In previous articles of this series, I reviewed the St. Clair line’s operation on New Year’s Day 2010 as well as the first week in January. This article turns to the last week of January when TTC had implemented a new line management strategy to address the problems of service reliability.
Author: Steve
TTC Announces Customer Service Advisory Panel
The TTC has announced the makeup of its customer service advisory panel. According to the TTC’s press release, the first work of this panel will be to review the scope of work including:
- A review of Operator, Collector and other frontline employee initial training, as well as recertification training;
- A review of the commendation/complaint process;
- A review of the selection and hiring criteria for frontline employees;
- The introduction of a customer Bill of Rights that would include employee as well as customer expectations;
- A review of current TTC plans to address customer service;
- Conducting public consultations/meetings/focus groups;
- Conducting employee consultations/meetings/focus groups;
- A public report on recommendations; and
- Advising on expertise/resources needed to achieve success, e.g. external consultants, organizational changes that could include members of the Commission, members of management, as well as private citizens to address specific areas of interest.
The panel is expected to report by the end of June.
From my own point of view, a review of how the TTC interacts with its customers is only one part of a three-part problem. Two others must be addressed in parallel. If they are ignored, then this panel’s recommendations won’t go very far.
First of the two is the relationship between the Amalgamated Transit Union and the TTC, and through them with the public. Recent media reports and “gotcha” photos of TTC staff in less-than-productive poses, coupled with public furor over the botched fare increase procedure, raised antagonism between frontline TTC staff and the public. My gut feeling from riding the system is that this is dissipating, but wouldn’t take much to become a major issue again.
If the ATU has specific issues regarding working conditions (the protocols re work hours and breaks, for example), then these need to go on the table in a public forum. If we, the public and the larger political framework in which the TTC operates, don’t know the nature or the scope of the problems, we cannot possibly assess their importance, priority or how they might be addressed.
The contentious nature of public statements by ATU leaders only serves to undermine support for the frontline workers. This may “play to the house”, but it alienates the public whose support is essential.
Second of the two is the nature of TTC management. Far too often we hear what cannot be done, not what can be achieved if only we have the will to do it. Some of the issues are financial, others are organizational. If there are ways to improve the quality of service, we need to have a public debate about how this will be achieved and at what cost, if any. The Ridership Growth Strategy was based on the premise “tell us what you can do” while placing the policy decision for what we considered “good” in the political realm where it belongs.
Meanwhile, the TTC needs to examine everything it does through a customer service lens. Will proposed changes in fare inspection annoy riders and frustrate operating staff? Are operating and management procedures for surface routes appropriate for provision of good service? Can customers and route supervisors benefit from widespread availability of real time displays of service conditions (eg: Nextbus)?
Whatever changes are made, they must not be superficial, but should bring a real sense of improvement for the riding public and for TTC staff. Riders must feel in their bones that the system is improving, and staff must feel that they can actively contribute to this process with the support of TTC management and the Commission.
Wandering Streetcars (Updated)
Updated March 1 at 10:00 am: Data for the Queen route for the months of October and November covering the period of split operation are now available for viewing.
George Bell has put together an application that displays the TTC’s vehicle monitoring data as an animation. The effect is something like NextBus, but for historical data. You can watch streetcars bunch now from the comfort of your own computer.
He is using the same source data from the TTC as I used for my analyses. At this point, only St. Clair for January is available.
A few notes from George:
I’ve put together the beginnings of a bing maps viewer for the data. Love for feedback from the community.
Just a word to people before clicking on the link – the data files for each day are about a meg or two each. Silverlight is required, and if you don’t have it a link will be shown so you can get it.
Please leave general comments in this thread, and send bug notes, requests for fixes, etc. to George using the link provided on his site.
When you view a day’s data, be sure to zoom in so that the route fills your screen and you watch things unfold in full detail. January 8th, a date already mentioned in my analytic article, gives a visual feel for the complete chaos of the line’s behaviour.
There is part of me that SCREAMS out that the TTC should make this data and the presentation format available for every route, every day. Anyone who wants to know how a route behaved would only need to pull up its animated version.
Real time would be even nicer. I can imagine a route supervisor (or an interested member of the public) sitting with an iPad to keep track of the service.
St. Clair From The Archives
The City of Toronto Archives contain many photos and documents of the early days of the TTC and its predecessors. Among them is a June 1914 schedule for the St. Clair car, a line that had opened only a year earlier.
The line ran from the Grand Trunk Railway crossing just west of what is now called Caledonia Road, but on the timetable shown as “Station Street”. A one way trip was given 18 minutes to reach Yonge Street during all hours of service. Headways were 4.5 minutes AM peak, 6 minutes midday, 4 minutes PM peak, 7 minutes evenings.
There were 13 crews for a day’s service with work hours ranging from 8 to 10 hours, most of them over 9 hours with a spread of 11 to 14(!) hours.
Thanks to Martin Phills for alerting me to this item in the archives.
Once you visit that site, it’s hard to leave without much browsing. Here is a selection of photos of St. Clair before and during construction of the streetcar line. Continue reading
Analysis of 512 St. Clair, January 2010 (Part 2: Weekdays, Week 1)
This post examines the details of operations for the 512 St. Clair route from Monday, January 4, to Friday, January 8, 2010. The next post in this series will review the last week of January for comparison to discover what improvements took place over the intervening weeks.
Future articles in this series will review weekend operations, as well as a month-long overview of the line’s behaviour.
When February 2010 data are available, I will examine the effect of new schedules introduced on Sunday, February 14.
Unlike the New Year’s Day operation discussed previously, the weekdays in week 1 were a mess, and service poor a great deal of the time.
Analysis of 512 St. Clair, January 2010 (Part 1: Introduction)
Updated February 26 at 11:15 pm: The legend on the service chart has been corrected to reflect the actual location of the timepoints.
The 512 St. Clair route resumed streetcar operation from St. Clair West Station to Earlscourt Loop on Sunday, December 20, 2009. This was the test everyone had waited so long to see — would the right-of-way on the busiest part of St. Clair Avenue make a difference, and how would the line operate.
As we know from complaints that poured in to the TTC and to local Councillors, things did not go well during the first month. New scheduled were introduced in mid-February, and the decline in complaints indicates that riders are much happier. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile looking at January 2010 to see where the problems lay.
This series of posts uses TTC vehicle monitoring data to review the operation of the St. Clair route for that first month. I have requested the February data as well so that a “before and after” comparison will be possible with the new schedules.
This article is an introduction and, for those who have read these analyses before, a refresher on the methodology I have used and the format of the data presentation. In future articles, I will review the month as a whole, but here the data is from one day, January 1, to set the stage.
Au Revoir, Andy Barrie
Thursday, February 25th brought regular CBC listeners Andy Barrie’s last show as host of Metro Morning, a role Andy had for the past 15 years. I met Andy by waking up to a new voice coming out of my radio, a new host on a show I’ve listened to, it seems, forever. My bedroom radio is never tuned to any station but CBC Radio 1.
Later that Thursday morning, Andy Barrie talked on The Current (scroll down to “Listen to Part Two”) about his history in broadcasting, as a Canadian immigrant, and his relationship with the radio audience. That friendship, that intimacy comes partly from the nature of morning radio, but also from radio itself, a medium where a good host is part of our daily lives, part of our family because they participate in so many of our routine moments.
I have had the privilege of sitting across the table from Andy or chatting on the phone over the years, as well as the dubious joy of a call from a story producer who would love to have me on at 5:50 am to help get the show rolling. Guests show up at outrageous hours, something the Metro Morning team does every day, not just because the show has a good audience, but because everyone there cares about the importance of local radio and local issues.
Many people are studio guests for one story, and we never hear them again. Others, like me, are repeat visitors. We are all treated well, our stories given respect on air by a host who actually listens, who lets the story unfold even as he gently aims it through an arc to fit the time available.
The sense of family, the rapport between everyone that sounds so good on air is just as real in the studio.
Starting Monday, Andy will be “just down the hall and around the corner” from his old studio, still active at the CBC, but with the luxury of sleeping well after 4 am, of having a life after 9 pm. He signed off with an “Au Revoir”, and I wish him the best of not-quite-retirements.
S(L)RT Open Houses Announced
Two open houses for the conversion of the SRT to LRT and its extension to Malvern have been announced:
March 8, 2010 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Jean Vanier Catholic Secondary School, 959 Midland Avenue (north of Eglinton)
March 11, 2010 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Chinese Cultural Centre, 5183 Sheppard Avenue East (at Progress Ave)
These meetings will discuss the conversion and extension plans, as well as the Kennedy Station changes needed to accommodate all of the new LRT lines.
GO Transit To Raise and Standardize Fares (Updated)
Updated February 22 at 4:00 pm
As expected, the Metrolinx Board approved the proposed increase in GO Transit fares at its recent meeting. The contrast with the debates about TTC budgets and fares was quite striking. The greatest potential for discord came with the presentation of an anti-increase petition.
The bottom line for this increase is “to ensure fiscal responsibility and meet the needs of a growing market of commuters” (presentation to the Board, page 2). That’s shorthand for keeping the subsidy requirement under control, paying for the operations we have now and giving us some headroom to do more.
GO customers are, after all, from a very different market than the TTC. Their median family income is $100k, they live well outside the core, and auto travel is already an established part of their lifestyle. 85% are fully employed, 9% are students and 1% are seniors. They are travelling on GO overwhelmingly by choice and good service, in all aspects, matters.
40% of GO riders use monthly passes and another 40% use 10-trip tickets. This is not unlike the TTC where the monthly pass accounts for over half of the adult trips, and a large majority of those remaining use token fares.
The purpose of the fare increase was to raise revenue by $14.6m in fiscal 2010. Provincial subsidy will also jump for 2010 from $52.6m to $72.1m, but over half of this changes adjusts for one-time revenue in 2009/10 that allowed for a lower subsidy in that year. GO’s total operating budget is $386.7m, and they expect to carry 56m rides.
By comparison, the TTC’s fare increase is project to raise somewhere between $36m and $50m depending on which figures you believe. In 2010, the City will carry the entire $430m TTC subsidy while Queen’s Park spends its way through this budget cycle propping up Ontario’s economy. The TTC’s proposed total operating budget is $1.37b, and they expect to carry 462m rides.
GO’s workforce, including contract staff, is 1,938. The TTC’s proposed “conventional system” workforce for 2010 (as discussed in another thread), excluding contractors, is 10,491. This number omits Wheel Trans, Capital Projects and Toronto Coach Terminal.
The TTC’s budget is only 3.5 times GO’s, but there are far more staff (5.4:1) and riders (8.2:1). The subsidy per rider on GO is $1.29. On the TTC it is about $0.93.
Earlier, I mentioned the potential for discord at the Metrolinx meeting. The protocols for these meetings accept the public’s presence only grudgingly, unlike meetings for municipal agencies such as the TTC where in camera discussions are allowed on only a handful of grounds. There are no deputations at Metrolinx, unlike the City of Toronto where a long history of public involvement would be impossible to silence.
The Directors, with few exceptions, ask no questions in the public session, and everything has clearly been worked out beforehand. They’re just one big happy family.
Alas, thanks to an email slip-up, Metrolinx’ attitude slipped into view. An internal email from Rob Prichard, Metrolinx CEO, was cc:ed to the petion’s originator in error. From this, the clear intent was to give the petition as little exposure at the meeting as possible and assume that the Board would ignore it. They did.
The original article from February 12 follows the break.
How Many People Work For The TTC? (Update 2)
Updated February 21 at 8:20 pm:
I have now assembled data on the TTC workforce going back from 2007 to 1990 and have, I believe, created as good a presentation of this as we are likely to see. Some readers may not agree. That’s their option.
There are two problems in going back over a long series of data like this:
- There were fundamental changes in the way the TTC reported its staffing over the period 1990-1996. Some of this arose from structural reorganization, some from changes in accounting practices. The numbers must be adjusted to place them on an equal footing.
- Many people worked on capital projects on a contract basis either directly for the TTC or for companies engaged by them. This is particularly the case for major design projects such as subways and new buildings. These people do not show up in TTC headcounts.
I have produced two charts which show the relationship of staff, budget allocation area and riding over the period 1990-2007. (2008 and 2009 will be added when I dig out details for those years.)
TTC Workforce and Riding 1990-2007
The first chart shows the major groups of employees:
- Operations: These departments are responsible for running service and maintaining vehicles and infrastructure. For 1990-91, the engineering staff are included in this number.
- Wheel Trans (W/T): There is an anomalous drop in 1995 which I suspect is an error, but the value used comes from the budget for that year. The staff reappear in 1996.
- Administration: These departments are a separate branch only until 1993. Thereafter, they are rolled into the respective branches which they support. The jump in “operations” in 1994 reflects the assignment of most of “administration” to that group.
- Capital: Starting in 1992, the engineering staff were reported separately from plant maintenance, and I have assigned them to “capital”. A few years later, the capital staff for all departments were identified explicitly in the budgets.
- Toronto Coach Terminal Inc. (TCTI): This is the Bay Street bus terminal whose staff were formerly reported separately. TCTI is all that remains of the old Gray Coach Lines Ltd.
The second chart shows the annual ridership and the ratio of riders to “operations” staff. A few important points:
- For the years when “administration” was a separate branch (until 1993), the headcount is included pro-rata in “operations” for the purpose of calculating the ratio. (The “pro-rata” allocation is based on the apparent redistribution of the admin staff in 1994, a year when nothing else changed much.)
- Ridership follows a long decline to its nadir in 1996 by which time the TTC had managed to lose 100m riders relative to its high point in 1988. Reports from the early 90s when management talks about stopping the downward spiral make sobering reading when we consider what actually happened.
- The ratio of rides to operations staff followed the same trend from 1990-92. This indicates that riding was falling, but staffing was not on a proportionate basis. Thereafter, due to staff cuts, the ratio rose until 2,000. From 2003 onward, both ridership and rides/staff have grown indicating that staff is not increasing as fast as ridership.
- The ratio of rides to operations staff in 2007 is slightly higher than in 1990.
During this period, new groups were formed to deal with a number of safety issues and transit policing. Moreover, there was a recognition after the 1995 subway crash at Russell Hill that “state of good repair” needed serious attention. This corresponds to the point where the capital workforce begins to grow. More recently, other projects such as the subway extensions, Transit City and station renewal have come into play.
Another issue is the distribution of increases between management and front line staff. A 2007 TTC report on workforce history gives this breakdown for 1997-2007. It also includes a description of the additions to salaried positions (broadly speaking management and administration) over the decade. (The report in question is part of the TTC meeting agenda for September 12, 2007. However, these appendices are not included with the online version.)
1997-2007 Salaried Staff Increases
In the Operations group, the number of salaried staff rose from 1,553 to 1,805, or 16%. During the same period, the number of hourly-paid staff (union positions, almost all operators and maintenance workers) rose from 6,963 to 8,030, or 15%.
The proportionate increases in the Capital group were larger (55% in management/admin, 249% in hourly). Some may argue that “operations” staff and costs are being hidden in the Capital budget. Some shift may be happening, but I don’t believe that is the entire explanation. Without a detailed review of TTC staff allocations over many years and the assignment of projects as “operations” or “capital”, this is a very difficult question to answer. Certainly, it is worthwhile understanding how these numbers evolve for future years’ budgets.
The original material in this post follows the break. It should be read with care in light of the more detailed figures I have presented above. Continue reading
Steve Munro 
