Finance

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It’s Official: The TTC is Overcrowded

The TTC Operating Budget presentation on January 31 included TTC Budgets and City Building, an overview of how the need for better service and a rejuvenated fleet are integral to our hopes for achieving the city building goals near and dear to some political hearts.

At this point, the TTC is in the hole by about $33-million for its 2007 subsidy requirement (the difference between what the City budget folks set as the target for the TTC and what they actually need).  Given that the TTC is one of the Mayor’s central platform issues, I think we can assume that this problem will vanish sometime over the next three months.  A fare increase doesn’t seem to be in the offing, but what is really troubling is that real progress on “Ridership Growth” will not appear until late in 2007 and early 2008.

Remember that the Ridership Growth Strategy is four years old this March and people might justly wonder when some of its promises will appear.  Yes, we have the transferrable Metropass and tax deductability that makes passes attractive to a wider base of users, but we are waiting for more service.  An important part of RGS is a change in the vehicle loading standards so that a service is deemed to be “at capacity” at a lower load factor than today.  This means, in theory, that service will be added before people resort to riding on the roof rather than afterwards.

The one flaw in this premise is that you need vehicles, operators and budget headroom to run more service.  Outside of the rush hour, we have vehicles today, but we don’t have operators and more importantly we don’t have budget.

Two charts in the presentation show just how far behind the system has fallen in dealing with pent-up demand.

The Map of Overcrowded Routes shows those that were already overcrowded in late 2006 plus those that are predicted to be overcrowded in early 2007.  In this context, “overcrowded” means that the loads exceed the pre-RGS loading standards.

The Chart of Service Vs Demand shows the total service provided in terms of vehicle hours.  Obviously, this is a rough surrogate for capacity given that vehicles come in different sizes.  Moreover, an hour in which a vehicle has surplus capacity cannot be easily moved to one where there is excess demand without destroying service at lightly loaded times of day and locations.  All the same, the chart does show the gap between the amount of service operated and the amount required to catch up with demand.

Note that this chart shows only service additions over the years, not total service.  In round numbers, the TTC runs about 120,000 hours of service on surface routes per week beside which the increase of less than 5,000 hours is rather small.

These should put Council on notice.  We can play games for months trying to appear “fiscally responsible” in the hope that Queen’s Park and Ottawa will take pity and give us more money.  There are two problems with that approach:

  • We usually get only a one-year bailout rather than major, meaningful, ongoing support for transit.
  • Because we lowball our budget needs for service expansion, we already understate the amount we need.

No doubt, somewhere buried in the TTC budget, there is money to be found.  That’s a worthwhile exercise, but it diverts attention from the real need to think on a larger scale, to embrace the idea that we are going to make transit much more attractive to potential customers. 

Not ten years from now with a new subway.  Not five years from now with new streetcars.  Not next year when there may be a handful of spare vehicles left to implement RGS.  Right now, today, with this budget.

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Meanwhile on the Queen Car

The following comments came in response to my post about travels on St. Clair.  It’s big enough and has enough material to warrant its own thread, so here it is:

This week has been an interesting one.  My morning commute is from Brown’s Line/Lakeshore to Queen/Spadina.  One seat ride on 501 is nice when the cars are running on schedule….

I’m getting a depressing kind of entertainment checking the time ahead/behind when boarding (and leaving if the car isn’t too crowded).

This week, it seems that 501 operators are not trying very hard to keep to schedule.

Tuesday: I go out to catch the regular 8:40 AM eastbound from Long Branch.  It’s signed as run 08/18, and there was one operator who was on this for a couple of board periods who was very good about leaving the loop consistently and arriving at Queen and Spadina no later than 9:35.  On Tuesday, it was a different operator, who arrived at the loop after the scheduled departure time.  She then took her backpack and vanished in the TTC building at the north-west corner of the loop.  Two other 501 ALRVs showed up while she was in there.  Three ALRVs stacked around the loop is a pretty unusual sight!  When she finally came out and pulled up to the loop, CIS was reporting -16 (which was about right); at Queen and Spadina it was still around -15.

Wednesday: after 9AM, waiting for a eastbound 501 streetcar at the 39/40th Streets stop.  And waiting.  A streetcar finally goes past westbound, and does not reappear eastbound for at least ten minutes.  This means it laid over for at least five minutes.  This is run 17; CIS is saying -20 as I board and of course it stops at every stop because people have been waiting for close to half an hour for a streetcar.  At Palmerston and Queen he turns on the four-way flashers and goes off to Starbucks for a coffee.  I think it was -19 at Queen and Spadina.

Today: same operator on the same run 17 goes past westbound; this time it returns eastbound in about five minutes.  CIS is saying -9 when I board.  There’s another ALRV on his tail westbound (run 02); and it stays on his tail eastbound.  We don’t move very quickly across Queen Street (slow bicyclists are keeping up or passing us).  The car is too crowded for me to check the CIS when I leave but I figure we were probably an additional few minutes behind, for a -14 or -15.  Run 02, which was right behind him westbound at Brown’s Line, is right behind him eastbound at Spadina.  As I leave the streetcar, run 17’s rollsigns are being changed to 501 KINGSTON RD & QUEEN.

Now I have been on other 501 runs where the operator is on schedule, or catching up to schedule.  I know it can be done. I ’ve been on other runs where we’re behind, and there’s no effort on the part of the operator to pick things up.  Combine the two, and you get huge gaps and multiple TTC vehicles showing up at the same time.

Steve:  Just think!  The TTC wants to put an LRT service out to the western waterfront.  This shows the sort of marvellous job they are doing of running attractive service now to build ridership.

Once again, I have to ask two questions of both the TTC and the ATU:  Why is it that situations where service runs at the whim of the operator are becoming more and more common, and what is the TTC going to do about it?  Do they even know or care?

There are a lot of wonderful operators out there, and it only takes a minority of bad apples to create havoc for riders and for other operators stuck in the mess.  This has nothing to do with the TTC’s favourite complaint, operation in mixed traffic, and everything to do with an abdication of the need to properly manage the service.

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My Little Jaunt to Forest Hill

This evening, I attended a concert at Grace Church in Forest Hill.  Because I was coming from Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton, the logical way to get there was to go to St. Clair Station, take the 512 bus, and then walk north on Russell Hill.  My experience shows that the TTC still doesn’t get it. 

I arrived at the Pleasant Boulevard loop in time to see the 7:25 South Leaside trip sitting on the platform.  No St. Clair bus.  After a 10 minute wait, one arrived, but it parked down at the far end of the loop for a crew change.  About 5 minutes later, a second bus arrived and parked behind the first one.  It was now 7:40 and I was in danger of missing my concert.

I walked out to St. Clair and Yonge (if I got really lucky, the first bus might make it to the stop by the time I got there), and found that a third bus was coming east on St. Clair.  This means that 3 of the 4 buses on the route (on a 7 minute headway no less) were at one end of the line.

I took a cab.

The TTC is fond of telling us how it will build ridership for new rapid transit lines by running really good surface routes in anticipation.  The 190 Rocket from Don Mills Station to STC is a good example, and ridership is building up on this route (although to nowhere near subway levels). 

The service on St. Clair is a disgrace that bears absolutely no relationship with the schedule.  This is not the first time I have found packs of buses and seen long layovers at St. Clair Station.  Please don’t tell me about traffic congestion.  There was none.  If anything, the TTC is driving riders away from St. Clair, a line that is to be the shining example of what we can do with LRT.

Memo to both the TTC and the ATU:  Better service means more riders.  “Better” includes properly managed, well-spaced, predictable service.  More riders means more justfication for expanding the system, and more work for union members.

Also, someone might like to take down the timetable for the Christie bus as well as the handwritten sign telling people that both the Christie and Vaughan buses will take them along St Clair.  They don’t run to St. Clair Station any more.

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Always A Car In Sight (2)

Not long ago, I wrote about the changing level of service on the streetcar system over the past 50 years in Always A Car In Sight.  Just to recap, my intentions were threefold:

  • Show how much service was actually operated and how many people a network of streetcar lines could carry.  If this could be done in mixed traffic, then it certainly could be achieved with some form of reserved right-of-way.
  • Document the changing service levels especially since 1980 first as the TTC saw the heavy streetcar routes as an easy place to save money, and later where service levels threaten the attractiveness of transit service.
  • Demonstrate why the Bloor-Danforth subway is so different from current and recent subway schemes by virtue of the very heavy, established ridership in the corridor the Bloor line serves.

This produced a number of comments as you can see in the post, but a few other points have come up here and in other threads. Continue reading →

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Always A Car In Sight

That, believe it or not, used to be the TTC’s slogan years ago when transit service was a far more important part of the life of Toronto than it is today.  Three love affairs have brought us to where we are now:

  • The automobile
  • The subway which moves huge numbers of people provided they’re going where one was built
  • Tax cuts and changes in public spending priorities

From time to time, people ask me both about how service has declined and about the practical limits on streetcar service.  I am not going to pretend that the answer to our problems is to build streetcar lines running in mixed traffic everywhere.  For one thing, there’s a lot more of that “mixed traffic” than there used to be.  But it’s interesting to see what streetcars were doing even well into the “modern” automotive era. Continue reading →

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Going, Going, Gone

I received the following note from a reader here, and this prompted me to dive into the archives. 

Hi Steve,

Do you know if the old TTC tokens have been redesigned since the 1950s?  I have a token that looks completely different from any of the tokens currently in use (with the TTC coat of arms etc; not the bimetallic ones).  It simply says “Toronto Transit Commission” around the edge and the word “Subway” across the middle.  Could this be a very old token or is it a fake?

Thanks,
Arthur

This is an older type of token.  The illustration below (click to open the larger version) contains three token holders of various vintages in the form that tokens were then sold.  There are both the 6/$1 and 5/$1 version dating from the late 1960s, as well as a single token holder that was a complimentary “first day cover” for the Bloor-Danforth subway.  Note that this last one is a brass token, the format used for single-token sales.

If you look at the regular tokens, you will see that they match the one you have.

Old Token Holders

Why stop at 1966, I thought.  Let’s go back a bit further.  The next pair of images are front and back scans of some pre-TTC fare media.

The red ticket is from the Toronto Street Railway.  The TSR was replaced by the Toronto Railway Company in 1891, and by 1911 when the TRC refused to extend its network, the city set up its own company, the Toronto Civic Railway.  These two, plus other bits and pieces, merged into the TTC in 1921.

The TRC tickets are interesting for a number of reasons.  First is the little picture of the electric trolley car.  The TRC was granted its franchise with the express purpose of electrifying the street railway, and so an electric car was central to their purpose.  Next, you will see that there were special tickets for employees that had restrictions on time of use.  Finally, there is the strip of Ferry Service tickets good only for women and children travelling to the docks (note that the service did not yet cross south of the railway corridor, and the destination is Bay and Front).

Old Tickets Front

Old Tickets Back

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Service For January 2007

January 2007 does not bring much in service changes beyond the return of streetcars to St. Clair west of the Spadina Subway.  Buses will continue to run east to Yonge Street until, it is hoped, the middle of February.

The RT will continue to operate with buses on Sundays to allow testing of the new RT signal system.  As a regular user of this line, I am looking forward to it actually working on those cold mid-winter days (which surely will be here eventually) when the old system regularly froze up.

There are several minor changes in running times and a few added trips here and there, but nothing major in improved service.  Current expectations are that we won’t see anything significant until the fall when sufficient operators, buses, and budget headroom will, in theory, be available.

Meanwhile, the list of services that should be improved or operated, but are not due to funding and other constraints, continues to grow. Continue reading →