A Grand Plan

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Toronto’s 2014 Budget & The TTC

On January 30, 2014, Toronto Council passed its 2014 operating and capital budgets.  In earlier articles, I discussed details of the TTC budgets and won’t repeat that info here.  However, a few details from the City budget debate are worth mentioning.

Scarborough Subway

Three Councillors attempted to sideline spending on the Scarborough Subway project by redirecting the planned $14-million in the 2014 budget either to a reserve or to other projects.

All of these motions were ruled out of order by the Speaker based on advice from City Legal staff who argued that since Council had already passes a special tax to fund the Scarborough Subway, they would be open to a lawsuit if the money were not spent for the intended purpose.  This ruling by the Chair was challenged, but the Chair was upheld by a vote of 23-22.  This is the same margin as in a previous vote on the issue, although a few Councillors switched sides.

I feel that attempts to derail this project are counterproductive at this time for several reasons:

  • Like it or not, Council has approved the Scarborough Subway project and its associated tax.
  • The issue is very contentious and in the current political environment quickly becomes a “Scarborough against the world” debate.
  • The cost estimate for the project is barely beyond the back-of-the-envelope stage, and this cannot be refined without further study that will occur in 2014 as part of the lead-up to the Environmental Assessment.  This will include comparative costs and effects for the City’s McCowan alignment and for Minister Murray’s “SRT” alignment.
  • If the cost of the subway proves substantially higher, this will certainly trigger a further debate at the 2015 budget sessions under the newly elected Council who must approve the next stage of the subway tax increase.  Any increase must be paid for with 100-cent City dollars because the commitments by Queen’s Park and Ottawa are capped.

Other related issues include:

  • The projected demand for the Scarborough Subway must be seen in the context of other regional plans that are under discussion.  These include substantially better service on the GO Stouffville Corridor.  An EA for double-tracking this line is already underway, and the corridor is part of the “Big U” that is under study as part of Yonge subway capacity relief.
  • The claimed shutdown period for the SRT for conversion to LRT has been inflated from the 2.5 years anticipated by Metrolinx to 4 years and beyond by subway advocates.  Any discussion of the LRT alternative must include a review of how long a shutdown really needs to take, but we are unlikely to see this given that the only authorized work for 2014 will be on the subway options.  Any work to make the LRT option more palatable would be viewed as backsliding by subway supporters.

The whole project will be back at Council again in 2015, and that is the time for a well-informed debate on alternatives.

Operating Subsidy

When the TTC Board approved its 2014 operating budget, there was a $6-million unspecified reduction in the expected subsidy based on a recommendation from the City Manager.  At the time, both TTC Chair Karen Stintz and CEO Andy Byford said that they would fight for the missing $6m, although we never found out exactly what the effect would be if the TTC didn’t get it.

The original 2014 subsidy proposed by management in the budget (November 2013) was $434m, up from a budget level of $411m for 2013. The Board passed a budget with a $428m subsidy.

The CEO’s report for November also predicted a $411m subsidy requirement for 2013, but probable actuals reported in January show that the system came in $7.3m below this number, at $403.7m.  Whether these savings are one time effects or sustainable into future years is a matter of debate (one unexpected source of revenue was the sale of retired subway cars).  The TTC does not distinguish between regular and extraordinary revenues, and some savings or costs (such as the actual vs budgeted cost of diesel fuel) vary with market forces.

In any event, for the second year running, the TTC’s actual subsidy requirements have come in below projections.  This makes the increase from previous year’s actual to current year’s budget bigger than simply a budget-to-budget comparison would show.

In case anyone is tempted to ask why the TTC cannot do “a better job” of budgeting “accurately”, that $7.3m is less than half of one percent of the total 2013 budget of $1.541-billion.  If your own personal finances operate at such a level of accuracy or better, then maybe you have a right to complain.  However, given that even a small percentage variation for the TTC turns into what, for Councillors, is a huge amount of money, debates about the TTC budget often turn on the minutia.  $6m represents 0.25% on the property tax rate.

Among several budget adjustments proposed by Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly and approved by Council, the TTC received an extra $3m for a new budgeted subsidy of $431m.

Council also passed a motion asking staff:

… to develop an intergovernmental campaign to advocate for a Provincial operating subsidy in line with pre-1995 levels.

$70m of Provincial subsidy now goes to the TTC operating budget as part of the City’s subsidy.  This is well below the formula instituted by Premier Davis in the 1970s of a 50% Provincial share.  A catch-22 here is that slavishly holding to a percentage allows Queen’s Park to dictate the size of the total budget by specifying an absolute limit to the dollar value of the subsidy.  This can artificially constrain the growth in TTC service.

Capital Budget

The Capital Budget was passed including over $2-billion in cuts (shifts of projects and funding to “below the line” over the coming 10 years.  Some of this lies in large projects that have yet to be approved, but a substantial amount comes from purchase of new vehicles (buses, streetcars and subway cars), garage/carhouse expansions and facilities maintenance.  $10m per year has been cut from streetcar track maintenance in 2014-18, and from subway track maintenance in 2019-2023.  In the out years, this is accounting hocus-pocus designed to make the capital spending fit within available target levels, but in the short term, this threatens some necessary TTC work.

The City and TTC will continue to beat their drums for added support at Queen’s Park and Ottawa even though, at least in the short term, this is likely to be more wishful thinking that productive lobbying.

Toronto has a self-imposed debt limit that arises from a desire to keep debt servicing costs at an affordable level relative to tax revenue.  Of course, if Council wants to raise taxes, they can also raise the amount of debt as they have done for the Scarborough Subway.

Affordability of Transit Fares

Council passed a motion asking several City departments and agencies, including the TTC:

… to report in advance of the rollout of the Presto Fare Card system and prior to the 2015 budget process, on options related to a fare media policy that addresses affordability issues of transit fares for low and moderate income Torontonians.

This topic comes up regularly at TTC Board discussions, and the common TTC response is that social benefits are not in the TTC’s purview.  With the move to smart card fare collection, there is an option to build fare subsidies into a rider’s account and to allow such subsidies to be tracked.

The question, as always, will be whether TTC funding should go to improvements in service and/or fare structure for all riders, or be targeted to those who receive some other form of social assistance.

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Will The TTC Board Ever Discuss Policy, or, Good News Is Not Enough (Updated)

Updated January 21, 2014 at 2:20 pm:  The description of the loading standards introduced with the Ridership Growth Strategy has been corrected.

The election season is upon us in Toronto, and transit made an early appearance on the campaign with mayoral candidate David Soknacki’s proposal that Toronto revert to the LRT plan for Scarborough.  I am not going to rehash that debate here, but there is a much larger issue at stake.

The Ford/Stintz era at Council and at the TTC has been notable for its absence of substantive debate on options and alternatives for our transit future.  Yes, we have had the subways*3 mantra, the palace coup to establish Karen Stintz and LRT, for a time, as a more progressive outlook on the TTC Board, and finally the Scarborough debate.

But that’s not all there is to talk about on the transit file.  Do we have a regular flow of policy papers at Board meetings to discuss what transit could be, should be?  No.  Ford’s stooges may have been deposed, but the conservative fiscal agenda remains.  Make do with less.  Make sacrifices for the greater good, whatever that may be.  Show how “efficiency” can protect taxpayer dollars even while riders freeze in the cold wondering when their bus will appear.

Every Board meeting starts with a little recitation by the Chair of good news, of stories about how TTC staffers helped people and the good will this brings to the organization.  There is ever so much pride in improved cleanliness and attractiveness of the system – a worthwhile achievement, but one that should become second nature to maintain.  It should also be a “canary in the coal mine”, a simple, obvious example of what happens when we make do with “good enough”, with year-by-year trimming to just get by.

If the bathrooms are filthy, imagine the condition of the trains, buses and streetcars you are riding.  I’m not talking about loose newspapers blowing around, but of basic maintenance.  From our experience in the 1990s, we know how a long slide can take a once-proud, almost cocky system to disaster, and how hard it is to rebuild.

In a previous article, I wrote about the threat to basic system maintenance posed by underfunding of the Capital Budget, an issue that has not received enough public debate.  Part of the problem is that the crucial maintenance work that must occur year over year is treated the same way as new projects.  Maintenance competes with the glamour projects for funding, and may be treated as something to be deferred, something we don’t need yet.  Couple that with starvation of funds for basics like a new and expanded fleet and garage space, and there’s a recipe for a TTC that will decline even while more and more is expected of public transit.

The budget isn’t the only issue that deserves more detailed examination, and many other  policies should be up for debate.  Within a month, the TTC will have a new Chair as Karen Stintz departs for the mayoralty campaign.  Within a year, Toronto should have a new Mayor, one whose view of transit is not framed by the window of his SUV.  At Queen’s Park we may have a Liberal government with a fresh, if shaky, mandate to raise new revenues for transit construction and operation, or we may have a populist alternative with a four-year supply of magic beans.

In the remaining months, the TTC Board has a duty to lay the ground for the governments to come, especially at City Hall.  The 2015 budget debates should be well informed about the options for transit, if only for planning where Toronto will need to spend and what services the TTC will offer in years to come.  Will the TTC rise to this challenge, or sit on its hands with a caretaker Board until the end of the current term?

Here is a selection of the major policy issues we should be hearing about, if only the TTC would engage in actual debate to inform itself, Council, the media and the voters.

  • Fare structure:  What is the appropriate way to charge fares for transit service?  By time, distance, week, month?  How does smart card technology change the way fares are collected and monitored?  What are the implications for regional travel and integration?
  • Service standards:  What loading standards should be used to drive service improvements?  Should the TTC build in elbow room to encourage riding and to reduce delays due to crowding?  Should there be a core network of routes with guaranteed frequent service?
  • Service management:  What goals should the TTC aim for in managing service?  Do the measures that are reported today accurately reflect the quality of service?  Are bad schedules to blame for erratic service, or does this stem from management indifference or from labour practices that work against reliable service?  What are the tradeoffs in the relative priority of transit and other traffic?  What are the budgetary effects of moves to improve service?
  • Budgets and Subsidies:  Both the Operating and Capital Budgets have been cut below the level recommended by TTC management.  These cuts will affect service and maintenance in the short and long term, but there has been no debate about the effect, especially if these are not quickly reversed in a post-Ford environment.  The Capital Budget faces a huge gap between available funding and requirements.  Over ten years, the shortfall is 30% in available financing versus requirements, and this is back-end loaded so that the shortfall rises to 50% in later years.  The proposed level of City subsidy is barely half what would be needed if Queen’s Park returned to its historical 50% capital funding formula.  Hoped-for money from Ottawa is more likely to finance major projects such as new subway lines, not the “base” budget for capital  maintenance.  The budget, especially capital, is not well understood by the TTC Board or Council in part because of the confusing way in which it is presented.  Toronto cannot begin to discuss subsidy policies if those responsible for decisions cannot understand their own budgets.
  • The Waterfront:  While battles rage over subway and LRT proposals for the suburbs, a major new development on the waterfront is starved for transit thanks to cost escalation, tepid interest by the TTC, and the perception that waterfront transit can be left for another time.  The pace of development may be threatened if good transit does not materialize on Queens Quay, and later to the Port Lands, but meanwhile this project sits on the back burner little understood by most members of the TTC Board and Council.
  • Rapid transit plans:  The artificial distinction between GO and the subway (or even higher-end LRT operations such as the proposed Scarborough line) will disappear as GO becomes a frequent all-day operation.  There will be one network regardless of the colours of the trains.  GO service to the outer parts of the 416 is particularly important as an alternative to subway construction serving long-haul trips to downtown.  Subways, LRT and BRT each has its place in the network, but electoral planning must not leave us with fragments of a network rather than an integrated whole.
  • Accessibility:  The need for accessibility extends all the way from the severely disabled who require door-to-door service, through a large and growing population who have some degree of independence, to those whose only problem may be bad knees or a weak heart.  Neither the TTC nor the City has taken the issues of accessibility particularly seriously in recent years.  There may be good words, but the budget and service policies clearly limit the growth of the parallel Wheel Trans system.  Meanwhile, retrofitting the system for full access is delayed thanks to funding limitations at both the City and Queen’s Park.  What we do not know is the true extent of the need for accessibility on the TTC and what this means for service and infrastructure.

Continue reading →

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Don’t Just Fund Transit, Build Transit

Back in December, the advisory panel reviewing the Metrolinx Investment Strategy released its report recommending a number of revenue generation tools and showing how these could support an accelerated construction plan for many transit improvements.  As background to this proposal, I asked for details on how the panel had worked out the spending pattern and the project timing.  Recently, this information was forwarded to me.

What is most interesting about this paper is the chart showing project timing and spending on page 4.  The projects include:

  • Upgrades to GO Transit for all day service on the Milton, Barrie, Richmond Hill, Stouffville and Georgetown-Kitchener corridors;
  • Electrification of the UPX to Pearson Airport;
  • LRT lines on Hurontario-Main and in Hamilton;
  • BRT for Dundas Street and Durham-Scarborough;
  • An unspecified rapid transit line for Brampton Queen Street;
  • The Relief Subway line plus partial extension of the Yonge line.

The work is spread over 2015-25 with peak spending in the years 2017-21.  The annual expenditures are not constrained by the size of the income stream because bridge financing would be used.  This would carry the program through to the later years when revenue would be used to pay down debt rather than to fund current construction.

What is so striking about this plan is that the goal is to build transit as quickly as reasonably possible, not to hamstring construction work with hand wringing about the amount of each year’s spending allocation from Queen’s Park.  Much of the hope vested in The Big Move was lost thanks to the extended delivery times for projects which, in turn, were dictated by the abject fear of financing the work with new revenues.  A bold plan was neutered by the McGuinty Liberals’ terror of criticism by the “no new taxes” brigade.

It’s all well to point to a list of “funded projects”, but if the delivery dates for construction and completion drift off into the future, the funding announcements are just so much toilet paper.

Overall construction time for each project is sourced from the Metrolinx Investment Strategy. However, the capacity to deliver these projects as outlined has not been factored into schedule development – the Panel’s proof of concept deliberately advances Next Wave projects to begin construction faster than currently anticipated and after the design period is complete. [Page 1]

That phrase “capacity to deliver” brings me to one of Metrolinx’ favourite excuses for an extended rollout schedule – a claim that the construction industry cannot possibly do so much work in so short a time.  That fails on several counts notably that the original Big Move, unconstrained by a spending slowdown ordered by Queen’s Park, planned a $2-billion annual outlay (plus inflation) over 25 years, a period we would be well into by now but for Queen’s Park’s reticence.

A great deal of the work outlined here would be underway and completed before the end of the “first wave” of Big Move projects.  This shows the effect of more aggressive planning where providing service is the primary goal rather than dragging out spending.  If a similar approach had been taken sooner, we could be riding new transit services in the next few years, not hearing over and over about a handful of projects such as the Spadina extension that have been in the pipeline for quite a long time.

Metrolinx staff are supposed to be reviewing the timing of at least the Sheppard LRT project with a view to beginning this earlier.  In the current political situation, with the  Scarborough subway/LRT debate heating up again, it is hard to know whether Metrolinx will even have the backbone to discuss a speedup of the Sheppard line publicly.

This shows everything that is wrong with that supposedly independent agency – policy debates, “what if” discussions never take place in public, presuming that they take place at all.  This might embarrass politicians and show voters what options would actually cost, and how soon they new services could be available, if only we had the collective will to proceed for the benefit of the GTHA as a whole, not for individual by-elections that skew political focus.

Whether any of this comes to pass will depend on how much of the Transit Panel’s recommendations are incorporated into the government’s budget for 2014-15, and whether the opposition parties force an election.  The key point is that voters need to believe that any new taxes will actually benefit them, and will do so soon, not a decade or more in the future.

We have had enough of spineless government on the transit file.  Dalton McGuinty was a huge disappointment substituting delay for action, and Kathleen Wynne has only one chance to prove that she really believes in attacking the deficit in transit construction head on.

No excuses.  Build now.

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Sprawl Is Good For You?

There are times I pick up my morning Globe & Mail and wonder who selects their articles, especially in the Report on Business where investigative journalism does not exactly reign.  A few days ago, right on the top of page B2, they had a piece of drivel by Brian Lee Crowley entitled “Sick of congestion? Build roads, not transit“.

Is the Globe playing for the Ford Nation readership?  Is their soon-to-be-neighbour on King East, the dwindling Toronto Sun, rubbing off on the Globe’s brand?  Will being at the mercy of the King car give them second thoughts about downtown?  After all, they’re also unable to plump for mayoral candidates who might be seen as part of the downtown elite even thought they might actually be competent for the position.

Crowley argues that building more roads is the secret of success far more productive than building new transit lines.  This is the orthodoxy one expects from someone who views Wendell Cox as an informed, unbiased source of information.  On the issue of concentrating resources on transit construction, Crowley writes:

As urban geographer Wendell Cox likes to say, this idea that road construction only worsens congestion is like believing that building more maternity wards will cause more babies to be born.

This argument is a total non-sequitur because the issue is not cause and effect, but capacity and latent demand.  The existence of a new, comparatively uncongested road will induce more driving simply by making this a more attractive option.  More maternity wards do not, of themselves, make having a family more attractive.  To continue the analogy, it would be like a construction program fixated with on ramps.

Cox is no “urban geographer”, but an apologist for anti-government, anti-transit arguments going back decades.  There are enough transit boondoggles in the USA for anyone to show how vast resources have been spent to build new lines of dubious value.  The USA, like Canada, has a long history of spending on capital projects as a job creation scheme regardless of the intrinsic value of what is actually built.  Pork barrel politics bring billions to cities and to the construction industry that feeds off of them.

That does not make all transit a waste of money any more than recent subway debates would invalidate any transit spending plans for the GTHA.  What those debates do achieve is to undermine the credibility of those who ask for more money when voters are suspicious that nothing of real value will be created.

Only when one is well into Crowley’s piece, does one find the real heart of his argument — lower density cities with spread out jobs and populations, and lots of road capacity, are actually less congested and have shorter commute times than the more traditional configuration of downtown-plus-suburb we know so well.  His poster children are Phoenix and Houston.

Certainly, if one has a city with ample room to grow, a history of leaving wide swaths of land around main roadways, and a development model that favours decentralization, one can easily have uncongested roads.  We saw exactly this in much of the 905 until growth caught up with road capacity and, suddenly, those quick trips through suburbia became a commuting nightmare.  The problem is not just “downtown” but throughout much of the GTA.

Crowley pulls a “bait and switch” on his readers giving the implication that he has a solution to congestion when, in fact, his answer is to not build denser cities in the first place.  One can easily argue that there are many other benefits of density and that the effect on commute times is a trade-off we make for a more “urban” environment.  Our problem in the GTA is that we only half-heartedly embrace a truly “sprawling” city.  We already have a dense core, and the idea of keeping housing and jobs spread out all the way from Steeles Avenue to Lake Simcoe is not a model the development industry cares to follow.

Crowley ends by exhorting planners to think of sprawl as part of their toolkit to make better, less congested cities.  This is complete nonsense.  He starts with the premise that where sprawling cities do exist, there is little or no congestion, but then reverses cause and effect to imply that sprawl can be used as an antidote.  No, it doesn’t work that way.  Our congestion already exists, and more sprawl won’t make it vanish.  Neither will road building, at least on a scale we can afford and tolerate within our already-developed city.

If anything, our problems are compounded by the demands of the industrial sector who want to see less congestion for their trucks and, by implication, a shift of road priority away from individual motorists by spending on alternatives like transit.

Simplistic analyses like this may keep Ford Nation warm at night dreaming of more expressways (provided the roads and traffic don’t go through their neighbourhood).  For the debate about Toronto’s transit future, Crowley’s empty and misleading thesis is a useless distraction.

Links to Other Articles in Response:

Jarrett Walker on Human Transit

Todd Litman on Facebook

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The Problem With LRT Publicity (Updated)

Updated on December 12, 2013 at 5:40 pm:  Maps of the original SLRT alignment proposed by the Transportation Plan Review and the alternate alignment proposed by me and Robert Wightman have been added at the end.

Original article from December 10, 2013:

Back when glaciers still plied the northern outskirts of Toronto, there was something called the Metropolitan Toronto Transportation Plan Review.  It was an outgrowth of the decision to halt construction of the Spadina Expressway and take a new look at Toronto’s transportation plans.  At the time, folks living in The Beach and the east side of downtown were fighting against the Scarborough Expressway.  This project would have linked the (former) stub end of the Gardiner at the Don east to Woodbine, north to the rail corridor, and then east to link up with the 401 in eastern Scarborough.

The MTTPR (as it was called) looked at alternatives to the expressway and in March 1974, they came up with a scheme to build an LRT line with two branches.  This would follow Queen Street (as part of the streetcar service) to east of Broadview, then follow the rail corridor to Scarborough Junction.  One leg would head east to Morningside, while the other turned northeast to the Scarborough Town Centre.

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Tearing Apart The Big Move

The Neptis Foundation has published a long report which provides a serious critique of projects in the Metrolinx Big Move plan and proposes significant alterations to the proposed network.  Everything is based on cost-effectiveness although the critique depends on implementation of the overall scheme rather than the usual piecemeal approach to network expansion.  Of particular note is the need to regard GO as a high frequency, high capacity regional system closely integrated with local transit.

There is too much in this report for me to comment on as I write this (midnight, December 11), but I will try to pull together more extensive remarks in the next day or so.  Meanwhile, coverage of this report will appear in the Wednesday Star, and this is likely to stir up several hornet’s nests.

A quick review indicates the following significant issues:

  • The Downtown Relief Line disappears and its “relief” function is provided by a combination of GO Transit upgrades and increased subway capacity.
  • The only service to Pearson Airport remains the Union Pearson Express which is considered to be profitable (operating cost recovery only) despite a conclusion to the contrary by the Provincial Auditor.  The wider question of this service’s ability to absorb greater demand and a wider variety of traffic is not examined beyond a proposal for a “frequent user” fare that would attract trips by airport workers, not just business class travellers.
  • Electrification of GO Transit is essential.
  • Fare and service integration with GO is an essential part of the proposal.
  • Several stations on the Eglinton Crosstown line would be dropped, and the proposed at grade section would become an elevated structure.  This takes us back to a version of the Eglinton line originally pushed by Metrolinx as a regional facility, and begs the question of transit service to the now wider “in between” locations that would lose their stations.
  • The Richmond Hill subway would also lose some of its stations pending contributions by developers along the line.
  • The Scarborough Subway, LRT and Sheppard LRT would be converted to one consolidated, automated line to attract more riders.

At first blush, I cannot help thinking that this report is hopelessly naive on a few counts.

First, it depends on a co-ordinated scale of network expansion we are unlikely to see, especially for the GO component which is used to justify dropping other parts of the Big Move network.

Second, there is a focus on cost-benefit that at first glance appears to preclude the function of new transit lines as part of a network.  A related issue is the question of marginal new ridership where a large expenditure to improve the quality of service for existing riders is given no credit for that benefit as they generate no net revenue.

Third, there appears to be no discussion nor appreciation of the role of local services for areas beyond the immediate reach of rapid transit stations.  This is very much a return to the kind of thinking that infected early days at Metrolinx.

I will leave further comments until I have a chance to read all of the details.

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Future Demand on the Downtown Subway Network

Recent discussion about the Downtown Relief Line study and its Terms of Reference sent me back to the TTC’s Downtown Rapid Transit Expansion Study (DTRES) published last year for a look at the demand projections.

What I found there was rather troubling.

The TTC looked at three scenarios to model future shortfall in network capacity by 2031:

  • The existing TTC and GO networks
  • An enhanced “reference network” with improved subway and GO service
  • The reference network plus the Yonge extension north from Finch to Richmond Hill

The demand model outputs appear in three separate tables within that study, but it is not until we consolidate the information that some anomalies really jump out.

DTRES_Demand_Comparisons

There are four sets of numbers in this table with columns corresponding to the three model networks.

  • Capacity:  This gives the capacity of each route based on service levels and train lengths.
  • Inbound demand:  This is the modeled demand on the network.
  • V/C:  This is the ratio of demand to capacity.  A value near to or greater than 1.0 indicates that the line will be over capacity during at least part of the peak period.
  • Inbound deficiency:  Where the capacity is lower than the demand, this is the magnitude of the shortfall.

The capacity of the reference network is about 50% greater than the existing one.  Note that for the northern GO services, ten-car trains are assumed although 20% could be added to the capacity with 12-car trains on the same presumed schedules.  (The model also considered the east-west GO services and their effect in draining trips off of the BD subway that would otherwise contribute to demand south of Bloor Station.)

The modeled demand is also about 50% greater than the demand that the model assigns to the “existing” network configuration.  This shows the modeled effect of increased transit service on network demand.  However, this also begs the question of where those trips would be if the TTC and GO improvements did not take place.  An obvious useful addition to the discussion would be the added road trips, or the trips simply not taken because there was no network capacity to handle them.

The big surprise is that there is almost no difference between the total demand with or without the Richmond Hill extension.  Indeed, most changes are re-assignments of trips from GO lines and the University subway in the “reference” network to the Yonge subway in the “reference + YSE” network.

Route                    Without YSE     With YSE
University Subway           25,100        23,500
Yonge S of Bloor            35,800        39,400
Barrie GO                    7,500         7,400
Richmond Hill GO             2,500         2,200
Stouffville GO               8,600         8,000
Total                       79,500        80,500

Why would we spend billions of dollars building a subway to Richmond Hill to carry no more total riders on the network than we do without it?

There are two obvious responses to this question:

  • Some of the new trips have destinations at or north of Bloor Street and therefore they do not contribute to the count of riders into the core area.
  • In the model’s world, the subway extension does not attract any net new trips beyond what would occur simply with better service on the subway to Finch and enhanced GO services (i.e. with the reference network).

This is a rather strange situation considering that the holdup on building the Richmond Hill extension arose from the claim that it would overload the Yonge line.  However, in the model, it does this primarily by attracting trips that would otherwise have been on GO or on the extended University subway.

(At this point, I have to wonder whether a similar methodology produced the inflated ridership projections for the Scarborough Subway, but that is another matter.)

The model shows very low ridership on the Richmond Hill line.  Indeed, the greatest number of riders (2,900) is obtained with the “existing” network and the value falls even though GO service is improved in the “reference” and “reference + YSE” networks.  This implies that the model prefers to assign trips to the “faster” Yonge subway especially when it goes all the way north to Richmond Hill.

On the BD line, although an increased capacity is included in the model (about 27%), ridership only goes up in the section east of Yonge.  This implies either that demand from the west is static (difficult to believe) or that it is going somewhere else in the model.  Where?  Is growth assigned mainly to GO because it competes well with the subway for traffic in Mississauga while to the east Scarborough is poorly served by GO?

There is no question that Toronto needs more capacity into the core area, but the modeled numbers in the DTRES are suspect.  If anything, they may understate the problem and the potential benefits of alternatives to stuffing more riders onto the Yonge subway.

The TTC has a long history of downplaying the need for anything beyond Yonge subway capacity expansion (more trains, new signals, bigger stations) to the detriment of long-term planning for better GO service and new TTC subway or LRT services.  For many years, all we heard about from TTC was the need for a Richmond Hill subway.  Any other project was cold-shouldered because it threatened that favoured scheme.  Only when capacity problems could not be ignored did the TTC turn to the “DRL” as a possible solution.

Toronto has been ill-served by this blinkered planning, and coming studies on the future of the transit network (without regard to the paint scheme on the vehicles) must be based on a fair and accurate assessment of how new and improved services will contribute to moving passengers and limiting the growth of congestion in Toronto.