Finance

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A Visit to the City Archives

Now and then, I spend my time browsing through the photograph collections at the City Archives, and this activity can be rather addictive.  The main page includes a link to a search page where you can start your travels.  Note that the indexing is spotty, and if you find items in a series that you really like, it is often worthwhile drilling down into the linked pages for the specific collections and looking for a “browse” link that will bring up the entire content.  I can’t put links to such pages here as they are built on the fly.

After looking at photos of my old neighbourhood in North Toronto, I stumbled on paintings of the Yonge Subway by the artist, Sigmund Serafin, whose paintings of Bloor and University subway stations are posted at Transit Toronto.  I have recently learned more about Serafin’s history, and that post will be updated in the new year.

I will leave the joy of finding intriguing bits and pieces to you, but there are a number of items I thought worthwhile to whet your appetite. Continue reading →

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Where Have All The Riders Gone? (Update 2)

[Updated December 14:  A chart of the top 30 bus routes has been added in response to requests from readers.  Comments on this chart are at the end of the post.] 

[Updated December 12:  Charts of ridership and vehicle mileage for most of the system from 1976 to 2005 have been added.  Comments on these appear at the end of this post.] 

My title may seem an odd choice, but my evening spent foraging in TTC statistics was quite sobering.

Some have commented here that I spend an undue amount of time on the streetcar system, and so for a moment, I will turn to the buses.  The TTC likes to believe that its system is growing, and in some very limited places, yes, that is true.  However, the service cuts of the 1990s decimated service and ridership on the entire system, not just downtown.

The count of boardings (one person on one bus regardless of whether they pay a fare or transfer) hit a peak of about 1.42-million in 1989.  This went into  long decline and by 2005, the number was 1.17-million.

Service, measured in vehicle miles, took a hit, although not as deep, through the 1990s, and by 2005 was growing back to almost the same level.  However, this masks what was really happening.  Routes in the handful of growing areas were getting more service, but the TTC was not recapturing riders it had lost.  Major routes now carry only a fraction of what they handled in 1989. Continue reading →

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Ridership and Service Since 1976 (Updated)

At the 501 Queen Forum last week, I and others talked about the declining service and ridership in the Queen Street corridor.  This post reviews the published statistics from 1976 to 2005, the latest information available so far.

Streetcar Ridership and Mileage 1976 to 2005

These data are taken from the annual Service Plan and related documents.  The most recent counts are on the TTC’s website.

Updated December 11:  A consolidated count has been added for the Queen services (501, 502 and 503) to show the ridership and mileage in the three routes serving this corridor. 

Continue reading →

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Before We All Say “Presto!”

Over at spacing.ca, there’s a post about the difference between Montreal and Toronto transfers, and comments arguing whether Toronto is hopelessly archaic, merely quaint, or actually a system that encourages friendly contact with the operators.

In the midst of this, I thought it would be worth looking back at older forms of transfers in Toronto, and this post links to two of them.

Toronto Railway Company September 1892

Souvenir Toronto Transit Commission 1953

The TRC transfers (shown slightly larger than actual size) are printed on very flimsy paper, and were intended to be given out by a conductor.  Note that the corner fold/cut indicates the direction of travel, and there is provision for the conductor to write in the time after which the holder had ten minutes to make their connection.  Obviously, these were intended to be issued as someone left the car.  This format didn’t last long.  (Note also the evolution of the printing of the date with the larger numerals for September 14.)

The souvenir transfers are from the display of the first two subway cars at the CNE in 1953.  I have shown both the back (left) and front (right) here.  The two that I have are printed on different coloured stock, but I don’t know if a wider selection was used.  At the top, you can see the area reserved for a station and time imprint from a machine.  Passengers picked up a blank transfer (yes, there were new ones printed for each date) and they manually validated it .

These transfers include one howler of an error:  one station is missing from the map!  This missing station almost had a different name from the one by which we know it today.  Rosedale is called “Crescent” on many early maps of the Yonge line.

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“Alternative Financing” and the GTTA

At its November meeting, the GTTA approved a report on “Alternative Financing and Procurement” together with a list of projects that will be studied for this approach. For those who seek to understand Queen’s Park’s schemes for transit infrastructure funding, their report provides interesting reading.

In brief, Ontario seeks to have private sector partners undertake financing and possibly construction of new infrastructure up to the point that they go into service.  At that point, the accumulated cost becomes, in effect, a mortgage on the infrastructure to be paid off over an extended period.  This gives the private sector partner (ironically, possibly a large public sector pension plan) a guaranteed long-term return while nothing appears as a charge on the Province’s books.

In the short term, this keeps the budget looking rosy, but as any reputable accountant will tell you, future commitments must appear in your long-term budget plans.  Someone has to pay for all that infrastructure eventually.  In the past, the cost of transit infrastructure (i.e. the interest on capital debt) was buried in the municipal and provincial budgets rather than appearing as a line item in the transit operating budgets.

Long term, we risk having a future government whose support for transit is, at best, tenuous who might point to all the debt servicing costs and say “don’t ask us for operating subsidies, we’re already paying a bundle for your capital debt”.  This sort of remark has already shown up in some budget papers in past years at the municipal level in Toronto.  It’s the invisible part of the iceberg of transit financing.

The projects to be studied for alternative financing fall into two groups diagrammed on maps on the GTTA site.  As I mentioned in my accompanying post on the “Quick Wins, Phase 2”, the concept of “regional” transit has become rather expansive.  Projects are included that might, in the past, have been treated as “local” and outside of the GTTA’s purview.  This comes partly from a recognition that transit anywhere helps the region as a whole, and partly from the desire to move as many projects off of local budgets as possible.

The projects that will be evaluated for AFP include:

  • SuperGo electrification of the Lake Shore corridor.
  • GO rail expansions include using the CPR North Toronto subdivision and, possibly, the station at Summerhill to serve new routes on CPR branch lines.
  • LRT expansions include the Transit City lines as well as the Hurontario and Dundas lines proposed for Mississauga.
  • Converting the SRT to use Mark II RT cars and extending it north to Malvern.
  • Richmond Hill subway extension
  • VIVA extensions in various corridors and conversion to exclusive lane operation.
  • Circumferential  GO/GTTA BRT network

This is a very large bundle of projects.   As usual, Ontario plans to call on Ottawa for 1/3 funding.  Whether they would provide anything, either directly or through their own AFP scheme, remains to be seen.  The problem remains that any current spending creates a future debt service charge, and Ottawa has always been loathe to fund what are, in effect, ongoing operating costs.

None of these facilities will begin operations, and therefore become charges on various operating budgets, until after the next provincial election in 2011.  In the short term, the creative accounting allows us to launch into a rosy transit future, but this must be sustained with solid, ongoing funding for operations.  A problem for politicians still in their infancy, but a serious concern for those observers who, like me, take the long view of transit’s financing and growth as a major part of the GTTA.

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Transit Service in Ottawa

For those who have been following my analyses of problems with TTC streetcar operations, David Cavlovic has sent along an article from today’s Ottawa Citizen. 

Toronto may have its problems, but Ottawa sounds even worse, including a lacklustre attitude by senior management.  At least here, there is a glimmer of recognition that service could be better.

One comment from the article struck a chord with me:

The company has spent a lot of money on a GPS system, but it lacks the software to analyse where service problems actually lie.

TTC’s signpost-based CIS has been in place for over two decades, but analysis of its data waited until I undertook it and started publishing results here.  CIS will be updated to use GPS information from vehicles where this is now available thanks to the stop announcement system, but we have yet to see whether the TTC will actually analyze its operations with all of the data at its disposal.

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TTC 2008 Capital Budget and Long Term Funding Issues

[For those who are wondering where their comments are:  Several of these touch on the question of Transit City project costs.  I plan a separate post on that topic and am holding your comments until that is ready.

[The many comments about the future of the RT have been moved to their own thread.] 

On November 14, the TTC considered its 2008 Capital Budget.  Although there are major issues with funding of many projects, especially on a long term basis, the budget has been passed on to Council. 

One important approval, made with the concurrence of the City Budget Committee, is that work can begin on the three top-priority Environmental Assessments for Transit City:  Eglinton-Crosstown, Sheppard East and Finch West-Etobicoke.  This work will stop Queen’s Park does not make funding available as part of their budget announcement for the fiscal year starting in April 2008.

The Capital Budget presentation at the meeting is not available on the TTC site, nor are several tables and charts from the main report.

The 2008 Capital Budget Summary gives a broad overview of the five and ten year projections.  The 2008 Capital Infrastructure and 2008 Capital Vehicles tables give some break downs.

The same information is subdivided in a different ways:

Growth and system renewal drive many aspects of the budget.

  • Peak period riding increases the fleet and garage space requirements.
  • The shift to low-floor buses reduces vehicle capacity and increases the size of the fleet needed to handle demand.  This changeover will be completed by 2010.
  • Replacement and expansion of the streetcar fleet for the existing base system plus planned additions such as the Waterfront lines.
  • Replacement and expansion of the SRT fleet both for capacity and for the proposed extension to Sheppard & Markham Road.
  • Expansion of the subway fleet and partial replacement with new cars to increase capacity on the Yonge-University line.
  • Transit City will add seven new LRT routes to the network.
  • Subway expansion on both the Spadina/York and North Yonge lines.

The Base Budget of $4.4-billion for 2008-2012 (detailed in the links above) covers only State of Good Repair projects.  At present, there is a $0.7-billion funding shortfall for this work.  Later in this article, I will return to this issue. Continue reading →

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TTC 2008 Operating Budget & Service Overview

On November 14, the TTC gave approval in principle to the proposed 2008 Operating Budget.  A short report is available online but it is missing one critical page, the table the table giving the details of the budget by major revenue and expense area.

You can read the details in the report including a line-by-line discussion of the changes.  Overall, the TTC’s operating expenses will rise about $74.6-million or 6.8% over 2007, and this does not include provision for wage settlements in the coming contract negotiations. 

Each 1% increase in wages translates to about $8-million in annual costs, of which $6-million would affect the current budget year because the new contract will take effect on April 1, 2008.

Ridership and service will both increase in 2008, and the cost of new and improved services accounts for over one quarter of the year-to-year change ($20.9-million). Continue reading →

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TTC Operating & Capital Budgets For 2008

The covering reports for the 2008 budgets are now available on the TTC’s website, although as usual there are severe formatting problems and the tables don’t display at all.  Once I have “real” reports, I will scan and publish the pictures here.

The TTC is supposed to be converting to PDF format.  Given that their IT Strategic Plan [sic] (also on the agenda for November 14) includes items that are six years old and counting, my guess is that we will see PDFs only after a multi-gazillion-dollar website redesign.

In the Operating Budget, we learn that the TTC is a bit shy of cash for next year, $13.6-million to be exact, to which must be added the cost of any contract settlement.  The annualized cost of a 1% increase in wages is about $8-million according to the report, although I have problems with this statement.  It implies that total wage costs for unionized staff are $800-million before any benefits are added, and before the cost of materials, fuel, power, fixed plant operations and, oh yes, those pesky non-union managerial staff.  I will return to this once I have a chance to review the detailed budget figures.

Ridership is growing, and is forecast to rise to 464-million next year.  However, we also learn than this year’s projected ridership, 454-million, is about 10-million high because the TTC overestimated Metropass usage.  Poof!  Ten million rides gone from the 2007 projection.  This may be the first time the TTC has lost rideship due to an accounting error.

An ironic side effect is, of course, that with fewer notional “riders”, the revenue per rider has gone up without the TTC lifting a finger (well maybe a few fingers to dip the quill pen into the inkpot).

Try telling people jammed onto the subway that there are really 10-million less of them.

The Ridership Growth Strategy kicks in next fall along with, if we are lucky, improvements to get service simply back to the TTC’s own standards early in 2008.  There has been no definitive announcement on the timing of this change, although February had been mentioned by some at TTC.

The story in the Capital Budget is much darker.  As I reported a few weeks ago, the TTC will scrape by in 2008 within the City’s budget target but future years are grim without major increases in subsidy from any government willing to lend a hand.  There is no funding in place for the proposed new streetcar order, and this needs to be sorted out by next spring if the procurement process is to continue on schedule.  This is only the first of several major unfunded projects.

(There is a followup report on the streetcar project listed on tomorrow’s Supplementary Agenda, but the report is not yet online.)

As the TTC rightly points out, we are in the “unusual” (their term) or “ludicrous” (my term) position of having a $1.5-billion shortfall in the base capital budget while, simultaneously, the Spadina/York Subway extension us fully funded.  If anyone says “the cupboard is bare”, we know where to look.  Anyone who feigns surprise that this extension has elbowed other projects off of the table deserves a dunce’s cap (in TTC colours of course).

Meanwhile, both the new streetcar procurement and Transit City are getting more expensive as cost estimates are refined.  This is not making friends among Councillors who want so badly to be pro-transit, but who are sideswiped by the TTC’s inability to price their projects.

Finally, there is a long report about Transit City laying out the rationale for the choice of lines and in particular the selection of Sheppard East, Etobicoke-Finch and Eglinton-Crosstown as the candidates for the first three Environmental Assessments.  There isn’t much here that we haven’t seen before, and some of the discussions about how to fit new LRT lines onto streets echo the comments in earlier posts on this site.  Transit City was designed to fit with known planning goals and to serve those communities with reasonable expectation of demand.  This is, of course, totally contrary to good transit system design where lobbying and political favouritism win out over, dare I say it, common sense.