A Grand Plan

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Stintz Supports LRT, Maybe (Update 3)

Updated January 23 at 11:00pm:  Links to updated coverage including signs of movement toward a new transit plan have been added.

From the Star:

Tess Kalinowski writes about support building for a new plan.  In this version, a surface-subway LRT on Eglinton frees up money for, possibly, a short extension on Sheppard to Victoria Park and something on Finch West.

It’s too early to tell which combination will win out, and there’s no reference to eastern Scarborough.

Martin Cohn writes about the imminent collapse of the McGuinty-Ford transit deal.  We learn that Queen’s Park was prepared to pay the extra cost of expropriating property to widen Eglinton to compensate for space lost to surface LRT, but this option was rejected by Ford.

A Star Editorial congratulates Karen Stintz for telling us the obvious and urges her to begin a campaign for a subway-surface line on Eglinton.  At this rate, they’ll be casting a bronze of Stintz arm-in-arm with David Miller.

From the Globe:

Marcus Gee writes favourably about a move to bring Eglinton back to the surface.

From the National Post:

Natalie Alcoba writes about the proposed change including comments from supportive Councillors.

Updated January 23 at 5:50 pm:  I recently spoke with Bruce McCuaig, President and CEO of Metrolinx, about this issue.  Notes from our conversation are at the end of this article.

Adrian Morrow reports in today’s Globe that TTC Chair Karen Stintz feels an all-underground Eglinton line should just be what it is, a subway, but that it belongs on the surface as LRT for its outer suburban section.

Karen Stintz argues it makes more sense to put the LRT underground only along the most congested part of the route, in midtown, while building it on the surface in the spacious suburbs.

“If the decision is to go with an LRT, it should be at-grade,” she said. “If there’s a decision to put it underground, it should be a subway.”

That’s an interesting position for someone in the Ford camp because it continues the anti-streetcar rhetoric of the Mayor’s office.  If Eglinton is built as a subway line, the option of converting it to LRT and resurrecting Transit City falls because a major link (and the proposed main shops for the LRT network) would vanish.

As Morrow points out in his article, other systems use a combination of surface and underground alignments (including Boston where downtown streetcars went underground over a century ago) so that a network of surface routes can share a common tunnel in the congested central area while switching to a simpler surface alignment elsewhere.

If Eglinton were to become a subway, the problem of valley crossings won’t disappear and Metrolinx will still face the problem of either going under several valleys, or bridging them with parallel structures.

The real question a subway option begs is the future of the SRT.  If Eglinton becomes a subway, it will not easily through-route to Scarborough Town Centre along the existing alignment, and this will reopen the debate over a Bloor-Danforth extension.

Morrow’s article implies that Stintz may be shifting into the pro-LRT camp, but I am not convinced.  If she were really shifting positions, there would be more talk about revival of some parts of Transit City, notably the Finch West line which, unlike Sheppard East, is completely independent of the Ford subway proposals.

The pending release of Gordon Chong’s report on financing the Sheppard Subway will trigger, finally, a debate on the future of Toronto’s transit technologies at Council.  We will see whether Stintz is truly an LRT supporter, or simply pitching Ford’s “no streetcars” view of the world.

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Metrolinx Plans a Fare Increase

The Metrolinx board will meet on Monday, January 9 to formally approve new, higher fares across the system effective February 18, 2012.  Unlike the previous fare hike of March 20, 2010 which was a flat $0.25 bump in all fares, this round uses tiered increases so that short-distance fares are not as disproportionately penalized.

  • Fares which are now between $4.20 and $5.50 would rise by $0.30 (5.5 to 7.1%)
  • Fares which are now between $5.51 and $7.00 would rise by $0.35 (5.0 to 6.4%)
  • Fares which are now at $7.01 or more would rise by $0.40 (at most 5.7%)

Considering that many GO fares are well above $7 (a one way from Kitchener-Waterloo to Union costs $14.60), that maximum increase amounts to only 2.7%.  Oddly enough, the presentation on the agenda notes that:

A flat increase disproportionately impacts shorter trips and will make any potential future fare integration arrangement with the TTC more difficult to achieve.

The 2012 increase is still disproportionately high for those who might make short journeys.  The idea that this somehow supports future fare integration with the TTC is hard to swallow.

The average GO fare is $6.55 and the average increase, allowing for the effects of discounts, will be about $0.31 (4.7%) .  If this were applied to the KW-Union fare, the increase would be about $0.70.

A chart of page 3 of the presentation makes interesting reading.  It shows various GO cost factors and their rates of increase over the past decade.  By far the highest are diesel fuel and electric power.

Concurrent with the fare increase, GO will change the discount plan for adults and students to encourage their shift from paper passes to Presto.  The discounts of 17.5% and 35% now offered to adult and student passholders respectively will stay in place for Presto fares, but the discounts for a paper pass will drop to 15% and 30%.

Like the TTC, GO faces the dilemma that adding service, even if they carry more riders, drives up costs because on average all services recover only about 80% from the farebox.  Stronger ridership with little service improvement is financially beneficial, but service improvements add to the operating costs.

With constraints on funding from Queen’s Park, passengers will have to dig a little deeper.  This is a major issue for future GO planning as they move to services that will not have as robust a cost recovery rate (two way, all day rail service).  The farebox cannot pay for GO’s evolution from a system that cherry-picks the cheapest of riders to one that provides service as a basic policy for the GTAH.

Metrolinx Board Report

Metrolinx Board Presentation

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Rebuilding A Transit City

The waning fortunes of the Ford regime and its defeat on planning for the eastern waterfront have emboldened many to focus on the resurrection of the Transit City LRT plan.  Advocates despaired as the newly-minted Mayor Ford so unceremoniously and undemocratically cancelled the plan.  We watched as Queen’s Park, terrified of a “Ford Nation” juggernaut decimating Liberal ranks in the 2011 election, caved in with a “Memorandum of Understanding” completely undoing the principles of their own “Big Move” transit scheme.

Now we’re in 2012, rumour has the Liberals wanting a return to the original plan, but fearing a unilateral move without a request from Toronto Council.  Oddly enough, the absence of any Council approval for Ford’s actions, a requirement of the MOU, is never mentioned.  The economics of the all-underground Eglinton “LRT” and the private sector Sheppard subway don’t look encouraging, and Queen’s Park faces widespread constraint in public sector spending.  This is hardly the time to be blowing billions to gold plate projects, to cover them with “gravy” that would invite ridicule in other circumstances.

The left may engineer a vote at Council once the 2012 budget debates are out of the way seeking to resurrect Transit City as it was originally proposed and agreed to.  CodeRedTO has formed with the intent of seeking a way, preferably through compromise, to a revised transportation plan that will keep the best of competing views of our future.  They hope to copy the success of the waterfront’s CodeBlueTO.

Whether this will be possible given the bluster and intransigence shown by the Mayor whenever surface transit is mentioned remains to be seen.  Unlike the Portlands fiasco, a scheme hatched and promoted by the Mayor’s brother Doug, the transportation file is firmly part of Rob Ford’s agenda.  It was in his campaign platform, and the Mayor has often repeated his loathing for “streetcars” and his mantra that the war on the car is over.

Unlike Waterfront Toronto, transit agencies don’t have a string of projects to show off as a mark of their expertise.

The TTC still hasn’t lived down the St. Clair project even though many of its problems were not of the TTC’s making, and “St. Clair” is as much a conjuration of urban myth than today’s experience.  Local transit is more a collection of horror stories, of fights between the system and its customers, rather than of day-to-day triumphs.  Right at the top, the TTC is infected with the premise that transit is for somebody else, for the folks who can’t afford to drive, rather than an essential part of the region’s network for everyone.

Metrolinx does well as far as it goes, but has the comparatively easy job of serving a small, concentrated and select market.  It’s easy to do well when you deliberately ignore millions of potential customers and see high farebox returns as a mark of success without seeing all those trips not taken (because service isn’t provided) as a cost to travellers and to the region.

However the politics works out, a vital challenge for advocates is to avoid an endless debate on thirty years worth of future transit plans, pitched battles between various transit schemes, technologies and alignments.  Taxpayers who must fund whatever we build, and politicians who must get re-elected, need a focussed, clear objective.

The waterfront file was an easy fight in this regard:  a widely-praised, detailed plan already exists that was demonstrably better than what was proposed.  The rivalry between agencies (Waterfront Toronto vs Toronto Port Lands Corporation) and the desire to get quick sales to fund property tax breaks in Toronto exposed the shallow goals and cronyism of the Ford alternative.  The situation with Transit City is much different.

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Union Station & Rail Corridor Capacity

At the recent Metrolinx Board meeting, staff presented an overview of planning now underway for the future of Union Station.  One background report addressed the future levels of GO, VIA and other services at Union and the surrounding rail corridors.  This report makes interesting, if unsurprising, reading because it confirms what anyone with even a modest understanding of railway operations already knows:  there are severe capacity constraints at Union as it is now configured and operated.  Too much discussion focuses on a bright future of frequent service without considering how we will fit all the trains and passengers through the hub of the network.

The full report is not online at Metrolinx, but I have obtained a copy.  Due to its size, I will not link the entire document here.  If you just want the highlights, read the Executive Summary.  For more details including a description of the evolving simulations of various levels of service, read the main report.

USRC Track Study Executive Summary

USRC Track Study Main Report

The study considered various scenarios corresponding to stages in the growth of GO and other services over coming decades:

  • Base Case:  The existing service at Union, including a reservation of two tracks out of service for the reconstruction project.  This was used to calibrate the model.
  • 2015:  Construction at the train shed is completed giving two more tracks for service.  The only new peak hour service beyond the base case would be a few VIA trains and the Air Rail Link.
  • Electrification study base case:  This configuration was used as a starting point for the recent electrification study, and it assumes two-way service on all corridors.  Three variants of this were tested to refine operations and remove constraints triggered by service at a much higher level than today.
  • Maximum capacity:  This configuration attempted to maximise service on all corridors.

The study concludes that significant changes will be required both in the physical plant (track, signals) and in train operations which will have to be managed considerably more tightly than today.

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Metrolinx Toys With 3Ps

The Toronto Star reports that Metrolinx is considering the private sector option for delivery of some or all of the Eglinton LRT project.  This is not much of a surprise given that Queen’s Park has an entire Ministry, Infrastructure Ontario, dedicated to building stuff, and their standard delivery model is a partnership with the private sector.

Advocates and opponents of public-private-partnerships often take extreme views that these schemes are either the saviour of government services, or evil works meant to transfer control (and money) of vital projects from public to private hands.  The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Every project the TTC or Metrolinx undertakes has a large private sector component:  engineering, construction, provision of materials.  Delays and cost overruns can arise from poor planning and design, some of it carried out by those same private sector engineers, or from contractors who view changes and delays as a potential source of profit.  They can also come from a client who can’t make up its mind and changes requirements as the project unfolds.

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GO Kitchener Rail Service Starts December 19, 2011

As previously rumoured in comments, the Kitchener rail service begins on December 19.  GO will implement this with two trains a day.

In the morning, the existing 6:47 Georgetown trip will originate in Kitchener at 5:52.   A new train will be added leaving Kitchener at 7:10 and arriving at Union at 9:08.

In the afternoon, two existing Georgetown trips leaving Union at 4:45 and 5:45 pm will be extended to Kitchener arriving there at 6:42 and 7:42.

The line will be renamed the “Kitchener” line.

GO Schedule Changes Page

Kitchener Timetable

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Metrolinx Board Meeting November 23, 2011 (Part I)

The agenda for November 23rd’s meeting of the Metrolinx Board is now online and it includes several reports of interest.  Here I will deal with GO transit performance and capacity issues.  In a future article, I will turn to Presto (and the proposed TTC implementation which is also on the TTC’s agenda for November 23), the Air Rail Link, and planning issues at “Mobility Hubs”.

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Sheppard Subway Inches Along (Updated)

Updated November 9 at 11:20pm:  The Toronto Star reports that Queen’s Park has told Mayor Ford that it will not advance any provincial funds from a possible “surplus” on the Eglinton project to jump start the Sheppard line.  This leaves Ford’s camp having to find money on its own if work on a first phase to Victoria Park were attempted.

The original article from November 8 follows:

The Toronto Star reports that Rob Ford’s Sheppard Subway proposal might creep eastward from Don Mills Station rather than bounding in one leap to Scarborough Town Centre.  An initial push east to Victoria Park might be a target for 2014, in time for the next municipal election, although the opening date would come later.

Considering that Ford was going to finance and build the entire Sheppard line in that time, this is a tad slower than promised during his election campaign.

The big problem, of course, is money.  Ford doesn’t have much and, as the Star points out, the engineering difficulties for an all-underground Eglinton line won’t leave much unspent of the provincial fund earmarked for that route.  For a route that was going to be financed by the private sector, Sheppard, or what we may see of it, is turning into a traditionally funded public sector project.

The specifics are no surprise.  Don Mills was always an odd place to end the Sheppard line, and this choice was dictated by available funding, not by network planning.  The proposed LRT connection into Don Mills is less than ideal, and a tunnel under the DVP would be required regardless of the technology.  The extra cost lies in continuing east to Victoria Park.

What we don’t know yet is whether this extension would include a Consumer’s Road Station, or just go straight through to the new terminal.

During the debates over possible adjustments to the Transit City network, a subway extension was one option proposed by some.  The typical reaction to this (and to any other schemes that would add to the cost of Transit City) was to reject the idea out of hand because the overall budget was already very tight.  However, now that Queen’s Park has decided that no price is too high to keep Mayor Ford happy, it’s much harder to argue against rethinking some Transit City options.

Victoria Park could be a good terminal for a Sheppard LRT, but there’s a problem of timing.  The “interim” subway terminal should be designed with provision for an LRT rather than subway continuation.  I suspect that no one at the TTC will be allowed to even discuss, let alone design such an option.  This will be a challenge for Councillors thinking ahead to a post-Ford era when LRT plans can be resurrected.

According to the Star, Gordon Chong should be reporting on a scheme to get the Sheppard line underway “before Christmas”.  Will Santa have a nice shiny subway train for little Rob’s stocking, or just a lump of coal?

Meanwhile for comic relief, Matt Elliot’s Ford for Toronto site reports how that pesky Don River just won’t get out of Ford’s way.

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Thirty-Nine

Thirty-nine years ago, the TTC made its historic decision to retain streetcars in Toronto.  At the time service on streetcar routes was considerably more frequent than today, and Torontonians generally thought kindly of that mode.

Over the years, it has been an uphill struggle to maintain this.  Service cuts on the TTC led to fleet reductions, and improvements we should have seen go unfilled thanks to the too-small fleet of unreliable cars.

We have been through one generation of “new” streetcars, and it’s hard to believe that these are now due for retirement.  The CLRVs (regular sized cars) are over 30 years old and although they may physically be capable of continued operation and body rebuilds, their ancient electronics are a challenge.  The ALRVs (two-section cars) are a bit younger, but still elderly.

Ongoing debates about the type of car that would replace Toronto’s fleet and, indeed, whether 100 of the CLRVs would receive a major overhaul including new control systems, delayed the replacement process.  This delay would be merely annoying had control of the Mayor’s office and Council stayed with a streetcar and transit friendly administration, but we’re now in an era where the streetcars are tolerated, not celebrated.

A mockup of the next generation of Toronto cars, Bombardier’s Flexity, goes on display next weekend at Hillcrest Shops.  Design delays, not to mention political foot-dragging, have this project running at least a year late.  Meanwhile, construction of the new carhouse and maintenance facility at Ashbridges Bay has not progressed beyond site preparation.

When the Streetcars for Toronto Committee (of which I was a member) advocated for streetcars, this was not just for the nostalgia of seeing rails in Toronto’s streets.  “Light Rapid Transit” (LRT), a then-modern-sounding pseudonym for streetcars on reserved rights-of-way, could have brought an inexpensive network of suburban routes long before the suburbs as we now know them were built.  Not until the Transit City plan, decades later, did we have an administration that took this concept seriously.  Transit City had its flaws, but these pale beside the madness of an all-underground alternative foisted on Toronto by Mayor Ford and Premier McGuinty.

Engineering challenges may force a rethink for Eglinton’s valley crossings at the Don River and other locations, but these will come grudgingly and the original surface alignment is at best “on the back burner” until less hostile forces occupy City Hall.

The rest of Transit City is so far in the background that even the name has been expunged from official use except as a slur against the Miller years.

Day-to-day transit service is under attack from City budget cuts and Provincial underfunding.  Toronto’s recent history of strong ridership may continue only by an accident of high energy prices and traffic congestion, not from an active plan to serve growing demand and population.

This is really not where I had hoped to see our transit system by now.

The 40th anniversary will come in 2012 when transit will still be fighting for its life politically and financially in Toronto.  We should have been celebrating a renaissance.

Readers of Douglas Adams will know that “42” is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything”.  What will 2014 bring?

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Memo to Queen’s Park

Almost a month after Ontario’s provincial election, the political landscape in Toronto is shifting away from the Ford Brothers and “Ford Nation”.    The Brothers Ford’s hoped-for Conservative ally, a Premier who would support any of their mad schemes, remains in opposition.  The Tories didn’t even manage to girdle Toronto with a sea of blue ridings, and the Liberals remain in power in much of the GTA with the NDP taking several urban seats.  Between them, the Liberals and NDP count for a large block of “not Tory” votes, and Ford’s effect on the election was at best neutral.

The Liberals, content to re-announce past commitments, proposed little on transit during the election.  Queen’s Park remains silent on any transit initiatives.  This might be a sign of consistency if only we did not hear daily about “congestion” and the need for much better transit in the GTA.

Bob Chiarelli, formerly Mayor of Ottawa, replaces Kathleen Wynne as Minister of Transportation (also as Minister of Infrastructure).  The Ministry’s website describes Chiarelli as “a champion of public transit, including clean light-rail expansion”, and for once we have a transition between Ministers that might not wreck a pattern of support for transit within the government.

There is much to do.  Simple recitations of committed projects must give way to discussions of a future, much improved world for transit in the GTA and other major Ontario centres.

Herewith, a few suggestions about what the “major minority” (Premier McGuinty’s term for a not-quite majority) of our new government might do on this file.

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