Finance

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Travel Times on Queens Quay West

At a recent TTC Board meeting, the question arose of just how well Queens Quay operated as a transit street and how long it took the streetcars to navigate through the new setup.

Staff claimed that they had added six minutes to the schedule to compensate for problems, but this really didn’t give the full picture. Not to miss a chance to carp, Councillor Minnan-Wong latched onto this number and worked it into the debate at Council when the “Waterfront Reset” report was up for debate. The report passed without amendment, but the seeds of disinformation have been planted.

In the interest of clarity and accuracy,  rare commodities at City Hall, here is a review of what has actually been happening.

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TTC Service Changes Effective Sunday, July 31, 2016

The service changes taking effect at the end of July consist primarily of realignment of surface route schedules to match the 8:00 am Sunday opening of the subway system. This affects a long list of routes, and the new first bus times are given in the attached document. Some night services will be adjusted to match the earlier startup times of the corresponding daytime routes. Routes that are part of the Ten Minute Network will have their frequent service hours extended earlier on Sundays.

For the duration of the CNE, the 511 Bathurst and 509 Harbourfront routes will return to Exhibition Loop. Although  the schedules provide running time for this effective July 31, cars will turn back at Fleet Loop until the CNE opens on August 15, 2016. A bus shuttle service will operate on Fleet Street until August 14. After Labour Day, service will be scheduled to end at Fleet Loop with a bus serving Fleet Street as at present. This arrangement is expected to continue until mid-November when construction at Exhibition Loop will be completed.

2016.07.31 Service Changes

 

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TTC Abdicates Responsibility for Public Budget Review

Toronto City Council is poised to set dates for the 2017 budget process with a report up for approval at its July 12, 2016 meeting. This report states:

By early August, 2016 all City Programs and Agencies will have submitted their Tax Supported Capital Budget and Plan and their Operating Budget requests to the Financial Planning Division for review and recommendation to the City Manager and Deputy City Manager & Chief Financial Officer.

Over the course of the rest of the summer and fall, each budget request will be analyzed and reviewed, with a first round of analysis and review undertaken by the Executive Director, Financial Planning from July to early September. A second round of review will occur with the City Manager and Chief Financial Officer to review unresolved issues and recommendations with the Deputy City Managers and respective Program and Agency Heads. The Preliminary 2017 Operating Budget and 2-year Plan and a 10 – year Capital Budget and Plan will be finalized by the end of October to provide sufficient time to prepare the necessary budget documents, communications and budget website in time for the Budget Launch. [p 17]

The Executive Committee, in transmitting this report to Council, has recommended:

3. City Council adopt an across the board budget reduction target of -2.6 percent net below the 2016 Approved Net Operating Budgets for all City Programs, Agencies, Toronto Community Housing Corporation, and Accountability Offices [Agenda Item 2016.EX16.37]

The report also lists budgetary pressures going into 2017, and for the TTC these include:

Base requirements for system operation:   $136 million
Presto card implementation:                 29
Annualization of 2016 changes:              13
Revenue loss due to declining ridership:    12
Total:                                    $190 million

Anticipated revenue from a fare increase: $ 12 million
  • The base requirements include inflationary increases plus startup costs for the Vaughan subway extension (TYSSE). Although its planned opening date is at the end of 2017, operating costs will begin to accumulate earlier in the year with no offsetting revenue. Ongoing operating losses are expected to exceed $10m annually, but this will be an issue for 2018’s budget.
  • Presto card implementation was supposed to be cost neutral, but at least during the cutover period, TTC will bear costs of the new and old fare collection systems. Looking further ahead it is unclear whether there will be new long term costs associated with redeployment of the Station Collector staff to station management duties.
  • The annualization value is derived by subtracting the first two items from the consolidated value of all TTC pressures which is given as $178m.
  • The revenue loss is versus the budgeted level of revenue for 2016.

The 2016 budgeted subsidy level is $493.6m for the regular system plus $116.7m for Wheel-Trans for a total of $610.3m. A 2.6% cut translates to $15.9m, and so the TTC is facing a drop of over $200m relative to its already-identified needs. This is not the scale of cut that is absorbed by minor “efficiencies”.

The TTC Board has a Budget Subcommittee where one might expect a discussion and response to financial pressures might be discussed, but all meetings planned for 2016 to date were cancelled. The committee is scheduled to meet on September 6. A meeting of the full board to discuss overall policy and direction was planned for April 7, but this was also cancelled.

There are no public meetings planned before the “early August” deadline for a preliminary budget submission to the City Manager, and we have no way of knowing what options might be under consideration by TTC management or the Board. Moreover, any advocacy that might take place during this process will be completely hidden, and there will be no information about options for 2017. This could very well suit Mayor Tory and his TTC Chair Josh Colle, but it begs the question of just what the TTC Board is for if not to discuss options and examine the potential effects of funding changes.

In late June, Chair Colle’s office wrote to a regular reader of this site saying:

The TTC Budget Committee is comprised solely of a handful of members from its Board – currently, Chair Colle and four other Board members sit on the committee.

There was a Budget Committee meeting scheduled for this June, but it was cancelled because the TTC Board members felt that the current budget issues are so pressing that they should come before the entire Board, not just the handful of Board members sitting on the Budget Committee.

The budget items will be making their way before the TTC Board as a whole, so that all of the Board members can weigh in on the agency’s financial situation. That being said, the TTC Budget committee will still be holding meetings in the fall, in advance of the 2017 Budget. [June 27, 2016]

These issues may be “pressing” but clearly not enough to warrant the Board’s attention at this time. The next meeting of the full Board is scheduled for September 28, 2016, well after the lion’s share of work on budget review will have been done. Indeed, the City’s Budget Committee will already have begun its informal review of the 2017 plans before the TTC Board’s next opportunity to debate and set policy for the new year.

The July 11 TTC Board meeting agenda is long, and important items will not receive the debate they require. The 2017 budget issues are mentioned only in passing as part of a review of ridership problems, not as a broader review of funding, fares and service options.

What is the purpose of this Board?

A long-standing problem at the TTC has been the absence of advocacy, of the presentation of options. Toronto may not be able to afford every item on the transit wish list, but at a minimum, we should understand what options are even on the list, and what they might cost.

There was an “Options” report in August 2014, during the interregnum between TTC Chairs Karen Stintz and Josh Colle. The publication of this report greatly annoyed then-candidate Tory’s campaign because it appeared to support positions taken by Olivia Chow. After election, Mayor Tory discovered that transit really did need improvement, and seized on this as a way to establish a toe-hold on more progressive policies.

With cancellations and a long gap before their next meeting, the TTC Board is not participating in a very necessary public discussion of transit’s future at a critical time. The Mayor’s Budget and Executive Committees may slash any TTC proposals to ribbons, but this should occur in public, not by way of a secret initial budget submission from TTC management.

Meanwhile, Council is about to debate billions in capital spending for several rapid transit projects. These cannot possibly be afforded without new revenue, new taxes by whatever name they might be called. Council as a whole steadfastly refuses to accept the link between a “no new taxes” policy and the inability to provide service, let alone build new lines and maintain the infrastructure we already have.

Mayor Tory and Chair Colle were happy to announce new money for transit over the past two years: new services, restoration of the Ford/Stintz cuts, and free transit for children to name a few. The proposed budget policy for 2017 undoes all of that investment and more. Where will the photo op be held to announce the cutbacks?

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Property Taxes and Subway Financing

The financing of a new rapid transit project in Toronto is a complex business, and probably the most complex part of the whole thing is the effect this has on property taxes.

This article is intended as an introduction to how these taxes actually work. It is not an exhaustive review, and there are subtleties beyond my scope here.

This is an article for people who like the gory details, and so I will insert the break right here.

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Smart Track Fantasy: Tax Increment Financing

Back when SmartTrack was first announced as the centrepiece of John Tory’s mayoral campaign, the most obvious question was “how will you pay for this”. At the time, “this” consisted of very frequent service running over existing GO transit trackage plus a heavy rail extension to the Airport Corporate Centre, and it had a nominal price tag of $8 billion. On the presumption that each level of government, so overwhelmed by the obvious necessity of SmartTrack, would pony up 1/3 of the cost, the campaign then turned to the issue of how the City of Toronto’s share, $2.6b, might be financed.

Enter the tax wizards of Tax Increment Financing (TIF), a financial scheme not unrelated to pulling rabbits out of hats or making the attractive assistant float in mid-air with no visible means of support.

The premise of TIF is simple: If there is a piece of land that, but for public investment, would sit empty for all eternity, then any taxes that might arise from induced development there are “found money”. In other words, if we take a swamp, drain it, clean up the pollution, build roads and utilities and install a transit corridor, all with public money, then the development that follows can be used to finance the investment through its future property taxes.

It’s rather like investing in a pair of glass slippers and then charging Cinderella for wearing them. She’s going to marry into money, and her family can afford to pay you back.

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The High Cost of Presto Taps

One great irony of annual reports is that they are usually glossy packages meant to say “look how good we are”, but they are like coffee table books where more people look at the pictures, and few read the fine print.

Buried in the Metrolinx Annual Report for 2015-16 are the details of the revenues, costs and subsidies applicable to parts of Metrolinx’ operations. There are specific figures for the UPX and Presto divisions, but not for GO Transit or the administrative/planning side of Metrolinx.

In a previous article, I reviewed the subsidies paid for UPX, and now I will turn to the Presto fare card.

Figuring out just how well Presto is used takes a bit of work because the information appears irregularly in reports to the Metrolinx Board. Here are the relevant excerpts.

June 2016:

PRESTO card taps per month:
February 2016: 16.2 million
March 2016: 17.5 million
April 2016: 17.5 million
**Taps refers to the total number of boardings by month for balance transactions, Period Pass transactions, and Transfers.

February 2016:

PRESTO card taps per month:
November 2015: 17.3 million, up from 15.6 million in November 2014
December 2015: 14.7 million, up from 13.6 million in December 2014
* Decrease in monthly taps for December may be attributed to holilday season

December 2015:

PRESTO card taps per month:
August 2015: 14.0 million
September 2015: 16.6 million
October 2015: 17.4 million

September 2015:

No usage stats reported.

June 2015:

As of June 1, 2015:
More than 417 million taps and $1.3 billion in fare payments to date including period pass taps.

March 2015:

More than 287 million taps* and $1.1 billion in fare payments to date.
*Excludes period pass taps

December 2014:

More than 266 million taps* and $1,032 million in fare payments to date.
*Excludes period pass taps

In the delta from March to June 2015, the tap count changes by 140 million, but the caveat about exclusion of period pass taps disappears. This gives some indication of the proportion of taps that serve pass holders as opposed to single fares.

It is clear that the monthly tap count sits somewhere in the 17.5 million range.

From the Annual Report, we know the revenue (fees from client agencies plus card sales) as well as the cost of the Presto system.

Fee and Sales Revenue     $ 9.454 million
Expenses                  $71.2   million
Net Cost                  $61.746 million

Taps/month                 17.5   million
Taps/year                 210.0   million
Gross Cost/Tap            $0.339
Net Cost/Tap              $0.294

The report is silent about whether there is any inter-divisional payment by GO Transit to cover the cost of Presto transactions in a manner similar to the fees charged to other systems using this fare card. GO Transit’s fare revenue was $464 million, and a 2% charge would amount to $9.3 million, roughly equal to the total fees collected by Presto.

As a matter of comparison, the TTC estimates its fare collection costs at 5% of revenues, and that is the basis for the agreement on Presto fees that the TTC will pay. With an average fare of just over $2, the cost per ride of fare collection is about $0.10. Given that the average ride would involve two taps (on average, riders transfer once in their journey), the cost of fares “per tap” would be about $0.05 on the existing TTC system.

The way the numbers are presented prevents a clear understanding of Presto’s cost or the degree to which it is subsidized either by GO fare revenue or by general subsidy payments from Queen’s Park. A basic question all transit systems using Presto must ask is for a clear understanding of the relationship between the fees they are charged for fare handling and the actual cost of Presto operations.

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Toronto’s Network Plan 2031: Part III, Fare Integration

This article is the third installment of my examination of reports going to Toronto Executive Committee and to the Metrolinx Board on June 28, 2016. For a complete list, see Part I of this series.

This article deals with two separate reports from the City of Toronto and from Metrolinx about Fare Integration. These two reports have quite different outlooks. For Metrolinx, there is an acknowledgement that any new fare policy will be difficult, but a determination to stay the course with their work plan and fare models. For Toronto, the focus is on the inequity of short versus medium and long-distance GO fares (a problem not just for Toronto as a node), and on the changes needed for GO to become more than a 905-to-Union Station commuter railway.

Additional material comes from the Metrolinx Fare Integration Advocacy Groups & Academics’ Workshop held on June 24, 2016. Presentations from this workshop are not yet online.

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Toronto’s Network Plan 2031: Part I, SmartTrack

For the past months, Toronto Planning, the TTC and Metrolinx have hosted a number of public consultation sessions leading up to two critical meetings on the same day: June 28, 2016.

One will be the Toronto Executive Committee’s consideration of a series of reports on various transit proposals.

The other will be the Metrolinx Board’s first meeting in four months with several related items on the agenda.

Reviewing all of this material will require several article that I hope to finish before the meetings where these issues will be discussed actually occur.

Here I will begin with SmartTrack because of all of the proposals, that has been the most threadbare one throughout the public consultation. It is complicated by being a joint project with Metrolinx who own the tracks over which the trains will operate, and who now quite clearly will also own and operate the trains regardless of what the service is called.

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Spinning a Tale in Scarborough

Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development & Growth, also the de facto spokesman for the Scarborough Liberal Caucus, was on CBC’s Metro Morning talking about the planned Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE) and its fast-inflating estimated cost.

Duguid had been quoted in the press a few days earlier as saying that downtown elitists have been opposed to the SSE from the start echoing the divisive us-versus-them context for so much of this debate. He likes to sound oh so reasonable, but his message is full of half-truths and puffery designed to support the “we don’t get our share” chorus so common from Scarborough pols and others.

The [subway] project has been on the books for 30 years.

Well, no, it hasn’t. The TTC’s original plan for Scarborough was that an LRT corridor would run northeast all the way to Malvern. (See Once Upon a Time in Scarborough and The Scarborough LRT That Wasn’t). More recently, the Transit City plan included an LRT network for Scarborough, and this received the endorsement of Council. Only when former Mayor Ford chose to use the potential of a subway as bait did Council change its mind.

If anyone has a plan for a subway from Kennedy to STC that has more status than the back of a napkin or a fantasy map, I’ll be happy to see and comment on it.

LRT was put in there as a political decision by the Davis government to promote UTDC globally.

The UTDC was a provincial agency that concocted the RT technology, and they couldn’t get a sale if Toronto wasn’t buying. This technology is most emphatically not LRT, no matter what Duguid and others like to call it, for the simple reason that it requires a completely segregated right-of-way. The true LRT line was already under construction when Queen’s Park pulled the plug, and there are remnants of the LRT design still visible in the RT structures.

Scarborough Town Centre is one of the fastest growing city centres in Canada.

Very little development, compared to the rest of Toronto, is planned for STC according to Toronto Planning’s own numbers. How many times must the following chart be published to drive home this fact?  [Source: How Does the City Grow, June 2015]

More generally, growth is not happening in the so-called centres which between them have less than 10% of the proposed development. The myth that the former “downtowns” of the old cities will become major nodes in their own right is neatly torpedoed here.

ProposedTorontoDevelopment_201506

Everyone is entitled to their views and opinions.

In a classic “yes, but” statement, Duguid tries to undo his slur against those who criticize the SSE project, but goes on to talk of how Scarborough residents have been fighting for a subway for years.

I [Duguid] have been involved in this debate for 30 years. All we’re asking for is that the fastest growing city centre be attached to higher order transit.

Fighting for “higher order rapid transit” (a phrase he uses a few times without recognizing that it actually includes LRT), maybe, but not specifically for a subway. The problem for years has been that subways and the rattletrap SRT are the only points of comparison Scarborough riders have, and it’s a no-brainer to choose one over the other. The LRT option has always been undersold, and then under Rob Ford, denigrated as “streetcars” (said with a pejorative sneer) when in fact the SLRT could be entirely on its own right-of-way.

The price came in over the estimate, but that was done a number of years ago. The price it’s come in at is the price it’s come in at.

No. The estimate was updated in 2016 for Council’s decision to go with the “optimized” Scarborough plan of a 1-stop subway and the LRT from Kennedy Station to UTSC. Does Duguid now claim that Council made a multi-billion dollar decision on a flimsy, unreliable estimate?

When challenged about insulting critics as a tactic to advance the SSE project:

Not everyone who has opposed this is from downtown, but generally critics are people who are less than 10 minutes to a subway station from their homes.

I don’t have the home addresses of the many SSE critics at my disposal, and there is no secret that I live within sight of Broadview Station. The point here is not where I live, but where people in Scarborough live, and most of them will not be within 10 minutes of the one remaining station on the SSE. Indeed, the “optimized” Scarborough plan does well on access not because of the subway, but because the LRT line to UTSC brings so many more people close to a station.

Scarborough people have been paying for the subway system for years. It is important to the entire city. We have to think about more than our ridings.

Duguid is getting too rich for words here implying that he’s not pushing the subway just to get votes even though his own party did just that, going along with Rob Ford’s fictional ideas about transit planning rather than opposing him. Yes, Scarborough has paid taxes for years into the pot, as has every other part of Toronto, including Etobicoke which is not exactly subway-rich. The SSE tax as well as development charges for new transit generally fall overwhelmingly on buildings nowhere near Scarborough, and the subway will be built mainly by funds raised outside Scarborough borders. That may be a fair trade, but not if the pricetag keeps going up and up, and not if other transit projects are cancelled to pay for it.

Yes, Scarborough too must think about more than itself, and stop acting like a brat who only wants the most expensive toy in the shop window.

Scarborough has been paying for years, but the minute something is going to SCC, such a big deal is made out of it. It’s easy for folks with higher order transit to oppose it, but it’s important to the people of Scarborough.

It is a flat out lie to say that people elsewhere in Toronto oppose “something going to SCC”. The problem here is that Duguid wants only a subway and will accept nothing else. We all need and want more and better transit, but we can’t have it when every penny is vacuumed up for one project.

Ridership numbers have to be put in perspective. STC is the first station in the system, and if the line were full here, people wouldn’t be able to get on elsewhere. It will be the 7th busiest station. If we had only looked at [terminal] ridership, we wouldn’t have built any of the subway lines.

Both the Yonge and Bloor subways were built in corridors where surface transit was already carrying thousands more riders than the RT is today, and where there was a concentrated demand to carry people from their homes to jobs downtown and on other parts of the (mainly) streetcar network. The same is not true for Scarborough, especially for transit carrying people to jobs at STC.

The Yonge extension was built to carry the very heavy demand pouring into Eglinton Station on buses from the north. The Spadina line was partly to relieve this, and partly to serve Yorkdale Mall not to mention sanitizing the proposed Spadina Expressway corridor. The extension through York University to Vaughan is well documented as a political creation, not the result of planning that would have independently justifed a line that far north.

This transcends politics.

That claim brought a guffaw from host Matt Galloway. The whole project has always been about politics, about being a “subway champion” for Scarborough and telling people how hard you are fighting for what they have been convinced they need.

The fact is that I’ve been supporting this since before I got into public office, for nearly 30 years. Scarborough residents take it very seriously. The subway will fulfill our full potential, and I fight strongly for it.

Actually, Scarborough has very substantial travel demands that have nothing to do with the Town Centre, and the subway won’t help them one bit. Moreover, most people who work at STC don’t originate from areas served by the subway network (or particularly well by transit) and they drive out of preference or because they have no choice.

Duguid and company have painted themselves into a corner by backing an option that is increasingly beyond the level where mutual back-scratching at Council and a hope for peace in the family will bring approval for the project. They’re now stuck having convinced voters that there is only one option, and that if Scarborough doesn’t get it, this will be the rich, elitist, downtown Toronto blocking their manifest destiny.

One might ask the same of City Councillors and the Mayor who short change transit at every opportunity and may even cut service rather than raise taxes and fares to pay the bills in 2017.

Our government already would have contributed 2/3 of the original cost estimate. We are the major contributor, and are unwavering in support. We will give the city the space to determine what the plans might be for the other part of the project – the line to UTSC – but we’re not in a position to commit more money.

In other words, don’t come to Queen’s Park looking for a handout, and if you have to raid the piggybank for the billion you thought you had for the UTSC LRT, then that’s Toronto’s decision. Needless to say, Duguid does not represent the ridings that the LRT would serve.

The real issue here is why a provincial Minister gets away with making such inflammatory statements about a decision which, in theory, is Toronto’s to make. Queen’s Park will spend the same dollars on Scarborough regardless of what is built, but they gingerly avoid commenting on which plan they prefer.

We’re getting almost an announcement a day from the Wynne government about transit expansion, even for some LRT funding, but Queen’s Park has stayed out of the Scarborough debate until now. When the bill comes due for the extra cost of a one-stop subway, when the hoped-for line to UTSC vanishes from the map, will Duguid or Wynne be anywhere to be found?

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Kvetching About 512 St. Clair

The opponents of the 512 St. Clair streetcar right-of-way don’t miss any opportunity to slag the line. The TTC doesn’t help when it does not fully explain what is going on with this summer’s construction projects, and paints the work primarily as “accessibility” and “new streetcar” related.

A common complaint in Toronto is that nobody co-ordinates construction projects. Well, for those who bother to pay attention to the announcements of such things, co-ordination on a large scale is happening, and St. Clair is part of it. Many projects fit together like a jigsaw puzzle this summer.

  • St. Clair Station bus and streetcar loops require structural repairs that will take from now until late in the year. This has nothing to do with accessibility (the station already is accessible), nor with overhead changes for new streetcars (new pantograph-friendly overhead has been in place since 2011).
  • The ramps leading into St. Clair West Station Loop were not rebuilt during the line’s shutdown a few years ago (this is the only part that was, for some reason, omitted). They are the original installation from the Spadina subway opening and require reconstruction.
  • St. Clair West Station is not accessible, and work on this will begin this summer. However, that has nothing to do with the shutdown for all bus and streetcar routes serving the loop.
  • The overhead within St. Clair West Station must be converted for pantograph operation, but this is work that would typically be done overnight, or at most over a weekend.
  • Presto conversion of St. Clair West Station can be conveniently done while the station is closed, but did not strictly require it.
  • Reconstruction of small sections of the islands on St. Clair is required for proper operation of the low floor cars’ boarding ramps, but these island also require electrical fit-outs for Presto. This work is similar to that was done on Spadina.
  • Track construction at College & Bathurst prevents streetcar operation including access to St. Clair (although if this were the only issue, it would be handled by storing cars at Hillcrest or on the line as has been done in the past). The controlling factor is the ramp construction at St. Clair West. The Bathurst trackage will re-open in mid-July.
  • Work on College Street West by Toronto Water and as part of local street improvements for the BIA requires partial street closures. This has been co-ordinated with TTC trackwork at Bathurst and at Lansdowne.

In all of this, if one wants to knock the TTC, one might ask “why were the islands not done sooner” and “why were the ramps at St. Clair West left so long”. As for the islands, that’s partly a head-scratcher for accessibility, but Presto is a net new requirement. I suspect that the work could be done in under two months, but co-ordination with the other projects makes for one shutdown, not two. The ramps are another matter, and I have never heard an explanation of why this work was not done during the previous shutdown.

As for the replacement bus service running in mixed traffic, yes, that is going to be annoying. TTC does not want to use the streetcar right-of-way understandably because of narrow clearances with the overhead poles and the meandering path the lanes take. Those poles (notably absent on Spadina) were put in despite many questions to the TTC (including from emergency services) about the need for this design. What was really happening was that there was a boffin in the consulting firm working on the new streetscape who wanted the street lighting poles (which traditionally held up the TTC’s overhead) to be spaced further apart than TTC requirements. In the fullness of time, this wasn’t how the street was built (because the illumination level would not have been adequate), but meanwhile the TTC insisted on its own centre median poles except where buses share the right-of-way west of Bathurst.

It wasn’t a technical requirement, it was the combined stupidity of the street designer and the TTC’s sticking with a design that they no longer required. The result we have is a streetcar right-of-way that cannot host temporary bus service.

There is a lot to complain about with the TTC, and I am often criticized for writing more about the negatives than the positives. However, this is a case where a great deal of work has been collected into one set of shutdowns, and that is precisely the sort of thing the TTC and City should be doing.