This morning, after a ceremony at Leslie Barns, car 4604 entered service on 504 King. It is running as an extra and is not visible to tracking apps, but can be located with a vehicle-specific search such as this on Transsee.ca. As I write this just after 3pm on November 17, the car is headed back to Leslie Barns.
The second car of the new set, 4605, is in Russell Carhouse. The remaining vehicles in the 60-car order will be delivered from now through 2025.
The real question remains what the TTC will do with these cars. Of the 204 they already own, the peak service has rested at about 140 cars for a few years. In February 2020, pre-pandemic, it was about 160. This is not just a question of construction projects and bus replacements, but of the TTC’s operating budget and staffing levels which prevent full fleet utilization of any mode on the system.
Lacking in TTC budget information, especially notable at a time when Mayor Chow calls for open dialog and transparency, is a clear statement of how much service the TTC can actually operate at various funding levels.
It is convenient for management to point to system ridership at about 80% of pre-covid numbers, but this does not account for the unequal level of recovery through the week. Weekends are already a time of strong demand, and Sundays are running above pre-covid levels.
Weekdays might, on average, be lower than historical numbers, but a well-known issue is that Tuesday through Thursday are the busiest days when more people come to work. On average, weekdays might be below early 2020 levels, but the TTC does not report how this demand is spread by day, and complaints of crowding are common.
Openness in budget and service planning might aid the debate, but so far proposals have been more “business as usual” with an asterisk beside possible improvements due to budget constraint. The freshly minted TTC Board has yet to demand a wider range of options, the costs they would entail, and an analysis of the TTC’s ability to actually field more service.
The 2024 Service Plan is part of the TTC Board’s November 22 agenda, and I will report on it in a few days (it’s a thick agenda this month).
Two new cars with more to follow are welcome, but they will simply add to the 30% of the streetcar fleet that sit idle every day, far more than should be needed for maintenance spares. It is the classic budget problem: money for new capital purchases, but no money to operate them.
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Steve Munro 