Finance

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Service Quality: What Tax Cuts Don’t Give Us

Tonight, I spent the later part of the evening at the Gladstone Hotel at spacing magazine’s latest issue launch, one devoted to transit issues.  You can read all about it at www.spacing.ca.

Let me tell you about my trips to and from the Gladstone.  I arrived at Queen and Spadina on a southbound 510 just in time to see not one, not two, but three 501 Queen cars leave westbound.  Hmmm.  Not a good sign.  As things turned out, the next 501 (actually two of them) did not show up for 25 minutes, and the first car was going only to Roncesvalles.  Fortunately for me, the Gladstone is not in Long Branch.

On the trip home, a bit after midnight, the eastbound 501 showed up reasonably promptly and the trip across Queen was uneventful.  We pulled up to Broadview just behind a 504 King car, the one that should have taken me home.  Did it wait for transfer passengers from the 501?  No.  At least the following 504, about 10 minutes later, was not short turned (this happens regularly late at night when I attempt this route home).

In a way, these are two isolated incidents.  Eastbound service on Queen at Spadina during my long wait was quite regular.  Service on the Dufferin bus seemed to be running smoothly any time I peeked out the door or window from the bar at the Gladstone [please note how this demonstrates my commitment to monitoring the TTC, and the places I will lurk to do so].

But the point is that in both directions, I encountered problems that should not be part of TTC service — a long wait and bunched service one way, and a missed connection thanks to an inconsiderate operator the other way.  We can have the cheapest fares in the world, but if we don’t have reliable service, people will stay in their cars.

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Tax Cuts and the Metropass

Today, Ottawa unveiled a expected tax credit for people who buy monthly or annual passes.  Although this will not put more money in the pockets of transit agencies, it will substantally change the break-even point for people who buy passes.

Without the tax credit, a monthly pass costs $99.75, equivalent to 47.5 fares.

On the Monthly Discount Plan, a pass costs $91.50 per month, equivalent to 43.6 fares.

The new tax deduction, at 15.25% reduces these multiples to about 40 and 37 respectively.  This is an important psychological breakthrough when the cost of using a pass falls below the perceived cost of a regular, daily commute.

The TTC needs to proceed on two fronts:

First, a revamped Metropass Discount Program campaign to swing even more riders over to the pass market which has already seen the benefit of a transferrable pass.

Second, a thorough review of service implications especially in the off peak.  We can reasonably expect that most of the marginal growth through shifting riders to passes is in trips they might not have taken otherwise and to pass sharing.

The City of Toronto has to get serious about funding growth in transit services in any time period where vehicles are available to do so.

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Coupled or Uncoupled? Spring Is In The Air

Yesterday’s TTC meeting definitely strayed into the realm of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of …

Although few of the Transit Commissioners could be called “young men”, we know that spring and the silly-season following the traumas of budget debates are upon us.

The plans for CLRV rebuilding and purchase of new streetcars were on the table with a status update on both projects.  (I will post a detailed piece on that issue tomorrow after I have finished work on the details.)  Among the topics of discussion was the question of couplers for the CLRVs.  This achieved much hilarity, albeit with some loss of decorum and a sense that the old-boy’s club is still too prevelant at TTC, and masked the fact that they really didn’t address the question.  Here are the important bits: Continue reading →

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From The Archives: 1984 Streetcar Operations Study

Following up from my long post about the King car, I dug into my archives for the 1984 report by Streetcars for Toronto about streetcar operations.  You can read all the details in the report here.

In a few days, I will post information about the responses between SFTC and TTC that followed.  The upshot of this exercise was that we proved the TTC was doing a lousy job of scheduling and running service, and the TTC did an excellent job of showing how unwilling it was to accept criticism.  The single largest effect from all of our effort was that they made the vehicle numbers on the streetcars (PCCs then) bigger so that the Inspectors (now called Route Supervisors) could see them easily.  I am not making this up.

The situation in the Beach raised the locals’ ire enough that the following cartoon appeared in the Ward 9 Community News [apologies if there are any copyright issues here 22 years after the fact].

HijackToNeville

[Ah the simpler days when grannies with guns could be used as a joke.]

Among the significant features of our report was the use of graphs to show the operation of a route.  The full set is not reproduced here because the salient details are discussed in the text.  However, I have scanned and assembled one graph for the King car’s operation on the afternoon of May 24, 1984.  The graph is linked here.

This image is explained in detail in the text, and it provides as easy way to analyze the operation of an entire route.  The technique is not new, possibly only to the TTC who do not use it.

We had over a dozen people standing on street corners recording car movements to get this data, but the TTC could get it today from the computerized vehicle monitoring system.  Alas, they don’t and it’s a great shame.  That part of the computer system was never developed as a budget saving.

Here’s a challenge for the TTC:  Digest all the data you already have, and provide a website where anyone can look at a graph of any route’s operation for, say, the past month.  This is not rocket science, but it would put to rest claims and counterclaims about what quality of service actually exists on the street.  Will the TTC do this?  Don’t hold your breath.

They will go on telling us that any claims of poor service are figments of our imagination or, alternately, the service really is bad, but only with a reserved lane will your bus show up on time.

I will return to the question of service management and what causes delays in a future post.

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Trains on King Street

Today’s Star contains an article by Kevin McGran in which we learn of a scheme to run trains of CLRVs on King Street.  This won’t happen any day soon because the CLRVs haven’t had couplers for years, but they are included in the upcoming CLRV retrofit.

The vital point comes in the article’s second sentence:

The coupling would move more people faster, even though the “headway” — the time between streetcars — during rush hour would increase from two minutes to four, the transit commission says.

This claim of a two minute headway is repeated elsewhere in the article.  Continue reading →

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Why Run Good Service When You Can Just Take Them To Court? (Updated)

In today’s Toronto Star we learn that the TTC is rather miffed about a plan by Humber Bay condo owners to run a private bus to downtown.  It seems that the Queen car might not be The Better Way for these folks.

This is the second time recently the TTC’s legal folks have come into the public eye (the first was the anagram subway map fiasco).  For more info on that, go to spacing.ca’s website for selected articles on the subject at this link.  For the original map go to here.

Maybe it’s time for more service and fewer legal threats.

Since the original post, I’ve had some feedback from readers: Continue reading →