The meetings originally announced for the week of March 1st in Toronto and Richmond Hill have been postponed by joint agreement of the parties involved. New dates later in March will be announced.
Metrolinx will hold three public meetings to discuss the Regional Relief Strategy on March 1st and 3rd in Toronto, and on March 5th in Richmond Hill.
This article is a continuation of a previous commentary on the Metrolinx Yonge Network Relief Strategy.
On February 14, 2014, the Metrolinx Board considered the presentation on the Yonge Network Relief Study, but little information was added in the debate. One question, from Chair Robert Prichard, went roughly “shouldn’t this have been started two years ago”, but it was left hanging in the air without a response. Two years, of course, has brought us a new Provincial Premier and a recognition that her predecessor’s timidity on the transit file wasted a great deal of time.
Moreover, there is a long overdue acknowledgement that Metrolinx cannot simply plan one line at a time without understanding network effects including those beyond its own services.
Originally, I planned to leave the next installment in this discussion until public consultation sessions began, but I have now decided to make some brief comments on the various options that will be on the table. (See Yonge Network Relief Study, page 11.)
At its meeting on February 14, 2014, the Metrolinx Board will receive a presentation on the Yonge Network Relief Study. Despite the need for better regional transit links (and by that I mean links that do not take people to downtown Toronto), the elephant in the room has always been the unstoppable demand for more capacity into the core area. Planning for and debates about catching up with the backlog of transit infrastructure cannot avoid this issue, and it skews the entire discussion because the scale and cost of serving downtown is greater than any other single location in the GTHA.
Conflicting political and professional attitudes across the region colour the view of downtown. Toronto suburbs, never mind the regions beyond the city boundary, are jealous of downtown’s growth, and for decades have wanted some of the shiny new buildings and jobs for themselves. But the development, such as it was, skipped over the “old” suburbs to new areas in the 905 that could offer lower taxes possible through booming development and the low short-term cost of “new” cities.
Strangling downtown is not a new idea, and politicians decades ago foretold of gleaming suburban centres to redirect growth together with its travel demand. The transit network would force-feed the new centres, and downtown would magically be constrained by not building any new transit capacity to the core.
Someone forgot to tell GO Transit where service and ridership grew over the decades. Downtown Toronto continued to build, and that is now compounded by the shift of residential construction into the older central city.
Thanks to the early 1990s recession, the subway capacity crisis that had built through the 1980s evaporated, and the TTC could talk as if more downtown capacity was unneeded. To the degree it might be required, the marvels of new technology would allow them to stuff more riders on existing lines. A less obvious motive was that this would avoid competition for funding and political support between new downtown capacity with a much-favoured suburban extension into York Region. Whenever they did talk about “downtown relief”, the TTC did so with disdain.
Times have changed. Long commutes are now a burden, not a fast escape to suburban paradise. Every debate starts with “congestion” and the vain hope that there is a simple, take-two-pills-and-call-me-in-the-morning solution. Top that off with an aversion for any taxes that might actually pay for improvements, or sacrifices in convenience until that blissful day when transit arrives at everyone’s doorstep.
The Toronto Star’s Royson James writes today about automation of the TTC’s subway service and the elimination of train crews. His article includes a figure taken from a paper published by the Neptis Foundation which claims:
Converting the TTC subway to UTO [unmanned train operation] could save about $200 million per year, or $2 billion NPV [net present value].
Installation of PSDs [platform screen doors] might cost another $300 million to $500 million.
[Page 51.]
I wrote briefly about the Neptis paper last year, and keep meaning to return to it if only to debunk some of its more outrageous claims. However, the emergence of fantastical statements about the potential benefits of total automation force me to address this separately.
First off, the cost of PSDs is considerably higher than stated in the report. When this was still part of the TTC’s “above the line” budget, the cost stood at roughly $1-billion (about $15m per station).
The Neptis report says that automation could save “about $200 million per year”. This is wildly inaccurate as can be proven in various ways.
The total TTC operating budget for 2014 is $1.6-billion. Of this, at most 80% of the costs are for labour, and only half of that will be for operators who make up roughly 50% of the workforce. This means we are starting with a total cost of everyone who drives a bus, streetcar or subway train of $640-million. Saving almost one third of this by eliminating crews on the subway simply is not credible.
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:
Other related issues include:
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.
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.
This post has been created to hold a comment thread that began under the “Poor Frozen Streetcars” about whether the DRL should be built with subway or LRT technology.
My position is clear and, as far as I am concern, this issue is beyond debate. I am moving comments already received into this thread.
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.
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 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.
There are four sets of numbers in this table with columns corresponding to the three model networks.
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:
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.
Updated December 4, 2013 at 7:00 pm:
Toronto’s Planning & Growth Management Committee considered the proposed consultation process from City staff regarding the Downtown Relief Line and approved it with only one minor amendment, that a contest be set up to name the new line.
Those of us who remember the last such contest will know that it produced, as a moniker for the line now serving Scarborough Town Centre, that heartwarming name, “RT”.
Two presentations were made by Metrolinx and by City staff.
The Metrolinx presentation gives an overview of the Yonge Relief Network Study which will consider capacity problems and approaches to relief from a network point of view including the possibility that some of the modeled demand can be shifted from the subway to GO Transit. Included in this is a map (page 4) showing the projected locations and degrees of capacity shortfall on the 2031 network.
What is quite striking about this map is that while there may be a severe problem south of Bloor Station, the situation north to Sheppard is not exactly rosy with demands ranging up to 100% of capacity. The need to divert demand north of Bloor is quite evident, although it is rarely mentioned in discussions of “downtown relief”.
The City presentation gives a précis of the report, but shows more clearly (page 10) that at this stage all that is happening is consultation on the Terms of Reference and the Public Consultation that would occur in a future study. This will come back to Council in the spring of 2014 for approval of the full study.
This is a hybrid version of the Environmental Assessment process. A Transit Project Assessment is intended to be fairly brief (120 days) based on a predetermined project. However, the DRL is so far-reaching and expensive a proposal that the City wants to ensure a valid review of all options has taken place before locking in to the formal TPAP review which offers little opportunity for amendment.
An important factor will be the co-ordination and integration of the network-wide study by Metrolinx and the local route and station planning by the City and TTC. Metrolinx will have a good sense of the network options by mid-2014 just at the point the City process enters its “alternatives” phase and the creation of a “long list” of options.
The greatest challenge in the short term will be to ensure that the Terms of Reference do not preclude options that should be considered. In this regard, limiting the study area to the initial phase of a DRL from downtown to Danforth may be valid for detailed planning of alignments and stations, but not from the larger view of how a second phase north to Eglinton or other extension options might affect the route selection on the first phase.
The City plans extensive consultation on the ToR including public input from community and advocacy groups.
Another challenge will be the credibility of demand and capacity figures used to model the future network. For reasons that I will discuss in a separate article, some of the modeling numbers cited by the TTC’s Downtown Rapid Transit Expansion Study are suspect on two counts:
If the numbers for the Yonge subway and the GO network are dubious, then what of the potential demand from a DRL, especially the component north of Danforth to which the TTC assigns a low demand and priority? Earlier at the same P&GM meeting, City staff presented information about the “Feeling Congested” consultations that have been underway. This included a preliminary evaluation of various additions to the transit network in which the Don Mills corridor, including the proposed LRT to Steeles, ranked highly (see map, page 19).
A future line cannot both be highly ranked and of little value, and this suggests at a minimum that the criteria by which it was evaluated are not the same in each case. The challenge for the DRL’s Terms of Reference process is to determine which evaluation is correct.
The original text of this article from December 2, 2013, follows the break.
Steve Munro 