Finance

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Service Changes Effective August 2, 2009

For mid summer, there are only a few schedule changes on the TTC network, and they take effect at the start of August running through to Labour Day weekend.

Changes for September are much more extensive, and I will deal with these in a separate post.

Bingham Loop Reconstruction

Due to the reconstruction of Bingham Loop, routes 502 Downtowner and 503 Kingston Road Tripper will be replaced by buses.  Combined streetcar service of 7’30” will be replaced by bus service of 6’00”.  The off-peak 20’00” headway is unchanged.

Diversions at Bingham Loop will change from time to time as construction progresses.  This also affects the 22A Coxwell, 12 Kingston Road, 322 Coxwell and 324 Victoria Park Night Buses.

Roncesvalles Reconstruction

Running times on the Roncesvalles shuttle bus will be increased at some times to compensate for actual start of construction and the diversion of southbound service via Dundas, Lansdowne and Queen.

501 Queen

The test of a modified step-back crewing operation will end, and normal crewing will resume on this route.

77 Swansea & 71 Runnymede

Running times on these interlined routes will be increased.  In the AM peak and midday, this will be done by reducing recovery times scheduled at terminals.  In the PM peak and evening, headways will be increased.  PM peak headways on the common section of the route will go from 10′ to 11′ with a change from 20′ to 22′ on the Runnymede branches.  A similar change will occur in the early evening, but at that time only half of the service runs south of Bloor.

Caribana

Additional service will operate for the parade on Saturday, August 1 on 511 Bathurst, 509 Harbourfront and 29 Dufferin, as well as express buses from Keele, Dundas West and Lansdowne Stations.  The 329/316 night routes will divert around the CNE grounds as described in the next section.

Additional service on 509 Harbourfront, 510 Spadina and 6 Bay is also planned for the Sunday, August 2 events on Toronto Island.  Whether these will actually occur given that the civic strike has shut down the ferries remains to be seen.  All of the added service is operated “at the divisional level”, meaning that the work is easily cancelled or reassigned if the party ends up at a new location.

Canadian National Exhibition

Additional service will operate on all of the usual routes including 511 Bathurst, 509 Harbourfront, 193 Exhibition Rocket and 29 Dufferin.  Overnight service on interlined routes 329 Dufferin and 316 Ossington will not operate through the CNE grounds, but will connect via Fraser and Liberty.

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Queen’s Park Reveals Metrolinx’ Role

My thanks to Peter Miasek who sent me the link to this item on York Region’s website.

Recently, Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Transportation, Bruce McQuaig, wrote to York Region advising on the financial and operational framework for “designated projects” as defined in the recently enacted Metrolinx legislation.  This letter can be found among several pieces of correspondence bundled into one PDF starting on pages 12-16.

I understand that a similar letter went to the City of Toronto, but it has not yet appeared in any public debates, partly because there are so few of them currently.  It is alluded to in a TTC report on Transit City funding.

The scheme begins with a desire by Queen’s Park to bring its books into line with current accepted accounting principles.  What this means, in practice, is that instead of shipping money off to York Region and Toronto, never to be seen again except as part of the Provincial Debt, Ontario will now own the assets purchased with those funds.  Nothing in the letter explains how those portions of projects funded by others such as Ottawa would be treated, nor what would happen with extensions of existing lines owned municipally like the Yonge-University Subway.

The assets would be depreciated over their expected lifetimes and would show up as an offset on the provincial books to the debt raised to fund them.  This is a neat bit of accounting that ignores the fact that an asset only has a real value if you could sell it and recapture your investment, but it keeps the bean counters happy and makes the books look better for the politicians.  To quote the letter:

Through retaining the risks and rewards of asset ownership over regional transportation assets, the Province can best achieve its accounting and financial management objectives.

This, of course, has nothing to do with transit and could equally refer to a hospital, a school or a highway.

There are some fine words about partnerships with the municipal governments coupled with concern about “value-for-money to taxpayers and transit customers”.  Then we get into the details.

Ontario, through Metrolinx, will own and control the Sheppard LRT, Eglinton LRT, Finch LRT, Scarborough RT and VIVA Next Bus Rapid Transit.  Ownership, from an accounting point of view, requires control and this means that Queen’s Park can’t just build the lines, they have to actually appear to manage them rather than effectively ceding them to municipalities via a long-term lease.  This does not prevent Metrolinx from contracting with local agencies for construction, operation and maintenance, but on paper, the lines remain Queen’s Park’s property, and they could be assigned to some other entity if they chose to do so.

Terms of any operating agreement would be set at 75% or less than the expected lifespan of the asset so that, in a worst case scenario, Metrolinx would regain control of a line before it was run into the ground.  A great deal of legal verbiage must be created to define the criteria to which local agencies (or any private entity) will be held by Metrolinx.  This strikes me as an opportunity for a huge bureaucratic waste of time especially if all parties involved are in the public sector.

Metrolinx will define project scope, budgets and schedules, and any changes will require their approval.  Given the total absence of political input from the municipal level to Metrolinx, these discussions will likely happen in private.  Of note is the exclusion for Metrolinx funding of ancilliary upgrades to utilities, streetscaping, etc. that are thought to be add-ons of convenience for a municipality rather than an integral part of a transit project.  It will be interesting to see what standards Metrolinx defines as the “basic” level it will fund, and how much will fall on municipal budgets.

Queen’s Park wants transit riders to “experience the benefits of a regionally integrated and inter-operable system”, and the Presto fare card will be a requirement for all of the designated lines.  In a telling comment, the Deputy Minister states:

 … the Province and Metrolinx will … monitor the evolution of technologies, and will consider how to plan for enhancements and improvements as part of an overall strategy to sustain the Presto electronic fare collection system.

“Evolution” will no doubt include a recognition that this is not a situation where Ontario should develop or adapt a proprietary technology, but should work with internationally recognized electronic payment standards and systems.  The time is long past when Ontario could get away with building “roll your own” systems, and they need to look at the extensive experience in other jurisdictions.

While Metrolinx is working on the benefits of a regional service, they will also need to address the integration of GO Transit fares and service into the wider regional system.  GO, as a separate entity, has remained aloof from regional integration except as it suits them with cost sharing arranements in 905 municipalities.  These arrangements are to GO’s advantage because the joint fares with local operators are much cheaper than the cost and development effects of building more parking at stations.

Finally, Infrastructure Ontario will act on Metrolinx’ behalf for projects that are to use Alternative Financing and Procurement (AFP).  This is a variation on a PPP in which the asset may actually be built and held by a private company and leased to Metrolinx.  The accounting fig leaves are thick on the ground here.  One way or another, Ontario borrows money, Metrolinx builds something (or has it built for them), and, likely, the local operating agency contracts to run it.

Lurking under all of this is a clear indication that it is Queen’s Park, not the Metrolinx Board of Directors, who runs the show.  To be fair, it is their money (or more accurately our money), but the opportunities for interference and sheer bureaucratic incompetence are legion.  There’s a reason transit has been in local hands for decades — the Ministry of Transportation hasn’t the first idea how to operate large systems, nor any feeling for the local issues involved.

Metrolinx itself becomes little more than a construction planning and, later, a holding company on the Province’s behalf.  This should not overly tax the skills of the new, non-political Board, for whom all of the important decisions will be made elsewhere.

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How Many Streetcars Do We Need?

Recent comments by Adam Giambrone, Chair of the TTC, suggest that 30 to 40 percent of the streetcar fleet is out of service in the shops, and that bus substitution will be required on some routes come the fall.

Those of us who follow the TTC have been waiting for a definitive fleet plan for some time, and hope to see one, finally, in the July Commission Meeting Agenda.  Meanwhile, I thought that I would set the stage by reviewing the current scheduled service to see how it may evolve over coming months.

The fleet contains 195 CLRVs (one of the original 196 has been scrapped) and 52 ALRVs.  The scheduled service beginning June 21 is 123 CLRVs and 38 ALRVs.  This is 63% of the CLRV fleet and 73% of the ALRV fleet.

Peak AM requirements by route are:  Bathurst (9), Carlton (32), Dundas (14), Queen (31 ALRV), Lake Shore (3), Downtowner and Kingston Road (11), King (27 CLRV + 7 ALRV), Spadina (15), Harbourfront (6), St. Clair (6).

What we don’t know is the number of cars that are permanently out of service with problems that cannot be or are too expensive to fix.  In effect, we don’t know what the true size of the available fleet might be.  A CLRV overhaul program is in progress (the affected cars are those with the new entrance layout and revised rear seating), but this is not as extensive as the original plans to replace major subsystems such as the electronics package.  This program takes some number of cars out of the pool, but should gradually replenish the fleet.  We don’t know how quickly this is happening, nor how reliable the “new” cars are.

In August, peak requirements will drop by another 11 cars when the 502/503 routes are converted to bus operation, although this will be offset in the fall when the 505/506 routes revert to their standard arrangement in the west end.  The May schedules for these routes required 53 cars in the AM peak compared to 46 today.  A further 9 cars will be needed to restore the 504 King line to its May schedule.

Late in 2009, the 512 St. Clair line’s service will be restored at least to Oakwood, later to Lansdowne.  However, this route is now using a captive pool of cars trapped north of the underpass work at Dupont and Bathurst, and there are, I believe, enough cars in that pool to handle this extension (combined with appropriate schedules where cars spend more time in motion than laying over at terminals).

The TTC needs to explain how it plans to manage streetcar service over the next three years, not to mention service improvements for capacity and the commencement of service in the eastern waterfront.  How long will new streetcars simply make up for failing CLRVs and ALRVs rather than contributing net new capacity to the network?

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Service Changes Effective June 21, 2009 (Updated)

Updated:  The Service Summary is now available online.

The June/July schedule board period will bring many seasonal cuts to transit service on the TTC.  I will not list all of them, but the real issue will be to see whether they are reversed in the fall.  A few cuts in this round are identified as a response to budget concerns (see my previous article about Metropass use and its effect on revenues).  If this is just reasonable belt-tightening, that’s just good management.  If this is a return to the bad days of stealth service cuts even while riding grows, the TTC is in for problems. Continue reading →

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TTC Ridership, Budgets and Those Pesky Metropass Users

This week, the TTC announced that it has record ridership for the past twelve months of 470.8-million.  This continues an upward trend from last year, and indicates that TTC demand may be insulated from the effects of the economic downturn.  Possibly a shift from auto to transit riding is offsetting any reduction in employment or recreational traffic.

The Chief General Manager’s Report for the first quarter of 2009 notes that although ridership continues to grow, revenue is below budget.  Why?  More Metropasses were sold than expected in January-March, and this trend is continuing into the second quarter.  The TTC had budgeted on a higher average fare-per-ride, and the more who travel with passes, the lower this average falls.

Rumours of budget related service cuts started to surface a few weeks ago, and one change effective June 21 is explicitly listed as being due to budget.  (I will report on that in a separate post on June service changes.)  This is an odd state of affairs considering that there is a buffer for service growth on the TTC”s budget, and there has been no report to the Commission of pending service cuts (or of deferred service improvements).

Moreover, in a separate report, the TTC plans to launch an ad campaign seeking organizations to be part of a Metropass Affinity Program where pass holders would receive discounts to products or events.  The intention is, wait for it, to sell more Metropasses by making them even more attractive.

The TTC has a long-standing love-hate relationship with the Metropass going right back to its origins 29 years ago.  Each pass is seen, by some, as a loss of revenue, a loss of individual fares that might otherwise be collected.  Of course, a pass is also an incentive for users to ride the system and get all those “free” extra trips, exactly the sort of mindset an auto driver operates in every day.

Those 260,000 monthly pass holders are now responsible for over half of the adult trips on the TTC.  Budgets and fare policies must recognize that there is a demand for flat rate purchase of transit services, and that this market will grow both through pricing incentives and improved service.  Cutbacks because too many people buy passes are a laughable, but unfortunately predictable response to what should be a transit success story.

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Who Pays for Transit?

Every so often, the question of subsidies shows up in comment threads here.  My usual explanation is “well, it depends, and it’s complicated”.

For those of you who want to see just how complicated, you can look at the TTC’s draft financial statements for 2008.  Scroll down to Notes 12 and 13 which detail where the operating subsidies come from and go to, and in much more excruciating detail, how the capital subsidies work.

This is a testimonial to the madness of project-based, partisan announcements.  Every government has to come up with its own program.  Even if an old one worked, we need a new one clothed in new party colours.  All of this takes a lot of accounting just to keep track that monies received are spent on only those projects for which they were announced.  Perish the thought that a Tory Blue dollar might accidently wind up paying for a Liberal Red bus, or that money intended for “Green” programs simply pays for keeping the transit system going.

We hear a lot from governments about getting out of the way of private business, of simplifying regulations and reporting because this is a huge burden on the private sector.  Canada’s competitiveness depends on the simplest and shortest rules possible.  The concept has not yet reached public sector regulation where the intent seems to be to strangle any ability to use funding productively and quickly.

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Some Things Take A Little Time

Oh dear, oh dear!  That poor old overworked, underappreciated TTC!

The Spadina car opened in July 1997, and one thing immediately obvious to anyone who bothered to look was that “transit priority signalling” was simply not working the way that phrase might imply to mere mortals who ride the service.  Indeed, a newspaper article by Stephen Wickens has taken on legendary status with the claim (valid under some circumstances) that a trip down Bathurst to Western Hospital in mixed traffic makes better time than the Spadina car and its right-of-way.  I’m not going to revisit that debate here .

In June 2005, I spoke to the issue of non-priority for Spadina cars at a Commission meeting.  At that time, then Vice-Chair Olivia Chow moved that staff take the necessary action to implement priority signalling by September 2005 where it is not already active and report back by September 2006 on the impact; and that the recommendations in my submission be forwarded to TTC and City staff with a joint report to fall meetings, presumably in 2005.

The due date for this report has always been a few months away, and I have had the honour of holding the longest outstanding report request at the TTC for some time.  I was expecting the report in April, but that month came and went.  Now, according to this week’s agenda, the report will be at the Commission meeting of December 16, 2009.

That is at least still “fall”, by a few days, albeit not the one Olivia Chow had in mind.

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Fare By Distance: How Much Would We Pay?

In the thread about new streetcars, part of the discussion turned on the question of fare collection.  I’ve been thinking about this for a while and planned to write about this topic, but when I actually started, realized that there’s more here than will fit in one article.

One major topic in all discussions is the question of flat fares versus fare-by-distance, and this inevitably gets pulled into questions about “equality” in the way that we price transit so that riders are not penalized by things like zone boundaries and operator service territories.  However, any fare system brings its own benefits and problems.  We may solve problems for one group of riders, and create a new set of problems for others.

This article considers fare-by-distance by analogy to the existing TTC system.  It is intended as a “back of the envelope” calculation to give readers a general sense of the numbers and is not intended to be a prescription for any particular implementation.  What is important is that anyone talking about fare structures cannot simply wish away problems of any system by saying “everything will be fixed with Presto!” or similar, simplistic bilge. Continue reading →

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My Ride on the King Car

A few days ago, my travels took me to Parkdale for a presentation near Jameson Avenue in the early afternoon.  The obvious route for someone like me living near Broadview Station was the King car.  That journey gave several examples of how service can be delayed that have nothing to do with traffic congestion, and illustrate the changes that will be possible when the TTC moves to low-floor cars and all-door loading.

Just south of Danforth, we picked up a load of students from Moncrest School on their way to Thomson Hall.  They filled up the back half of the car.  Just loading them all took a while, and I wondered to myself how the TTC will handle fare collection for this type of group when they move to self-service.  Now we were slightly late.

By the time we were westbound on King, the car was filling up.  A man had boarded with a shopping buggy, and he took a single seat just ahead of the rear vestibule on the left side of the car.  This started a plug in the aisle that worsened when a group of five boarded.  There were not enough seats for all of them, and they wound up partly seated and partly standing right across the aisle from the shopping buggy.  Needless to say they were not going to “move to the rear”.

At Sherbourne, we passed up the first group of would-be customers even though there was still room in the rear vestibule.  This continued at Jarvis, Church and Victoria.

At Yonge, the crowd turned over, but the car was now quite late and we still didn’t manage to fully use the capacity.  By University we were again leaving people at the stops.  The students piled off the car at Simcoe, and by Spadina the car had cleared out reasonably.  All the same, we left an unhappy customer running for the car at Bathurst because getting back on time was more important than waiting, and the next car was only a block behind us.

While this may have been a particularly bad example of how service can be screwed up by loading delays, it’s not uncommon.  The combined effect of many factors interferes with the travel time of TTC vehicles, and this has nothing to do with whether they are in a private right-of-way.

Loading delays caused by inadequate service can cause a downward spiral where line capacity drops even as ridership grows because cars spend longer at stops and onboard crowding slows or blocks movement of passengers.  We hear far too much about traffic congestion as the root of all evil.  Yes, it exists, but it’s not the only problem.

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Who Will Pay for New Streetcars?

A great deal of bilge was pumped out by Ottawa and Queen’s Park over the past few days about the TTC’s proposed order of new streetcars from Bombardier.

In today’s Globe & Mail, John Barber did a particularly nice job of eviscerating George Smitherman, the Minister of Infrastructure, for his apparent total ignorance of the TTC’s funding needs and requests.

It’s no secret that the TTC is looking for new streetcars.  The original bid process had to be halted when no vendor came up with a technically and commercially compliant proposal, and more recently the whole process of getting a second set of bids has been well covered in the media.

Many of us will remember walking through Bombardier’s mockup display at Dundas Square which happens to be in Smitherman’s riding.  Maybe he was out of town at the time and missed it.

Smitherman claims that the City can’t make up its mind what its priorities are.  Strange that in a letter to Dalton McGuinty, copied to Smitherman, dated December 16, 2008, Mayor Miller wrote of upcoming meetings of Finance and First Ministers:

Toronto’s first priority for infrastructure is to build Transit City, the 21st century modern public transit network that our city needs.  The Government of Ontario has demonstrated foresight and leadership in its support for Transit City.  Toronto City Council has unanimously agreed to request the Government of Canada to provide:

  • $368 million toward the streetcar fleet’s replacement and expansion; and
  • the federal $6 billion share of Ontario’s $17.5 billion Move Ontario 2020 commitment for the Metrolinx Regional Transportation Plan.

The streetcar fleet replacement also shows up in the list of funding requests under the stimulus program by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

Other related letters to both Queen’s Park and Ottawa can be found on the City’s website.

Meanwhile, Smitherman’s comment that the TTC shouldn’t be awarding a contract without knowing funding is in place shows that he is badly out of touch.  First off, the TTC has not signed the contract, and its execution is dependent on funding being in place.

Second, there is a long history of agencies such as Metrolinx (a provincial body) announcing plans for which they have no funding, and for which even discussion of proper funding won’t happen for years into the future.  There are two subway extensions (Spadina/Vaughan and Richmond Hill) of which the first was not fully funded until long after the project was announced, and the second still does not have full commitments.

That’s how projects like this work.

The streetcar purchase will run over a 10-year period, and funding it can hardly be called a short-term stimulus.  Funding would likely come from some other program, but the funding should come.  Toronto is asking, in effect, for $40-million a year from Ottawa and from Queen’s Park to re-equip the core of central Toronto’s transit system and to anchor the expansion of LRT in our city.