A Grand Plan

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Mind the Doors! (Updated)

In today’s Metro, Ed Drass writes about the problem of subway car doors closing before people have a chance to get on and off. (The article is not yet online except in the full PDF version of the paper.)

Updated: This item has been clarified to show that Ed is paraphrasing the TTC’s remarks rather than directly quoting them. My apologies if the earlier version of this piece misrepresented the situation.
Drass paraphrases the TTC as saying:

… the TTC has not changed its policy, but ridership has definitely grown across the system. Train guards are given about 15 seconds at each station, typically opening the doors for shorter periods at quiet stops and longer at busy ones.

When asked why trains wouldn’t take longer at busy stations, the TTC replies:

If you extend it too long you’re going to develop gaps in your service.

Drass notes that the TTC has asked for help with expanding capacity on the subway, but it is unclear from his article whether this is his own comment or a paraphrase from the TTC itself. Such relief, in the form of new trains and signal systems, won’t be here for years and only affects the Yonge line.

Moreover, they won’t address problems with jackrabbit behaviour at stations. Although the TTC worries about keeping the service properly spaced, the signal system (anqituated though it may be) does that today unless, of course, the service is late. Like other TTC systems, it focuses on schedule maintenance, not headways. When trains are late, operators are free to make as brief stops as possible in an attempt to get back on time again.

There is no excuse for ultra-brief station stops, trapping people in trains before they can get off, or catching people in the doors. All have happened to me, and not during the peak of the rush hour when we can blame the problem on rising demand.

Once again, the TTC needs to get its own house in order before blaming those pesky passengers who insist on getting on and off the trains for their problems.

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B.C. Announces Major Support for Transit

The government of British Columbia has announced funding for major expansion of transit especially in the Greater Vancouver area. This was covered in yesterday’s Globe & Mail and the full details are available on the government’s site.

There is a glossy brochure (4MB) with maps and other info.

Looking at all this, I am reminded of Move Ontario and similar announcements. They look great on paper, but there are problems in the details. As with so many plans, this one depends on money from various levels of government. The total is $14-billion, but it comes from:

  • $2.9-billion in existing commitments
  • $4.75-billion in new money from the province
  • $3.1-billion from Ottawa
  • $2.75-billion from Translink (the Vancouver equivalent of Metrolinx)
  • $500-million from local governments

The major components of the announcement are:

  • The Canada Line (now under construction) linking the airport and Richmond to downtown.
  • The UBC (University of British Columbia) Line which will serve the heavy crosstown Broadway corridor and run into the UBC campus where there is already a large bus and trolleybus terminal.
  • The Expo Line (the original SkyTrain) will be extended and will receive additional cars to boost capacity.
  • The Evergreen LRT Line will connect Coquitlam Centre to Lougheed Town Centre SkyTrain station
  • A network of rapid bus routes will provide BRT service primarily in outlying areas.
  • 1,500 new “clean buses” of various technologies will green the fleet.

Like the Canada Line, a good chunk of the UBC Line will likely be underground as an elevated down the middle of Broadway would not do wonders for the character of the street with stations posing a particular problem. Unlike existing SkyTrain routes, the UBC Line runs along a main street rather than through back lanes, industrial districts and railway corridors.

The Evergreen line is the odd-man-out in this plan as the only true LRT line. Support and funding for the line has been slow to come, and I would not be surprised to see it fall victim either to funding constraints or to a change of heart in the interest of standardizing rapid transit technology.

The clean bus plan involves hydrogen, hybrid, electric, natural gas and low emmision diesel options. The announcement is rather vague on the actual mix, and one only learns that these technologies are under consideration in the glossy. The hydrogen bus project is a rather sad reminder of the dreams for Ballard fuel cell technology. The company itself has decided to get out of the vehicle market and concentrate on smaller stationary plants such as emergency power supplies, but dreams of large-scale fuel cell applications die hard.

When the 20 hydrogen buses arrive in 2008, BC claims it will have the largest fleet of such vehicles in the world. At a cost of $89-million, that’s an expensive demonstration.

Notable as part of a rapid transit announcement are plans to improve bus services. This is a welcome change from the capital rich, capacity poor, transit announcements so popular in Toronto for decades.

As for fare collection, BC will move completely to Smart Cards which will include on-the-spot fines for scofflaws.

Probably the saddest part of this announcement is a chart showing the hoped-for market share by transit (page 5 in the brochure). By 2020, Vancouver will move up from 12% to 17%, and then to 22% by 2030. Percentages are lower in other parts of the province. I can’t help wondering what that other 78% of the trips will be, and why they won’t be on transit.

All-in-all, there may be good times for transit planners, builders and riders on the west coast. Tactically, an important role for such announcements (like Transit City) is to have something on the table. Someday, someone may want to get elected, and they may want to spread some money around. We hear that times are tight in Ottawa, but strange things happen in elections.

If there are enough plans from enough cities looking for funding, this may scare off the Feds, but alternately it makes the basis for a truly national transit investment program. We can dream.

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Trams to the Airport

Today, spacing’s Montreal site includes a report that a tram-train has been proposed as a link to Trudeau International Airport.

Meanwhile in Toronto, the “official” scheme for airport access is still the free-standing “Blue 22” proposal that is mired in Environmental Assessment problems, not to mention its dubious attractiveness to private sector proponents.

The Transit City scheme holds hopes for an LRT access to Toronto Airport, and this could include a connection directly into Terminal One.  This has major implications for airport access from various origins:

  • The Eglinton West LRT connection to the Spadina and Yonge subways, and beyond
  • An Eglinton service extending into Mississauga
  • A connection with the Jane LRT which could also be routed down the Weston corridor to Union Station
  • A connection with the Finch West LRT

This would make Toronto’s airport both a major hub for transit services and provide huge improvements in access to the site from many parts of the GTA, a far superior arrangement to the downtown-oriented Blue 22 scheme.

We are starting to see the benefits of a technology, LRT, that is comparatively easy to implement and doesn’t cost the earth just to go a few kilometres.  How we think about planning transit and how prospective customers view transit services can be transformed over the next decade.

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Now It’s Time For Ridership Growth Strategy Two (Updated)

[The original version of this post, up to the point where the update starts, appeared as a guest column on the Op Ed page of the Toronto Sun on January 5, 2008.] 

[Updated January 4, 2008 – see end of post for the changes.] 

Here we are in 2008. We’ve survived threatened cutbacks to service and even have hopes of improvements starting in mid-February with more to come through the year. Mayor Miller’s 100 new buses and Mt. Dennis bus garage will operate, eventually. Plans are afoot for a new streetcar fleet and a huge expansion of rail services via Transit City.

Often, people ask why I’m not satisfied with our plans, and the answer is simple: as an advocate, it’s my job to never be satisfied, to always say “you can do better and we want more”. In that spirit, this thread is intended to ask: what should happen after RGS? What should we aim for next?

In a separate thread’s comments, there’s an important issue about Transit City: we need to establish minimum service levels for major surface routes that are much more like subway standards. Today, we run trains every five minutes everywhere even though there are times that half that service would be adequate for the demand. Why? Because part of the allure of a subway is that you don’t have to wait a long time for it to show up. Moreover, a good chunk of the operating cost relates to the stations and infrastructure, and the trains are a comparatively cheap addition once the line exists.

People on Transit City routes, and even on major surface routes that are not part of Transit City need the same sort of guaranteed service quality.

The TTC hopes to implement two RGS changes later this year. First, service will run on all routes whenever the subway is open. If a route exists, it runs 7 days/week, 19 hours/day. Second, no headway will be worse than 20 minutes anywhere. Both of these will fill out the network and get us back to the idea that transit isn’t just something we run when hordes of people want to use it.

However, a next step might be to designate “A-list” routes, major routes where the maximum headway is no worse than 10 minutes.

With new buses finally coming into play in 2008, we will see reduced crowding during the peak period because the TTC will actually meet their own loading standards. Great stuff, but what happens if we set the loading standard so that there is more room for growth on major routes? What happens if we actually try to encourage people to use the system by making it frequent and if not uncrowded, at least less than jam-packed?

By late 2008, it’s possible the TTC and their political masters will be feeling rather pleased with themselves. Press releases will be issued. Similing faces will appear in front of buses and streetcars everywhere. The job will be done.

No, that’s only for starters.  We need the next round of plans on the table before the year is out.

RGS was first proposed when David Miller was still a Councillor, and it’s taken ages to implement with no end of bureaucratic and political interference, not to mention a fiscal crisis or two. While Miller is still Mayor, it would be nice to see a second round of RGS hit the streets so that Toronto can take on the challenge of making transit a better alternative to driving.

We won’t do it overnight, but we will never do it if we stop after one long-overdue effort.

Update: Today I learned that the TTC is working on a scheme for better bus service.  According to Chair Adam Giambrone:

The TTC is developing a Transit City Bus plan that will likely include max 10 minute service to match subway hours at a grid of streets and new separated bus ROW’s.

Some streetcar lines have service worse than every 10 minutes at times.  This should not just be a plan for the bus system.

Examples include Harbourfront (off season), Queen (west of Humber Loop), and evening service on King, Dundas and Carlton on some days. Some of these will probably qualify as part of the “grid of streets”.

Good news if and when we see this plan on the street, but the service has to actually show up.

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“The Three Cities” and Transit City

The Centre for Urban & Community Studies at the University of Toronto recently published a bulletin entitled The Three Cities within Toronto:  Income polarization among Toronto’s neighbourhoods, 1970–2000.  This is an important look at the evolution of Toronto’s economy and social structure, with a widening gap between the well-off and the poor.

The authors reviewed the evolution of individual incomes by census tract across the 416 to see which areas showed rises and falls relative to the average level for the “Census Metropolitan Area”.  (The CMA includes part of the 905, but is part of the overall employment area for people living in the 416, the City of Toronto proper.)

What emerges is a pattern they describe as “The Three Cities”. Continue reading →

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A Visit to the City Archives

Now and then, I spend my time browsing through the photograph collections at the City Archives, and this activity can be rather addictive.  The main page includes a link to a search page where you can start your travels.  Note that the indexing is spotty, and if you find items in a series that you really like, it is often worthwhile drilling down into the linked pages for the specific collections and looking for a “browse” link that will bring up the entire content.  I can’t put links to such pages here as they are built on the fly.

After looking at photos of my old neighbourhood in North Toronto, I stumbled on paintings of the Yonge Subway by the artist, Sigmund Serafin, whose paintings of Bloor and University subway stations are posted at Transit Toronto.  I have recently learned more about Serafin’s history, and that post will be updated in the new year.

I will leave the joy of finding intriguing bits and pieces to you, but there are a number of items I thought worthwhile to whet your appetite. Continue reading →

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“Alternative Financing” and the GTTA

At its November meeting, the GTTA approved a report on “Alternative Financing and Procurement” together with a list of projects that will be studied for this approach. For those who seek to understand Queen’s Park’s schemes for transit infrastructure funding, their report provides interesting reading.

In brief, Ontario seeks to have private sector partners undertake financing and possibly construction of new infrastructure up to the point that they go into service.  At that point, the accumulated cost becomes, in effect, a mortgage on the infrastructure to be paid off over an extended period.  This gives the private sector partner (ironically, possibly a large public sector pension plan) a guaranteed long-term return while nothing appears as a charge on the Province’s books.

In the short term, this keeps the budget looking rosy, but as any reputable accountant will tell you, future commitments must appear in your long-term budget plans.  Someone has to pay for all that infrastructure eventually.  In the past, the cost of transit infrastructure (i.e. the interest on capital debt) was buried in the municipal and provincial budgets rather than appearing as a line item in the transit operating budgets.

Long term, we risk having a future government whose support for transit is, at best, tenuous who might point to all the debt servicing costs and say “don’t ask us for operating subsidies, we’re already paying a bundle for your capital debt”.  This sort of remark has already shown up in some budget papers in past years at the municipal level in Toronto.  It’s the invisible part of the iceberg of transit financing.

The projects to be studied for alternative financing fall into two groups diagrammed on maps on the GTTA site.  As I mentioned in my accompanying post on the “Quick Wins, Phase 2”, the concept of “regional” transit has become rather expansive.  Projects are included that might, in the past, have been treated as “local” and outside of the GTTA’s purview.  This comes partly from a recognition that transit anywhere helps the region as a whole, and partly from the desire to move as many projects off of local budgets as possible.

The projects that will be evaluated for AFP include:

  • SuperGo electrification of the Lake Shore corridor.
  • GO rail expansions include using the CPR North Toronto subdivision and, possibly, the station at Summerhill to serve new routes on CPR branch lines.
  • LRT expansions include the Transit City lines as well as the Hurontario and Dundas lines proposed for Mississauga.
  • Converting the SRT to use Mark II RT cars and extending it north to Malvern.
  • Richmond Hill subway extension
  • VIVA extensions in various corridors and conversion to exclusive lane operation.
  • Circumferential  GO/GTTA BRT network

This is a very large bundle of projects.   As usual, Ontario plans to call on Ottawa for 1/3 funding.  Whether they would provide anything, either directly or through their own AFP scheme, remains to be seen.  The problem remains that any current spending creates a future debt service charge, and Ottawa has always been loathe to fund what are, in effect, ongoing operating costs.

None of these facilities will begin operations, and therefore become charges on various operating budgets, until after the next provincial election in 2011.  In the short term, the creative accounting allows us to launch into a rosy transit future, but this must be sustained with solid, ongoing funding for operations.  A problem for politicians still in their infancy, but a serious concern for those observers who, like me, take the long view of transit’s financing and growth as a major part of the GTTA.

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Thirty-Five Years

November 2007 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the TTC’s decision to retain streetcar operations in Toronto.  Godfrey Mallion wrote me recently asking if I would reflect on the events of past decades prompting this post.

When the Streetcars for Toronto Committee formed in 1972, our goal was to fight the proposed removal of streetcars from the St. Clair route which, at the time, ran from Keele Loop to Mt. Pleasant & Eglinton.  The TTC had surplus trolley buses from the Yonge 97 route (Eglinton Station to Glen Echo) that was replaced when the subway opened to York Mills Station, and these buses were to operate on St. Clair.  The fact that the TTC didn’t have anywhere near enough trolley buses to replace the streetcars, and a substantial service cut was required to make this work, undermined the proposal from the beginning.

The TTC’s long-range plans foresaw removal of all streetcars by 1980 when the Queen Subway would open.  Pause here for laughter because it was clear, even then, that a Queen line was not going to be built any time soon, if ever.  However, the streetcar fleet was wearing out, and St. Clair’s conversion was to be the beginning of the end.

A few years earlier, the TTC had worked with Hawker-Siddeley (whose Thunder Bay plant is now owned by Bombardier) on the development of a new streetcar for Toronto.  Its cost was quite reasonable for its day, and one big advantage was that it evolved from the existing PCC, a car long-proven on Toronto’s streets.  It did not have to be re-invented.  Work on this car stopped cold when Queen’s Park got into the high tech transit business with Maglev trains and GO Urban.

Toronto’s decision to retain its streetcars came at the beginning of a light rail renaissance in North America, although the real leadership came from cities like Edmonton, San Diego and Calgary.

Over the years, Streetcars for Toronto, and later I as an individual advocate, were involved in many issues:

  • Implementation of trolleybuses on Bay Street as a hoped-for first step in renewal and expansion of the network.
  • Advocacy for LRT technology to build a network of suburban lines at a time when much of the suburbs did not yet exist.
  • A detailed review of operational practices on downtown streetcar lines to address service quality.
  • Advocacy for increased transit funding, not just as capital megaprojects (usually subways), but for day-to-day operations.
  • Advocacy for what became the Harbourfront and Spadina streetcar lines.  This started in the 70s, but only bore fruit two decades later.
  • Advocacy for improved service quality as a TTC goal leading to the Ridership Growth Strategy.
  • Renewed advocacy for LRT leading to the Transit City plan.

Continue reading →