Updated March 25, 2016 at 1:45 pm: Charts and commentary have been added at the end of this article regarding monthly ridership statistics published by the TTC through the CEO’s Report.
In a previous article, I wrote about a TTC management report giving a “Ridership Update” for early 2016. This was triggered by concerns that overall ridership had stagnated, and the obvious question management might hear: “what are you doing about this”.
During the debate at the March 23, 2016 Board meeting, it became clear that to some extent, management was making up the story as they went along. The report includes data for the first two months of 2016, and February was particularly bad with a drop against both the budget target and against results in 2015.
However, once the debate was well underway, management reported that March to date was almost on budget, and was up 2.5% over 2015. Why was this information not in the report, or at least in a supplementary paper published before the meeting got underway? The entire tone of the debate would have changed with the sense that, maybe, things were turning around and ridership was growing again.
The situation was further complicated by repeated claims from management and from TTC Chair Josh Colle that ridership was not on a decline, but that it simply did not achieve its budget target. This quite flatly is not true as anyone capable of reading TTC reports can see.
In the February 2016 CEO’s report, a chart showed the data for 2015 with comparative numbers for 2014. The 2015 counts run consistently behind 2014 actuals from June onward, and all of 2015 is below the budget target.
Moreover, the actual full year count of riders for 2015 was down from 2014 as shown both in notes within the CEO’s Report and in the ridership and fare tracking table available on the City of Toronto’s Open Data website. (Thanks to @nfitz1 for pointing out that the spreadsheet had been updated with 2015 data.)
The reported total ridership for 2015 was 534.0 million while for 2014 it was 534.8m. That’s not just a failure to hit the budget target, that is an actual, albeit slight, decline. (The 2015 value does not include approximately 4m Pan Am Games free rides so that year-to-year comparisons are on the same basis.)
That tracking table provides an interesting long-term view into the evolution of TTC ridership and fare payment methods.
Total system ridership bottomed out in 1996 at the end of the early 90s recession, a period when through a combination of falling employment, rising fares and service cuts, the TTC managed to lose a substantial portion of its ridership. (This fall also provided a window during which there appeared to be “surplus” capacity in parts of the system allowing fantasies about subway extensions to take root, but that’s another topic.) Since 1996, with a brief drop in 2002-3, ridership has climbed consistently until 2015.
There is a challenge to management and politicians in an ever-growing era – the moment growth slows or reverses, they have no sense of what to do. At the TTC, this first happened in the early 1980s when, for the first time in decades, ridership fell slightly. The result was a new policy of “tailoring service to meet demand” that translated into “let’s pack those vehicles as tightly as possible”. Only with the Ridership Growth Strategy of 2003 did the TTC return to Service Standards that embraced the idea that less crowded service would attract more riders, a policy undone by the Ford/Stintz era at the TTC and still only partly reversed under Tory/Colle because the TTC had no vehicles with which to provide more peak capacity.
TTC management attempted to back-pedal from the appearance of imminent cutbacks saying, “no we never said that” and attempting to undo the “sky is falling” impression that the original report triggered. In a scrum after the meeting, CEO Andy Byford talked about a possible delay or deferral of service improvements, but strongly implied that cuts were not on the table. This does not accord with the content of his own report which suggests that actions under consideration include:
• A freeze on further service additions until it can be determined if the year-to-date ridership results are only temporary or more indicative of a lasting trend;
• Expense reductions that would be achieved from across-the-board service reductions in 2016 and 2017.
The next round of major improvements would normally come with the fall schedules in September or October 2016. These are set in place by early summer because of the lead time needed to organize crewing and other factors. Therefore, the go/nogo decision is only months away. The TTC Board has asked management for a review of what options and tactics are available to increase ridership, in effect, an updated Ridership Growth Strategy in which the TTC would understand in detail the behaviour of its market and present various options to attract more riders. The vital distinction in an RGS is to ask “what could we do”, not to start from the premise that “we can’t afford to do anything”.
The chart above shows that both weekday and weekend ridership have grown, but the ratio between them has also been shifting. Although weekdays still account for the lion’s share of trips, there has been a continuous decline in the ratio from 5:1 in the mid-80s to under 4:1 today. As the next chart shows, what is happening is that weekend riding is growing faster than weekday riding.
The chart below uses 1996 as a reference year because that was the low point for ridership. Since that time, and especially since 2003, weekend ridership has grown faster than weekday ridership, although it showed more of a downturn in 2015. This group of trips (together with off-peak riding on weekdays) does not get enough attention in ridership reviews that focus on peak period commuters. They are important, but they are not the only TTC riders.
The situation is also intriguing when we look at ridership by mode. In 2015, subway ridership continued to rise while surface modes suffered a downturn.
Looking at this over the entire period of the data with 1986 as the base year shows how ridership on various parts of the system has evolved, relatively speaking.
- The SRT opened in March 1985 and data for that year represent only 9 months’ operation. 1986 is used as the base year so that all modes are 12-month values in that year.
- SRT ridership bounces around from year to year, dropped in the early 1990s, rose on and off to 2010, and has dropped back almost to 1986 levels since. There is a problem with these data because periods when the line was shut down for major repairs do not count toward “SRT” riding.
- The bus counts stayed flat in the early 1990s in part because the area buses served continued to see population growth that offset the general economic decline in the older parts of the city.
- Streetcar riding was most affected by the decline on downtown employment, both in office and manufacturing, and it started a long climb upwards in the late 90s.
When 1996, the bottom of overall system ridership, is used as the base year, another important pattern is evident. Growth on the streetcar and subway networks has been stronger than on the bus network since the 90s. This is especially a challenge for the streetcars because the fleet, up until the arrival of the new Bombardier Flexitys, has stayed the same size for two decades. All of the growth has been accommodated without any increase in the vehicles available to carry riders. (Note that buses substituting for streetcars or for the SRT count as bus ridership, a statistical anomaly the TTC would do well to correct as it creates the appearance of lost ridership where, on a route by route basis, none may actually exist.)
The TTC’s tracking data also includes a breakdown of fares by class of user and by type within each class.
Over the long haul, the type of fare where we see the greatest change is for adults. Seniors and students still account for fewer fares in 2015 than they did in 1985 (71.0m in 2015 vs 76.8m in 1985). Riding by children is also fairly flat although there is a small jump shown for 2015. Note that this is an estimated figure based on the effect of free children’s fares starting with previous years’ data and assumed elasticity of demand.
Since 1996, the biggest jump in adult fare trips has been with the Metropass. The elimination of tickets saw a migration to tokens, but the Metropass growth was also strong suggesting that some riders moved over to that fare medium as a convenience.
A major problem for the TTC in “counting” fares is that over half of all rides are now taken using a medium which is a bulk purchase (some form of pass), and these sales must be convered back to an estimated number of “rides”. The Metropass average today is about 73 trips per pass, but the actual range of usage varies widely. It is not impossible to take over 100 trips per month with a pass, and some riders take less than 50. When sales fall, this is most likely to be among riders for whom the pass price is least attractive due to low usage, but the TTC counts the lost riding at the average value. This likely overstates the actual number of trips lost when a passholder reverts to tokens.
The tiny usage of Presto shows just how massive a jump in system demand will occur as riders convert to that mode over the next year. What might be minor annoyances, numerically speaking, from bad implementation decisions will become major headaches when usage grows from only 13.3m in 2015.
Senior and student fares have been shifting to passes from tickets over the past decades, and the trend implies that over half of the trips in this fare class will be by passes in only a few years.
The history of Metropass sales was shown in the 2016 budget by the following chart. Total pass sales declined, but this was concentrated in the full-price pass while other categories grew. One aspect of the Presto conversion that has not yet been decided is the form that passes, or their equivalent, will take including:
- Whether the monthly discount plan will be eliminated.
- Whether a “pass” will be sold as such (unlimited riding in exchange for up front payment) or as an automatic cap on fares charged to any rider based on actual usage (the GO Transit model).
Clearly, passes are a popular method of fare payment as shown by the fact that over half of all trips are carried on some form of pass today, and this has been the case for almost a decade. The TTC ignores the importance of passes as a fare medium at their peril.
Actual trip counts for passholders are dominated by the Adult Metropass, although the Post-Secondary pass has grown since its introduction in fall 2010.
Updated March 25, 2016: Commentary on Monthly Ridership Statistics
In addition to the annual summaries used to produce the charts in the original part of this article, the TTC provides ridership stats on a monthly basis through the CEO’s Report.
There are a few caveats required before diving into the charts:
- Because there are fewer than 12 regular Board meetings per year, there are also fewer than 12 published CEO’s reports. Therefore, some months’ data never appears in a public report. This is particularly true during an election year when there is a long break in the meeting schedule.
- Although the TTC sometimes refers to ridership per month, they actually are using 12 reporting periods per year with a standard pattern of 4-4-5 weeks to produce four, 13-week quarters regardless of the actual lie of the calendar. This leaves 1 or 2 days over (depending on whether it is a leap year), and I believe that these are included in period 12.
- Year-to-year comparisons may vary depending on whether holidays such as Christmas fall on weekdays or weekends, and whether Easter falls in March or April.
The raw monthly numbers are shown in the chart below. Where no data is available, there is no data point shown, but the monthly spacing is retained for visual continuity.
In this format, the distinction between the three sets of numbers is difficult to see in many cases because values are close together. The purpose of this chart is to show the regular peaks corresponding to 5-week periods. Even though it is a five-week period, the values are low for period 12 in 2013 and 2014 because of the harsh winter. Even at the end of 2015, period 12 does not show the same spike visible for period 12 in 2012.
The same data plotted in bar chart form look like this:
Even here, the distinctions are difficult to see and the trends are simply invisible.
However, if we look at the variation between current counts and those from the previous year, as well as the budgeted values, some patterns become more obvious.
The values versus the previous year stay positive until mid-2015. This corresponds to the comparison chart published by the TTC. After May 2015, the change goes negative except for a spike up in December (period 12). This is not surprising given how bad the weather in previous Decembers was compared to 2015, but one cannot assume that this is a lasting trend. Indeed, by January (period 1 of 2016), the change had fallen below zero slightly.
The numbers compared to budget are also important. Starting quite abruptly in 2013, the TTC never has as many riders as they budget for, and the percentage drop declines visibly through 2015 and into the first month of 2016. This begs the question of whether there is consistent overestimation of ridership in the budget, a mechanism as discussed earlier, which can provide headroom for improvements both in projected revenue and in budgeted service mileage.
Finally, we come to the moving total ridership year-to-year.
The blue line above shows the moving annual total (the sum of of the previous 12 periods’ worth of ridership), while the green line shows the values reported for the previous year. (Note that previous year values will not necessarily line up with “current” a year ago because different calendar boundaries have been used by the TTC.)
The yellow line shows the percentage change from “previous” to “current”, and this line shows a steady drop from 2012 through to the end of 2015. In other words, although ridership has been growing, the rate of increase in the year-over-year numbers has been falling for a considerably period. This has only been noticed recently when the monthly figures started to drop below the previous year’s data.
The values in this chart smooth out any short-term variations because they show 12-month totals, not individual monthly data. Only long-standing effects will show up. What is particularly troubling is the fairly sudden collapse of the space between current and previous starting in mid-2015, the point where monthly change became negative. The question, still unknown, is whether coming months will bring increases so that current values again track higher than the previous year.
The decline in the rate of ridership growth goes back several years, and it cannot be traced to a short-term effect, but rather must be viewed as a longer-term problem with the attractiveness of TTC service to riders. The problem has been hidden under overall growth.
Steve Munro 
Excellent analysis!
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my top 10 list of non-technical guesses for the source of ridership decline:
1. metropass prices are getting ridiculous
2. constant weekend subway closures coming home to roost, turning
3. streetcar fare evasion means more riders aren’t being counted?
4. rise of uber as an option
5. the availability of bixi, which may have found its legs
the rise of cycling in general
6. low gas prices throughout 2015
7. economic growth in TO – ‘wealth effect’ encourages car purchases, driving
8. car traffic downtown is actually getting better in some places (my anecdotal observation)
9. business are locating to the core, and that’s where people are moving – so many can just walk / ttc doesn’t benefit
10. go transit is a bona fide competitor for longer haul 416-origin trips? (I’m just speculating)
11. bonus reason: kids ride free means they aren’t counted?? (I have no idea if this true)
Steve: I will respond to a few of these.
2. The downtown in January cannot be explained by closures because they didn’t start until March.
3. I know that there is some evasion, but how many who just get on at the back doors are Metropass holders who don’t bother to flash their pass at anyone?
4. If uber is an option, it is for convenience, not for price (see point 1).
5. Again, cycling does not explain the big drop in winter months, although this year was milder than last.
10. GO is competitive only on speed and for specific trips, not on price (again see point 1).
11. TTC includes an estimate of the free rides for kids in their total count, and that component is up this year on the assumption of growth induced by free rides.
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Anecdotal stories can be misleading but based on my own observations I think this is a very fair statement. My partner usually buys a Metropass though he normally makes only between 45-55 trips a month (12-15 a week) and certainly well below the theoretical average of 73 – it’s convenient, allows for extra short trips and is tax deductible. If he will be out of town for more than a week in a month he reverts to tokens and to walking/biking. In these weeks he probably only makes about 6 ‘token rides’ as he walks and bikes far more than normal.
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This is clearly caused by the 2015 economic downturn. Traffic congestion on the highways has declined significantly and has not returned to pre-2015 levels, so it is not people switching to driving. If TTC ridership is going up in March 2016 this suggests that the economy is starting to recover again. It might also be useful to look at the percentage of people who are using adult vs post-secondary Metropasses (if more people are using post-secondary Metropasses this suggests that people are unemployed/underemployed and going back to school).
Steve: Careful. The subway saw higher ridership in 2015, while the surface routes fell. Also more riders lost proportionately on weekends than weekdays. There is no one factor that explains these variations.
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Why doesn’t anyone ascribe ridership stalls to poor and inconsistent service? As in, I can’t be bothered to take three buses from Scarborough to East York.
Steve: This question comes up all the time, but the TTC spends too much time patting itself on the back for lacklustre improvements in “service reliability”.
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Yes, and when it is the surface routes that are hurting …. well. Downtown, you can’t expect much growth in the busiest areas, because well frankly if you cannot board, you cannot ride. Scarborough and Etobicoke, if the buses are overloaded at peak, people will not get in the habit of riding on peak, if they are too far between off peak, people will not get in the habit of riding off peak. The bus has to be there, and have space, frequently enough or on time enough that it is easier and more effective than driving, otherwise … The TTC better get to real service reliability, where schedules or headways are reliable, and most trips will go off without a hitch, or people will not pick transit. If auto, instead of transit grows, the city will choke.
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Great analysis!
I would be part of the statistics of people not using TTC as after using it almost every day since 2004, I just got a car. Since I was a small boy in the 70s I always wanted to help the environment and there were lots of scientists warning about air pollution back then. I now live in Scarborough near Birchmount & Sheppard with my wife and we decided to buy a car after 3 years of living here without one. We decided to get the car because us standing in the freezing cold waiting for a late, overcrowded bus is not going to change the world. I know a good winter coat and long underwear is a lot cheaper than a car however there are lots of other inconveniences. I feel sad though as I know it isn’t the best for the world and I feel like I’m getting a car because the transit system here is far from satisfactory.
I should add that at many places we go there is a struggle to get a parking spot and I wonder how many of those parked there wished that transit was better.
Since getting a car I have compared what the customer experience of taking transit versus driving a car in Toronto is in terms of frequency of service, speed of travel, price, and comfort. I did some rough calculations and per travel speed (about 35 km/h versus about 11 km/h), TTC fare would have to be about $2 per trip to be comparable. Per the CAA web site, a car costs about 45 cents/km and with an average trip of 15 km that makes $6.75 per trip. It is hard to do a direct comparison however it gives an idea.
To me I think car drivers are undercharged while transit riders are actually overcharged when you consider just travel speed. I wonder what the difference would be when you include hidden subsidies and economic externalities (sprawl, productivity, pollution).
Questions:
1. Do you have any tips for current car drivers who want a better world and want elected officials build a good transit system instead of one based on truthiness?
2. Do you have suggestions for elected officials so they make wise election promises? I noticed promising subways is an easy way to get votes though they are not feasible in most areas. I know many experts say to build multi-modal networks however do you think a person could win running for mayor of Toronto if they promised such a network?
3. I think the sweet spot for making transit viable for most commuters is having travel speeds of 20 km/h along main avenues for TTC riders. How well would someone running for mayor do if their slogan was “20 km/h on major avenues!!!” or “20 for 2″(20km/h with $2 fare)
3. Any tips on dealing with friends and relatives who always drive and look at me as if I have two-heads if I say I’m over 21 and don’t see a car as a necessity?
Steve: I do not blame your friends. If I lived at Birchmount & Sheppard, I would be hard-pressed to defend transit.
Pols will promise anything to get elected, including making “congestion” vanish, a task which is almost impossible. But they promise it anyhow, if only to justify spending on transit. The conundrum is that there is a latent demand for more transit capacity (and road capacity too), and as fast as relief is provided in the network, it will fill up again. Nobody wants to admit this. The real reason for providing more and better transit should be to underpin economic growth, and by that I don’t just mean commute trips, but all of the travel people need to make to live in a city.
That brings us to another problem that cannot be fixed quickly: bad planning. Or maybe I should not say “bad” per se, but planning that is oriented to a car culture. We cannot just sweep away decades of suburban development that assumes autos as the primary means of transport overnight. By contrast, I live in an older part of the city dating from the early 20th century. Having a subway station, two streetcar lines, and four bus routes a five minute walk from my home is very convenient, and not even in the old city does everyone have this sort of luxury. However, the part of my neighbourhood that really works for a non-car owner is that any day-to-day shopping I need is a short walk away, as are restaurants and cafes should I be so inclined. Even specialty shops I like are only a short transit ride from home on frequent service. This is definitely not the picture one sees in much of suburbia.
You mention average speeds. 20km/h is simply not practical on the street and stop grid within the older part of the city. Some suburban routes, including your Birchmount bus, do have scheduled speeds above 20km/h in the peak period, but many are slower, and not just downtown.
Subways are attractive because they run faster than surface lines, although access time to stations can be an issue, particularly off-peak when feeder services are less frequent. That’s one of the tradeoffs with the new LRT lines — is access more important than the time saving from having fewer stops?
The whole problem of shifting the view in favour of transit is something of a chicken & egg situation. People don’t want to use transit (or worse, be lectured about how bad they are for taking any alternative) when their experience with it is so demonstrably inferior. Politicians don’t want to spend money on transit because it appears to be a bottomless pit, and many of their constituents feel it is tax dollars down the drain. But without more and better service, transit cannot change its relative position in voters’ minds.
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Just to chime in on your comment here – it’s a mindset, a “secular shift” or whatever the economists call it which is required. We can’t have better transit without substantial investment – A LOT of substantial investment. I mean tens of billions of dollars for a city of Toronto’s size and layout. This won’t happen if the people – all the people, the voters, the planners, the politicians, the media – believe this to be important and necessary. How to get there? No idea. I’m sure you’re more experienced with this since you’ve been a transit advocate for ages.
I spent the past 6 years living in Europe (prior to that I lived 14 in Toronto), then came to Toronto past September. Four of those years I lived in Zurich, Switzerland, but I traveled extensively … Western Europe is a place where there is a commitment to public transit. It gets money. Everyone agrees it’s important. That it’s good. That it’s necessary. It’s a given. Of course there are debates, on why this, why that, why LRT or why a subway, etc. etc. However the idea that a large city’s transportation problems can be solved primarily by public transit is simply taken as truth, as dogma. This is acted upon.
Don’t let anyone (I know you know Steve for sure, this comment is more for the other readers/commentators of this blog) fool you with the “but they have higher taxes” mantra. Zurich has a superb public transit system. Switzerland has superb public transit systems. They have probably the best railway system in the world, and it functions essentially like a huge public transit system for the entire country. Yet Switzerland has some of the lowest taxes in the world. The taxes are certainly much lower than in Canada. I paid 8% income tax there on a substantial salary … yet tons of money is invested in public transit, and in the railways. While I was living there, an approx. 2.5 billion dollar (cdn.) 9.5 km underground rail tunnel (with some new commuter rail stations) was being constructed to relieve congestion at the central station (the canton – equivalent of our provinces – was paying one third, and the federal government two thirds). Tram (LRT) lines were being extended or newly built constantly. Note, this was not China, where a central committee makes all the important decisions and just imposes them. Rather, almost anything important (or expensive) is decided in the end by a referendum. It’s one of the most democratic places on Earth.
So it’s not a question of taxes, but of spending priorities. It’s not a case of swindling the voters, but of political priorities and different mindsets. How to get anywhere near such a mindset in Toronto, or the rest of North America for that matter, for me is a mystery, all I know it’s certainly not easy. It is however, required, if we’re gonna go from a situation where the transit in this city lags constantly behind necessity instead of leading.
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A huge chunk of the issue in North America, is the basic city design, and hidden subsidies to cars, that do not even show up in taxes. We do not think in terms of zoning, and costs imposed on developers shifting the car/transit balance, but insisting on massive parking, means already using lots of space, makes walking harder, reduces density. It is a self reinforcing drive. The GTA needs to reverse this, problem is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Scarborough for instance is not transit friendly, with its relatively low density, larger parking areas, lack of dedicated space for transit. This makes it more expensive to run transit, and transit less attractive. The lack of transit makes it harder to justify zoning changes, that requires very expensive parking. Personally I think the region needs to bite the bullet, with provincial leadership, change the zoning in specific corridors today and improve service in those corridors. Previous comment with regards to Birchmount and Sheppard – but what would that look like with an LRT on Sheppard, and Don Mills (to a DRL) and a BRT on say McCowan? How many more trips would be transit? How much more density if we reduced parking requirements and increased times coverage allowance for the area?
I agree transit is a choice, and when you factor amount of road required for auto, density that auto oriented development delivers and the cost of delivery for services per hectare, it would seem to me, that net, higher density, transit/walk/cycle oriented development, would be easier on both the taxpayer and environment. It is a question of bridging between one and the other. The provincial government needs to get rid of the free rider effect for the outer municipalities, and mandate transit and lower zoning requirements for parking.
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To fill in on this,
Let’s take three streets in “Old Toronto” with streetcar routes – King, Queen, and College. Long stretches of these streets have 2 lanes per direction – the streetcar is in the middle 2 lanes – but the outer 2 lanes allow parking! Which means, with tons of cars parked in the right-most lanes, this leaves one lane per direction to be shared by cars and streetcars. This slows traffic down. Nobody likes it. Drivers don’t like being stuck behind streetcars stopped at stations. Streetcars don’t like being stuck in a stream of car traffic, cars turning left, etc. When you’re a streetcar passenger, it’s frustrating. When you’re a driver, it’s frustrating.
Yes, I know, in the busiest stretches of these streets, curbside parking is not allowed during rush hour. Also during rush hour in many of these stretches the middle lanes with streetcar tracks are reserved for streetcars only – but this is not enough. On those streets, there should be no curbside parking – never, ever, 24hrs per day. The middle 2 lanes with the streetcar tracks should be reserved for streetcars, buses and emergency vehicles only – always, 24 hrs per day. Period. This is transit-priority planning, a transit-first mindset – and it costs almost nothing. Zero new infrastructure required. Yes, the city must give up some parking revenue but a lot of the paid parking can probably be shifted to side streets, and certainly 3 streets don’t account for that much in the grand scheme of parking revenues. The effective streetcar speeds would increase dramatically, as would reliability.
It’s so simple, so cheap, yet it isn’t done. Shows the problem with the mindset.
Steve: Actually it is a bit more complicated than this. Yes, definitely some areas and times could do with parking restrictions, but not all areas at all times. This is borne out by the studies I have done of streetcar routes where the effect of parking (not to mention turn restrictions, advance greens, etc) vary immensely along routes. A related problem is that the curb lane is often blocked in areas where it is supposed to be free by delivery vehicles, and sometimes by construction. Deliveries can in some cases be relocated to alternate streets, and there is always the question of the time of day when these occur. Outside of the business district, particularly west of downtown, there are many competing interests who want to use the street space, and the off-peak streetcar service is not frequent enough to justify a complete takeover of the road. East of downtown, congestion is rare except for specific times and locations.
Could it be better for transit? Yes. Should transit have absolute use of the streets with no parking allowed? Not everywhere, every time.
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I have also lived in Switzerland. Being an international center for tax evasion means that they have a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth (and taxes) given how small their population is. As such, they can spend money on ridiculous things like a subway for moving garbage underground, or building a subway where a set of stairs would also have worked fine, or building tunnels in the countryside not for any practical reason but simply because the federal govt was willing paying for it.
Despite that, I never found their suburban transit service to be that great. You only get a bus every hour or so at non-peak times, and the suburbs are usually in a different fare zone, requiring you to pay for extra zones. They did have some neat ideas regarding taxibuses that you could phone up for service, but I could never figure those out. When people think of Europe, they often think of the downtowns, but their suburbs are dominated by cars too and face similar problems as in North America.
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The issue is, in my mind, the core and adjacent areas, were not really designed for cars in the mix at all. The question in areas where we have 2 chains of road allowance, and are mandating massive private parking. The outer areas, could be much better for transit if they were slowly redeveloped, and better than the core. There is room to have dedicated delivery areas in private lands, and dedicated transit corridors in road allowances, and still radically increase density, and radically improve access to services for those on foot or bike. Scarborough has the room to develop much higher density, have LRT corridors, that support high density, high service neighborhoods like King West, Liberty Village or Roncesvalles, while not suffering the issues around transit flow they face, and even improving traffic flow from current.
Forcing massive parking allowances, tends to mean low density. Yes parking and deliveries are an issue in areas with standing development, however, the issue is how we approach, growth, transit, redevelopment and zoning. To my mind more moderately high density, high service, transit oriented development should be pushed, with Toronto itself absorbing at least a million of the 3 in projected growth for the area, and nearly all of the growth being a result of higher density not more sprawl.
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I would take this suggestion one step further and pedestrianize King St. between Spadina Ave and Berkeley St (west of Parliament).
With the exceptions of Blue Jays Way/Peter St. (69%), University (90%), Church (84%), Sherbourne (44%), and Berkeley (21%), this stretch of intersections have more pedestrians than cars. Sherbourne and Berkeley are included to include the George Brown Campus.
The theory is that under gridlock conditions, it is sometimes better to remove road capacity to reduce lane conflicts and thereby relieve congestion. Deliveries could be made at any time, just with a 10 or 15 kph speed limit.
Of course, a lot of modeling would be needed, and maybe even a “trail run” period where the road is closed to through-vehicles while no permanent work is undertaken.
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P.S. To the previous comment I made – it should be noted that downtown already has lower parking allowances, just not roads that can be made to allow a dedicated transit area.
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@Ming
Where in Switzerland did you live? I found the suburban service in Zurich to be quite good, and it was based primarily on the commuter train (S-bahn) rather than buses. Admittedly, I didn’t live in the suburbs (didn’t live in the downtown either), I just took a trip there here & there to go to Ikea and such. What I found made their public transit so user-friendly was the fact that it was so punctual (90% of the time it seemed to arrive on the dot) and that the “meeting up” of lines between which there were frequent transfers was so synchronized (90% of the time you only needed to wait a few minutes to catch your next bus/tram/train/whatever). So even with a bus that runs only once per hour, you could reliably plan your time (and they had a great app/website for that).
Speaking of which, this is a comment which comes up a lot from people who live in neighbourhoods where frequent transit is just not viable – I often hear “the fact that the bus comes once per hour is not the problem, the problem is that it doesn’t come reliably on time so I can’t plan my time.” Zurich had this problem fully solved (TTC-like “frequent service” doesn’t exist there as a concept, all lines run on a fixed to-the-minute schedule throughout the day – no, the streets are not empty of car traffic, there are terrible traffic jams during rush hour). Maybe I’m overgeneralizing Zurich to the rest of the country, but the other places I visited (Basel, Geneva, Lausanne) seemed similar.
As for the “useless tunnels in the countryside”, if you’re thinking of what I’m thinking – those highway “underpasses” – they have a purpose – to allow wildlife and livestock to pass over the highway unhindered. It’s a neat thing to have really (assuming you have the money for it – but those things didn’t seem so expensive). Also, it was my impression that it was mostly small rural communities that benefited from “tax tourism”, not the larger cities, but I don’t have statistics.
(Don’t get me wrong – Switzerland is not some ideal country – there are plenty of things wrong with it and many things Canada does a lot better – but transport policy is not one of them.)
You’re certainly right that Europe has a lot of car-oriented suburbs – car-oriented planning was a big thing in Europe too in the mid-20th century – yet even those seem to be higher density, with more transit options than in North America. Also, there are just as many high density, more urban, transit oriented suburbs – think of the banlieues of Paris. In many countries, the word “suburb” is not synonymous with large single-family homes in a lot of greenspace, but with blocks of (often drab) highrise apartments. Again, those suburbs have their own problems, but transit is usually not among them.
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Yes, it can be incredibly easy to build a large number of apartment buildings at too large a scale, and create a space and streetscape that is very cold and not conducive to neighborhood creation. The balance between space, height scope of building, and type of transit it important. However, much denser, and still human scale development, is both needed and desired as we go forward. Also I think that the big lawns, fences and cars are also acting as barriers to real neighborhoods. I believe this is also true for our police. We need to create walk friendly commercial and social space, and increase the focus on neighborhoods and neighborhood policing, which the massive space of suburban sprawl, also makes hard.
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It is going to Uber and cycling and there is more telecommuting. I have been congratulated for having the guts to take TTC since it is so customer unfriendly.
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