A Grand Plan

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Wanna Buy a Subway?

For Sale:  One Transit System.  Slightly Used.  A Faded Beauty and a Handyman’s Special.  No reasonable offer refused.  Call Honest Rob’s Transit Hotline for details!

Adam Radwanski’s article in this morning’s Globe and Mail triggered a flood of emails between the latté-sipping chattering classes today as journalists, politicians and transit advocates tried to make sense of Mayor Ford’s scheme to upload the TTC, or at least its subway lines, to Queen’s Park.  By the end of the day, the McGuinty government had replied “no thanks” to the offer, but the issue will still get lots of debate.

I have to wonder if the Mayor has really thought through what he has proposed.  Here are a few small questions.

  • The City’s share of the operating and capital deficits for the entire TTC, including Wheel Trans, is over $1-billion.  How much of this would the province actually take over?  If Toronto wants better service — things like trains every 5 minutes at 1 am on a line carrying almost nobody — would Queen’s Park send us a bill for service in excess of their own standards?
  • If Queen’s Park got only the subway system, how would revenue for the TTC as a whole be shared?  Would the subway become a separate fare zone with its own GO-like premium fares?  Would the revenue split be skewed to make the subway “profitable” even though it depends for its huge demand on the surface feeder network?
  • If Toronto wanted a subway on Sheppard, but Queen’s Park thought that an LRT line was all the street really needed, (a) how would the City force Queen’s Park to build it and (b) would Toronto have to pay the difference in construction and operating costs for a subway?  Why should provincial planning trump local preferences when this almost never happens in any other sphere of provincial influence worth mentioning?
  • If Queen’s Park took over the bus and streetcar services, who would riders complain to about overcrowding, service quality, system cutbacks and fares?  Would Liberal ridings (at least while they’re in power) get better service than Tory and NDP ridings?  If people living in Long Branch elected a new government, would service on the Queen car improve?  (They’ve tried everything else.)
  • How much will it cost Queen’s Park to buy out objections from Hamilton, Mississauga, Ottawa and every other transit operator about an unfair subsidy by way of a Toronto upload?

Anyone who has dealt with GO Transit on a construction project, or with Metrolinx on transit financing, will know that “transparency” is not their watchword, information is difficult to come by, and future planning consists of whatever is announced in the provincial budget.  Don’t look for a politician because the board is a collection of untouchable agents of the private sector bringing their expertise to bear, don’t ya know, but certainly not interacting with the public on a day-to-day basis.

Radwanski reports that Queen’s Park wants ownership of lines it pays for to stay on its books.  At first, this looks like little more than accounting dodge — a way to show an asset to balance of the debt floated to build, say, a new subway.  However, a book asset’s real value is that it can be sold.  Remember Highway 407?  What would prevent Metrolinx from selling the Sheppard line to a private owner with no control over what the new proprietor might charge us for the use of “their” subway?  Would fares go through the roof just like highway tolls?

Selling or uploading the TTC is a hare-brained idea that does nothing to address the basic transit problems both Toronto and the GTA face.  Transit is a big, expensive business, and somebody has to pay for it.  Cook the books all you like, there is only one rider, one taxpayer, one citizenry stuck with the bills at the end of the day.

Debating who might “own” the transit system diverts attention from vital transit advocacy.  Mayor Ford and Premier McGuinty should concentrate on transit plans and strategies that are achievable, and convince voters of the need for good transit funding, even if this means new sources of revenue.

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Not Quite Greased Lightning: GO Transit to Electrify, Eventually

Today, Metrolinx released its long-awaited study of GO Transit electrification.  I will comment on this in more detail over the next day or so, but here are preliminary observations while the news is fresh.

Updated 4:30 pm: The study appendices are now available online.  I have not incorporated any information from them in the article below.

The study finds that electrification is a worthwhile venture on selected, well-used corridors, and that it is an important foundation for the growth of GO Transit into its regional role proposed in Metrolinx’ Big Move.

The proposed staging of the electrification project (all times are estimates) is:

  • Preliminary design and Environmental Assessments (3-4 yrs)
  • Union to Pearson Airport, and Union to Mimico (Willowbrook Shops) (4-5 years)
  • Pearson Airport spur to Brampton (Mt. Pleasant) (2 years)
  • Union to Oshawa (including access to a new eastern maintenance shops) (4 years)
  • Mimico to Oakville (2 years)
  • Oakville to Hamilton (James Street Station) (2 years)
  • Oshawa to Bowmanville (2 years)
  • Brampton to Kitchener (2-3 years)

Other corridors were studied, but the best benefit-cost ratio was found to be the combination of Georgetown and Lake Shore.  Events over the next decades may prove this to be short-sighted, but that’s today’s plan.

The implementation is rather leisurely, and if all of its phases take place sequentially, it will be the early 2030s before this scheme is completed.  The Environmental Assessments will use the expedited process most recently seen on the Transit City projects.  This will avoid the need for “alternatives analysis” on projects where the alignment and technology selections are a foregone conclusion, and the “terms of reference” will be much simpler than a full EA.

No individual benefit is cited for electrification, but rather the combined effect of contributions to travel time savings, operating costs, reliability, environmental concerns and long-term capacity of the GO system.

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TTC 2011 Capital Budget

TTC management unveiled its Capital Budget and 10-year forecast on January 12 with a presentation to the Commission, and followed up with a presentation at the City’s Budget Committee on January 14.

Online information about the budget is incomplete.  More troubling, however, the “Blue Books” which contain the details of all capital projects have not yet even been issued to members of the Commission, let alone Councillors or, it would appear, the City’s Budget Analyst who is supposed to digest all of this on Council’s behalf.  Full consideration of the TTC budgets was held over to January 20 by the Budget Committee to await the Analyst’s Notes.

TTC Capital Budget Report

Appendix A: Ten Year Summary

Appendix B: Sources of Funding

Appendix C: Project “Packages” For New Funding Requests

Presentation to City Budget Committee (See Pages 49-70)

Meanwhile, the TTC presented a budget with previously unknown major capital projects and additions to existing ones, but with little explanation of why they are here.

Oddly enough, the City’s Executive Committee only yesterday was in turmoil over unexpected increases in the cost of hosting the Pan Am Games due to unplanned costs for soil remediation and the fact that the project estimate was in 2008 dollars.

The TTC would do well to understand that surprises in budgeting will not be warmly greeted by the City, and moreover that they can have a compounding effect of squeezing available funding for other projects.

In this article, I will give an overview of major points in the budget along with specific comments on a few major issues.  When the “Blue Books” become available (expected later this week) and I get a chance to review the full budget, I will write on major topics such as subway fleet planning and system expansion in detail.

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A Grand Plan: 2011 Edition

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a long paper about the role of transit and what a truly regional plan would look like.  To avoid extensively quoting myself, I suggest that any newcomers to this site read that as a starting point as it contains not just a list of routes, but a philosophy of how one should look at transit.

Since 2006, we have seen Transit City, MoveOntario2020 and The Big Move.  The GTA appeared well on its way to real progress in transit although problems, notably the question of local service funding, remained.

Now we have a new Mayor in Toronto, and plans that came from years of work and debate lie in pieces on the floor.  Metrolinx and Queen’s Park seem content to “plan” by carving up funding that’s already committed and redrawing their map to suit the whims of a new regime at City Hall.

The fundamental problem in this exercise is the phrase “funding that’s already committed”.  When you draw a map with a half empty pen, you make compromises, and you run out of ink leaving huge areas bereft of service.

If redraw we must, then let us do so with a view to a transit network and to a view beyond the end of next year.  What does Toronto and the GTA need?  How much will that cost?  How do we pay for it?  If we start with the premise that we cannot afford anything, we should stop wasting our time on planners, engineers and the myth that transit can actually transform travel for the next generation.

The discussion below is Toronto centric because this is a Toronto blog, and that’s where most of the GTA’s transit riders are.  All the same, the philosophy of what transit should be affects everyone, especially in those areas where so much transit growth is needed just to catch up with the population.

Some of the info here will be familiar to those who read my commentaries regularly, but I wanted to pull it all together as a starting point.  My comments are not intended as the one, definitive “solution”, but to show the need for debate on a large scale, integrating considerations from many parts of various schemes.

[While I was writing this article, the Pembina Institute published its own critique of the Ford transit plan.  I do not intend to comment on that document here because it addresses only one part of a much larger collection of transit issues.]

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Let Them Ride Buses

In case anyone missed the latest word from City Hall, here is Mayor Ford talking about transit to Rexdale in today’s Globe:

“Eventually, I’m sure we can build the subways. It’s more expensive, but that’s what the people want. People in North York and Scarborough, they want that line connected to the Scarborough Town Centre. If I heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

Even if that means cancelling or postponing indefinitely rapid transit in his own former ward of Etobicoke North?

“They have transit,” he laughed. “It sounds like we’re – we have transit. People get to the slots, they get to Woodbine racetrack, people get to Humber College. There are buses that run up there.

“Eventually, I’d like to have subways running through the whole city. But what we can afford realistically, right now, is just Sheppard, right?

People will wait a long time for their pet transit lines, and all those fine words about the importance of transit to Toronto’s economy are just so much hot air.

Cake, anyone?

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Metrolinx Muses About Elevated Railways

A strange twist of journalistic coincidence saw two articles with almost identical content in The Star and in The National Post about technology alternatives for Transit City.

Toronto Star:  Elevated transit among Metrolinx alternatives

Toronto Star:  Beauty in the eye of the rider

National Post:  Elevated trains:  Metrolinx offers subway alternative

When this sort of thing happens, and especially when some of the reference material is supplied by a public agency, I can’t help thinking someone wants to get “a message” out.  Whether it’s the appropriate message, or one that has been approved by the Board of the agency pushing the story, is another matter.

I can’t help thinking of the shell game perpetrated by the TTC and Queen’s Park to get an elevated through Scarborough Town Centre.  The politicians didn’t want it, but the decision for an el was forced on them before the technology change to Skytrain.  “Streetcars” would isolate land south of the Town Centre and an el was the only solution.  Scarborough Council held its nose and agreed.  With this decision out of the way, an elevated Skytrain line was a much easier sell.

We now see lovely photos of Vancouver’s Skytrain, some courtesy of the head of Metrolinx, in local media.  Do we see the view from underneath the structures?  Do we see neighbourhoods where buildings are close to the road, or suburban lines with roads surrounded by parking?  Does anyone talk about the road space occupied by support structures and stations?  Does anyone acknowledge how much of Vancouver’s Skytrain does not run down the middle of arterial roads, but underground or along old rail corridors?  Dishonest presentations of elevated proposals for Toronto go right back to the days of the Ontario Transportation Development Corporation, and little seems to be changing.

Those of us who watched the tug of war over Transit City know that there was a big fight between Metrolinx and Toronto about the technology choice and, as usual, Bombardier had an inside track as a proponent of a turnkey project to build new transit lines.  This scheme was eventually scotched and, for a time, LRT won out with the expectation that David Miller and his successors would keep Transit City alive long enough to ensure it didn’t revert to a Skytrain network.

That was a nice idea, but political events didn’t work out as planned, and we now have a Mayor for whom LRT is a very bad word.  This plays right into the hands of those at Metrolinx who never wanted an LRT system in the first place.  Oddly enough, this seems to be happening without public debate, precisely the concern levelled at Transit City for its choice of technology.

If we are to revisit the technology choice and the network design, then this needs to be an open and fair discussion, not something cooked up in a Metrolinx back room and leaked out through the media.

Meanwhile, transit planning continues its journey into fantasyland.  MPP David Caplan wants to set up a development company to market land around potential subway station sites as a way to pay for construction.  The former Minister responsible for Infrastructure Ontario  touts the success of “alternative financing procurement” used for projects like hospitals and court houses as a sample of what might happen with subways.  Caplan ignores the fact that subways cost vastly more than hospitals, and that the land around stations is generally not in the public sector.

Is Caplan freelancing (not a great comment on the cohesion of McGuinty’s government) or is he floating a trial balloon of possible government policy?  Has he considered the reaction of neighbourhoods to the possibility that they can get a subway, but only at the cost of their established lower densities?

Meanwhile unnamed transit planners say it’s too soon to decide on specifics of a new network, and claim that they trying to respect Mayor Ford’s desire to preserve surface road capacity without necessarily putting everything underground.  This directly contradicts the Mayor’s love for a Sheppard subway — if we don’t have the money, other lines can just wait.  Ford dismisses elevated structures as cavalierly as streetcars.

This is not transit planning, it’s the hubris of a Mayor who won’t discuss anything, who would rather make announcements than involve his Council, his Transit Commission, in a real discussion of what is possible and desirable.  We hear how important a change in the TTC board’s makeup will be, how we need experts and business-minded people running the show rather than politicians.  Why would any true “expert” lend their name to an agency whose only function is to rubber stamp the Mayor’s narrow view of transit’s role?

Metrolinx may try to counter Mayor Ford’s position with selective discussions through the media, but at best this only exposes the Mayor’s intransigence to any consideration of alternative schemes.  At worst, this tactic replaces considered studies and consultation with seat-of-the-pants planning aimed at getting something, anything, approved by Council early in 2011.

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Did Toronto Council Ever Vote For Transit City? (Update 2)

Updated Dec. 8, 2010 at 7:45 am:  On Sept. 30, 2009, Council voted to fund continuing work on Environmental Assessments, and to enter into an agreement with Metrolinx for funding of the Sheppard, Eglinton, Finch and SRT projects.

Updated Dec. 7, 2010 at 10:30 pm:  This post has been updated with additional info supplied in a comment by a reader.  See the body of the article for the change which documents a vote in 2009 reaffirming Council support for Transit City.

In the brouhaha of Mayor Ford’s inauguration, his brief meeting with Premier McGuinty, and the question of whether Council will support ditching the LRT plan in favour of a subway network, a question comes up often:  did Council ever actually approve the Transit City plan, or was this just done by the TTC Commission itself?

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Waiting at Sheppard & McCowan

On Monday, December 6, CBC’s Metro Morning included a piece by Mary Wiens about the problems of commuting through the suburbs, and the hopes of folks on Sheppard (and by implication many other places) for a subway network some day.

In reply to this, I sent a note to Mary talking about some of the issues and misunderstandings, and my sadness at the degree to which people who think they voted for subways have been misled.  Metro Morning liked the piece enough they asked me to record it, and it aired on December 7.  As I write this, the podcast version is not on the CBC’s website, and so I have placed a copy on my own site.  When the podcast goes up, I will switch the link to use the CBC’s version.

What About Transit, by Mary Wiens

Steve’s Letter, by Steve Munro

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The Day The Big Move Died (Update 2)

Updated December 2, 2010 at 11:55 pm:

The Globe and Mail has a story by John Lorinc echoing the sentiments here with quotes from sundry people weightier than I am.

The Star reports on provincial reaction to Mayor Ford’s move.

Updated December 2, 2010 at 1:50 am: The Globe and Mail reports on a poll of Councillors regarding support for Transit City or subways.

  • Pro Transit City:  14
  • Transit City + Tweaks:  4
  • Subways:  11
  • Unknown:  15

Original article from December 1, 2010:

Toronto’s new Mayor Ford, acting with a haste uncharacteristic in Toronto affairs, and without even bothering to consult his new Council, has directed the TTC to stop work on Transit City.  The “war on the car” is over, and all new rapid transit will be underground.

The deafening silence from Queen’s Park shows us how much Metrolinx and its regional plan, The Big Move, depend on political agreement among GTA municipalities.  Removing the pols from the Metrolinx Board may have centralized important announcements at Queen’s Park, but it did nothing to blunt the effect any local Mayor or Council can have if they don’t play ball.

The Big Move has both a 15-year and a 25-year component, although the likelihood either of these would see substantial construction was compromised the moment Queen’s Park’s budget priorities trumped a scheme to build major transit improvements first as a prelude to new revenue tools.  Nobody wants to talk about taxes or tolls, but money for transit, whatever the technology, won’t come from the tooth fairy.  It won’t come from the private sector either, at least not without a guaranteed return on their investment.

Ford, whose aggressive tactics on Council are well known but whose character was carefully controlled during the election, has shown that he has a plan, and feels that his mandate gives him carte blanche to implement whatever he wants.  The voters have spoken.  Those who voted for 44 Councillors might beg to disagree, but that’s for Council to decide in weeks and months ahead.

The real problem is the lack of leadership on the transit file from Queen’s Park.  The Big Move was cobbled together from many local plans, including Transit City, and flawed though it might have been, there was general agreement about the shape of the plan.  Changing Toronto’s focus to subways unbalances the plan’s scale and benefits, not to mention the huge change in net cost.  Mayor Ford’s concern for taxpayers’ dollars appears to end when someone else is expected to pay the bill, and this could deprive Toronto of transit improvements while growth proceeds on smaller-scale projects in the 905.

If we can rip Transit City out of The Big Move with only the barest of response from Queen’s Park, how safe is the rest of the plan?  Will expansions in Mississauga, Hamilton, York Region and Durham be subject to the whims of whoever is in power, or will a semblance of regional planning remain?  Will provincial efforts dwindle to supporting GO Transit, an organization whose forced marriage with Metrolinx is still quite shaky.  The bride and groom are still arguing over decorations, and they almost certainly have separate bedrooms.

Readers who know me well will appreciate that today is not the brightest day in my history of transit advocacy.  It would be easy just to write a bitter rant against the incoming regime.  That would be a waste of time — they won’t read it anyhow, any more than they will listen to editorial boards at the Globe and Star.

That regime is not stupid, although many would paint Ford and his crew as a bunch of bumbling hicks.  They know what they want to achieve and they appear ready to push as hard as possible until, no, even if someone pushes back.  That’s the role of Council and of Queen’s Park if they really believe in Transit City.

There is a place for LRT and for subways in Toronto, and if we are to remake the transit plans, this process deserves more than the midnight YouTube announcement of Ford’s election campaign.  It also deserves a concerted effort by transit supporters everywhere to fight against slurs of downtown elitism, and to argue strongly for better, cost-effective transit.  We need to ensure that the “war on the car” is not replaced, stealthily, by a war on transit.

As for Metrolinx, I can’t help wondering what, exactly, its purpose is.  The Board rarely meets in public, and doesn’t discuss much of substance when it does.  Major announcements come from the Premier or the Minister, and many of these deal with GO plans that were in the pipeline before the Metrolinx amalgamation.  Now we see a Mayor can just tear up part of the plan, an ironic situation considering the grief David Miller endured for trying to get Toronto’s interests recognized at Queen’s Park.  If the Tories win the fall 2011 provincial election, Metrolinx and its hoard of consultants may find themselves out of work, and transit may be relegated to a desk at the back of the Ministry of Transportation offices in Downsview.

Meanwhile, my box of “Big Move” documents can join the many other plans in my archives.

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LRT vs Subway — A TTC View

Before Mayor Ford took office, the TTC briefed his transition team on the comparison between LRT and Subway options for the Sheppard and SRT projects, as well as on the status of Transit City.

This article presents a condensed version of the information.

TTC Briefing Summary

The Briefing Summary contains three tables consolidating information scattered through many pages of the briefing documents.

The first page shows the committed and spent funding for the four projects:  Sheppard East, Eglinton, Crosstown and Scarborough.  An important note here is that the lion’s share of the money is in the period from 2015 to 2020.  Queen’s Park expects to raise this via whatever “Investment Strategy” Metrolinx comes up with, but the funding machinery is not yet in place.  Only the $3.1-billion for 2010 to 2015 is “money in the bank” for Toronto.

This is the first of several potential drags on any plan to revise or accelerate transit construction.  Queen’s Park has not planned to spend most of the money until after not just one, but two coming Provincial elections.  Moreover, they have not yet engaged voters and taxpayers with a debate over the exact source of funds be they tolls, taxes or the Tooth Fairy.

To the end of September 2010, just over $129-million has been spent, although there are commitments for considerably more.  At this point, we have no idea of the “break fees” involved in closing down these contracts.

The second table consolidates the status information on the four projects.  An important point here is that the extended construction period is determined by Provincial spending priorities and the desire to shift as much as possible into the “Investment Strategy”.  The original plans for both the Finch and Scarborough lines would have seen them completed years earlier.  The constraint is financial and political, not technical.

The third table shows the cost estimates for two variants on the Scarborough line as a subway (one ending at Scarborough Town Centre, the other at Sheppard), and for a Sheppard East line running to STC.  Schematic maps for each line are linked below.

TTC Scarborough Subway

TTC Sheppard Subway

It’s worth remembering how little of Sheppard Avenue in Scarborough would actually be served by the extended Sheppard Subway.

A critical point for the SRT is that in the subway scenario, it would have to remain in operation until 2022.  The TTC was concerned about making it last to the Pan Am Games in 2015, and a 2022 date is not credible given past TTC comments on the declining reliability of that line.

The presentation materials end on a summary page that concludes that the segment from Kennedy Station to STC is the “best candidate for a subway”.  This reiterates the TTC’s long-standing anti-LRT position for the Scarborough RT by comparing only the portion of the line from STC south.  The whole purpose of an LRT conversion was to reduce the cost of reaching Malvern, but with a subway plan that will never happen.

TTC staff is expected to produce some sort of subway plan in about six weeks, probably in time for the January 2011 Commission meeting.  We will see how much is a fair presentation of options, and how much is creative writing.

The big issue for me is that if we are going to have a subway-oriented plan, then it should be a plan that serves the emerging needs of the whole city.  Just building as much as you can with the money now earmarked for Transit City will give the impression of movement, but most of this will be to the benefit of the construction industry, not transit riders.  We need to know where demands are growing to the point where some form of rapid transit is needed, what form that would take, and how much it will cost.  Otherwise, voters will have a big surprise when they see how little they get for a substantial outlay.