Day: June 12, 2024

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Josh Colle Returning to TTC

TTC CEO Rick Leary has announced that former Councillor and TTC Chair Josh Colle will return to the TTC in the position of Chief Strategy and Customer Officer effective July 15. He has several years of consulting work for various transit agencies in Canada and the US in a variety of roles.

Colle will come into a difficult position where the TTC faces much more serious problems than his term as chair ending in late 2018. There are severe challenges with ridership, service attractiveness, budget, operations, maintenance and capital funding. The City’s hopes for a strong TTC role in attracting travel from cars onto greener modes, notably transit, are not supported with funding and service beyond a stand-pat level.

Within the TTC there are issues in the management ranks, although “Strategy and Customer Service” is not first among them. Better and more reliable service sound like they should be customer service priorities. Without staff to drive and maintain vehicles, a reliable fleet and infrastructure, and an ethos that looks first within the TTC to solve problems, all the strategy and smiling faces will not get people on transit.

The TTC faces a severe backlog of maintenance and quality control problems that have been downplayed or hidden for some time. A near-miss subway incident, deteriorating track, the Scarborough RT derailment are only part of what is seen publicly. There are unseen issues such as subway work car reliability that contribute to infrastructure issues and recently an all-day shutdown of Line 2. Work is deferred for want of appropriate equipment. On the streetcar system, problems with track are “solved” with slow orders as streetcars tiptoe through problem areas, and we know from the Auditor General’s report that overhead maintenance planning and record-keeping leaves much to be desired.

We do not know if the passenger fleet condition — subway trains, streetcars and buses — constrains the amount of service that might operate. All three modes have considerably more spare vehicles than needed for routine maintenance, and this allows the less reliable ones to be set aside, a particular problem with the bus fleet. In theory, the TTC could run better service, but they do not have the budget to operate it, and we do not know if all of those spare vehicles could actually run if they were needed.

Hundreds of new hybrid and battery buses, plus 60 more streetcars are on their way. The TTC trumpets its green fleet initiatives, but is silent about vehicle reliability and durability. The recently published Five Year Plan foresees only modest growth with the system still running below pre-pandemic levels in 2028.

All of this leaves Josh Colle sitting in an organization he does not control. If he is truly going to handle “strategy” at more than a superficial level, the TTC must take the need for renewal and transparency to heart. Whether the current crop of managers can or will do this is quite another matter.

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TTC Draft Financial Results for 2023

The TTC’s Audit & Risk Management Committee met on June 5, 2024 with a lengthy agenda. This article includes comments on:

For the financial statements, I have attempted to explain the difference in presentation under the Public Sector Accounting Standards the TTC uses and the more familiar annual budget. The standards require the capital and operating streams to be consolidated including showing assets such as vehicles and infrastructure on the balance sheet. This arrangement swamps the operating results with the much larger capital values even though TTC’s assets are almost entirely funded by subsidies, and they do not represent a value which can be used offset operating costs.

There is a new provision in the capital accounts this year for the disposal cost of assets. This recognizes the future cost of removal and remediation including environmental exposures.

Covid relief has been shown in the statements to distinguish revenues and costs specific to the pandemic, but future budgets and financial reports will no longer do this because the special provincial and federal subsidies ended in 2022.

There was a $38 million operating surplus in 2023 due to unused provision for opening of Lines 5 and 6, offset by extra costs to operate the SRT replacement service sooner than planned.

I have included tables from the financial statement notes showing the breakdown of various subsidies as this area is poorly understood. Provincial gas tax comes to the City and portion of this is allocated to TTC operations with the remainder going to capital. Federal gas tax, now renamed the Canada Community-Based Fund, goes entirely to the capital program.

The TTC accounts do not include provincial projects such as the Ontario Line, nor the City’s SmartTrack program which is implemented by Metrolinx with funding from various sources notably Toronto’s City Building Fund.

The Draft Annual Report does not contain much at this point, but will eventually include the approved financial statements. It is the usual collection of pretty pictures and good news stories sure to warm the hearts of TTC Board members who don’t look beyond the surface.

The report contains a 10-year summary of key system statistics which I have included in the article as well as percentage changes in various factors over time. One item of note is the growth in staffing over ten years to operate roughly the same amount of service. Part of this due to changes in system scope (a larger subway system) and the pandemic-era problem that the staff needed to support fleet and infrastructure does not decline even though there are fewer riders.

The bus fleet today is also larger than in 2014. This does not reflect increased service, but rather a higher proportion of buses idle as maintenance spares. The Annual report includes different claims about the fleet size and overstates the number of green buses the TTC actually owns. I have asked the TTC for clarification of these numbers, but they have not replied.

The TTC is taking delivery of hundreds of new buses through 2024-25 that will replace older inactive vehicles, but there is no budget plan to fund operation of more service. The report crows about the greening of the fleet while neglecting to address how it will be operated.

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