Updated January 12, 2011 at 5:30 pm: Today the TTC decided to defer the matter of the proposed service cuts to its meeting on February 2. I will comment in more detail on both the Operating and Capital budget presentations that were made today (they are not available online).
Meanwhile, details of the service cuts are available. A few notes about this table (which comes from the TTC):
- Vehicle reductions: This is the TTC’s estimate of how many vehicles will be saved, and these numbers won’t always be the same as in the table I produced because of assumptions about interlining.
- Customers affected: These are the people who now use the service. Equivalent to “boardings” used in a calculation below.
- Customers lost: This is the TTC’s estimate of the riders who will be lost. Generally this is much less than the number affected because the TTC assumes people will walk to another route rather than abandoning the system.
- Boardings/service hour: For some reason, this appears only for a subset of the cases shown, although you can calculate the values. If the proposed cut is 2 vehicles for 3 hours, then this is 6 service hours. Divide that into the number of people affected to get the boardings/hour. The screenline for cuts is 15 (not 12 as previously reported) boardings/service hour.
The TTC has already noticed one “oops” — the Downsview Park bus on early Saturday evenings carries 267 riders in the three hours between 7 and 10 pm, or almost 90/hour. Saturday daytime, it carries 176 in the 13 hours from 6 am to 7 pm, or 13.5/hour. However, it is likely that a good deal of this riding is concentrated later in the day, and it will be easy to get over the screenline by taking this into account.
I will digest this chart with additional calculations in a post tomorrow.
The methodology has a certain prejudice depending on the type of route. For example, very short routes tend to have a lot of turnover and rack up boardings quickly. Long routes handle longer trips, and the resources used per boarding are proportionately greater. This means that a long route has to have a higher average load to meet the boardings/hour criterion and escape cuts.
For routes that don’t do well, this is something of a moot point because they are never going to the cut, but this sort of systemic error in analysis becomes important if, in 2012, the bar is raised to cut more “unproductive” services.
Updated January 11, 2011 at 8:40 pm: The budget reports for tomorrow’s TTC meeting are now available on the TTC’s website. The Operating Budget is a scanned version of the originally proposed report with manual changes to reflect the absence of a fare increase.
It is worth noting that the original text projected 4 million fewer riders (483m vs 487m), and so the TTC had allowed for the possibility of ridership loss in the face of the fare increase. If those riders are retained, let alone if ridership goes up more than expected, the “unspecified” revenue or cost saving within the TTC’s budget will come from riders just as, in 2010, the TTC generated a large surplus.
Within the budget itself, an $8m saving comes from halving the workforce assigned to Customer Service initiatives (see page 8 of the linked pdf).
For those who wonder about the components of rising TTC costs, these are broken out in detail in the body of the budget report.
Although the budget recommends cuts to free up $7m for demand-related service improvements, there is no hint of where this might be applied or how much service will result. Given that this is about half of one percent of the total budget, this is really not a lot of added service spread over the entire system.
The Capital Budget gives more details of the major projects and funding problems faced by the TTC. The budget contains a long discussion of the problems of adding capacity to the Yonge-University-Spadina subway, and it is clear that the TTC still feels it can get 50% more out of the existing infrastructure. “Existing” may be a misnomer considering the changes needed to achieve this, and we are still waiting for a proper evaluation of the Downtown Relief Line as an alternative to massive spending on the YUS.
The budget discusses the shortfall in available funding in detail, and urges improved support from senior governments. To that end, the TTC proposes “packages” of projects that could be presented for funding support. These include:
- the “legacy” streetcar system ($490m),
- subway capacity ($1.4b),
- bus fleet ($607m),
- accessibility ($356m) and
- fare collection ($87m).
The budget notes that a key reason for the long term shortfall in available vs required funding is the windup of various federal and provincial funding schemes. While it is true, to a point, that the gas tax revenue does not fully cover many projects, there is also the basic fact that the TTC’s need for capital investment is growing much faster than inflation due to the concurrent requirements of so much of the system for reconstruction and expansion.
“Subway capacity” in the list above includes only $1m for the Bloor-Yonge expansion project for a study to evaluate whether and how throughput at this station can be increase. Although this is a small amount, it is a critical part of the overall scheme because if the BY bottleneck is not eliminated, many other expenditures will not be necessary or possible on YUS, and the money will have to be diverted to another project such as the DRL. The long list of YUS improvements ends with the note:
All of these improvements are needed to address subway capacity requirements before the alternative of building a Downtown Relief Line would be warranted.
This presumes, of course, that the many improvements are (a) feasible and (b) cost effective, issues that have not yet been addressed by TTC management.
The full Capital Budget is a huge document, and I will report in more detail on it after I have a chance to review it.
The Wheel Trans Budget includes a subsidy increase of about 10% over 2010 reflecting a quickly growing level of demand.
Updated January 11, 2011 at 4:15 pm: Karen Stintz, Chair of the TTC, has confirmed that the proposed fare increase will not go forward. The $24-million it would have raised be will be funded with $16m from the City of Toronto and $8m of internal TTC efficiencies.
This raises the question of whether the $7m worth of service cuts were really needed given that there was an equivalent amount available to help offset the fare hike.
All of this has the feeling of smoke and mirrors, a manufactured crisis, and an avoidance of real decisions about the future of TTC funding and service.
Updated January 11, 2011 at 1:35 pm: The Star reports that the proposed fare increase has been cancelled, and money will be found elsewhere in the City budget to cover the cost. It appears that the optics of a fare increase that matched the annual value of the just-ended vehicle registration fee were less than palatable to the pols at City Hall. Mayor Ford was much displeased by the proposal when he spoke to the press yesterday.
Updated January 11, 2011 at 1:10 pm: The Star’s Google Map of the routes affected by service cuts is available here.
Updated January 10, 2011 at 9:30 pm: I have added a table showing in detail the service cuts proposed for March 27, 2011 together with a comparison of the service levels on the affected routes in April 2008 before the Ridership Growth Strategy improvements were implemented.
I will be expanding this article with more information later today (January 10) and as events unfold over the coming week.
[Original article below]
The TTC has announced a proposed fare increase of 10 cents in the adult fare with comparable changes to some other fare classes to be effective February 1, 2011. Together with this increase, a large number of service cuts to lightly-used periods of operation on many routes will be implemented at the end of March.
Oddly enough, the TTC says that it will take several months to identify routes requiring additional service, but had no trouble finding a three-page list of routes for cutbacks. We have often heard how the TTC could not improve peak period service due to its vehicle shortage, and it will be interesting to see which routes and periods actually benefit from these cuts.
The fare proposal table linked above shows the proposed fares, the percentage increases for each class of fare, and the fare multiple for each class of pass.
The TTC will meet on Wednesday, January 12 at 9:00 am in Committee Room 2 at City Hall to consider staff presentations on the Operating and Capital budgets. These budgets, together with any amendments by the Commission, will be forwarded to the City’s Budget Committee for its meeting of Friday, January 14.
City 2011 Operating Budget Presentation
City 2011 Capital Budget Presentation
I will comment on these in more detail in updates, but a few points are worth noting.
Operating budget (see presentation at page 31):
- TTC’s “conventional system” operating subsidy will fall from about $430-million in the 2010 budget to about $413m in 2011.
- TTC’s Wheeltrans operating subsidy will rise from $82.7m in the 2010 budget to $91.0m in 2011.
- Considering that the TTC actually underspent its 2010 allocation by $59m, this is a net increase relative to 2010 actual.
Capital budget (see presentation at pages 37-41):
- Funding for the new streetcars and associated works (notably the new and renovated carhouses) remains in the TTC’s budget because of commitments already made. However, it is no secret that Mayor Ford is opposed to continued use of streetcars and spoke during his campaign of phasing them out. Current budget pressures coupled with a desire to explore possibilities for better capital subsidies at the provincial and federal level may delay and thereby threaten this.
- There is a $2.3-billion shortfall between the TTC’s currently identified list of capital projects and the known funding available for them. Which projects will be “in” and which “out”, at least in the short term, should be clarified by the TTC’s budget presentation on January 12.
- The budget contains no money for Transit City as this is now part of the Metrolinx project portfolio.
At a press statement before today’s budget launch, Mayor Ford spoke strongly about the need for all city departments and agencies to reign in their spending in line with his priorities.
“If they’re unable to manage effectively in the best interest of the taxpayers, then we will have to find new managers that can.”
The full text of the Mayor’s remarks is not yet online.
Ford is unhappy with the proposed fare increase, and was quite clear that he wishes to avoid it. This puts his Transit Commissioners in an intriguing position. Do they approve the staff recommendation and go against the Mayor, leaving any dirty work to the Budget Committee and Council, or do they find other cuts to avoid a fare increase?
At a media briefing, City Manager Joseph Pennachetti, was clear that staff at the City and TTC would prefer a clear, multi-year plan for fares so that the TTC would know what revenue they should expect.
If adult fares rise by 10 cents, a typical rider will face $40-50 in additional costs per year. Oddly enough, this is a good chunk of the saving just extended to motorists who no longer bear the vehicle registration tax of $60 abolished on January 1.
Updated January 10, 2011 at 9:30 pm:
The table linked here details the service cuts to be implemented effective March 27, 2011. For each affected route and time period, the table shows the level of service as it was in April 2008 before the Ridership Growth Strategy kicked in as well as the service now operating. Where the 2008 headway is blank, this is a service that was added with RGS. Otherwise, the service already existed, although in some cases at pitiful headways up to 60 minutes.
Note that in some cases I have estimated the number of vehicles saved because only part of a route or a branch is eliminated, and I had to make an educated guess at what would remain. When the official service change notice is issued by the TTC, I will publish a condensed version of it in my usual manner.
Now that the TTC is abandoning the premise that service is operated at all hours on all routes, we will return to the “service standards” methodology for evaluating whether routes should have additional operating periods. This methodology purports to establish the customers gained per dollar expended and balances this value between competing service change proposals.
The TTC claims that the value is dimensionless and, therefore, not subject to inflation even though it is self-evident that the amount of service provided per dollar goes down every year and, therefore, the cost of a given addition goes up while the passengers attracted stay the same. There is a flaw in their methodology that has not yet been publicly acknowledged, and the supposed lack of variation in the screening value is caused by changes in the way it has been calculated. This will become a major issue in future service planning as the “formula” purports to show what we should do with service.
Steve Munro 
I too am finding the news disheartening. In a very short time it seems many of the gains we were making in improving transit service have been erased. Whatever complaints one might have had with Miller, he was not just a was a strong supporter of transit, but also a regular transit rider and likely could empathise with the challenges TTC riders faced, especially those in the suburban parts of the city. Comments like “they can take the bus” are easy to say for those have their own car and don’t have to face a long commute on 2 or 3 (or more) buses, especially if their workplace is not downtown.
Not sure if it’s worth challenging the mayor or members of council who don’t use the TTC to do so for a week, though they would have plenty of excuses not to do so. I wouldn’t blame them – a coworker of mine has endlessly complained about service on the Yonge line (he lives in Markham and drives to the nearest subway station and dearly wishes we were still at our old office location near York Mills and Don Mills, where we could quickly drive and park for free. Between the cost of parking and gas, he feel he has no choice but to take TTC (GO is too costly). I find it frustrating that while other cities expand and improve their transit systems we continue to dither, make plans only to scrap them in favour of the next “flavour of the month”, with little if anything progress. Such a waste.
Phil
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The whole point is that for far too long, the city of Toronto has been run without sufficient checks to its balance sheet. You would have things such as untendered contracts, sweetheart deals to friends, cronyism, and a complete lack of oversight.
I’m definitely not agreeing with the fare increase but I don’t have many qualms about the service cuts, especially if the savings from these cuts are used to bolster busy service on other routes. To me, the ability to provide sufficient rush hour service is more essential then running empty buses on routes that don’t warrant the service.
As for such things like policing, ambulance, and garbage collection, the first two are considered essential, while the third is not. The sooner they contract out garbage collection, the better. It will be a good day for Toronto once the sweetheart contract to garbagemen is ended.
Steve: The fare increase will bring $24-million in 2011, somewhat more on an annualized basis. How would you offset this if fares were frozen? What would you do in 2012? 2013?
The TTC needs more vehicles (or better reliability on its existing ones) before it can increase peak period service, and the marginal cost of peak service is higher both because of fleet effects and because of poor operator utilization (better off peak service tends to lead to more crews where the ratio of driving time to pay time is high).
The City Clerk has already reported that the vast majority of “untendered” contracts were given to bona fide sole source vendors. I really do get tired of hearing arguments that have already been debunked trotted out like this.
The single biggest case was, of course, the new subway cars. Ford’s claims of savings from a Siemens proposal over Bombardier were double what the actual numbers were. In any event, Queen’s Park is paying the freight for a good chunk of this, and the idea of shipping jobs overseas to a low-cost plant in China just isn’t going to happen. As for the new streetcars, there was a tender, and Siemens’ price was 50% higher than Bombardier’s.
Yes, I thought the deal for the restaurant at the Beach did not pass the smell test. That said, it does not establish that this is the City’s standard way of doing business.
We are hearing a lot from Mayor Ford about savings that don’t amount to the shavings in a pencil sharpener — tens of thousands on a base of ten billion — while he gets most of his “saving” from one time surpluses and revenue growth, not from spending cuts. Some of the cuts that are in the budget were actually started under the Miller administration, not Ford’s. Remember the rhetoric about how we have a “spending problem”? Ford is not moving to address this, buying him time to stay popular, but he will have to get serious for the 2012 budget and following years.
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As a YRT route, it is up to YRT to run it or not, but the TTC has some say in what the cost of it will be. If YRT does not want to pay the price, they have to find an alternative, which is to cut service but still have the TTC operate the route.
Last year when YRT wanted to extend the operation of what was being run as the Don Mills 25D route another half kilometre or so north of 16th Avenue, the cost to do this by the TTC was probably more than YRT expected. I suspect it would have required another bus on the route to keep the same frequency. In that case, YRT cancelled having the TTC operate the route and started running it themselves as the Leslie 90B route.
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The methodology for counting riders on a bus system where only a minority leave a trace in the farebox, such trace being undifferentiable into a real count of individual users, causes me to doubt this entire exercise. I strongly dispute that TTC knows how many people use any particular bus route at all, let alone at specific times.
I am aware that drivers are sometimes expected to estimate.
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I had yesterday off (as my “normal” off day: Sunday/Monday) as per my crew. I had several appointments to attend to in the morning, an as such wasn’t able to analyze the budget announcements (particularly the TTC portion) until yesterday afternoon. Some of the service reductions leave me scratching my head (based on some of the comments that I have read here and elsewhere), but some do make sense to me. For example: 167 Pharmacy North being cut back to peak period Mon – Fri service only. I have driven this route on Saturdays and daily non-peak mornings. There is very little ridership at these times and many times I have had the bus completely to myself from Sheppard Ave. northbound and sometimes from Steeles to Sheppard southbound.
On another note however, I have spent some time trying to figure out the nature of the TTC announcement and the reaction of Rob Ford and Karen Stintz to it. It would seem that the chair wasn’t in the loop prior to the TTC announcement! This is most odd, to say the least. If I wanted to look at this as a type of conspiracy, I could develop the following theory very easily: this is the first step to the TTC playing “hardball” for the upcoming contract negotiations. If the union doesn’t accept a wage freeze (or rollback) and give up major benefit concessions, the TTC will be forced to raise fares and do additional route cutting/reductions.
This just in (at 12:53 pm) CP24 announcing that “sources” say “no TTC fare hike”. Karen Stintz to make announcement at 2:00 pm.
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Steve: What about what seems to be an appalling SAFETY record for the TTC?
CBC News
Toronto Star
Maybe they need the fee increase to do something about it. Today’s pedestrian death by TTC streetcar should be a lightening rod for mainstream media to be looking into this. Why does TTC Chair Karen Stintz tout ‘Cleanliness’ as a priority?
With regards to TTC Budget, I think that TTC management is top heavy and needs to be cut back. Who audits this?
Steve: To be fair, another recent spectacular accident involving a streetcar and a Greyhound bus resulted in charges against the bus driver. This suggests that it was not the TTC’s fault in that case.
Oddly enough, also on the Star’s website is an article about a woman hit by an automobile on the sidewalk on Dundas Street near Bay. “Safety” applies to all drivers, not just to the TTC. I regularly see unsafe and aggressive driving by motorists.
On the “cleanliness” front, my feeling about service quality as the most important part of “customer service” are well known. We will have clean stations, but crappy service. Stintz is echoing Mayor Ford’s bluster from his press statement yesterday morning.
The City is planning a thorough review of its budgets during the coming year by outside consultants. I do not know whether this will extend to the TTC or the Police which are the two largest agencies in the City’s budget.
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@Ken Wood – do you also blame GO Transit when pedestrians are killed on the tracks?
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I completely agree with Joe. I don’t think the TTC has a clue when it comes to ridership. If they did provide statistics of ridership on the routes that are being cut I’d be very skeptical if this is a true representation of how many people use these routes or if they were made up numbers to justify the cuts.
Steve: I expect to get the detailed numbers from the TTC at the Wednesday meeting.
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Let’s face it, if Toronto didn’t expand through car-inspired sprawl into Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke, we would not have this problem. Those 3 boroughs are simply a drain on the TTC and City hall, given how they were designed and built for car use and did not think of reserving right-of-way corridors for rapid transit to serve the new communities. Look at the Calgary Northeast LRT line extension, the areas it will serve are newly built sprawl, BUT at least at the time of construction it reserved an LRT corridor through the middle of the neighbourhood to run the LRT service on, and now, as a result, Martindale and Saddletowne stations will be able to serve those communities, greatly contributing to the reduction of car use instead of a typical sprawl neighbourhood where transit isn’t even considered.
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I realize that by the TTC’s findings, the 101 Parc Downsview Park route may very well be a loser in terms of riders and revenue, and indeed, has scarcely been mentioned in all the kerfuffle. But as a user of said route, I have to speak in its defence.
The route travels from Downsview Station, and its only purpose is to loop into Downsview Park and back again. At the best of times, it runs every 20 minutes, and no joke, is usually a single bus and driver making said loop. Most often, I am one of perhaps 10 people at a time on board. At times, however, the bus is rammed, most often when Toronto Roller Derby, of whom I am a fan, and with whom I often volunteer (on occasion I have filled in when the regular announcer has been unavailable) holds its bouts, which are usually on Saturday nights. Yes, many people drive up there, but plenty of the league’s skaters, not to mention numerous fans, lack cars or rides and for them that is the only way to make it to the venue. The skaters pay to play (in the form of dues) and for many, the extra costs in cab fare or car ownership/rental is not an option. (I once cabbed it from the subway – $13!) The same goes for fans. At our most recent championship, in November, we had 1200 people up there and when that 101 bus pulled in it was packed to a full crushload each time; when the bout ended, people waited for two or three passes of the bus to get back to the subway.
Now, I know full well this is not how the bus constantly operates, most nights, when the skaters – all women by the way, with the exception of some of the referees – head up for weeknight practices, the bus, like I said, may have a dozen or fewer on board. But roller derby is not the only thing happening at The Hangar: the indoor soccer fields are heavily used, and they hold other sporting events up there. The bus is frequently used by kids and families, some from the very same communities in which Mayor Ford coaches football. Cutting off access to this venue will not only affect businesses (The Hangar and its tenants, such as ToRD, not to mention the Go Karting place, the climbing gym, etc) but also affect youth and adults who use this facility for recreation and fitness.
One of the mantras about TTC routes used to be something along the lines of how many minutes’ walk a destination was from transit. Well sure, a stop on Sheppard Avenue may be 20 minutes from The Hangar, but that 20 minute walk is:
* poorly lit and surrounded by dark warehouses
* mainly along roads without sidewalks
* on the other side of an in-use rail line with trains that breeze by
* results in waiting along a dark, isolated stretch of Sheppard that frankly feels unsafe.
I would wager that the audits of the route – surely they have done them – will show that the route is more heavily used during evenings and weekends than on weekdays, aside from the summer, when there are more public daytime events occurring in the park. Surely a compromise may be had that alters the schedule accordingly. Or perhaps there is a way to interline the 101 with another route that terminates at Downsview station. Or maybe a branch of the Sheppard West bus can be created that periodically, during certain days and times, cuts into the park. But cutting the route all together is simply wrong.
What galls me the most is Karen Stintz’s insistence, as quoted in the Sun yesterday, that “no one is losing their bus”. Well, the 100+ members of Toronto Roller Derby are, in addition to the hundreds of fans that we count on, not to mention the various other people who work at and take part in events and facilities in the Park. Chair Stintz is welcome to walk from the bus stop on Sheppard to The Hangar at 10 pm and then tell us that she doesn’t support a bus route there.
Andrew Wencer
(aka Mr Whistler)
Steve: You may have seen Chair Stintz on today’s news backing away from cutting the 101 and saying “we didn’t know there was a roller rink there”. So nice to know that the TTC’s planning is so up to date, and that they managed to finger the route as one that should not operate even though it is, at specific times, very well used. This is what happens when an edict “cut some service” comes down from the top and a formula, one that may may even make sense, gets blindly applied.
I will be intrigued to see how many Councillors show up at the TTC meeting with special pleadings for other service cuts where the effect is underestimated or not even understood by TTC management.
Of course, if the process had actually allowed time for feedback and correction, rather than being rammed through to meet the Mayor’s unreasonable budget deadlines, this problem would have been caught without the sense of last minute panic.
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That Star Google Map is pathetic. If I can make a better one will you share it with your readers?
Steve: Sure. I linked to it because it has been referenced in a comment left by Sean Marshall.
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Were the cuts to routes considered in isolation?
For example the 15-Evans and 110A-Islington South (via Horner) both serve the Alderwood community. If only one of those routes were being cut you would still have the option of taking the other bus (and walking a few extra blocks.)
Similarly the Royal York South bus that goes to the Queensway and Grand Avenue is being cut but so is the Queensway bus so you don’t have the option of transferring at Royal York and the Queensway.
Steve: I suspect that all they looked at was riding counts, not the effect on the resulting network.
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Since the fare increase has been cancelled (at least for now) this question is moot but why was the increase going to be 10 cents on an adult token (4%) instead of 5 cents (2%) which would be closer to the inflation rate?
Steve: It has nothing to do with the inflation rate. To begin with, the TTC used about $59-million less of its subsidy in 2010 than was budgetted. The City in its 2011 budget proposed that the TTC get about $17m less subsidy for the “conventional” system than it budgetted in 2010, although this is still about $42m more than they actually used.
However, the total TTC budget is roughly $1.4-billion, and 5% of that is $70m. TTC costs in 2011 will go up 3% for inflation, but they will also rise because some materials costs rise at a faster rate, notably fuel which was cheaper than expected in 2010 due to the world-wide recession, but probably won’t be in 2011. Also with service growth due to higher riding, more vehicle hours and kilometres will be operated. The 5% factor roughly covers the combined effect of all of this.
Note that the $24m that was to come from fares plus the $42m net increase in subsidy totals $66m. This is close enough to $70m to be equal within the limits of back-of-the-envelope calculations.
The powers that be have now decided to find that money partly in the City budget (in effect restoring all of the 2010 budget allocation for the 2011 year) and partly in as-yet unspecified cuts elsewhere within the TTC’s own operations. It will be intriguing to see where they find this.
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From Torontoist, here’s a map by Laurence Lui that shows the routes graphically. It’s also not perfect (where branches are impacted, it shows the removal on the entire route, not just the branch, leaving the impression of greater impact on the trunk — see Steeles West for example). But it’s ten times better than what you see on that Star map.
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Steve: Sure. I linked to it because it has been referenced in a comment left by Sean Marshall.
By who now? 🙂
Steve: Sorry about that. I had just been reading an article of his.
It’s OK, Sean Marshall is one of the big kahunas from Spacing, right? I should feel honoured.
I agree the map should show the actual bus routes, and not just the feeder stations. If only because it will look rather similar to a map that came out in November, something to do about electoral support of various candidates…
The Ford Fanatics are in full throttle about the budgetary shell game played today, crowing on the Star about how great a fiscal manager he is, and wait until next year when he really sticks it to the civic workers. In the same breath, they both excoriate Mayor Miller for “overtaxing the hard-working taxpayers” in creating his surplus, and defend Ford for coming up with his “honey pot”, as Adam Vaughan put it on CityNews. Looking forward (not) to Sue-Ann Levy’s love letter to Ford tomorrow in the The Paper above No Frills.
Steve: Ford a great fiscal manager? Most of his budget fixes come from one time revenue and increases that depend on a continued strong economy. Any “manager” who holds a press conference, timed so that there could be no questions, gives a statement that sounds like he is still running for election, and then threatens senior city staff with firing, only to back down a day later on both the TTC and the police budgets, well, that’s no managerial genius.
As the detailed budget review plays out, we will see how much more the Mayor and his staff don’t understand, or don’t want to reveal.
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“Within the budget itself, an $8m saving comes from halving the workforce assigned to Customer Service initiatives (see page 8 of the linked pdf).”
Wait, what?
After “stop the gravy train,” the two words most frequently uttered by His Worshipfulness during the campaign were “Customer Service.” So much for that.
Also, perhaps I’m missing something, but I find it amusing that the budget document suggests that it’s a good thing that the TTC relies on farebox revenue to a greater extent than virtually every comparable city. I suppose if your goal is to encourage people to drive their cars, that’s true.
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I looked a little more closely at the implications on interlining after reading comments half-buses and noticing one example myself where half of an interlined route was removed, leaving the other half with only 1.5 buses. From your original PDF, Steve, I’ve assembled the following list of routes where a currently interlined route will be short half a bus for at least part of the week after its counterpart is cut.
– 5 Avenue Road: cancelled M-F early evening, while 56 Leaside remains
– 43B Kennedy: cancelled M-F late evening, Sat. late evening, and all day Sun., while the 134 Progress remains
– 51 Leslie: cancelled M-F late evening, Sat. late evening, and Sun. all evening, while the 61 Avenue Road North will continue operating all periods except late night Sun.
– 115 Silver Hills: cancelled M-F all evening, and all day Sat. and Sun., while the 122 Graydon Hall will only be cancelled in the late evenings
– 130 Middlefield: cancelled M-F late evening and Sat. late evening, while the 132 Milner remains
– 167 Pharmacy North: cancelled M-F midday while the 24A Victoria Park remains
The question is how the half buses will be made up on the portion of the interlined route that remains. Will they see a cut too? Will they have an extra half bus added to the route with extra layover time (partially negating the cost savings of the cut)? Will they be interlined with different routes that in turn will have headways cut? I suspect the TTC doesn’t know — as you say, they may have just supplied their list of poorly-performing routes, figuring that they would work out the details if it came down to it.
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There were comments about the accuracy of the counts, particularly the 101 Downsview Park. My understanding is that the TTC sends out surveyors (students?) to ride the routes periodically, capturing ons and offs at each stop, in addition to static counts at key points on-street estimating the load on each vehicle. (I have done a few of these myself for HSR.) You wouldn’t capture the loads that Andrew Wencer talks about on the 101 Downsview Park unless the surveyors happened to be there on a day when an event was occurring. Otherwise, you’ll see lots of zeroes, ones and twos. This may not be bad — the idea is to get an indication of “typical” usage, so the question is whether those occasional surge loads are considered “typical” or not.
(I recall a story a few years back where the TTC was sued by a number of riders that were injured in a collision on the 64 Main north of the Danforth subway, but it was discovered that they were accomplices to an insurance fraud scheme, along with the motorist that caused the collision. Part of the evidence was the TTC’s ridership data that showed that that particular bus had been operating with an unusually high load, and that the number of people seeking compensation was significantly higher than the number of people that normally would be traveling on that part of the route.)
You could get around this by talking to the operators instead of relying on statistics. You can only get statistics on isolated days, but the operators see the route every day. This would mean having to make adjustments based on qualitative rather than quantitative evidence — an operator saying, “I could drive this route all night and still be able to count the total number of riders on two hands”, or “This route is usually dead, but there are occasions when an event is occurring and it’s standing room only”, instead of “Route xx operates with an average of 2.7 boardings per hour during the late evenings Monday through Friday.”
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I think everyone has been fooled by all this, my feeling that all this has been orchestrated by the mayor as a continued attack on the Unions. First make the service essential, make a big press announcement about fares going up and then not …. and now it it sets up a future confrontation between the union and the passengers. Union is going to go cap in hand for their raises … the mayor is just going to simply say “you want a raise, then you tell your passengers how much more service cuts you want and how much to raise fares.” The union has been placed on the back foot here, they have to tread very carefully here otherwise the drivers will be using those screens a lot more often. Classic right wing ploy … divide and conquer. Already seeing taunts in comments posted in The Star etc about $100K operators, let the games begin.
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I’ve really got to agree with Steve on this one. As a professional Accountant, I can assert that it is my professional opinion that Mr. Ford’s financial plans are mathematically impossible to achieve. If 2+2=7 his plans may have had a hope, but it doesn’t so they don’t.
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Steve: “The TTC claims that the [minimum customers gained per dollar expended] value is dimensionless and, therefore, not subject to inflation even though it is self-evident that the amount of service provided per dollar goes down every year and, therefore, the cost of a given addition goes up while the passengers attracted stay the same. There is a flaw in their methodology … This will become a major issue in future service planning as the “formula” purports to show what we should do with service.”
That is an excellent point. Based on your also excellent older post at https://stevemunro.ca/?p=53, the methodology means that service is unwarranted if it costs more than $4.35 to attract a new rider to the system. Surely that number should be adjusted for inflation.
Even worse, the methodology places no value on the time saved and added convenience of a new route for *existing* passengers on the system, which makes no sense. That kind of thinking must result from creating a transit system that is so dependent on fare revenues — and so on new customers — to survive.
Does this perhaps explain why the TTC is so little interested in the DRL? Most rides on a DRL East would be diverted from existing surface routes or YUS-to-BD connections, they would not be new passengers generating new revenue for TTC. But those passengers would be saving the time and inconvenience of the Y/B transfer, as well as freeing up capacity for new riders north of Finch, and a transit authority with the right incentives would place a value on those savings.
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While I can understand reducing some frequency of service if the ridership does not warrant it (say by cutting back from 15 minute service to 20, for example), it is important to not cut to the point that few, if any, will continue to use the service, thus making the need to cancel the service altogether become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In addition to that, looking at the effect on the whole network is very important. Just imaging going through a building to find studs in load bearing walls that are not supporting the full weight that the average stud carries. Sure, they are ‘underperforming’, but they still contribute to the structural integrity of the entire building the same way that ‘underperforming’ transit routes contribute to the operation of the whole network in some way. There may be the odd one that can be removed, but not as many as one might first assume!
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I find it quite surprising that the disabled-accessible east-west routes that serve as an alternate to the BD subway are going to see cuts. Changes to 26 Dupont, 30 Lambton, 62 Mortimer and 43 Kennedy would represent a nearly city-wide denial of service to the mobility-impaired should any elevators be inoperable. Now how’s THAT for optics?
One other twist is that the change to 80 Queensway may actually affect my career path with my employer. If I don’t have the Keele Station terminus available at all times on this route then I will likely not seek a promotion/move to a newly opening retail location in Etobicoke. The 80 Queensway as it exists now would be a critical alternate route if there are problems on the subway. I was even considering making it my primary route. If I have to buy a car to guarantee this commute then the financial gains from the promotion would be wasted. Ironically the service cuts could prevent me from improving my financial situation and my future ability to contribute more tax dollars to the city budget. I suspect a very large portion of the suburban residents in Toronto are facing a similar ‘financial gridlock’, not just the traffic-based one their crowded buses are stuck in.
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Thanks for pointing out the news story, Steve. It was likely airing as I was writing you last night. It sounds like word has gotten out there, and with any luck, the administration will learn from the public about making blanket decisions based on flawed statistics. Given that the lighting-quick plan to make a decision right away has been postponed until next month, I wonder if that bodes well or ill for this and other routes on the chopping block; I fear that the Ford government operates on knee-jerk timing, and reacts similarly. With the immediate response to this plan we’ve had immediate back-tracking; with time to let things simmer, I wonder if they’re more likely to quietly go ahead with their plans as-is next month.
(On a side note, I saw myself in the background of the bout footage used, so I can say that you and I appeared in the same news story. Huzzah!)
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This morning provides an excellent example of everything that is wrong with transportation planning in Toronto. The storm, quite frankly, was not that bad. 5 cm? Big deal. This should be a completely normal, routine winter storm that we can expect to get several of each winter.
And yet, the City completely failed to clear the streets so that it was safe for me to cycle to work this morning. So I was forced onto the TTC. Plenty of other cities experience worse snow in the winter, and somehow are able to cope with keeping people moving. See, for example, Copenhagen is continuing to move despite a series of storms that were much more serious than anything we’ve got so far.
This morning the Sheppard subway was absolutely jammed full. Looks like I wasn’t the only person forced off the road. What absolute folly in running off-peak service during peak hours. The cost of running a few more trains during peak hours is insignificant compared to the fixed capital costs of building the subway and its stations and the fixed operating costs of manning and maintaining the stations and systems. We don’t need ATC to lower headways on Sheppard.
And then the sardine-can cattle-car Sheppard train unloaded onto the sardine-can cattle-car Yonge train. In spite of a lot of cramming, pushing and shoving, not everyone was able to get onto the Yonge train.
What an unpleasant experience.
It is, of course, all due to the folly, greed and irresponsibility of politicians and the people who elect them. After a huge amount of letter-writing, lobbying and persuading (not just by me! I claim no more than my tiny sliver of credit as part of the effort) the Richmond Hill GO line was put onto the MoveOntario 2020 plan. But even there it is only with 15 minute headways during peak hours – and no mention at all of fixing the current absurd Oriole/Leslie Station connection (or lack thereof). And just because something is in the plan doesn’t mean it is going to happen!
In a City not dominated by folly, greed and irresponsibility, that would have happened in 2002 with the opening of Leslie Station. Then people going downtown would have a fast and convenient subway connection to get on the GO train and be whisked downtown in speed and comfort. Local subway passengers, like myself who gets off at Eglinton, would be able to get onto a non-sardine-tin subway to get to work.
Sigh…
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I think it is time the bashing of the suburbs when it comes to transit comes to an end.
The truth is that the majority of TTC ridership comes from the suburbs.
The TTC’s success story of getting people on transit, comes from the suburbs.
Suburban TTC bus routes for the most part have just as good a cost recovery and sometimes better cost recovery than their inner city counterparts.
The success of the TTC has come from providing a viable and good service across inner city and suburban areas. And we are not going to continue to have success if we keep pitting the inner city and suburban against each other.
Could the design in Scarborough or Etobicoke be better? Sure it can. But it is not like the designs are that hostile to transit service. For the most part transit was thought off in the designs of most areas.
The area were transit is really going to have to watch out in mind is the inner city. The new residents of the inner city are much less transit friendly and much more happy to live a car centric lifestyle than previous residents.
And I would not be surprised if it in the inner city where we see transit usage drop and car usage increase. Because everyone I know who relies on their car, lives in inner city of Toronto. Not in the suburbs.
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If the TTC is unwilling to raise fares, why are service cuts still on the table? Everyone knows that service cuts drive away more ridership than fare increases.
Also, I have a feeling that many of these service cuts are because of low ridership caused by poor service (30 minute frequencies especially when alternative routes run more frequently) not lack of demand. Anyone have vehicle traffic counts for the areas affected to confirm this?
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Thanks for posting this, Steve – I exported the PDF information about route cuts back to Excel. Filtering to only show Mon-Fri cuts, I get totals of 2,600 customers per day affected by these weekday cuts, 658,569 customers affected per year and 126,086 customers lost.
Is it fair for me to total up the columns like this? I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
Steve: I agree with your methodology. What is such a shame is that the TTC presumes such a low rate of customer loss. These folks must really like to walk.
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One of the proposed cutbacks would be with the 74 Mt. Pleasant bus. No service after 7:00 p.m., every day (proposed).
Boy, did that route ever go downhill. It used to be the east leg of the St. Clair streetcar. It even had 24-hour service from the St. Clair streetcar. When it was split into a separate Mt. Pleasant streetcar (east of Yonge Street) in 1975, the service ran from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m., but had night service was provided by the St. Clair streetcar route. That lasted until 1976, when it was replaced by the 76 Mt. Pleasant trolley bus.
From 24-hour service to no service after 7:00 pm. Shows what happens when you replace streetcars with buses, as well.
Pitiful.
Steve: I think a more subtle analysis would look at the way service was systematically cut back on the bus route, in part because the buses could not make the same running times as the streetcar, and so they just kept stretching the headways. Meanwhile folks adjusted and either gave up on the TTC or took the east-west routes to the subway on Eglinton, Davisville and St. Clair. It’s a classic downward spiral.
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I thought the 100K operator was a myth. And then I looked at the 2009 sunshine list.
All I can say is…..WOW……there are a LOT of people on the TTC, with the City and with the Cops making more then 100K.
The Zoo has 11, and all those positions kind of make sense to make more then everybody else.
The TTC list is in the hundreds, as is the police.
I’m sure there are circumstances behind every one of these; but that many operators and constables are not people getting one off pension type pay outs.
Steve: The TTC list is mainly management and senior technical folks. There are also operators and tradespeople, but their high total pay is due to overtime work. As I have written here often, it is cheaper to pay someone to work some overtime than it is to have a separate employee who carries all of the cost and overhead even if they don’t work a full day.
As for the police, they spend a lot of time working overtime on court appearances, and paid duty for traffic management is likely overtime too. We may argue that one does not need a police constable for this sort of work, but that’s not going to eliminate all the members of the $100k club.
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I am still trying to understand how the TTC arrives at its ridership figures for a route especially since it has been years since I have seen checkers riding a bus. Their chart you have just added for cuts 15 or fewer boardings per service hour. 73B Royal York via LaRose. Shows Sunday 1900-2200 save 1 vehicle. . It leaves the subway every 30 minutes. 16×2=32 I have seen a number of times about 32+ passengers on 20.15 departure. Something doesn’t add up. I think they are pretty clueless as to just what their ridership is at any given time. Excellent example is the acknowledged complete unawareness of the riders using the Downsview Park route as they were unaware of the presence of a major facility in the Park which riders say needs more vehicles at certain times. Seems to me they need to get their act together. (Fat chance!)
Steve: The 73B carries 41 people in the three hour period you cite, and so the average per vehicle hour is 13.67, very close to 15 before we even reach the point of challenging the counts. This methodology has flaws that I will explore in a separate article.
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Brent,
It is unlikely that the TTC will improve other routes to account for the scenario that you have described if the proposed cuts are approved on February 2nd.
The amount of savings required for reallocation to Fall 2011 seems to be more of a moving target than we were first led to believe. However, it has to come from operations, from a budget forecasting perspective, if material savings cannot be found in overhead, no level of government steps into provide additional subsidy, and/or fares are not increased. As you alluded to, adding “half a bus” to maintain frequency on an interlined service would partially negate the savings that the TTC has been directed to achieve.
Incidentally, the 5 Avenue Road and the 61 Avenue Road North buses (in addition to the 32 Eglinton West) are briefly interlined west of Yonge Street. The 51 Leslie and 56 Leaside are interlined as far east as Laird Drive / Brentcliffe Road (in addition to the 34 Eglinton East, 54 Lawrence East, 100 Flemingdon Park, and 103 Mt. Pleasant North).
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I found an interesting justification for low-ridership routes in the Star. Royson James wrote quoting the TTC’s Mitch Stambler:
“They were introduced as valued, credible transportation options and alternatives to driving a car. They were to help people adopt transit as part of their lifestyle. We clearly said they would not generate huge ridership or carry huge volumes but they would allow citizens to count on transit wherever and whenever they need it.”
Royson James continues: “And that’s what they have done. Off-peak ridership is growing faster than rush-hour service and accounts for more riders. ”
“We achieved what we set out to do,” Stambler said.
So that why I spend over $1200 per year in Metropasses.
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I don’t know if Councillor Fletcher was genuinely taken by surprise or not. She might have been playing politics for the City Hall press corps.
That said, I don’t agree with insinuating that Councillor Fletcher is a moron or, generally, any of the name calling that has slowly started to creep into the discourse of this site recently. It really does nothing to advance anyone’s position to engage in this most childish form of rhetoric.
If you disagree with someone or are displeased by their actions, or inactions, fine. But disagreeing and being disrespectful are not synonymous with one another. I am certain that, face to face, you wouldn’t dare call her, or anyone else, a moron.
Steve: I think the TTC budget, along with others being considered this week, are a wakeup call to those Councillors who thought they would let Rob Ford off without a fight on the vehicle registration tax.
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It is a valid concern if accident rates increase. Is there a problem with the training of drivers? Is the TTC hiring too many rookies too fast and not supervising them properly?
Daily I ride streetcars and buses where I see extremely bored drivers chatting on cell phones, reading things and generally not paying attention. If there were driving a car, they could be charged.
Mark: Yes I would blame GO transit if something they did lead to pedestrian deaths. TTC is seeing far more accidents than GO. What’s your point?
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It’s ironic that these infrequent services are being cut just before the Nextbus system is going to be rolled out for buses. Knowing, with confidence, when an infrequent bus is going to arrive makes them much easier to use and should boost their popularity.
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Jason wrote about “…the name calling that has slowly started to creep onto the discourse of this site…”
Kevin’s comment:
In my opinion, this is largely a response to the logically incoherent proposals of many politicians. When their budget proposals just don’t add up unless 2+2=7, then it is reasonable to conclude that the politician is either ethically or intellectually challenged.
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Steve wrote:
“I regularly see unsafe and aggressive driving by motorists.”
Kevin’s comment:
Me too. In my opinion, TTC drivers as a group are the safest and most courteous drivers on the road.
This does not mean that there are not exceptions. Unfortunately, there were one or two bus drivers who had the belief that it was acceptable to pass me too closely, pull right in front of me and slam on their brakes to stop at the bus stop.
The previous sentence used the past tense, because I wrote down the licence plate numbers and the TTC acted upon my complaints. The bus drivers on my route don’t do that any more.
Car drivers, on the other hand, commit serious Criminal Code offences such as “Dangerous Driving” (punishable by up to five years in jail) on a routine basis every day. My many complaints to Toronto Police have not resulted in any noticeable change of behaviour.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I am currently planning upon getting a video camera to mount on my handlebars. With any luck, this video will help the Toronto Police to get these violent, dangerous criminal car drivers the lengthy jail time that they so richly deserve.
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I think your point about Miller needs some qualification: Miller took transit, yes. But, if my understanding is correct, he commuted via subway, not buses, and not streetcars. Personally, I have my doubts that he could (or did) “empathise with the challenges TTC riders faced, especially those in the suburban parts of the city”. It’s a common theme I’ve noted (and have been observing for some time now), that any time a “pro-transit” City Councillor is listed as taking “transit” themselves, that transit is almost invariably the subway, or at most 1 bus+subway – never more than one surface transfer. My own former councillor, who was a TTC Commissioner, was infamous for being Queen of the Limo (that and having the highest expense account…). I’d be surprised if she’d ever been on the 501 herself – other than the occasional photo-op. And the infamous Mr. Giambrone who was listed as being both “pro-transit” and a transit user oddly rang up an astoundingly large taxi/limo bill himself.
But overall I agree with you. I once wrote a rather facetious post here (I was only half joking) suggesting that we remove all parking privileges from City Councillors (particularly the Transit Commissioners), dissallow taxi/limo/parking ticket expenses, &/or track and report on their Transit usage. If they actually had to use it themselves I bet we’d see all kinds of creative ideas to improve it. And it would be illuminating to see how many of them actually walk their talk.
Steve: Considering that David Miller lives a stone’s throw from High Park Station, and worked at City Hall, I would expect him to commute on the subway. The only surface route at High Park is a bus that goes west. As for other Commissioners, I have run into Adam Giambrone and Joe Mihevc on surface routes. You really have to stop assuming everyone is as bad as your former representative.
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You hit the nail on the head.
30 Lambton is the ONLY link to an area with a high amount of disabled/blind people (Dundas/Cordova/Maybelle area) there are a lot of disabled & seniors in this area, most who do not qualify for WheelTrans services, also if cut on Sat nights, there will be an 11 hour window with NO accessible service to the subway, (Kipling) the walk from here (Maybelle/Dundas) is very long & dangerous for anyone with a disability, also the walk to Islington Station has lots of stairs, dark areas & is totally not safe, as its riddled with druggies & scary people lurking in the park on Maybelle & the stairs down to the Islington raised walkway that goes under the bridge, also under that bridge is not well lit, nor is the walk along Maybelle.
I wrote a letter, as I was supposed to give a deputation at the Jan, 12 meeting, but unable to get the time off work at such short notice prevented me from going.
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