Finance

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A Tale of Two Maps

Two days ago, Toronto’s Planning & Growth Management Committee approved both the Environmental Assessment Report for the Sheppard East LRT and an Official Plan Amendment extending the scope of the transit corridor east on Sheppard to match the LRT line.

Scarborough Councillors popped the Champagne corks, or at least sparkling water, and I got an invitation to talk about the significance of the occasion on Metro Morning.

This should be a big event — approval of the first leg in a suburban LRT network.  Back in 1972, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to save what we now call the “legacy” system as a base for suburban expansion, and I have waited a very, very long time for this day.

Over the decades, a combination of Provincial meddling in transit and local subway megalomania  stymied transit’s ability to keep up with, let alone form suburban growth.  All the planning mantras about leading development with transit from the sixties and seventies are little more than quaint memories.

Finally, early in 2007, the TTC and City announced the Transit City plan for a network of seven new LRT lines.  Work began immediately on detailed studies, and three EAs are already underway with the Sheppard Line’s being the first to come up for approval.  The Don Mills study recently had a round of public meetings, and the Eglinton study will roll out in the fall.  Add to these the non-TC projects in the eastern waterfront and the Kingston Road study, not to mention proposals outside of Toronto, and there’s a lot of LRT on the table. Continue reading →

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“TTC Culture” : 1 Queen Car : 0 (Updated June 25)

Updated June 25:

Jonathan Goldsbie has an article about the Queen car forum on the Eye Weekly site.

Updated June 18:

First, apologies to Gary Welsh of City Transportation Services whose name I misspelled in the original post.  I’m used to the many permutations possible with “Stephen Munro” and don’t like to screw up other people’s names myself.

Today I deputed on the subject of the Queen report and forum, and the thrust of my remarks was:

  • I agree that some of the proposals for traffic-related improvements on Queen will be good for the route.  This and other operational changes have been under discussion for some time and were part of the reason I started my analyses of CIS data in 2007.
  • There are many items on the “to do” list including detailed evaluation of alternate route structures, monitoring and management of the existing service, and bringing reports on traffic changes to Community Council for discussion and approval.  They’re worthwhile and we mustn’t lose the momentum.
  • The monthly update on cancelled service and short turns is missing, and we have no idea of how effective any new practices might be since late April.
  • At the Queen Car Forum, the same May report was presented without updates, but the big problem was the issue of “TTC Culture” as an explanation for the slowness of change.  I made the point that this is hard to believe given enthusiastic celebration of TTC employees’ skills and dedication at the 40-year service presentations that opened the meeting, and the extensive review and recommendations for immediate change in the report on the Lytton Boulevard subway fatality.  Both of these show a culture that celebrates skill and dedication.  I made it clear that my remarks were aimed at corporate culture, not at any individual who happened to be the bearer of the message.
  • My own view is that problems on Queen are disproportionate to those on other routes and this is a function of the length and challenges posed by the 501, not just any “cultural” issues.
  • When the report with a recommended strategy for dealing with the 501 comes forward in October, I hope that it will have more substance and a positive outlook about what can be done.
  • Commissioner Bussin (who attended the Forum) replied that she felt the “culture” reference was only to short-term problems with introduction of change and asked how I took the impression I did.  I replied that the sense was not just mine, but that of others I had talked to and responses to the original post here.
  • TTC staff argued that they only intended the “cultural” reference as a short-term problem to be overcome, that years of line management style can’t be changed overnight.  They haven’t given up on the system.  Also, the problem with a lack of updated info appears to be a staff resource issue (for which read they’re too busy with other things), but the information will be incorporated in the monthly Chief General Manager’s Report.

I have managed to cheese off a number of folks at the TTC and City Hall, but feel it’s not my job to be a cheerleader.  I report what I hear and what I see.  Possibly my comments influence how others see the same events, but such is the problem of any media (the “it’s in the Sun so it must be true” syndrome).

Some of you have already written with your own reflections on Tuesday’s meeting, and if there are others reading this, I would be interested in your take on what was said.  This blog exists not just for my opinions, but as a forum for many others to let those interested in transit matters see a variety of positions whether I agree with them or not.

The original post follows below. Continue reading →

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Caribana Cash Grab (Updated)

Update:  At the TTC meeting on June 18, the Caribana pass was approved at a cost of $18, the price of two Day passes.  Sanity prevails.

At this week’s TTC meeting, a report recommends that a special two-day Caribana pass be issued for August 2 and 3.  Great stuff!  Give the tourists a souvenir.  Simplify ticketing.

But wait.  The price will be $20, or $2 more than the cost of two Day Passes “to offset the cost of production”.   Are we really supposed to believe that it will cost $100,000 to produce the 50,000 passes the TTC expects to sell?

I have no objection to event-based transit passes for conventions and other gatherings, and the idea is certainly not new in Toronto.  Tourists are found money for the TTC, and the last thing we need is to put them in a situation where they pay more for their “special” pass.  

Collecting fares is part of the business of running the TTC.  Selling special passes simplifies TTC operations because visitors only need to buy one pass.  These can be sold through hotels, not just a handful of downtown subway stations.  Pass holders enter vehicles quickly rather than pulling together odd amounts of cash.  Service runs more smoothly, and all door loading is possible at major stops.  That quality of service is worth something, if only fewer delays and short turns.

Doesn’t this count for anything at the TTC?  Maybe the lesson they need is that of basic market forces — have a pile of unsold, overpriced passes on August 4.

The two-day pass should be sold at a discount relative to individual Day Passes.  Show our visitors that we welcome them on the TTC.

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Route Supervision on Queen?

I received a note from Pete Coulman in the Kingston Road thread, and moved it here as a separate item.

Quick comment on Queen service also.

Yes, a supervisor is in the loop at Neville (AM&PM only).  These are timings made at Queen & Lee the other day (May 29).  What do you make of these?

On one hand 13 cars in an hour seems good, on the other hand, the actual headways, especially with a supervisor there, seem all over the place.  As most readers will know, Lee is Stop 6 WB from Neville and on a bad day, one-way travel time from Lee to Neville is about 3 minutes tops.  Check this out.

Car    EB   WB

4244 607 618
4233 608 624
4203 616 627
4212 618 632
4251 620 639
4206 625 648
4208 634 650
4224 6xx 654
4240 651 701
4213 651 702
4238 657 707
4237 700 713
4214 700 718

WB headways are : 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 1, 5, 6 and 5.

Traffic is not an issue at this hour, there were no accidents, clear morning, AND a supervisor at Neville.

I don’t know what to say …

Supervision?  What supervision?  What is particularly striking are the long round-trip times from Lee to the loop for some runs.  The erratic departure times may be as much an effect of padded running times as anything.  When running times are too long, operators know that (a) they can make up for a long layover and (b) leaving strictly on time means a dawdling trip across the city at a time when there is little traffic.

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Fun With Figures at the TTC

After a long hiatus, we finally have a Chief General Manager’s Report for the first quarter of 2008.  Over the past few years, the CGM’s report dwindled, and the online version of this one is a threadbare five pages long.  There are three appendices with the meat, no doubt, but you have to actually attend the meeting to read them.  Within those five pages, however, we still see the TTC’s inventive approach to reporting ridership.

Last summer, in the midst of the financial crisis, the TTC suddenly discovered that Metropass riders were taking too many rides.  Even though they were selling more passes, probably due to the tax incentive for pass use bringing a new demographic into the Metropass cohort, they were collecting less revenue.  This brought out the thundering forces of the TTC’s right wing who demanded that the price of Metropasses go up to compensate for the lost revenue.

However, after the City’s new taxes (and their revenue for 2008) were safely in place in the fall, we learned that the TTC had been counting those passholders as more “rides” than they actually represented, and retroactive to July, they dropped the calculated  total ridership by using the new, lower multiplier.  Nobody bothered to apologize about the erroneous claims of how Metropass users were ripping off the system.

This year, ridership for the first quarter is not doing as well as projected.  It’s 0.7% above budget, but ever so slightly below last year.  Never fear!  TTC New Math to the rescue!  If we use the lower Metropass multiple for all of last year, then the ridership for Q1 last year goes down by 3.3-million and — Presto! — we have a tidy jump in riding this year.  The TTC seems to have missed the point that adjusting their ridership for last year downward throws off all their claims about a banner year for transit and causes a slight increase in the overall average fare per ride, but we’re not supposed to notice that.

You can count the riding increase in 2007 or you can count it in 2008, but double-dipping ain’t allowed in my transit planning 101 class. 

The Metropass Multiple is supposedly calibrated every month by selected riders keeping trip diaries.  Even I did it years ago.  There will always be some month-to-month variation, but over time there should be a good trend (rather like the headway charts for the Queen car).  However, you can make the ridership numbers, and the imputed impact of passes on the revenue stream, jump all over the place simply by twiddling that multiple.  It’s a basic piece of data that should be published so that we can get some sense of how it shifts around over time and in response to external factors such as tax regimes, the price of gas, and seasonal changes in tripmaking.

It’s particularly odd to think that a value that is recalibrated as part of a monthly moving average can be changed retroactively over a year backward in time.  Have they only now gotten around to looking at those early 2007 trip diaries?  Of course not.  If the multiple was actually dropping in early 2007, the TTC would have known it by early Q2 at the outside, and certainly should have known it by the time of the fare and budget debates in the summer, Q3.  However, that was news best kept under wraps as long as goading the Commission into approving a jump in pass pricing was the real agenda.

This is a case where the TTC has that classic choice:  admit that you presented faulty data because you were asleep at the switch and didn’t know what was happening on your own system, or admit that you misled the public into thinking that a Metropass increase was essential.

Postscript:  Recently, we’ve seen media reports that the TTC faces a big jump in fuel costs later this year and is thinking of adding a fuel surcharge to the fares rather like the airlines.  Please don’t insult everyone’s intelligence.  If total costs go up, you raise fares or subsidies.  Period.  Don’t call it a surcharge when we are in an era of higher prices as part of the landscape.  Or does the TTC know something about the oil market they’re not telling anyone?  Do they have some magical access to cheap diesel fuel a year or two out?

That’s hardly the message for a transit system to send to motorists who, we hope, are in mortal fear of never affording to drive their SUV to the corner store again, much less to work.  Don’t worry, folks, it will all be over in a little while and you’ll be back to 70 cents a litre before you know it.

If the TTC wants more money, call it a fare increase and be done with it.  Or is someone not wanting to break a political promise to hold the line on fares?

The creative accounting at the TTC has got to stop.  It takes X dollars to run the place, and Y dollars are needed from the farebox.  Period.  Decide how you want to divvy up the revenue among available fare classes and get on with it.  If we ever do get back to 70 cent fuel, I will expect a reduction in the cost of my Metropass.

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Service Changes Effective Sunday, May 11, 2008 (Updated)

Many service changes will take effect this Sunday.  Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories:

  • Improvements to handle overcrowding
  • Season changes (mainly services to university and college campuses, and to parks)
  • Construction changes

I have listed only one of the construction changes.  Weekend service on 512 St. Clair will be reduced slightly because cars will now be stored at Hillcrest Yard and it is not necessary to have all cars in service all of the time.

A number of the “seasonal” changes involving longer hours of service will likely stay in place in September.  In November 2008, if the planned implementation of 30-minute minimum frequencies on all routes while the subway is operating goes ahead, these services would become permanent.  There is no point in removing them for a few months between the end of the summer and the implementation of the Ridership Growth Strategy policy for hours of service.

Service Changes for May 2008

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When Is A Plan Not A Plan? When It’s A Test Case!

Today’s Metrolinx board meeting actually produced some interesting debate about the draft white papers for the Regional Transportation Plan.  There was little discussion of the Goals & Objectives paper, but the Preliminary Directions & Concepts really got people going.

Two items attracted particular interest.

First, how are we going to pay for everything?  The options listed in the White Paper do not include some rather obvious options such as a higher gas tax and or a regional sales tax.  The boldest of the bold plans will cost close to $4-billion annually in capital costs and a comparable amount in operating costs.  At that level, I think we can reasonably assume that naming rights will not raise the money we need.

There is a separate Investment Strategy paper that will be published concurrently with the Draft Regional Transportation Plan in early July, and it will address the financial issues.

Second, David Miller led off a critique of the White Papers noting that the option of not building more roads was completely absent.  Indeed, the authors assume that since all of the road projects for the forseeable future are funded, one way or another, these should be assumed as part of the base plan.  This is a strange state of affairs for an organization that recognizes, quite strongly, that the problems of the GTAH will not be solved by road building. Continue reading →

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Welcome to Walmart Station

It really was silly season at the TTC yesterday.  Commissioner Peter Milczyn asked for a report on naming rights for stations in return for corporate sponsorship.  A short debate ensued during which the Commissioners seemed to forget that barely an hour earlier they had approved a report entitled TTC Corporate Policy Review – Policy 2.8.2 Identification of Routes, Stations and Stops.  This report states quite clearly:

Normally, the station name will incorporate the name of the major cross-street at which it is located, so that the location of the station is clearly identified to customers as they travel through the system. If this is not possible (because, for example, confusion would result with existing station names, or because there is no major nearby cross-street), then the station name may be related to the area in which the station is located, or a major destination nearby.

A good example of the last class of station name is “Museum”.

I have a fundamental objection to corporate sponsorships on the basis of equity.  If you want to build a subway station, it will cost anywhere from $70-100 million, and even more for a large terminal or interchange, not to mention ongoing operating costs.  If Pepsi or Walmart wants to sponsor a station, let them shell out at least 2/3 of the cost so that, on an after tax basis, they’re paying at least half the price of the station. 

Meanwhile, you and I, who actually pay for the station through our taxes should expect that naming rights will stay in the public sector.

No sponsor wants to shell out $35-50 million, and they hope to buy a station for a few million.  For that they get a couple of escalators.   Maybe they could actually pay to maintain the escalators so that their logo isn’t associated with a machine sitting in parts all over the floor more often than it actually carries passengers.

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TTC Riding Counts — Are There More Passengers? (Updated)

The 2008 Service Plan report is out although only the cover document is posted online as I write this.  The detailed report is not yet up with the other Service Reports.

Updated April 20, 2008:  The report is now available online.

Once I get a chance to digest the updated route statistics, I will post them here.  However, it is worth noting that, as usual, several streetcar routes have riding counts that are years out of date.  We know that more recent data must exist because some service improvements are starting to work their way into the system, but it’s always troubling when the overall system reports don’t have current data.

Routes With Updated Riding Figures

  • 502/503 Downtowner & Kingston Road – 7,800 (up from 6,100 first reported in 2002)
  • 504/508 King & Lake Shore – 53,100 (up from 47,900 in 2005)
  • 501 Queen – 43,500 (up from 41,200 first reported in 2002)
  • 510/509 Spadina & Harbourfront – 48,000 (up from 43,400 first reported in 2003)

Routes With Unchanged Riding Figures

  • 511 Bathurst – 13,600 (unchanged since 2005)
  • 506 Carlton – 41,200 (unchanged since 2001)
  • 505 Dundas – 35,200 (unchanged since 2005)
  • 512 St. Clair – 31,000 (unchanged since 2002)

It’s good to see riding going up, but the infrequency of updated counts means that the so-called financial performance (a piece of creative accounting of the highest order) of major routes is misreported to their detriment. 

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The Mysteries of Capital Budgeting

A few people have left comments here asking when I am going to write about the Federal and Provincial budget announcements. From my silence, you may have assumed a big yawn, or simply too little time, or the sense that there are better things to do. Actually, it’s a bit of all three.

The TTC (and transit in southern Ontario in general) has a big problem thanks to the way governments make their announcments and finance large capital projects. It can be a real shell game trying to figure out how much money from any announcement is really there.

Rather than establishing a standing fund for transit capital projects from, say, a percentage of sales tax, governments use trust funds and other similar devices as holding tanks for money burning a hole in their pocket. Suppose you want a subway. Well, we set up a trust fund and let everyone contribute to it and, eventually, we can actually build it. Never mind whether this is really the best use of the money, it’s been earmarked and that’s what it’s for.

More subtle, however, is the accounting. Suppose you’re Ottawa and you have some spare change left over at the end of the year. Rather than paying down the deficit or lowering taxes (which would affect your revenue in future years), you stash the money in trust for a future project. This allows you to show it as an expense in the current year and have a nice press conference, even though you won’t actually have to spend it for as much as a decade depending on the project. In some cases, the money really is sequestered and earns interest that will contribute to the project, but there’s no guarantee.

Because funds are announced and allocated for projects, we have a few TTC budget lines that are flush with cash, but many that go begging. To further confuse things, these are divided into “above the line” and “below the line” items. “Above” means that the project has Council approval, although it may not yet be fully funded. “Below” means that Council has not yet blessed the project, although other governments may be waiting in the wings with contributions. That’s how pet projects get built, and there’s all sorts of jockeying to ensure that favoured schemes find their way “above the line”.

For those with the stomach to actually read through the TTC’s Capital Budget (two very thick blue binders containing more details about the TTC than even the most hardened transit fan will ever want to see), it’s important to keep in mind both the project status and the source of funding, if any. “State of Good Repair” projects almost always go “above the line” as they have first call on any available funds. Toronto has sad history with deferred capital maintenance (projects large enough that they are funded from the capital rather than the operating budget) and even now we are still making up for this in many areas.

Funding comes from a dizzying collection of programs as each government seeks to rebrand its transit spending with yet another scheme. These are often time-limited, or overlap in various ways with existing programs, and it can be difficult to figure out where the next dollar will come from. In the agenda for the March 26 TTC meeting, a report talks about the funding problems, but the detailed information from the appendices is missing.

Appendix A gives a breakdown of the various programs that fund (or are hoped to fund) the capital program from 2008 to 2012. The numbers down the right hand margin refer to explanatory notes in Appendix B. I am not going to detail these here, but if you make it all the way to the fifth page, you will begin to understand why we have so many problems with planning capital spending for transit.

It gets worse. Look closely at Appendix A and you will note three circled figures in the 2008-2012 column. Line 3 is $481-million of Provincial money that, when the report was written, had not been confirmed. Line 8 is $324-million of Federal money that’s in the same boat. Down at the bottom, is a $278-million “unspecified reduction” that the City made in the budget plans on the assumption that the TTC usually underspends on its capital projects due to generous contingency provisions, or because projects are cancelled or rescheduled beyond the five-year budget window.

The funding shortfall starts out at $420-million, but when these three amounts are added back in, it rises to $1.503-billion.

Provincial announcements made after the report was completed reduce this by $360-million to $1.143-billion, and the recently concluded agreement with Ottawa has released more funding as well. However, this still leaves a great deal to be found, and does not even touch the many “below the line” projects notably the new streetcar purchase and the SRT renovation. Funding must be in place by fall 2008 for the streetcar order to be executed with a supplier, and the SRT project requires funding by September 2009 to be started on schedule.

If you thought all of that was complicated, there’s more. Late last week, there was much confusion over how much, exactly, Queen’s Park had announced to fund capacity expansion on the Yonge-University subway. The relevant section of the Budget has a table of “Metrolinx Transit Projects” (table 1 on page “34” which is really quite near the top of the linked document), and further information about GO Transit funding on page “35”. GO is still separate from Metrolinx and its funding is not yet bundled.

The Yonge Subway Capacity Improvements total $293-million, and this is intended for the Automatic Train Control system. However, this project extends beyond the TTC’s five-year budget window, and only $189-million will be spent in that period. That’s why the TTC shows the smaller amount in its updated figures. The total cost of the ATC system is estimated at $342-million of which about $4-million had been spend by the end of 2007.

This is the sort of confusion that arises when governments announce project-based funding, but transit agencies must restate this into current and future budget years to show where top-up municipal contributions might be needed, or where there will be pressure to defer or reduce some projects.

If you are still here at the end of all of this, congratulations!

This hopelessly convoluted way of planning and budgeting for transit clearly shows it is not a priority, not an important, entrenched program, but a series of ad hoc political announcements designed to give the impression of movement on a serious problem for the GTAH. The underlying question is whether municipal, or at least regional, agencies will be trusted with spending transit funds, regardless of where they come from, or if their every move must be balanced and monitored from two senior governments.