Finance

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Metrolinx Fare & Service Integration (Update 3)

Thanks to an oversight on the security on the Metrolinx website, it was possible to view a report that was pulled from the agenda for this Friday’s meeting.  (Thanks to one of my regular correspondents for spotting this.)

The report talks about integration of services between the TTC and other systems as well as a Metrolinx-GTAH pass.  Because the report has been withdrawn it cannot be considered to be an authoritative Metrolinx statement, but it’s indicative of Metrolinx’ ham-fisted attitude to local systems including the TTC.

Updated:  Comments on the report added.

Update 2:  Tess Kalinowski writes about this issue in The Star.

Update 3:  For the convenience of readers, the report which was pulled from the Metrolinx site is now available here.

John Barber’s scathing commentary on this report is online at the Globe and Mail.

This report proposes that Metrolinx embark on a takeover of fare integration and service co-ordination for cross-boundary operations.  To that end, Queen’s Park would be asked to implement the necessary legislation to remove jurisdictional obstacles and to proclaim the section of the GTTA act empowering Metrolinx to implement a Farecard Division.  The target for full GTAH-wide fare integration would be 2012.

Notable in many discussions of fare and service integration is the absence of GO Transit, even though the GTTA Act includes GO as part of a future integrated system.  Nobody wants to mess with GO’s revenue stream, or to contribute “local” demand to what is seen as a regional service.  Strangely, the same approach is not taken with respect to the TTC (see the Richmond Hill subway debate).

The report notes that between 1996 and 2006, transit trips to downtown Toronto from the 905 have increased while auto trips decreased.  I venture that the vast majority of this effect is thanks to GO rail services, not to cross-boundary bus routes. Continue reading →

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Vancouver: More Service / Great Blog

Calls for added service on transit systems are nothing new.  We have seen lots of them in Toronto as we struggle to implement the Ridership Growth Strategy despite a shortage of operators, vehicles and, I suspect, budget headroom.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, riding is growing apace, and the additional challenge of the coming winter Olympics has yet to be digested.

A very fine blog from Vancouver is run by Stephen Rees.  In a recent post about service quality to outlying sports venues, he included the following:

If transit is to be an attractive, useful alternative to driving then Translink has to get much better at understanding how to make routes easy and convenient to use. The biggest block to transit use in this region is lack of service frequency and the planners at CMBC and Translink are both way out of line on what they feel is a “frequent” service. It does not mean ‘more buses than we had last year’. It means that people do not get passed up at stops – and do not have to wait for interminable periods of time due to chronic unreliability. It is not just how many buses you have, but how you use them and how much priority the bus gets in congested traffic. In my travels recently I have been been frequently struck by how easy it is to use buses elsewhere – and how frustrating it is to be stuck at a bus stop here not having the slightest idea of when – or if – the next bus will arrive.

Sound familiar?

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Is There Hope For Transit In 2009?

The new year brings a dark economic climate, worries about job losses, falling revenues for all governments and a pervasive sense that we have not yet seen the worst.  Whether this is media disaster-mongering, a realistic view of the future, or something in between remains to be seen.

What is quite clear is that an economic model that underpinned the past decades has run its course.  Can the same level of activity — jobs, travel, government investment — be sustained into 2009 and the next decade?

Transit is only a small part of this, and yet decisions made about transit funding have long-lasting effects.  Through my “career” as a transit activist, I have seen the boom-and-bust cycles of funding and watched as grand schemes for transit investment disintegrate when the economy falters and governments lose interest.  Too often, transit was something everyone wanted to champion, but nobody wanted to pay for.

A major problem throughout the North American transit industry, not just in Toronto, is that transit capital spending is viewed as an economic stimulus, a job creation (or preservation) mechanism, not as an essential part of what makes urban economies work.  The dominance of auto travel (and the lack of transit alternatives) puts transit down many voters’ priority lists.  People are comfortable in their cars which, for all their problems and costs, work.  The same cannot said for transit.  You cannot get to work on a press release.

The long lead times for transit projects bring a typical cycle:

  • Governments with money to spend start to think about investing in transit.
  • Plan, Plan, Plan.  Much work for consultants and facilitators (less so with the new streamlined approval process).
  • Finally a map, and a few lines that get into detailed design.
  • Ooops!  A recession.

We are a bit better at it this time around.  We have many plans in the hopper and we haven’t (yet) stopped everything in its tracks waiting for the next boom.  The root problem is that transit is not something we spend on regularly, but only when we can drum up a few billion for someone’s pet project.

Where does this leave us for 2009? Continue reading →

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Buses on Streetcar Routes?

The CBC this morning carried an item reporting that the TTC would begin running buses on streetcar routes to relieve crowding.  Chair Adam Giambrone was quoted as saying that cars don’t get out of the yard due to “safety” problems such as dashboard heaters failing and causing windows to fog up.

Sigh.  That’s this week’s excuse.  Things are getting bad when the best that Giambrone can trot out is that chestnut “safety” that is a catch-all excuse in the same league as “congestion” and “TTC culture”.  The real problem is that the TTC has been hiding reliability problems with the streetcar fleet for years, and needed service improvements don’t show up because they don’t have enough working cars.  The problem has been masked because at least one carline has been under construction for most of the last five years.

Next week, a new schedule comes into play on Queen with less, yes less service than today.  The reason?  The operators need even more layover time (strangely only on weekday schedules but not in the evening), and the TTC comes up with this by stretching the headways.

Management’s refusal to undertake a restructuring of the line, to break it into separate components that don’t have an immense round trip and a corresponding need for layovers, is getting quite trying.  The use of relief crews at Russell Division works in the east end because the carhouse is near the end of the line, but a completely different scheme is needed in the west for Long Branch bound cars.

If we are going to start busing streetcar lines, then let’s stop running inadequate service to handle the demand on the routes.  Stop telling us about average loads that are within standards when news reports include clips of people complaining about huge gaps and crowded cars.

Thanks to inaction on streetcar reliability, riders will have to put up with ongoing problems for three years until the new fleet begins to arrive.  Even that is dependent on funding, and I am not convinced that the streetcar fleet will survive the many demands for new money in Ottawa and Queen’s Park.  Is this the beginning of the end?  A fate like the trolleybus network that was allowed to deteriorate beyond the point of no return?

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Service Changes for January 2009 (Updated)

Updated December 29:  The January 2009 Service Summary is now available online.

January 2009 brings a small number of service changes notably on the streetcar system.  Many of these address overcrowding problems during the off-peak (there are no spare cars for peak period requirements).

Of particular interest are the changes on 501 Queen.

The weekday schedules will be adjusted by adding running time and stretching the headways during both peak periods and midday.  The alleged purpose of this change is to improve trip reliability.  Whether this will simply mean that even longer layovers will be available at both ends of the line remains to be seen.

Given the length of the Queen route, the TTC needs to move away from laying over cars to laying over operators by way of scheduled breaks at Russell and Roncesvalles carhouses.  Ad hoc changes to line management are in place at Russell, but still not at Roncesvalles.

I have requested the CIS data for December 2008 and January 2009 for Queen (and related routes) in order to investigate whether there has been any improvement due to recent and pending schedule changes. 

Meanwhile, the service improvements on Saturday and Sunday address crowding that shows up even on the averages, never mind when the service is erratic.  It wasn’t your imagination, there just were not enough cars on the line for the demand.

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Where Is The Wellesley Bus?

Over the past week, two people have commented to me about trying to use the 94 Wellesley bus and just giving up.  Among the complaints I have heard are:

  • The printed timetables are completely meaningless.
  • Gaps of over half an hour in the peak period occur.

This is quite different from the rosy view the TTC system had in the wake of November’s service improvements.  Looking at the Scheduled Service Summary I see that the headways are supposed to be:

  • AM Peak:  12′ between Ossington  and Wellesley Stations, 6′ east to Castle Frank
  • Midday:  10′
  • PM Peak:  16′ between Ossington and Wellesley Stations, 8′ east to Castle Frank
  • Early evening:  13′
  • Late evening every day:  15′
  • Saturday early morning:  17′
  • Saturday afternoon:  12′
  • Weekend early evening:  16’40”
  • Sunday daytime:  18′

What is ironic here is that the PM peak service west of Yonge is worse than it is during most other operating periods.  On top of this, if a bus is missing or short turned, a gap of over half an hour results.

I know it’s a lot to expect that there are hundreds (tens?) of Wellesley bus riders reading this blog, but if you have some service horror stories of this or other routes, please let me know.  We need to ensure that the TTC is actually operating its services properly, and not just the ones that had recent improvements.

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November 2008 Service Improvements (Update 2)

Update 2:  The TTC now expects to have all posted schedules updated by Christmas Eve, subject to delays caused by the weather.  Please hold your cards and letters, folks, about places they have missed at least into mid-January.

Original Post:

This Sunday (November 23) will see a large number of service improvements both during peak and off peak periods to implement the next major step in the Ridership Growth Strategy. Continue reading →

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The Ten Minute Network

Recently, the TTC implemented a maximum 30 minute headway across the network and full service from roughly 6:00 am to 1:00 am everywhere.  Plans for 2009 include a reduction of this maximum to 20 minutes, a topic I reviewed in a previous post.  Whether we will actually see this next year is still a topic for budget debates, and the recently announced fare freeze could put that scheme on hold.

Another option that has surfaced is the concept of a core grid of routes where service would never be worse than every 10 minutes.  To get a sense of what this might look like, I culled through the current schedules to produce a list of routes that have headways wider than 10 minutes.  This is not a definitive list, and I know there can be both additions and deletions.  Indeed, proposals like this are guaranteed to produce all sorts of political fights as each Councillor tries to get “their” routes on the “A list” for service quality.  The criteria for picking the routes were:

  • Routes on the major concession roads, or a reasonable approximation, were chosen.  This is the roughly 2km square grid of main streets in Toronto.
  • For areas with more complex geometry such as southern Scarborough, I have selected routes to provide geographic coverage.
  • Only services within the 416 are included.
  • All streetcar lines are included, although an argument can be made that one or two of them could be trimmed from the list.

Where the cells in the table are empty, the service is already at a 10 minute headway or better, and some routes have completely blank rows.  What is quite noticeable here compared with the chart of 20 minute routes is that there are more time periods where service improvements would be needed on more routes.  Moreover, many of these are major routes where the number of additional vehicles would be substantial.

In a period of tighter finances, this raises the question of which approach to service improvement should get priority:

  • Improve service even more on lesser used routes and periods from 30 to 20 minute maximum headways.
  • Improve service on core routes to 10 minute headways.
  • Improve service on routes that could benefit from reduced crowding.

All of these must be balanced against the debate over fare levels.  Regular readers will know that my preference has always been to concentrate on service because that’s what people really need.  The greatest prices in the world won’t do any good if the shop window is empty.

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The Twenty Minute Network

Among the side comments with the proposed fare freeze announcement came a note that we might not see the implementation of a 20-minute maximum headway in 2009.  Indeed, just paying for the changes recently introduced could be a stretch.

Just to see what this entails, I have compiled a list of the services that now run less frequently than 20 minute headways.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list as I built it rather quickly to get a sense of the size of the issue, not to nail down every last detail.  A few important points here:

  • Routes outside of the 416 are not included as they are contract services not subject to TTC headway policies.
  • Sunday early morning services are not included because this period is not part of “subway hours”.
  • Where routes overlap, I have tried to omit infrequent services on the overlap.  For example, individual services on Broadview may run on wide headways, but the combined frequency is within the 20 minute cutoff.
  • Not every route with two or more branches has been included.  I mentioned a few in the list because there is an important policy question here.  Should the TTC run very frequent service on a route so that its branches can each stay within the 20 minute maximum?  (A very good example is Eglinton West which has both the Emmett and Trethewey branches that are not always scheduled into the pattern of the main route.)
  • Routes that have no service less frequent than 20 minutes are not included in the table.
  • Empty cells in the table indicate a period when the service is every 20 minutes or better, or in a few cases where there is no service.

One overwhelming observation is that the late evening periods (generally after 9-10 pm) most commonly have wide headways on most listed routes.  A relatively few routes have 30 minute headways for most of the day.

The debate on use of any funding for service increases needs to determine whether the 20 minute maximum is an appropriate goal across the system, or whether it is time to start subdividing by class of route and time of day.  For example:

  • Is a 30 minute headway after 10 pm an acceptable compromise or first step in a full 20-minute rollout?
  • Should routes serving primarily industrial areas be subject to the 20 minute maximum?
  • Do rush hour express buses (the 140 series) qualify as full routes once they no longer charge premium fares, and if so, what should be the minimum headway?
  • Should there be a special class of peak-only routes that do not automatically get full service at the policy headway?

In my next post, I will turn to what may seem to be a more radical idea, the Ten Minute Network.  Such a network would have a guaranteed maximum 10 minute headway on a core network of routes.  Please save comments on that idea until I get the post about it online.  Meanwhile, the policy question is this:  would a Ten Minute Network contribute more to the system overall at this time than the move to a twenty minute maximum affecting only the infrequent services?