Subways

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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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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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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.

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LRT For Toronto

Royson James has a pair of columns in the Toronto Star discussing the perennial LRT vs subway transit debates.

City needs a transit lesson (Nov. 17, 2010)

Commuters won’t fill LRTs, much less subways (Nov. 19, 2010)

James sets out the pros and cons without becoming mired in either side’s arguments.  As with any overview, there are points for or against either technology that are not made with the vigour that advocates would prefer.  The important issue, however, is not to choose one technology to the exclusion of the other, but to look at the appropriate one for each implementation.

One critical issue — regardless of which side one might be on — is the matter of land use and how the evolution of Toronto will affect demand on routes and the overall network.  There are two fundamentally different views of of future development — the Official Plan’s “Avenues” with major streets lined by mid-rise buildings and shops giving an active pedestrian environment at ground level, or the more traditional “tower in a park” design that has shaped much of Toronto’s growth since the 1960s.  A third variant has appeared over the past decade — both tall and dense, as exemplified by the railway lands, parts of Liberty Village and most recently the Queen West Triangle (Queen & Dovercourt).

Each of these produces transit demands which vary both due to the built form and to the neighbourhood in which development occurs.  A building located in an existing walkable neighbourhood with shops and transit will have very different transportation demands than the same building located on a suburban arterial where the nearest shop is the mall a short drive or a lonely, windy walk away.

The perennial myth about subways is that their high capacity will be consumed by redevelopment around stations.  This is utter hogwash.  The Yonge line is full well north of Eglinton not with Willowdale condo dwellers, but with traffic fed in on surface routes.  Developments along the line add to the demand, but the subway exists to serve a much wider catchment area.  Similarly, the BD subway depends on feeder services to many stations, and the decades-long absence of nearby development did not prevent the buildup of demand eastbound from Etobicoke or westbound from Scarborough.

LRT lies somewhere in between by serving both busy “local” corridors and, in some cases, acting almost like a subway in speed, if not capacity.  We must remember that the SRT would have been an LRT line (and to Malvern too, decades ago) but for Queen’s Park’s intervention with the ICTS technology.  Regardless of technology, it is a medium capacity line whose principal function is to feed the BD subway at Kennedy and, much more recently, to serve the high-density residential development at Scarborough Town Centre, developments that did not occur until decades after the SRT opened.

In many ways, LRT has always been a misunderstood, orphan technology in Toronto.  Some within the TTC have never accepted the retention of streetcars, much less the creation of an LRT alternative to full-blown subway construction.  At a time when LRT was coming back into favour around the world, Toronto pursued ICTS and lost the chance to show what real LRT could do.  At more than double the cost of the LRT proposal, ICTS “proved” that there was no cheap way to implement transit lines, and system expansion stalled.  The TTC did nothing to advance the LRT alternative.

Spadina, Harbourfront and St. Clair are really not LRT, but rather upgraded streetcar lines.  That statement brings me to a common question:  what’s the difference between streetcars, LRT and “Heavy Rapid Transit” (or HRT)?  Everyone knows what subways, streetcars and buses are, but things get mushy in the space between them.

The boundary between HRT and LRT is fairly straightforward:  if the technology cannot run at grade in medians or crossing streets and walkways, then it’s HRT regardless of what vehicle actually operates on the structure.  There can be “light” railways such as the SRT, or full-blown subways, but in either case the lines are confined to an exclusive right-of-way.  This imposes costs and complexities wherever they are built.

The boundary between LRT and streetcar is not as clear-cut.  How exclusive is the right-of-way?  How much mixed-traffic operation does a route have?  How aggressive is the traffic signal priority?  Do passengers board through all doors?  How far apart are the stations?  How long are the vehicles or trains?  All of these issues and more produce a range of answers, and there is no magic point at which a light blinks on “LRT”.  That’s the strength of the technology — LRT does not have to be the same thing all the time on every metre of a route or a network.  The challenge is to strike a balance between the “light” and “rapid” parts of the name — exclusivity and speed versus the footprint a line can have in a street and neighbourhood.

The term “LRT” has been oversold in Toronto.  We have never seen something in the style of other Canadian LRT implementations in Edmonton or Calgary.  We lost that chance when the Scarborough LRT became the “RT”.  It’s still dubious whether we will see that route incorporated into an LRT network, or swallowed by a subway extension.

Toronto’s “LRT” routes run through downtown areas with frequent cross-streets where traffic signals grudgingly give priority to transit (but just as often serve to delay it).  They have slow on-board fare collection with high-floor cars and low-floor platforms.  They suffer a planning context where transit must fight to be acknowledged.

There is only so much road space and money to go around.  Subways make for flashy announcements and lots of work for the construction industry, but endless waits by riders whose trips are not served by the most recent subway extension. LRT lines (and busways while we’re on the subject) take space that would otherwise be used by motorists.  On some arterials, this space is available, but on many it is not (even VIVA’s BRT network is constrained in places by a narrow right-of-way).

LRT advocates have an uphill battle because Toronto’s version of this technology pleases few.  St. Clair was a disaster for “LRT” (and for transit in general) — there were too many design tradeoffs and construction was appallingly mismanaged.  Operations have improved over “the old days”, but still depend on keen route supervisors who actually manage the service rather than letting cars roam back and forth in packs taking generous layovers at terminals.  We may be rid of traffic congestion, but not the infamous TTC culture.

The political climate may shift back to one where we make announcements to appear to be “doing something”, even if that won’t bear fruit for a decade or more.  Such plans will serve only small parts of the GTA when finished (if ever), we will have yet another “lost generation” of transit investment.  Decisions about how to build, where to build, what to build are difficult and need more than an endless supply of magic markers, maps and press kits.

We have seen how a proposed LRT network suffered from funding cutbacks.  Major new revenue streams (tolls, regional taxes) cannot be implemented in the current political climate without a huge fight and an expenditure of political capital nobody seems willing to make today.

“The Big Move” could turn out to be little more than a modest expansion of GO Transit, busways, and a few rail lines of indeterminate technology within Toronto.  That’s not a network, and certainly not a recipe for convincing people that transit can offer an alternative to driving.  The challenge is to find a plan, a network, a quality of transit service that people are willing to pay for, however the money is raised.

LRT has a role as do full-blown subways and busways with each fitting into the mix under the right circumstances.  Advocates would do well to focus on the strength of each technology rather than trying to justify a full network of one option.  The goal is to improve and expand transit, not to prove that my subway is better than your streetcar.

Footnote:

Within James’ second article, the TTC is quoted as saying that ridership on the King car is 1,800 per hour.  It’s worth noting that the AM peak service is 30 cars/hour of which 7 trips are served by ALRVs.  The TTC’s service design capacity is 74 for CLRVs and 108 for ALRVs, and this gives a total for the route of about 2,450.  Crush capacity is higher.  A common complaint from riders is that they cannot get on, and this suggests that the demand cited by the TTC is rather lower than the actual level.

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Lost in Downsview (Updated)

In case you have nothing else to worry about in this election season, the TTC unleashed one of the less helpful bits of debate a few weeks ago with a proposal to change the names of some of the stations on the Spadina Extension.

The staff proposed that:

  • Finch West, York University, Steeles West, Highway 407 and Vaughan Centre retain their original names
  • Sheppard West be renamed as Downsview Park
  • The existing Downsview Station be renamed Sheppard West

Metrolinx wrote asking that Highway 407 be named something else, but with no suggestions, as this could be too generic a name as other major transit nodes will eventually exist along this highway.

Vaughan Council wrote and appeared by deputation asking that their station be named Vaughan Metropolitan Centre in keeping with the name of their new development district.

Commissioner Perruzza weighed in with a proposal that Finch West be renamed University City Heights.

Update:  This name was actually applied with some objections by residents to the Jane-Finch location, two kilometers to the west, by Councillor Perruzza.  See the Toronto Star from January 2009 for more info.

After a great deal of rather pointless discussion, given the much weightier items on the agenda, the whole matter was referred to the new, post-election Commission.  The approved motion reads:

1. REFER CONSIDERATION OF THE NAME FOR THE VAUGHAN CENTRE TO THE NEXT SCHEDULED COMMISSION MEETING; AND

2. REFER CONSIDERATION OF THE NAMES FOR THE FINCH WEST, STEELES WEST AND DOWNSVIEW STATIONS BACK TO STAFF TO CONSULT WITH THE PUBLIC ON NAMES FOR THOSE STATIONS AND REPORT BACK ONCE COMPLETED.

The motion makes no reference to what we now think of as Sheppard West Station, but I’m sure that will be in the hopper too as it is an essential part of the discussion about which station gets to keep the “Downsview” name.

I am looking forward to the scrolling station name for Vaughan on those undersized destination signs fitted on the TR cars.

As for “University City”, this appears to be a last-ditch move by a soon-to-be-ex Commissioner to impose his idea of what Finch and Keele should be called on the City.  It remains to be seen whether this has general support in the neighbourhood.

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A Few Myths About Subway Capacity (Updated)

Updated October 18 at 10:15 am: A few comments about system reliability during bad weather have been added as a postscript to this article.

In a recent post, I wrote about the TTC’s Capital Budget and the projects that are creeping into view as the true cost of adding capacity to the subway becomes evident.

Once upon a time, the TTC was really worried about the capacity of Bloor-Yonge Station, and came up with a scheme to add a third central platform on the upper (Yonge) level, and possibly a second, eastbound platform on the lower (Bloor) level.  Interest in this project faded with the dwindling riding of the mid-1990s, but it never completely vanished.  Plans such as a Richmond Hill extension raised concerns about YUS capacity even before recent ridership growth took back the “surplus” capacity available for many years to hide the problem.

Independently of the third platform proposal, the TTC came up with a plan to add to the number of trains on the line.  If only they could convert to automatic train control (ATC), they could decrease the headway of trains and add to the line’s capacity.  In practice, what happened was that the TTC had to replace the existing, worn out signal system anyhow, but really wanted other governments to buy into the project.  At that point, ATC’s justification became not only the rejuvenation of the subway (a maintenance project), but a way to add capacity at lower cost than building a new line.

Of course, the trains the TTC was running, the H-series cars and the newer T1 fleet, are not equipped for ATC.  A retrofit of the T1 fleet is possible but expensive, and this drives a “need” for a completely new fleet simply to make use of ATC on the Yonge line.  In earlier fleet plans, the TTC treated the entire system as one pool and simply counted trains regardless of which type they might be.  Now, however, they need a “YUS” fleet that can run ATC and a “BD” fleet that will run with conventional manual controls.  (It is unclear what will happen if a BD train finds its way onto YUS trackage, say, for a diversion.)

With the recent, overdue arrival of the first TR train in Toronto, there were bold statements by the Mayor no less (although he was just parroting the TTC) about how these new cars would allow a 40% increase in subway capacity.  Well, yes, maybe, but there’s a catch.  Several catches, in fact.

Continue reading →

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TTC 2011 Budget Preview — Part II: Capital

In my previous article, I reviewed the TTC’s preliminary information regarding its Operating budget for 2011.  Here I turn to the Capital Budget — the one that pays for major repairs, replacement vehicles and system expansion.

Following this budget from year to year can be challenging.  For the better part of a decade it has been clear that there would be a funding crisis as project deferrals accumulated, and now the dam has finally burst and big-ticket schemes are underway.  The early years of such projects tend to have low cash-flows because they are mainly design work and progress payments on smaller preparatory steps (such as the utility relocations and grade separation on the Sheppard East LRT).  Now, as spending builds on Transit City, the Spadina Subway Extension, replacement subway trains and streetcars, the demand for capital will grow.

During the 2010 Budget Cycle, many projects were deferred beyond 2019 so that they would not appear on the City’s or TTC’s books.  This made the depth of the budgetary hole appear more shallow than it really was.  If that were not bad enough, the TTC has created a new group of projects aimed at Yonge Subway capacity problems and, in the process, is partly pre-judging the outcome of a Downtown Relief Line study.  The combined result is that the funding shortfall shown as $1.344-billion in the 2010 budget papers for the years 2010-2019 has grown substantially, and there is now a funding shortfall of $2.8b for 2011-2020.

The staff budget report does not include a detailed breakdown of the projected funding sources.  Much more information was presented in the September 2009 report in the previous budget cycle.  (Note that the 2009 report does not exactly reflect the budget as it was eventually approved by Council.)

For the 2011-2020 budget planning, the TTC is taking the approach that it should show what spending is required, not just which projects fit within the available envelope.  This puts both Council and various funding agencies on notice about the true scope of future needs.  Council may not like the level of spending, but at least a debate is possible on the relative merit of transit programs.

In theory, this is a welcome change as it avoids the “surprise” factor when unplanned spending requests appear out of thin air.  However, there will be some debate about how critical some “required” projects might be, and what additional projects are still hidden out of sight.

The TTC estimates that restoring previously omitted items as well as new additions will raise the capital requirement by $3-billion over the next ten years.  That is a gross number, but the degree to which it will attract subsidies depends on the generosity and enlightenment of other governments. Continue reading →

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Union Station 2nd Platform Update

I have received queries from some people here, and know there is a discussion on another transit site, about the status of the TTC’s 2nd platform contract.  Recently I asked Adam Giambrone what was going on, and the following info is based on his reply.

The bid that would otherwise have been successful came in at a price well above the project budget.  As this work will be funded by Waterfront Toronto, and they are not prepared to up their contribution, the bid was rejected.

The TTC has reviewed the project staging and will re-tender the work using a different construction scheme that will require the full or partial closing of Front Street.  The new tender will go out within a week.

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TTC Launches Downtown Rapid Transit Expansion Page

The TTC now has a page within the Projects section of their website devoted to the Downtown Rapid Transit Study.

The study’s purpose is:

1. Assess the need for additional rapid transit capacity to serve the downtown core given the capacity improvements already planned by TTC and GO and recognizing forecast land use and ridership scenarios;

2. Assess alternative strategies to accommodate the forecast demand including the costs and benefits associated with various scenarios composed of the following elements:

(a) The construction of new rapid transit lines such as the previously-proposed Downtown Rapid Transit (DRT) line;

(b) Expanded GO Rail capacity (including additional GO stations in the City of Toronto);

(c) Improvements in streetcar services to enhance shorter-distance transit accessibility in the downtown; and

(d) Fare, service and other policy initiatives to increase downtown transit ridership that may be appropriate.

3. If necessary, undertake the appropriate functional design and environmental assessment studies required to obtain approval for the construction of the recommended facilities.

Information about public consultation will appear when available.

This study is important by comparison with many past efforts by both TTC and Metrolinx in its review of transit as an integration of long, medium and short distance trips, each of which has its own requirement for service.  Too many studies look at only one aspect of this larger problem.