Finance

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TTC’s 2016 Customer Charter Reviewed

The TTC has released the 2016 version of its Customer Charter listing a number of areas in which they promise improvements through the year.

First Quarter:

  • Ensure that 510 Spadina is served by fully accessible streetcars: Mostly done already with a few of the high-floor ALRVs still in service but the majority of runs operated with low-floor Flexitys.
  • Apple Pay at collectors’ booths: In progress.
  • Reduce streetcar short-turns by a further 20% over Q1 2015: New schedules on 501 Queen effective January 3 make a big contribution to this coupled with the milder winter weather.
  • Start subway service at 8:00am on Sunday: Done effective January 3.
  • Add service to Line 1 (YUS) during off-peak: Not done yet, but the schedules going into effect at the end of March have not yet been announced. (Note 1)
  • Establish a Local Working Group for Donlands Station second exit project: Done.
  • Add five new express bus services: Planned for late March.

Second Quarter:

  • Wifi at 22 new stations (Note 2).
  • Roll-out of new fare gates with Main Station as a pilot: Work at Main in progress.
  • Improve bike parking at 5 stations.
  • Add 20 bike repair stops at subway stations: Subject to outcome of a pilot.
  • Install notice boards in 12 busy stations to inform passengers about planned/unplanned closures.

Third Quarter:

  • Ensure 509 Harbourfront and 511 Bathurst are served by low-floor streetcars: With delivery of new cars, Harbourfront is already planned to ramp up beyond two assigned Flexitys in mid-February. Delivery rates for new cars are supposed to be up to 1/week by the end of March and this should make conversion of 511 Bathurst an easy task provided Bombardier manages to stay on track.
  • Pilot high capacity bike parking at one station.
  • Replace T1 trains on Line 4 (Sheppard) with 4-car TR sets: The order for these cars is in progress at Bombardier with delivery expected later this year.
  • Improve 28 Bayview South and 101 Downsview Park routes to be part of all-day, every day service. This will bring services to two park-based areas. The Bayview South bus serves the Brick Works from the west (Davisville Station), but service from the east (Broadview Station) will still be operated by a free shuttle bus.
  • Add 3 trains to Line 1 (YUS) to improve AM peak service. It is unclear whether these will be “gap” trains used to supplement service when things go wrong, or an attempt to slightly shorten the average headway over the entire line. Gap trains generally make a bigger difference for situations where holes in service at peak times and direction need to be filled because the extra train is used specifically where it is most needed.
  • Add peak service to 25 busy bus routes.
  • New streetcar service on Cherry Street: (Note 1) This service could most easily be implemented by converting the 504 buses now scheduled from Dufferin to Parliament back to streetcars as a Dufferin to Cherry operation. Peak vehicle requirements would probably go down, but the off peak service on Cherry would be a net addition. This change is related to whatever modifications the TTC will make to the 72 Pape and 172 Cherry bus routes.
  • Begin revamping the east parking lot at Finch Station.

Fourth Quarter:

  • Widen 25 bus stop pads to improve accessibility: Locations TBA
  • Install external route announcement system on all vehicles: Work in progress.
  • Add two new elevators at Ossington Station: Work in progress.
  • Install customer info screens at Union Station mezzanine and platform levels: An overdue follow-up. This work should have been an integral part of the station renovation.
  • Install customer info screens at Dufferin, York Mills and Lawrence stations.
  • Install transit signal priority at 15 intersections: Locations TBA
  • Complete PRESTO roll out to the entire system: Bus fleet conversion in progress; new fare gates will finish PRESTO subway access as they are installed.
  • 10 additional WiFi stations: Locations TBA (Note 2)
  • Lengthen 10 bus pads for compatibility with articulated buses: Locations TBA
  • Start construction on a bus queue jump lane: Location TBA
  • Introduce a new Wheel-Trans qualification process: Details TBA
  • Install new, “more informative” stop markers at over 3,000 surface stops.
  • Review schedules on 32 bus and streetcar routes to improve reliability and travel times.
  • Reduce subway delays by 10% (counted as both incidents and minutes of delay). See What Causes Subway Delays?
  • Consult with riders and other stakeholders to revise service in three neighbourhoods around routes 40 Junction, 54 Lawrence East and 116 Morningside.

Note 1: Some items in the Charter are not yet funded in the City’s budget. Whether they will actually operate depends on the TTC’s ability and desire to squeeze money out of other parts of their operation.

Note 2: The WiFi rollout in the subway is limited to internet access only because the major telcos – Bell, Rogers, Telus – will not provide service over the incumbent provider’s network. Even the internet access has its problems due to login requirements recently introduced that require signon to a sponsoring site such as Twitter. This state of affairs can be traced to a bad system and contract design by the TTC who appear not to have contemplated the difficulties of the “big” players refusing to come onto, and thereby financially support, the network.

I cannot help feeling that a lot of this “Charter” is a shopping list of the low hanging fruit, things the TTC planned to do anyhow, but repackaged in a “look at us” format where green tick marks will gradually fill up the boxes. What is missing, and this is as much a political discussion as a managerial one, is a “what could we be” dimension and aspirational goals that might not be achieved, certainly not in a one-year timeframe.

Of course, when there are members of Council and the TTC Board who would rather count paperclips than address fundamental issues of just what  “good transit” really is, this situation is almost inevitable. Good news, but as cheaply as possible, and so we aim low.

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What Causes Subway Delays?

The TTC’s Andy Byford recently committed to a major reduction in subway delays by 2019 thanks in large measure to the introduction of a new signal system on Line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina.

Can this level of reduction actually be achieved? To get a sense of this, we must look at the actual delay reports from the TTC to see the location and type of service interruption. If a problem only account for one quarter of all delays, then a three-quarter reduction in delays cannot possibly be achieved simply by eliminating this class of problem. Similarly, if half of the delays are on one line, and a new technology is implemented on another, then nothing has been done to address delays on the untouched part of the system.

The TTC reports overall reliability statistics in the CEO’s report, but these are (a) not subdivided by cause and (b) use a measure of service “reliability” that would give a perfect score even if a large proportion of the service were missing. As long as trains are close enough to each other, even if there is one gap leading the pack or all of the trains crawl along the line, they do not count against the metric the TTC used for years to report service quality.

The counts below were calculated by reviewing all of the TTC eAlerts for service interruptions on the four rapid transit lines for January 2016. Anyone who reads these alerts and rides the system regularly knows that some delays never make it to an alert, but this is the best we have for published information.

Type of Delay                    Line 1    Line 2    Line 3    Line 4

Passenger Alarm                   6  16%   14  23%    2  18%
Signals                          11  30%   11  18%              3  60%
Mechanical                        1   3%    4   7%    8  73%    1  20%
Track                                       3   5%
Switching                                   1   2%
Security                          5  14%    6  10%              1  20%
Police Investigation              3   8%    4   7%
Fire Investigation                3   8%    8  13%    1   9%
Medical                           3   8%    4   7%
Power Off                         4  11%    3   5%
Unauthorized at Track Level                 1   2%
Late Clearing Work Zone           1   3%    1   2%
Unspecified                       0         1   2%

Total                            37        61        11         5

The details of the incidents are in the following table.

201601_SubwayDelayStats

This is only a one month sample, and there are bound to be somewhat different numbers for other periods, but this gives the flavour of the situation.

Signal problems, annoying though they may be, account for only 30% of the delay incidents on the Yonge line, and 18% on the Bloor line for January 2016. That said, these tend to be the most long-lasting incidents and so their effect is greatly out of proportion to their number. Moreover, the incident count is higher on the Bloor-Danforth line by a wide margin. The new signals on Yonge-University will certainly improve conditions on that route, but delays overall will not be a thing of the past.

If the TTC is going to shoot for improvements, then they must start reporting their delay statistics at a more granular level so the a link will be visible between the type of “fix” undertaken and the location and type of delay whose stats go up or down. This would be a much more useful measure both of service quality and of the effects of management programs to improve the quality of transit service.

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Memo to John Tory: Where’s The $50 Million? (Updated)

The Mayor and other worthies showed up for a press conference and photo op today at Davisville Shops to trumpet all the new money the TTC will be getting in 2016.

Quoting the TTC’s Media Release:

In 2015, the TTC received an unprecedented $95 million increase to its budget and is set to receive over $50 million in new, annualized funding in 2016 to improve service on buses, streetcars and subways that serve the 555 million riders who use the TTC each year.

…

“Through two budget cycles, we have made significant service enhancements and continue to improve the experience for our customers” said TTC Chair Josh Colle, “As TTC Chair, I will continue to push for further investments to enhance service, and make the TTC less crowded and more reliable for our customers.”

Those are stirring words, but let’s have a look under the covers. Here is the TTC Budget as presented by the City Budget Analyst going into debates at Budget Committee.

PrelimANotes_OpsBudgetByCategory

The important line here is “Total Net Expenditures” which is another way to say “subsidy from the City of Toronto”. The actual increase from 2014 actual to 2015 projected is only about $77 million ($393m to $470m). The projected bump to 2016 is a further $25.6m, and that looks good only because it is relative to the 2015 actual, not budget.

On a budget to budget basis, the change is only about $21.5m ($473.7m to $495.2m). Even that may overstate the real increase because the “change from 2015 approved” budget shows growth of only $11.1m. This is probably due to in-year amendments to the 2015 budget.

(The inconsistencies in budget reporting at the City and TTC are an ongoing challenge, and there is usually just enough information missing to cloud any analysis.)

Note that these numbers include the effect of the fare increase, but do not include the TTC Board’s proposed enhancements.

There was a lot of fine tuning at the Budget Committee, but at the end of the day only the following changes were approved:

  • POP Inspectors: $1.7m
  • Streetcar service reliability: $1.2m
  • Early Sunday surface (surface routes): $0.6m
  • Discretionary spending : $5m reduction

That’s right – the cut in discretionary spending (paperclips, conferences, and other accounts the TTC has already pillaged to find “efficiencies”) is bigger than the approved additions to the budget. This is in a budget where there is already an across the board $10m reduction to reflect savings based on actual spending patterns vs budget in 2015.

The key phrase in the release above is “new, annualized funding” which is takes the improvements approved for 2015 and operates them for the full year. No real “new” investment for 2016. Worth remembering are the items that were not approved by the TTC Board and/or the Budget Committee:

  • Reliability Centred Maintenance (Pro-active vs Re-active): $7.7m
  • Track Safety (Flag Persons): $1.8m
  • Training: $1.8m
  • Bus Service Reliability: $2.0m
  • Express Bus Services: $1.6m
  • Subway Service Reliability: $0.6m
  • Line 1 3-minute service: $2.8m
  • Cherry Street streetcar service: $0.8m

When the TTC turns into a publicity machine for the Mayor, and so much that was touted as part of the 2016 Budget doesn’t make it past the sharp knives at Budget Committee, press conferences about “improvement” and “investment” ring rather hollow.

So, please Mayor Tory, stop using our subway trains as publicity props, and start being straight with Toronto about what you are really spending on transit service. As anyone who reads the budget can tell, the big increase in TTC “funding” comes from the paying customer, the riders who pay higher fares, not from the penny-pinching City Council and a Mayor who cares more about looking like he is pro-transit than actually paying for the honour.

Updated:

The TTC’s Brad Ross explains the $50m figure thus:

There’s $20M in additional subsidy over 2015. The balance of $30M is annualized for the new and enhanced services begun, primarily, in the fall that now apply to all of 2016. That’s in addition to POP, early Sunday service, streetcar reliability and the 5 express routes that start in March.

I hate to point this out, but the basic numbers show that the City has very little on the table in this game, and the riders are paying the freight for a lot of the new services carried into 2016 from 2015. As for new services in 2016, don’t hold your breath.

The Lord Mayor’s new transit clothes are rather tattered.

Updated:

The section about year-to-year budget comparisons has been clarified.

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Relief Line, SmartTrack, GO/RER, Scarborough Subway Consultations

Toronto City Planning has released a draft list of upcoming public consultations on various transit plans including:

  • The Relief Line
  • The Scarborough Transit Plan (Subway, SmartTrack, Crosstown East LRT)
  • The Western SmartTrack Plan (SmartTrack, Crosstown West LRT)

2016_ConsultationCalendar

Additional meetings and information about Metrolinx plans (GO Regional Express Rail) will be organized by that agency.

Even more information will be available in March 2016 when the City releases a compendium report on all transit initiatives currently under study. These will include items listed above as well as the “Waterfront Reset” study, TTC Fare Integration proposals and a review of how (or if) Tax Increment Financing can contribute to the many transit projects under review. The intent is that this report will form the basis for public consultation and debate leading to recommendations at Council in June 2016. This is a very aggressive schedule, and there is no indication how consensus will actually be achieved in so short a time, especially with the usually-secretive Metrolinx as an essential player. At least the discussion will be at a network level, not ward-by-ward with a “relief” line for every member of Council, and there will be some filtering of various schemes based on engineering and operational realities.

What is sadly missing from all of this is a discussion of day-to-day transit operations and the backlog in the state-of-good-repair budget. We can blithely discuss billions worth of subway building to Scarborough and a Relief line, but Council won’t fund the basics of running a transit system.

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TTC Service Changes Effective Sunday February 14, 2016

The TTC will implement several service changes for its February-March schedules primarily to improve peak service on some overcrowded bus routes. This is a sign that the available bus fleet is expanding and more peak service can be offered.

A few routes have new schedules to reflect actual operating conditions.

The 66 Prince Edward bus will be revised so that the same level of service is provided to Lake Shore (Humber Bay) and Humber Loop at all times.

2016.02.14_Service_Changes

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TTC Board Meeting January 21, 2016

The TTC Board will meet on January 21, 2016. Unlike most meetings, the public session will begin at 10:00 am, although they may go into camera to discuss details of item 3 on the agenda, the cost overrun on the Spadina subway extension.

Items of note include:

This article has been updated with details on these subjects.

Continue reading →

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SmartTrack: Now You See It, Now You Don’t!

Oliver Moore in the Globe and Mail reports that there have been major changes to the SmartTrack plan, to wit:

  • The western branch of the service to the Airport district will be provided by the western extension of the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT as originally proposed.
  • “SmartTrack” per se will operate as a heavy rail service overlaid on GO Transit with the initial phase running from Mount Dennis to Kennedy Stations.
  • The northern extension of “SmartTrack” to Markham will be a separate phase of the project.

The map from the Globe & Mail is reproduced below.

GlobeSTLRTMap_20160114

According to Moore, the cost of adding SmartTrack to GO under this configuration would be much, much less than the originally quoted figure for the entire line. In turn, this would free up substantial capital spending headroom in City plans for other projects.

SmartTrack service at 15 minutes (the level proposed in Tory’s campaign) is far too infrequent to attract much riding, and especially to make a dent in demand on the existing subway interchange at Bloor-Yonge. We saw this in the June 2015 Metrolinx demand projections that were far more favourable to a Relief Line operating north to Sheppard and Don Mills. However, getting SmartTrack service down to as close a headway as every 5 minutes will be challenging for Metrolinx and for the corridors through which this would operate. There are no details yet on how this would be achieved.

The Eglinton West LRT has always been the superior way of serving this corridor compared to the heavy rail SmartTrack scheme. ST foundered on major problems with constructibility and neighbourhood effects, issues that were dismissed in a stunning display of cavalier “expert” knowledge during the campaign. Planning by Google Maps from an office in the UK has its limitations, but Tory’s campaign relied on this “expertise”. One shameless professor even rated ST with an “A+” in the CBC Metro Morning interview.

Keeping the first phase of ST confined south of Eglinton on both branches limits the operating costs the City must bear if this to be truly a “Toronto” project with “Toronto” fares, and it avoids the complexities of building into the 905.

Indeed, SmartTrack began as a real estate development scheme to make commercial property near the Airport and in Markham more accessible from downtown in a series of studies that actually claimed the market for downtown office space was static and falling. Yet another expert should be eating crow pie from his perch on the Metrolinx board. It was never clear why Toronto should shell out billions to improve property values in the 905, and this task now falls clearly to Metrolinx where it belongs.

The eastern leg of SmartTrack, north from Kennedy, obviously competes with the Scarborough Subway Extension, and there is no need for two routes serving the same demand, especially when GO already plans substantially improved service in the rail corridor. The long-standing issue of SSE demand may be clarified by the absence of SmartTrack as a competing service.

It is no secret that my own position would be to revert to the LRT plan in Scarborough, but that train has probably left the station, especially if the City can “save” a small fortune by scaling back on SmartTrack.

These changes could also foreshadow a revised schedule for the LRT projects at a time when “shovel ready” projects are in demand to soak up new federal spending. Eglinton West’s LRT extension is relatively easy to build, and it could be started soon enough to complete concurrently with the main Crosstown route. There is also the matter of the Sheppard East LRT including its proposed service linking to UofT Scarborough campus.

Coming weeks may bring many sputtering denials, or possibly, much improved clarity and acceptance of an – at last – realistic plan.

 

 

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Does More Running Time Improve Service?

[This is a long article, and I won’t hold it against anyone for failing to read all the way to the end, or not looking at every page of every chart. The issue here is a system-wide one of how service is scheduled and managed using routes where the TTC is attempting to improve operations as a reference.]

At the TTC Board Meeting of December 2015, Chief Service Officer Richard Leary gave a presentation “Performance Based Service” outlining the work done to date to improve the reliability of surface routes. [A YouTube video of the presentation is also available.]

The focus of changes made to several schedules has been that end-to-end running times should reflect actual on-street conditions rather than presenting drivers with an unattainable goal that cannot be met during typical conditions, let alone anything unusual such as poor weather or unusually bad traffic congestion.

The changes to date are summarized in the table below.

201512_Leary_AddedRTT

In some cases, the extra running time is provided simply by widening the headway. For example, if a route takes one hour, and it has a bus every 10 minutes, that’s six buses. Extending the headway to 11 minutes would change the round trip to 66 minutes with no added cost. In theory, if this allows vehicles to stay on time, better service might actually be provided because all buses would show up as planned. That, however, depends on them being properly spaced so that their capacity is evenly used.

In other cases, where the problem is not just scheduled time but also capacity, more vehicles can be added. In the example above, a seventh bus would allow the headway to stay at 10 minutes while the trip time went up to 70. With the long-standing problems of a constrained fleet, this is only possible in off-peak periods, or by raiding other routes for vehicles.

Continue reading →

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NextBus Next to Useless After Major Schedule Changes

Updated January 5, 2016: New schedules have been installed at NextBus and the service on affected routes should now appear correctly.

On January 3, 2016, the TTC implemented major changes in the schedules on 501 Queen and 510 Spadina, as well as minor changes to 509 Harbourfront and 511 Bathurst. Since then, NextBus information has been wildly erratic for these routes.

There are a few underlying problems of which I am aware from past experience like this, and there are likely more, but it’s worth consolidating this information in an article.

First, it is important to understand the basics of how NextBus works:

  • TTC vehicle location information is collected by their monitoring system which polls each bus and streetcar every 20 seconds to obtain GPS readings. These are consolidated into an updated feed that is available to NextBus, but not to the general public.
  • There are two extracts of schedule data that provide the “in theory” version of service for external agencies/applications:
    • A GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) data feed available through the City of Toronto’s Open Data site
    • A NextBus-specific feed that is not public
  • NextBus uses the real-time data plus the schedule to produce maps showing all vehicles on a route, plus predictions of arrivals at stops. The predictions are based on historical tracking of vehicles and their likely running times, not on scheduled values, except at termini where a vehicle is expected to leave on its scheduled time.
  • Downstream stops from terminals show predicted arrivals based on the schedule until a vehicle leaves the terminal. This can cause errors in predictions because the schedule and real world might differ. Conversely, predictions based on actual travel times will correct for cases where the schedule is unrealistic provided that a vehicle is actually enroute to the stop. This is a “Catch 22” situation.
  • Predictions and displays (e.g. on video displays at stations) can run “late” to the real world for a variety of reasons related to latency in updating the data at each step along the way. If the “real-time” location feed is slow getting from TTC to NextBus, then vehicle positions will not reflect the world “now”, but some time ago. If the station/stop displays do not refresh their information frequently, they will show stale predictions.
  • NextBus only displays vehicles whose “run number” (the reference number assigned by the TTC to each vehicle) is actually in the schedule. When schedules change, an entirely new set of run numbers might be in use, or there could be some overlap with the old schedule. This can cause only partial service to be tracked/predicted because some vehicles are not linked to a run number that is in the schedule NextBus is using. Problems arise either if the new schedule is not imported to NextBus, or if the data exported from the TTC is in error.

All of the apps that run on various platforms use the NextBus feed. They may present this information in different ways, but all are limited to whatever NextBus puts out because that is the only feed available.

As I write this, there is an additional problem with the NextBus display for Queen which is hinted at by the snapshot below.

20160104_Rte501_0515

Note that all of the cars show with the arrow pointing west. If you watch the animated version, some of these cars are actually moving east. Predictions are wildly inaccurate because NextBus does not seem to “know” that eastbound cars actually are eastbound. (This snapshot was taken at 5:15 am.)

The problem changed somewhat later (5:56 am) when a few “eastbound” cars did show up in the display, and in downstream predictions. However, the predictions are still wrong because they only include cars NextBus is tracking, not all service on the route.

20160104_Rte501_0556

For example, NextBus claims there will be two cars eastbound at Bathurst in 18 minutes (they are both at Humber Loop eastbound), and the next one 53 minutes hence.

It is a bit early in the day for examples, but there will likely be cars missing from displays and predictions for 510 Spadina (which has a completely revised schedule for Flexity operation), on 509 Harbourfront and 511 Bathurst (which have been revised to terminate at Fleet Loop due to construction).

Updated: The problem with vehicle direction tracking also appears to have affected 505 Dundas.

The schedule data [this link returns a large XML file] NextBus is using for 501 Queen is from December 2015 when all service operated from Long Branch to Neville rather than with a route split at Humber. (For those who are interested, search on the string “scheduleClass” to locate the start of each block of schedules available.) The situation is the same for other routes.

This type of foul-up between TTC and NextBus has occurred before and at times has taken weeks to resolve making the “service” NextBus provides of poor quality, to be as generous as possible. The problems may lie at TTC or they may be at NextBus or some combination of the two, but they are problems that should be fixed. At the very least, some basic testing should occur at the TTC’s end when there is a change to ensure that the updated schedules have been installed. If I can do this with a simple XML call to the NextBus site, then so can anyone at the TTC.

Problems have arisen in the past where the TTC’s schedule extract for NextBus does not contain complete or correct data. This will only show up with actual use, but some sort of internal quality control on the content of the extract should be possible, especially for a major change such as the restructuring of a route.

This has been an ongoing problem, and it says a lot about the TTC’s alleged commitment to “Customer Service” that it has not been fixed.

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TTC Transfers: 1954/55

Transfers as a physical fare medium are set to disappear from the TTC in 2017 with the completion of the migration to Presto fare cards.

Here are the transfers as they existed in 1954 and 1955, the first year of the “Toronto Transit Commission” by that name. These include many suburban bus routes that were amalgamated into the TTC’s network with the formation of Metropolitan Toronto in 1954.

A few items worth noting:

  • Many of the suburban routes used red ink on white paper as a distinct colour scheme to identify cases where a check for a “zone 1” fare on a city route would be necessary. When coloured paper was abandoned for the older routes, Carlton was already using the “suburban” colour scheme and was missed in the conversion. For many years, it was the only “downtown” route with a red transfer.
  • There are two Yonge transfers. One is for the “Yonge T.C.”, the trolley coach operation from Eglinton to Glen Echo. The other, simply “Yonge” might suggest that the streetcars were still operating in 1955 over a year after the subway opened. This is for the night service.
  • Many route names are recognizable, but the outer ends of the suburban routes are a lot closer to the old city than they are today.
  • The text on the back of the transfer exhorting riders to only make their connections in the proper TTC way has not changed in years (it can be found on transfers from 1921). The use of the word “Conductor” is amusing considering that by 1955 two-man operation had ended. The term even appears on bus transfers.
  • “Up” and “Down” refer to directions of travel and correspond to the “U” and “D” cutoffs along the edge of the transfer. Generally, “Up” is westbound or northbound, but there are exceptions sometimes caused by route changes and amalgamations with segments in the “wrong” direction.

For a look at pre-TTC transfers, please refer to this article.