) The cost per km is $150 million – Montreal uses a single bore tunnel which save a pile of money.
Steve: Montreal trains are smaller than Toronto’s trains, and a lot of their tunneling is through rock. These two characteristics make the systems quite different. As for the size of the car order, the increase is due mainly to a decision to replace all of the fleet rather than only part of it.
I don’t think people would have such an issue to Transit City if the plan more resembled the C-train.
Steve: I suspect that if we proposed to make Eglinton Avenue look like downtown Calgary, they would object a lot. The C-train benefits from the availability of a radial network of rights-of-way that allowed the network to be built with little impact on the street system. Suburban traffic congestion in Calgary is unknown on a scale common in Toronto. This is an apples-and-oranges comparison.
I’m not going to vote for a candidate that doesn’t have a vision to solve the problems. Right now, we have the Marie Antoinette style of transit vision.
Steve: I too dislike candidates who lack a vision for transit. Sadly, the current crop’s vision seems to consist of “give it to Queen’s Park” or “sell it”, neither of which takes any responsibility for what the transit system might do. Maybe we should do the same thing with the major roads and let someone else figure out how often they would be paved and what you would pay to drive on them. That wouldn’t be a transportation vision either.
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Peak oil – are we still having transit-paradise doomsday fantasies about that? If cars become playthings for the rich, won’t blogs and the Internet also be out of reach? Be careful what you wish for.
I note that regular contributors seem to decry the need/desire for long-distance rapid transit – not simply emphasizing local over express, but DENYING that express service needs development. Is this more peak oil wish-fulfillment?
Mr. Munro, I am afraid I must object to one of your remarks. If you told most daily commuters that you opposed (or would delay spending on) the 401 model of public transit, I do not believe you would be well-received. A highway may require travellers to go out of their way (i.e. weak local service), but its TRULY RAPID (meaning faster than a 95 minute LRT ride from Kennedy Station to Pearson!) aspect would not be other than welcomed, and HEARTILY. Do you really think that the majority of riders would rather have the city’s remaining major corridors spoken for by a system slower than than the Bloor/Spadina lines?
And PLEASE do not lecture me, Mr. Munro, on how filling the long-distance need is the job of GO – I do not see much advocacy on this site or elsewhere to have GO properly assume the 416-crosstown rapid transit market. The poor souls on the 95 York Mills or 46 Martin Grove ride to the termini of their routes for a reason: their trip needs are not served by GO (or any other present TTC route). Is that too small a demographic to consider when spending BILLIONS on a (hoped-for) improvement of local service?
I guess that many of the denizens on this blog implictly accept that they are only preaching (or is it screeching?) to the converted. How many of you would like to try your arguments out on the general transit public?
Steve: I will lecture you all I like. This is my site, and I have to put up with a lot of crap from people who misrepresent my position. I have never said that we don’t need long distance services, but that there are different type of services and we have not spent enough time on the medium distance ones that serve comparatively local travel and will support intensified land use along the streets they will serve.
As for GO, the flavour of the month seems to be to talk about Metrolinx taking over the TTC. Well if that happens, the artificial distinction between a regional and a local agency will disappear. Even GO has problems with its model because plans for all day bidirectional service run headlong into the complete absence of good local transit anywhere but Toronto to get people to their destinations. A 1,000 car parking lot may keep the commuters happy and make for good press releases, but it’s useless to someone trying to do a reverse commute or a midday trip.
Up until now, GO has had the easy job (much like the TTC during the 60s and 70s) of building lines where there is a huge backlog of demand. Trains are full the moment they operate. However, their network is limited to existing rail corridors, and even these have limitations. As GO moves beyond that model, they will find themselves more in the TTC’s position with a much more complex set of demands and a desire, as a matter of policy, to provide a good level of service everywhere, not just when they can pack trains to the roof.
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Eglinton west of Leslie will be as fast or faster than Bloor, and probably close to equal to Spadina. I find it a bit presumptuous when people try to compare the subway lines to the LRT lines assuming that they operate at the same speed everywhere they go; They don’t.
Eglinton, as proposed, will actually be an average of 7km/h faster than its equivalent section on the Bloor-Danforth line. This is not a good thing, because it is denying service to pockets in the corridor in order to get up to that needlessly high speed. If people are happy with the Bloor-Danforth line, and I don’t see indications that they’re not, then there is no need for Eglinton to go so much faster. Sheppard and Finch are both projected to only be 2-3km/h slower on average than the central 1/3rd of the Bloor-Danforth line or the downtown core portion of the Yonge line.
Subways are not built to provide speed. Subways are not built to provide express services. Subways are built for high capacity demands, demands that do not exist in the suburban 416 outside of the Yonge and Bloor-Danforth corridors. Even the Spadina Subway under-performs north of St. Clair West; check the AM rush hour headways in the service summaries if you doubt that claim.
Steve: And the TTC plans to extend that short turn all the way to Glencairn!
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There are still people who want to supplement the HRT and LRT service with buses because they think the stops are “too far apart”. One only needs to see what happened with the 97 Yonge bus service between York Mills and Eglinton to see what happened when buses are used to supplement the “express” HRT subway between those points. The buses are rarely used because of the wide headways. The trains are faster because there are no stations forcing the trains to stop.
But putting in more stations, like it is between Bloor and Union, will result in slower speeds. The trains will be braking and stopping more often.
So it has to be a compromise, more stations will result in slower service, but better access; while less stations will result in faster service, but less access. But supplementary bus service is not an answer, because they would be used less.
Steve: I disagree. The absence of stops north of Eglinton is dictated partly by the terrain, and the subway is very deep at the midpoints where stations might be inserted. As for the replacement buses, they are so infrequent and unreliable, of course people don’t use them. However, what may have happened is that they are now simply not riding transit.
On a related note, we keep hearing about accessibility. Long walks to stops make them inaccessible to a growing part of the community, and a strong argument can be made for providing a reliable service at least every 15 minutes to supplement the underground operation.
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I had read that the TTC wanted to save capital costs by taking out “mid-block” stations, like Glencairn/Yonge, and that that was the reason stops are ~2km apart between Eglinton and York Mills (where they originally didn’t want to go under the Don, they wanted to go over).
Steve: Same difference. A station at Glencairn would have been very deep and expensive. There would have to be a station at York Mills one way or the other, but going under the river made stations at Glen Echo and north of the 401 difficult. In all three locations, they would have been stations like Chester that would be entirely dependent on walk-in traffic with no feeder buses. You can do “walk in trade” with a surface route, but for a subway it gets really expensive. Note that the closely spaced sections of both YUS and BD have surface feeders at many locations. You can’t just compare station spacing, you have to look at how the network funnels and concentrates traffic.
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A number of people seem to think that the TTC spends too much on labour cost:
Would you be willing to do the same work that you are now for half the money? I doubt it. If you want to save labour cost then you have to make the TTC more efficient. LRT trains of 3 cars can carry 400 people, between 5 and 6 buses worth with one operator. If or when the TTC switches to a “proof of Payment” fare system they can start using all door loading on all vehicles. This should reduce dwell time and increase capacity for the same number of vehicles.
If the TTC can ever find an articulated bus that meets their standards then they can save even more money or carry more people for the same level of service. The subway has about 70 stations depending on how you count interchanges and always needs about 75 collectors on duty in off peak and close to 200 in the peak. With POP the number can be reduced drastically.
Transit City and POP can reduce the TTC’s operating costs if the TTC can be dragged kicking and screaming from the nineteenth century to the twenty first completely by passing the twentieth whose innovations in fare collection and vehicle scheduling they seem to have completely skipped over. The TTC does not seem to comprehend the fact that if they can save 20% in operating cost while fare evasion goes up by 2% then they are ahead of the game. Not to mention the fact that the surface passengers are happier because they spend less time waiting for boardings and more time moving. GO figured this out years ago and so while I am not happy with the idea of Metrolinx absorbing the TTC they would probably force them to change their fare policy.
Someone else said:
Have you tried to GO from Pearson to Kennedy and Eglinton at the height of the rush hour. You would be hard pressed to do it in much less than 75 minutes and you would still have to park your car and walk to the terminal. The Eglinton LRT would do it in 78 minutes not 95 but don’t let facts get in the way of your argument. I took the underground from Heathrow to the east end of London and that took almost 90 minutes. I probably could have saved time if I took the commuter train service then the Underground but I had just finished a 7 hour flight and wasn’t interested in looking up two sets of schedules and making an extra transfer. The trip time from Keele to Brentcliffe goes from 48 minutes to 19. That is a significant time saving on the densest part of the route.
If GO were to run a GO service to the Airport from Union Station then you could save a lot of time. Remember that there are not a lot of people who would be riding from Kennedy and Eglinton to Pearson but the LRT would be a vast improvement over what they have now. Most of the people who take transit to the airport work there; they are not [airline] passengers. When Finch is built then there will be two additional higher speed transit services for the workers.
Road and expressway users, except for the 407, do not pay as high a share of the true operating costs of the highway as transit riders pay. Also do not forget that the land area wiped out by the 401 does not pay any property taxes and I will bet that the 407 doesn’t either. Automobiles have a lot of indirect cost such as parking lots in the suburbs, extra health service cost from increased air pollution, policing and snow removal. Parking lots at malls such as Yorkdale and Square One occupy land that cost money and they also need maintenance and have property taxes paid on them. These costs are not covered by the retailers but come out of revenue earned so you pay for it whether you want to or not. Don’t come back with the amount of money from gas taxes. When you throw in all the costs associated with expressways the gas taxes cover a lot lower percentage than transit fares do.
The problem that Torontonians have never faced squarely is what do they want the “subway” to do. Do they want high capacity local service or high speed express service? I have ridden the Bloor Danforth from end to end and it is a mind and bum numbing experience. I am afraid that they are perpetuating this error with the proposed Yonge extension. If you want people to ride from Richmond Hill all the way downtown, then eliminate a couple of stops and get them there more quickly, or improve the GO service.
It is not easy to compare Toronto to Calgary and Montreal because our topography and population densities are so different. Toronto does not have any readily available corridors on which to cheaply build cross area high speed transit routes. All the rail lines lead to Union Station except for CP’s North Toronto Sub and the CN’s York/Halton Subs. I doubt that CN would be happy to have GO trains on the Toronto by-pass and there is no capacity on the downtown subways to handle any GO passengers from the North Toronto Sub. Toronto and the province cannot afford to build any more expressways into Toronto and the infrastructure cannot absorb the traffic. There is only a finite amount of resources and we need to build what gets the best return on investment. LRT seems to be the best solution to most, not all, of the problems.
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Steve –
I’ll be damned if I misrepresent your position after reading your blog thus carefully. Since you deem that my post merits such a rude reply, perhaps I should narrowly argue specifics…
Steve: You got a rude reply because you made a rude post that I actually deigned to let through rather than just deleting it.
Mr. Junkin, I am all too aware that the (proposed) Eglinton LRT will have a variable operating speed, which is a function of several variables, but permit me to focus on one aspect of operation. It is very frustrating to read the arguments of learned transit observers and others about the surface section, and interaction with signals. ‘T’is even more frustrating to read (or hear, from TTC planners) all the weak excuses about how and why it is infeasibile/impractical/unaffordable to fully seperate the TC line(s) from general traffic. That means intersections! Mr. Munro, you propose to support “comparatively local” transit in a manner Toronto has not seen in many decades, if ever (disregarding the Bloor line, of course). Yes? If LRT is so flexible, why must it trundle like the Spadina line?
Steve: Spadina “trundles” as you put it for two reasons. First, it is in a very dense part of the city with a closely spaced street grid. There was a big fight when it was built about having only a few stops because the major demand, wait for it, was going to be at “Metro Centre”, a new office development roughly where all the condos west of the Dome are now. Anyone who rides the line knows there is extremely heavy demand to stops within the UofT and in the College to Queen area. The line has also picked up a new demand pattern of people travelling to Harbourfront.
The “trundling” is in part thanks to the City’s traffic engineers who refuse to adjust the signals to give priority to north-south transit. This is a big problem especially at the south end of the route, but at other locations along the way as well.
As for the TTC, you probably know from reading this blog carefully that I don’t think much of their excuses on a number of topics, including some of the design issues of the Eglinton LRT.
If we are going to propose something truly new, devote an entire generation’s worth of transit capital funding thereto, and ask motorists (the community!) to accept reprioritization and a reshaping of the streetscape, then should we not go that one step further and fully separate the line? This is not a call for full tunnelling or any particular implementation, but for the maximization of the asset. Whether one thinks the Eglinton line should be express or local, should we not all advocate for the fastest possible operation?
Steve: I’m all for the fastest possible operation of the LRVs, and if this takes capacity from the other road users, so be it.
Until GO/TTC offers rapid crosstown services, the fact is that these “comparatively local crosstown lines” WILL be used for those pesky longer journeys. And NOT, I daresay, by <= 2% of the line ridership, if *only* one considers that the proximal crosstown bus trips are bloody interminable! (Let us not speak of GO bus service…) When someone tells me that we can literally spend billions on such a line but fail to separate "the last mile", I feel the need to call "Ideologue!", or at least profess that I am mystified.
And yes, I do know that some contributors to this site have advocated for side-of-road running on the Eglinton line. Am I still misrepresenting you, Mr. Munro? Let the lecture begin.
Steve: I am not going to duplicate the long comment left by Robert Wightman, but will make a few separate points here.
I too advocated side-of-road running, and this is an issue where the TTC and I part company on rather strong terms. However, if they’re going to run centre-of-road, then the debate turns on the best (or least worst) way to do this.
As for GO offering rapid crosstown service, GO has been notoriously absent from provision of any services where a right-of-way doesn’t fall into their lap. Metrolinx has even tried to highjack the Eglinton line as a limited stop regional line to fill just that purpose, abetted by Bombardier who would like nothing better than to get a turnkey contract to “extent” the Scarborough RT to the airport.
The problem with any express service is that people have to get to it whether it’s on a main street like Eglinton, in the Finch Hydro corridor, or on the CPR main line. If your trip doesn’t start and end at a GO station, you are at the mercy of whatever gets you there. Flying across the city at high speed isn’t much good if you need half an hour on either end of the journey to reach the express service.
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A few things I wish to comment on from the comments.
Steve is fully within his rights to “lecture” or even be “rude” (which I’ve never seen him do, even within this thread) as this is his Blog. I have my own blog, and if others want to rant, they should get one too.
Steve, you mentioned extending the short turn from St.Clair West up to Glencarin. I’ve heard even possibly Wilson. Do you know when this will be done?
Steve: At one point, I think it was going to be this year, but may be delayed for budgetary reasons.
On Yonge mid-block stations – did the TTC not build provisions into the line so that they could still be built in the future, like North York Centre was? IE, does it not already exist, a long enough stretch of track to build Glencairn-Yonge and Glen Echo-Yonge stations?
Steve: I believe that North York Station was the only place where an actual flat section was left in anticipation of a station.
To Mr.Slow-Peddle
On Eglinton – while agree there is an argument to be made to keep the line grade separated from Yonge to the Airport, the idea that you should just “tunnel” the whole thing proves that you have not opened up google maps. There is ample space to put the line in an elevated berm, or perhaps in a sunken RoW (much like the Allen Expressway). The later especially would not radically destroy the neighbourhood (especially if quarter-block pedways were built over the track) and I myself have proposed such a thing. However, if you’ve ever taken an Eglinton East bus you will know that between Don Mills and Kennedy, ridership is limited at best. This part of Eglinton also has among the widest right-of-ways within the entire city. There is no reason, whatsoever, to tunnel this portion, or to build a “subway” under this portion. Either would be a waste of money. If you are truly interested in making transit better, so what I did when I first started butting heads with Mr. Munro – go out there, ride these buses, look at google maps to familiarize yourself with these areas, download Toronto’s “Official Plan” (which includes a diagram map of street right of ways – IE the amount of space the city owns long each street – this tells you how many lanes they can fit).
I also want to note that you specifically said “motorists (the community!)” suggesting that by not owning a car, that I am not part of “The Community” or that I do not matter. Sir, not all of us work 9-to-5 jobs in downtown office towers, nor do we even WANT to work such a job. Just because we are not home-owning-9-to-5ers-with-a-family does not mean we do not count (Politicians need to realize that too). I do not own a car, nor do I want one here in the city. I have owned a car, when I lived in a rural area, but do not need one in Toronto, nor should I in a city as dense as this where Public Transit is far more efficient.
The main reason that transit city will not be 100% in tunnels is this: We don’t have the money. This is not a choice between better transit and the best transit, this is a choice between better transit and transit as-is. Anyone who’s recently taken transit as-is will know that this option is no longer acceptable.
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Pardon me if this seems disjointed but I am trying to address a number of items that have come up.
Dear Slow peddle:
When you talk about “the 401 model of public transit,” are you talking about the expressway or a high speed transit line across the city with limited stops or local and express services similar to the collector and express lanes of the 401? As the love affair for the car grew in the last half of last century municipalities were being crowed out by the car and the necessity to provide parking for it. This caused the creation of by-laws that required most new stores to provide “adequate parking” rather than relying on “on street parking” This resulted in new development moving out to the “sticks” where land was cheaper.
This was alright as long as the populations stayed relatively small. Now with the golden horseshoe home to over 8 million people, depending which definition you use, roads cannot handle the demand. Brampton, where I live is growing by about 50 000 people per year. Traffic is hopeless during the rush hour and it is only going to get worse. The province is talking about adding 2 lanes in each direction to highway 410. This will help in Brampton but where will these cars go when they reach the 401? The city is trying to get denser development and has outlawed highway commercial zoning (Eglinton Avenue in Scarborough) from all new development to make the streets more pedestrian friendly.
The 401 model works as long as the local roads and infrastructure can handle the traffic, AND the necessary parking. I would be in favour of introducing road tolls on all the expressways and reducing the taxes on gasoline to compensate. That way you could have the users pay for the service and you could also have reduced rates for off peak use. You just could not have the 407 corporation run it because they would gouge everyone for all they could get. I think that the last time I was in Sydney all the major expressways had been converted into toll roads. This is what happens when you take Thatcher Reagan economics to the logical conclusion.
If you would give me the middle two lanes of the 401 I could give you a high speed transit service across Toronto and the GTA. The problem would be getting to it be cause it would be in the middle of no man’s land. I don’t think that many road users would be happy. Car drivers squeal when they lose some of the precious lanes or parking to transit but if they had half a brain they would realize that a good transit system would remove some of the competition for the limited road space.
The Spadina line may “trundle along” but it carries a lot of people and not just during the rush hour. How many other lines do you know that run a better service at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning than in the weekday a.m. rush, 2:10 vs. 2:30? Spadina is a line that would probably benefit from having its headway increased to 2 times the normal light cycle north of Front St. (which would be 160 to 180 seconds) instead of 113 seconds that it has now. It is impossible to keep the cars evenly spaced because the head way is just slightly greater than the cycle time. Some cars are 1 light behind the one in front while others are 2 behind. This results in one car catching the one ahead and the resulting convoys. When they get the new cars and go to a POP system they should reduce the headway slightly while increasing capacity with the larger cars. Every second car would go to Union instead of every third to maintain headway down on Queens Quay.
I agree that it is foolish to operate Eglinton in the middle of the road from just west of Keele and from Brentcliffe to Don Mills Road. They should have a segregated right of way, some combination of elevated and subway to west of Eglinton then on one side of the road west of there. A number of the intersections already have partial grades in them in preparation for the old Richview Expressway and these could be used for LRT bridges. The line should also stay on the south side of the road to Don Mills. Once you start climbing out of the Don River Valley it is difficult to do anything but go in the centre right of way unless some one would spring for the cost of tunnelling. This is a major cross town link and it should be built to run as fast as possible with the minimum chance or traffic problems. But even with the TTC’s plans it will be a lot faster than what is there now and the BD subway, it will not “trundle” and it won’t take 95 minutes to get to the airport from Kennedy station.
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The 905 (and outer 416) has office buildings surrounded by parking lots (mostly free upfront). The 905, and most of the 416, has homes (that includes condos) that have a garage, carport, or space to store maybe one vehicle (if not used as a storage locker) and another on the driveway. There are stores in shopping centres with vast parking lots (again mostly free upfront, but pays for it in the prices in the stores).
They are also single-use. The stores don’t have apartments or offices above them, for example. And most of the parking lots are empty, waiting for the very few hours in a 24-hour day when they maybe used (like at Christmas). But there is maintenance costs and property taxes to be paid on those parking lots. Who pays for that? Even the home owner has to pay property taxes on that driveway, garage, and the grass between the homes.
My question to the candidates would be do you support the automobile oriented development of the past 50 years, or do you support transit oriented development of the prior 50 years and in the future?
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Nick J Boragina in response to Slow-peddle:
I read the original Slow-peddle’s post, and it does not state that a person who rides transit is less important than a person who drives a car. Sorry Nick, but you over-reacted here.
I believe that statement “motorists (the community!)” simply points to the arithmetical fact that drivers represent more than 50% of taxpayers and voters in Toronto, and more than 80% in 905. Therefore, any effective transit policy has to include selling transit enhancements to “motorists”.
How? I think that “motorists” demographics consists of three sub-groups:
1) People who would rather use transit, but find the existing network unsuitable for their travel pattern (infrequent / unreliable / trip takes too long).
2) People who would prefer to keep driving, but might switch to transit for systemic /social reasons (road congestion and pollution) if transit reaches a certain level of comfort.
3) People who will never trade their car for transit.
Catering to groups 1 and 2 is an important part of a good transit policy. Group 3 is unlikely to ever support transit and transit funding, but that group alone does not make a majority.
Steve: This is an important distinction. If we try to design transit systems around the demands of group 3, we will always short change groups 1 and 2 by overspending on the hard core motorists who are, if we do things correctly, in the minority.
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I think the issue of local versus regional users comes down to not so much an us vs. them, but how to move the most people the best way, that may mean that to accommodate both, you need different services to accommodate both. This may mean that you have some express services, but you need the ability to have one train or car skip stations, while another one services all stations.
Difficult for a built subway system, because you need express and local tracks, but none of TC is built yet. For a line like Eglinton where it goes a very long distance and some people are travelling the entire distance, this may be an option. An express car that stops only where it crosses other lines, so for example, an Eglinton car that stops at only, Kennedy, Don Mills, Eglinton Station, Eglinton West and Jane and the airport would be a viable option. If you are going from Kennedy to Keele, you would take the express car to Eglinton West, then switch to a local car.
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Michael Forest says:
March 8, 2010 at 5:59 pm
I read Slow peddle’s statement the same way Nick did. I would also question your statement that drivers represent more than 50% of taxpayers.
Are you counting all people who own a car or just those who drive to Work?
Do you count those who are too young to drive as taxpayers or don’t they count because they can’t vote?
What about those who cannot afford a car or who are physically unable to drive? Do they not count?
You may be correct that the modal split for cars in Toronto is over 50% (57% in 2006) for those travelling to work but what about those going to other destinations? It is some times necessary for politicians to make decisions that are unpopular with one group of the populace because they are what is best for the majority. The people who live in the 905 and work in Toronto should not be allowed to dictate the transit plans of the city. I live in Brampton and worked in Toronto for 2 years and Bathurst and Harbord. I only drove once because I had to stay in the city after 8:00 p.m. and hated every minute of it.
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(1) Cost savings
Steve: “That’s about $100m/year. Assume that the union accepts this and that the labour market is such that the TTC can get workers at the lower rates. Fine. Now it’s 2011. Where are you going to get the next $100m?”
The increase in cost over time is not a shorty term problem – it’s been going on for 15 years or more. $100 million a year could fund a great deal more service, or it could keep fares in check, or some combination. If applied to the capital account it would fund many projects – $3 billion over a 30 year lifespan.
You ask what a reasonable rate of pay is for staff. Increases above inflation can be justified by market conditions or and/or an increase in productivity. There are job rating system (like the old Hay points one) that can help determine this. The TTC certainly has no shortage of productivity measures on that end.
Would the union accept this? This comes down to negotiating leverage. The TTC have options for helping level the playing field in negotiations but have no availed themselves of them.
2. Paris, London, Copenhagen:
Paris and London are using light rail on a very limited basis. I’m sure LRT activists moan about the trams being removed in Copenhagen – but by all accounts I’ve found, transportation in Copenhagen work very well:
http://www.eua.be/events/qaforumcopenhagen/practical-info/getting-around/
“Copenhagen is a compact city with a well-planned network of public transportation, making it easy for visitors to get around. The city is served by a Metro system, local S-trains (red), and buses, and connected by regional trains to points beyond the metropolitan area.”
I also notice that the Copenhagen Metro has been rated the world’s best – and there are competitive tenders out to build and equip the next line.
3. Montreal’s trains
Steve: Montreal trains are smaller than Toronto’s trains, and a lot of their tunneling is through rock. These two characteristics make the systems quite different. As for the size of the car order, the increase is due mainly to a decision to replace all of the fleet rather than only part of it.
There is no reason that Eglinton line could not use the same narrower cars. Either light rail or guideway technology choices would bring new technology into play. There is no reason not to consider this. The potential savings look large.
I understand that the proposal is that a good chunk of the Eglinton underground section will likely be bored. It’s certainly better to bore one whole than two. The montreal Metro cars are narrower – but it this has certainly not been an impediment to the system being successful.
(3) Calgary
Steve: I suspect that if we proposed to make Eglinton Avenue look like downtown Calgary, they would object a lot. The C-train benefits from the availability of a radial network of rights-of-way that allowed the network to be built with little impact on the street system. Suburban traffic congestion in Calgary is unknown on a scale common in Toronto. This is an apples-and-oranges comparison.”
It’s also apples-to-oranges to talk about most (or even all) of the LRT systems in the world. On a ridership basis, Calgary stands out as the real LRT success – so if the model doesn’t fit here – what are we doing folks?
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Re: Copenhagen — if you compare the old tram map to the current Metro map, it’s clear the 2-line Metro isn’t a very good replacement for 18 tram routes. (I believe most of the old tram routes are now served by buses, which run frequently.)
Copenhagen is also less than half the size of Toronto, and also has the S-train (imagine something halfway between the subway and GO Transit). As for the Metro, it’s quite new and rather small (the trains are shorter than Scarborough RT trains) but sleek, shiny, and well-designed, so long as you’re going where it’s going.
Plus, the city core there is so compact and walkable (not to mention bikeable) that many visitors don’t need transit at all, making a tourist guide perhaps not the best place to look for an assessment of how well-served the city is.
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I’ll attempt to answer *some* recent points, more later, Steve-permitting…
Mr. Boragina –
Are you sure you have read MY comments carefully? I did NOT propose to tunnel the whole line. I wrote “fully seperate the TC line(s) from general traffic”, AND “This is not a call for full tunnelling or any particular implementation, but for the maximization of the asset”, in anticipation of just such a reply. Once freed of interaction with general traffic signals, and with the proposed full PROW, I might THEN find estimates of an average 78 minute ride believable. As it is, even with the limited number of proposed stops, the Eglinton LRT would still have to deal with traffic at very busy intersections such as Victoria Park and Islington. If the traffic signal “improvements” to St. Clair of the past month are a sign of what we can expect Toronto to implement for TC, I will remain unconvinced of the 78 minute figure. And with all due respect, I have traversed Eglinton East before, by wheels and by (peak oil-proof) shanks.
I’m not advocating for a particular implementation of “fully traffic-separated”. It could be in the style of the SRT, or a subway/sunken berm (prohibitive cost, aye), or perhaps something heretofore unseen in Toronto.
I thank Michael Forest for the benefit of the doubt. I thought that some might misread my parenthetical INCLUSION of motorists as part of the community. If there is misunderstanding, I ask your pardon. But if your assumption was that I deliberately exclude you as a non-motorist, I would find that telling. I am trying to include motorists as PART OF THE COMMUNITY – even motorists who do not live within 1 km of Eglinton! My only quibble with Mr. Forest is this: I would sub-divide group (2) into those you describe and those who might prefer transit, but simply for the loss of speed/time. Indeed, I know many who grew up taking transit, since migrated to outer-416 / 905, who would change modes if travel time on crosstown (be it N-S or E-W) routes improved… or if they even existed!
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Michael Forrest writes:
I have a driver’s licence and own a currently licenced, insured automobile, with proper winter tires and everything (damn thing even *runs*). Therefore I guess I’m part of the “motorist demographic” for Michael.
He then continues:
How so? In the last 10 days:
My trips by TTC: several dozen
My trips by car: zero
Not only does Michael leave out the demographic of “Owns a car, but prefers to use transit wherever reasonable/possible”, if gas prices go up to $1.30/litre like they did a while back, there are going to be motorist demographics like “Would drive everywhere but can’t afford the gas and must take transit”.
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Just out of curiosity, why is it better to bore one hole (double diameter means quadruple the amount of soil and rock removed) than to bore two?
Steve: It’s not quite that simple. The larger hole means that you have a bigger void underground on which pressure from soil, underground streams, the weight of nearby buildings, etc., will bear. A good parallel would be that a small arch is much simpler to build than a big one because the forces it must bear do not go up linearly. I spoke with some of the engineering folks about the tunnel options, and one major concern on Eglinton was that a double-sized tunnel would have to be quite deep to avoid compromising buildings that are close to the street line. This, in turn, would push the stations further underground adding to their complexity and cost.
A single large tunnel is easier to build when going through rock which provides good structural support around the tunnel. Toronto has a mixture of things, including a lot of underground streams, but no rock unless you go down a very long way.
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Robert Wightman said:
My response:
Steve: I have to jump in here. The supermarket trip was not likely to have been a candidate for transit travel for many people (although I walk the two blocks myself). It’s important when quoting modal splits that car trips that cannot be replaced by transit be dealt with separately. For example, the fact that someone drives to market in Scarborough has nothing to do with their choice of how to get to work, or to school, beyond the fact that they have a car in the first place. Conversely, if there is a large amount of traffic that is for local trips that are impractical with transit, and the result is congestion on a local scale, then this is a different problem from, say, the issue of taking lanes off of major arterials far from where the “shopping congestion” exists. This is also a land use issue in that neighbourhoods designed to force you to drive anywhere create demand for auto trips and infrastructure.
Robert Wightman said:
My response:
Robert Wightman said:
My response:
Steve: I concur with the analysis up to a point. Getting “motorists” onboard includes giving them transit options where this is possible rather than condemning them to sit in traffic jams and burn expensive fuel. Transit doesn’t have much credibility as one gets further from downtown Toronto, and “motorists” might be forgiven for their suspicion. After all, Queen’s Park announced $50-billion worth of transit, but still doles out pennies to Metrolinx on a year-to-year basis.
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Michael Forest says:
March 9, 2010 at 12:04 pm
True, but it does not give them right to demand that more roads and parking be built in the city so that they can drive to work. Why should someone who lives in the city put up with more roads and parking lots so some one else can have their big house on a large lot in the “quiet” suburbs. The government has to provide them with an efficient method of getting to work; it does not have to provide them with their preferred method, especially if it has a negative impact on others.
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