Transit advocates spend a lot of time explaining why we need more and more transit service.  Riders spend a lot of time complaining about sardine-can loading on vehicles.  Politicians spend a lot of time complaining about “inefficient” transit operations, most likely the empty buses they saw while driving hither and yon across the city.

Where do those buses come from?

Leaving aside the obvious cases of buses enroute to or from a garage, there is a basic fact that may seem rather strange:  most buses will not be full most of the time.  This flies in the fact of those who demand efficiencies and treat half-empty buses (or worse) as a sign that transit riders live in coddled luxury compared to the hapless drivers stuck on the 401.

Transit routes have many different types of loading patterns, and they may have different patterns at different times of the day and different days of the week.  Continue reading →

In an earlier posting, I talked about the Forest Hill bus and the methodology used to identify candidate routes for service cuts.  The rule is simple:  if the number of passengers lost per dollar saved is less than .23, then the service goes on the list for evaluation of cutbacks.  The same process is used in reverse for new services:  if they will attract .23 riders per dollar expended, then they are implemented on the system.

What is the magic about .23?  At least if it were something like .42 we might attribute this to some long and complex process involving much Deep Thought.

To discover the meaning of .23, we need to delve into the history of the TTC Service Standards. Continue reading →

Some of you may have read Geoff Nixon’s article in the Saturday Globe and Mail Toronto Section about the 33 Forest Hill bus route.  The piece gives a good overview of the issues, and that’s not just because I am quoted in it.

The list of “poor performers” comes out each year as part of the Service Plan, and this is a very dangerous document.  Why?  Because it gives politicians whose grasp of complexity may be tenuous something easy to understand:  an index, a hit list for budget cuts.  Indeed, a few members of Council complained that the TTC should just cut the routes on this list, save scads of money, and quit griping about funding problems.  Amusingly, few if any “poor performers” happened to be in their wards.

Where does this list come from?

First off, it is important to recognize that if a route doesn’t have many riders, there is no formula that is going to hide the situation on a purely financial basis.  But routes don’t just exist for financial reasons.  There are many other criteria including:

• geographic isolation (how hard or far is it to walk to another route)
• special traffic generators like schools, hospitals or industrial areas
• network role (does this route segment bridge two areas of acceptable performance, or is the route part of the 24-hour Blue Night Network)

Two sets of data are published every year by the TTC. 

One lists the alleged cost and revenue for each route along with other operating stats such as riding count, peak vehicle requirements and vehicle mileage.  [Gentle reader:  The TTC and the street railway industry before it have used miles as long as anyone can remember.]

The other lists various routes or route segments that do not make the grade at certain times of the day.  The measuring stick used here is different than in the overall list for reasons I will explain shortly.

To read the source report containing this information go here and read Appendices B and C. Continue reading →

[With apologies to The Barenaked Ladies]

From time to time I get asked “Is There Any Hope For Transit?” (it’s a question that deserves caps on all the words).

Everything these days is doom-and-gloom, horrendous deficits, downloading, uploading, fiscal inbalance, and nobody is giving an inch.  I was asked this while sitting in a bar today talking about the TTC, and in the best tradition of all good bar conversations, started to work something out on a used napkin.

This post is a cleaned up version of that napkin.

The infamous Ridership Growth Strategy got us 100 net-new buses that may actually start providing additional service sometime late in 2007.  That’s as far as we got.  No buses for 2008, 2009, to the horizon and beyond.  Nobody wants to plan for it because the numbers scare them to death.  More accurately, the thought of the numbers scares them to death because nobody has bothered to work this out yet.  You saw it here first!

Meanwhile, some members of Council, not to mention developers, construction companies and other boosters of ways to waste public money, want to build one, no two, no THREE new subway lines.  Cost: somewhere around $4-billion plus inflation.

What happens if we spend some money on the surface network, on the lowly bus system?  Let’s not worry for the moment about reserved lanes or anything else, let’s just get the fleet back to its 1990 level.  Our peak service in 1990 was 1,550 buses and by 2001 this had fallen to 1,302 (248 buses).  Allowing for spares, this is a drop in the active fleet of about 300 buses.

What would happen if we started buying 100 new buses (over and above our needs to replace old, worn-out ones) for the next five years?  How much would it cost?  What would happen to the level of service?  How would this scheme compare to subway construction as a way to increase ridership in the system? Continue reading →

In March 2003, the TTC published its Ridership Growth Strategy. Although it’s hard to believe, this report is official TTC policy, but like many good ideas has always been subject to the constraints of budget and subsidy pressures.

Now we’re coming up on the third anniversary, and I thought this would be a good time to review what was in the RGS and to see just where we are in implementing parts of it.

Ridership Growth Strategy Review

[This item has been expanded on February 5, 2006 with additional information about loading standards in the more section.] 

This item contains a copy, modified into a suitable format for easy downloading, of the TTC staff presentation on January 25, 2006.  This has been adapted from a Power Point file by stripping out all of the photos and converting the remainder to a PDF.  This will allow easy access to the material by readers and very substantially reduces the size of the file.

20060125 TTC Flatlining

Explanatory notes and comments about this presentation are at the end of this item.

Here is the presentation I made at the TTC meeting.  My recommendations have been sent to staff for comment.  The nub of the argument is that TTC needs to provide ongoing projections of the resources needed to handle various scenarios for growth in demand, rather than treating each year’s changes as a big surprise for which there is no room in the budget.

20060125 TTC Budget and Loading Standards

Continue reading →