Finance

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The Missing Half of OneCity

Last week brought the excitement of the OneCity network announcement, followed by mildly supportive words from Queen’s Park and its agency Metrolinx, followed in turn by rather stronger provincial denunciation of a City that can’t make up its mind on transit.  Queen’s Park can hardly talk about consistency given their happiness to leap into bed with Rob Ford’s subway plan until Council gently reminded their provincial cousins that the Mayor had not bothered to ask for Council’s approval.  Meanwhile, delivery dates for provincial “commitments” drift off into the 2020s with the flimsiest of excuses about the limitations of an overheated construction market.  This is the same provincial government who talks about the power and capabilities of international companies just itching to work in the Toronto market.

All this kvetching detracts from two major issues.  First, once we get past the obvious conflicts created by proposals for the Scarborough Subway and the Scarborough/Etobicoke express services taking over the GO/ARL corridors, the rest of OneCity doesn’t step on any provincial toes.  As with so many of the debates here (and on other transit blogs), it’s the “I’m 100% right and you are 100% wrong” outlook that gets in the way of intelligent conversation.  There may be a role for the Scarborough Subway, although I am less certain about the proposed services taking on GO corridors.  At least we should get more information about the options and effects, not to mention defensible costs and demand projections (something neither the TTC/Toronto nor Metrolinx have been strong on in either Transit City or The Big Move).

Second, and at least as important, is the complete absence of money for improved service and maintenance, including a huge capital backlog on the TTC for vehicles and facilities.  The Ford era saw “savings” through cuts in presumed future growth.  A bus order for system growth was cancelled, and a new garage dropped from the plans.  The size of our future streetcar fleet was trimmed about 10%.  Who knows how many cars we really need given the strangulation of streetcar routes for service by the TTC.  Service growth in general was artificially depressed by changing loading standards to fit more people on each  vehicle.

These were all one-time fixes, fudges that got Toronto through two budget cycles while meeting the meddlesome demands of an administration for whom transit was just too much fat waiting to be cut.

The sad part is that thanks to two years of see-no-evil budgeting, nobody really knows what the true backlog in operations and maintenance might be, or what it will cost to put things aright.  Even if OneCity gets some sort of approval and funding, its projects won’t see a rider for years, and in some cases decades.  Should people who cannot get on the King streetcar or Finch West bus have to wait a decade for someone to address their problems?

OneCity is a plan for enhancing transit on major routes, but it’s only half of a network plan.  Most Torontonians will still ride on ordinary bus and streetcar routes for part or all of their journeys, and they are just as deserving of good service as those who will have new subway and LRT lines.  Indeed, even those who will, someday, see a new faster route should not have to wait for its construction.  “Coming in 2021” is cold comfort to someone waiting for a bus in February 2012.

If Council refers OneCity to staff for a report on costs and first-cut details of projects, we will learn more about the options for rapid transit in Toronto.  A long-overdue, informed conversation may actually happen rather than endless posturing for one neighbourhood or another.  But it will only be half a conversation.

Toronto needs to know what it will take to bring better service before we can build our rapid transit dreams, and what might come to many corners of our city that will never see a subway, LRT or BRT line.  What is our goal for these neighbourhoods?  What does “good service” mean to this newly enlightened Council?  How much will it cost?

These questions are just as important for transit’s future as contemplating the route of a new subway or the mechanics of a tax increase.  Council needs to ask them loudly and strongly as part of an integrated review of Toronto’s transit network.

Meanwhile, down the road at Metrolinx, a little humility might be in order.  This is an agency which, until fairly recently, did not even acknowledge the importance of local transit as part of the regional system, and still boasted about its high farebox recovery thanks to cherry-picking the most cost-effective services.  The provincial “investment strategy” must sustain not just the simplest, cheapest lines on the GO Transit map, but a wide range of services across the region including those provided by local carriers.

Is Toronto, is Ontario, serious about transit being a real alternative, about providing a “car-free” option to a much wider market of riders, or do they both simply prefer to hold press conferences with pretty maps?

The maps are nice, and the accompanying studies will fill yet more space in my library (or storage on my hard drive), but it’s the space and time in between that’s most important.  Riders will wait a very long time for some of these brave new transit lines to appear, and they deserve better than a walk to a crowded, infrequent bus route or a drive to a parking lot that fills before 7am in the meantime.

Toronto Council should demand that the TTC look not just at shiny new lines for the indefinite future, but that it address its real requirements today.  If the “new TTC” gets bogged down planning for the 2020s while transit continues to wither from overcrowding and underfunding through the 2010s, they are not doing their job.

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TTC Meeting Wrapup: June 29, 2012 (Updated)

Updated July 3, 2012 at 5:00 pm:  The TTC has clarified the issue of the number of locations for debit card facilities.  “60” refers to the number of locations to be done in 2012, with a further 23 in 2013.  The count refers to booths, not to stations, and the project will result in all regularly staffed booths accepting non-cash payments.  Thanks to Chris Upfold for this info.

Original post of July 1, 2012 follows:

The TTC met on June 29 to consider an agenda that didn’t have much of great importance.  The “elephant in the room” was the OneCity plan announced earlier in the week by the Chair and Vice-Chair, and supported by most of the other Commissioners, but this item was not on the agenda.  Concurrently with the meeting, Bob Chiarelli, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure was announcing Cabinet approval of the four LRT lines approved by Council in March, and pouring cold water on One City.  It was rather strange sitting in a calm TTC meeting while Twitter went crazy with reaction to events up the road at Queen’s Park.

Continue reading →

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OneCity Plan Reviewed

The OneCity plan has much to recommend it even though in the details it is far from perfect.

The funding scheme requires Queen’s Park to modify the handling of assessment value changes, and they are already cool to this scheme.  Why OneCity proponents could not simply and honestly say “we need a 1.9% tax hike every year for the next four years” (not unlike the ongoing 9% increases to pay for Toronto Water infrastructure upgrades) is baffling.  A discussion about transit is needlessly diverted into debates about arcane ways of implementing a tax increase without quite calling it what it is.

On the bright side, Toronto may leave behind the technology wars and the posturing of one neighbourhood against another to get their own projects built.  Talking about transit as a city-wide good is essential to break the logjam of decades where parochialism ruled.  Couple this with a revenue stream that could actually be depended on, and the plan has a fighting chance.  Ah, there’s the rub — actually finding funding at some level of government to pay for all of this.

Rob Ford’s subway plan depended on the supposed generosity of Metrolinx to redirect committed funding to the Ford Plan (complete with some faulty arithmetic).  Similarly, the OneCity plan depends for its first big project on money already earmarked by Metrolinx to the Scarborough RT to LRT conversion.  If this goes ahead, we would have a new subway funded roughly 80% by Queen’s Park and 20% by Toronto.  Not a bad deal, but not an arrangement we are likely to see for any other line.

On the eastern waterfront, there is already $90m on the table from Waterfront Toronto (itself funded by three levels of government), and OneCity proposes to spend another @200m or so to top up this project.  Whether all $200m would be City money, or would have to wait for other partners to buy in is unclear.

Toronto must make some hard decisions about a “Plan B” if the Ottawa refuses to play while the Tories remain in power.  Even if we saw an NDP (or an NDP/Liberal) government, I wouldn’t hold my breath for money flowing to Toronto (and other Canadian cities) overnight.  A federal presence is a long term strategy, and spending plans in Toronto must be framed with that in mind.

Sitting on our hands waiting for Premier McGuinty or would-be PM Mulcair to engineer two rainbows complete with pots of gold landing in Nathan Phillips Square would be a dead wrong strategy.  Bang the drum all we might for a “one cent solution” or a “National Transit Strategy”, Toronto needs to get on with debating our transit needs whether funding is already in place or not.  Knowing what we need and want makes for a much stronger argument to pull in funding partners.

In some cases, Toronto may be best to go it alone on some of the smaller projects, or be prepared to fund at a higher level than 1/3.  If transit is important, it should not be held hostage by waiting for a funding partner who will never show up.

The briefing package for OneCity is available online.

My comments on the political aspects of OneCity are over at the Torontoist site.

To start the ball rolling on the technical review of the OneCity network, here are my thoughts on each of the proposals in the network. Throughout the discussions that will inevitably follow, it is vital that politicians, advocates, gurus of all flavours not become wedded to the fine details. Many of these lines won’t be built for decades, if ever, and we can discuss the pros and cons without becoming mired in conversations about the colour of station tiles.

Continue reading →

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Metrolinx Board Meeting, June 2012

The Metrolinx Board met on June 21 with a full agenda.  As is unfortunately the case with this quasi-public board, the fatter the agenda, the less time is spent on actual discussion of the material in it, at least in public.  Presentations were rushed, and there were few questions from the Board to staff.  Many issues on the public agenda have counterparts in the private session where, one might hope, there is more robust debate.

[This article has been in the hopper a bit longer than I had hoped while I chased some details from Metrolinx.] Continue reading →

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“One City” To Serve Them All

Updated June 27 at 5:20pm:  I have written a political analysis of today’s announcement for the Torontoist website that will probably go live tomorrow morning.  A line-by-line review of the plan will go up here later the same day.

TTC Chair Karen Stintz and Vice-Chair Glen De Baeremaeker will formally announce a new plan called “One City” on June 27 at 10:30.

The plan already has coverage on the Star and Globe websites.  Maps:  Globe Star

I will comment in more detail after their press conference, but two points leap off the page at me:

  • The proposed funding scheme for the $30-billion plan presumes 1/3 shares from each of the Provincial and Federal governments.  This money is extremely unlikely to show up, especially Ottawa’s share.  From Queen’s Park, some of the funding is from presumed “commitments” to current projects such as the Scarborough RT/LRT conversion which would be replaced by a subway extension.  The rest is uncertain.
  • The “plan” is little more than a compendium of every scheme for transit within the 416 that has been floated recently in various quarters (including this blog).  What is notable is the fact that glitches in some of the existing ideas (notably the fact that the Waterfront East line ends at Parliament) are not addressed.  The whole package definitely needs some fine tuning lest it fall victim to the dreaded problem of all maps — once you draw them, it’s almost impossible to change them.

For those who keep an eye on political evolution, the brand “One City” surfaced in April 2012 in a speech made by Karen Stintz at the Economic Club of Canada.  This idea of a new, unifying transit brand appears to have been cooking for some time.

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TTC v. Metrolinx (Again): Who’s In Charge Here? (Update 2)

Updated June 8, 2012 at 11:00am:  My comments about the Commission’s action appear in an article on the Torontoist website.

Updated June 1, 2012 at 9:15am:  The motions passed at the TTC meeting of May 30 have been added at the end of this article.  The Commission took a much more conciliatory view of their relationship with Metrolinx than the staff report.  I will be writing about this situation in a separate article.

The original May 29 article follows below.

The Supplementary Agenda for the May 30, 2012 TTC meeting includes a report “LRT Projects in Toronto — Project Delivery”.

This report deals with the proposed transfer of responsibility for the Transit City LRT projects on Eglinton, Sheppard, Finch and the SRT replacement from the TTC to Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario.

As TTC reports go, this one is rather oddly worded in that it:

  • asks the Commission to “note” a number of factors,
  • requests that provincial agencies respond to various issues,
  • sets an October 31, 2012 deadline for the transfer of project control, and
  • proposes that the TTC’s own staff now dedicated to the LRT projects be redeployed internally.

In effect, the TTC is taking their ball and going home rather than play with the guys from down the block.  This suggests a strained relationship between agencies notwithstanding the soothing words we hear so often, and a sense that a fed up TTC is telling Queen’s Park to get lost.

From a purely political and administrative point of view, Queen’s Park holds all the cards because they are paying almost the entire cost (with a small Ottawa contribution to Sheppard) for these projects.  It’s their money, and they get to say how it will be spent.  Whether it will be spent wisely, and how the projects might fare with the TTC on the sidelines, these are questions that won’t be answered for years until we see the results.

Continue reading →

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TTC Meeting Preview: May 30, 2012

The Toronto Transit Commission will meet on May 30, 2012.

CEO’s Report

The scoreboard which begins the CEO’s Report includes the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) about which I have written elsewhere.  Subway performance continues to be monitored against schedule ±3 minutes 96% of the time.  It remains unclear how a systemic delay — where many trains are one or more headways out of place but service is otherwise well-spaced — affects this metric.  Surface routes aim to be within 3 minutes of the scheduled headway 65% of the time for buses and 70% of the time for streetcars.  Considering the headway on which all major routes operate, 3 minutes represents close to if not more than one headway, and much service will easily hit that target even though the rider sees disorganized bunching service with many short turns.  I will address this problem in separate articles looking in detail at specific routes’ behaviour.

Riding is up relative both to actual results in 2011 and to budget in 2012 (see following section on additional service to handle growth), and the offpeak increase is running ahead of peak as it has for some years.

The top source of complaints continues to be “Other” with “Surface Delays” and “Discourtesy” coming next in that order.  The TTC has initiated a rolling survey of customer satisfaction, but it has not yet accumulated enough data to produce a metric that shows a trend over time.  One big challenge of “customer service” is that some initiatives have an effect at limited points — clean and well-maintained washrooms may be appreciated by those who use them, but they don’t make any difference to overall service for most riders.  Pervasive changes — more frequent and regularly spaced buses, improved station cleaning and escalator/elevator maintenance — require changes in how the system thinks about its operation as a whole, not in discrete chunks that are easily targeted. Continue reading →

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The High Cost of Going Underground(?) (Updated)

Updated May 17 at 11:00 pm:  Richard Gilbert has responded to this article.  Rather than leave his remarks and my replies in the comment stream, I have placed them at the end of this article.

Urban consultant and former city Councillor Richard Gilbert has an article on the Globe & Mail’s blog titled “How Toronto’s transit plan takes taxpayers for a ride”.  The article decries the high cost of the Eglinton LRT and in particular the high effective subsidy per rider of the capital cost of burying much of the line.

The basic premise, the questions behind the article are sound, but the methodology is not.  This leads to a substantial overstatement of the per passenger subsidy for the capital construction.

At the outset, I must emphasize that my intent is not to attack Richard Gilbert himself, but rather to comment on the pitfalls involved in making comparisons between different systems, and in the use of generic formulas in planning.  In many of the critiques I have written over the years, the hardest  part has been to delve into the underlying assumptions and methodologies (themselves often hidden away in background papers).  These may “prove” something, if only that an author found the number he wanted to find and looked no further.

Gilbert writes:

According to Metrolinx, the provincial agency charged with implementing the transit improvements, the Eglinton line is to cost $4.9-billion (an amount under review). It is forecast to carry 5,400 passengers per hour in the peak direction in 2031, eleven years after it is scheduled to begin operation.

This peak rate is usually associated with an annual total of some 17 million rides. The annualized capital cost of the line is about $300-million per year ($4.9-billion amortized over 35 years at 5 per cent).

Thus the capital cost per ride will be an extraordinary $17.50 ($300-million divided by 17 million). This will be the effective subsidy per ride if the fares to be paid roughly cover the operating costs.

Central to this calculation is the translation of a peak point/hour demand of 5,400 to an annual ridership of 17-million.  The Eglinton route, like many transit lines in Toronto, is not a commuter line feeding unidirectional demand into one point like a GO train.  It is a route (actually several bus routes) serving an overlapping set of demands.  Many riders on the line do not contribute to the peak point count — a peak measured westbound to Yonge in the AM peak will not include any riders using the west end of the line, nor will it include any counter-peak traffic.  Many riders will not contribute to the peak hour counts — the ratio of off-peak riding on the TTC is much higher than on GO Transit even where all-day service is provided.

Any claim that a single peak point’s ridership can be translated to an annual figure will be inaccurate because it ignores the characteristics of the line as a whole. Continue reading →

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Good News Far Too Much of the Time

The TTC has now launched a public-facing version of an internal campaign pitching its new organization and attitude to serving riders under the rubric Modernizing the TTC.  The same information appeared in a poster recently issued throughout the organization.

From a service delivery point of view, the key pages are the 25 Key Performance Indicators and the Daily Customer Service Report.

The “KPIs” are intended to give ongoing information about ridership, service quality and station conditions including availability of escalators and elevators.

Strangely enough, the daily report is not available to the public, only a snapshot from March 19 on which — surprise! — everything is just fine, thank you very much.  This is precisely what has been wrong with the TTC for so many years — they are addicted to hearing good news.

Three changes are badly needed.

1.  Put real time data online

It’s all very well to know service ran so well two months ago, but I want to know how these indices are tracking today and over recent weeks.  Riders who waited while full buses zoomed past their stops, or were thrown off of short-turning streetcars, need to see what’s happening now and whether the TTC’s stats reflect their actual experience.

2.  Put more detail online

While the system as a whole may meet its targets, that does not reflect actual rider experience at a route-by-route level or at various times of the day.  The public information should be subdivided by route so that riders (and members of Council) can check against their local services rather than system averages, and the stats should be subdivided by time of day to distinguish busy peak periods from quiet evenings or weekends.

3.  Collect meaningful statistics

The statistics and targets now reported by the TTC have been with us in one form or another in places like the Chief General Manager’s Report (now the CEO’s Report) for some time.  Everything looks rosy until one thinks about what data drives the KPIs and whether it is really meaningful.

Subway and surface operations are measured by the proportion of trips that operate within three minutes of the scheduled headway.  It’s good to see the TTC moving away from “on time” as a measure of service quality because in most cases customers only care that vehicles/trains are regularly and reliably spaced.  They couldn’t care less if they are “on time” except in cases of wide headways.

However, if a service is scheduled to run every 4 minutes, this means that any headway from 1 minute to 7 minutes is acceptable for the statistics.  Even worse, a parade of vehicles each 1 minute apart meets the target except for the first in the queue where, presumably, there is a large gap.  A parade of 10 cars would be 90% “on time” because 9 of the 10 would be within 3 minutes of their scheduled headway.

With uneven headways more passengers accumulate in the wider gaps.  What most riders see is the train, bus or streetcar that arrives with a heavy load after a long wait, and they may not even be able to board.

The KPI needs to be revised so that vehicle bunching cannot produce statistics showing an acceptable quality of service.  As things stand, it would be easy to achieve a target of 2/3 of trips within an acceptable headway and still have quite ragged service especially on “frequent” routes.

Where headways are wider (some off-peak services and especially those with branches), on time performance is much more important.  Riders would like to plan their travel based on when a bus is supposed to appear rather than having to face waits of 20 minutes or more.

At a route level, an index is required to track service quality not  just at the route’s peak point, but at termini and common short-turn points.  Some routes have multiple peak points, and reporting only on one of them can misrepresent what many riders actually experience.

A sad commentary on the reliability of the SRT is that its service target is to operate 80% of scheduled trips.  Whether this will happen in a snowy winter remains to be seen.

Elevators and escalators are supposed to be 97% available.  However, I understand that this status is of about 9am and does not reflect whatever outages may occur through the day.  Moreover, devices that are out of service for maintenance don’t count against the target.  Unfortunately, a rider who cannot use stairs only cares that they cannot use their station.

As of May 16, 2012, there are seven escalators listed as out of service by the TTC not including devices at Union Station affected by the second platform project.  From a rider’s point of view, these are just as unavailable as a bus or streetcar that shows up after a long gap or hopelessly late.  They are a service that is expected but not available.

Outages for planned maintenance should be included in the stats, even if as a separate category.  Availability stats should be based on all-day operations, not once-a-day surveys.  (Note that it is not necessary to physically visit every station, but simply to log trouble calls that come in.)

When I spoke with the TTC about the fundamental problems in their statistics and goals, they freely admit that these just are not good enough.  However, management and Commissioners are now trumpeting a scorecard of success just at a time when they really need to set the standards higher.  All those green checkmarks will change at least to yellow if not red when the bar is raised.  TTC management and staff must be ready to accept the need for improvement against goals and measurements that reflect what passengers actually see day-to-day.

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Service Changes Effective June 18, 2012

The TTC will implement many service changes on June 18, 2012 mostly for seasonal changes in demand.  The lion’s share of these are service cuts, with a few increases.  These are detailed on the first six pages of the document linked below.

Construction will continue in many parts of the city notably affecting the streetcar system.

Waterfront / Spadina

The separate operation of 509 Harbourfront and 510 Spadina will continue into June, but the Spadina streetcar service will be replaced with buses running in mixed traffic to permit construction.  This includes both track repairs and changes to the safety islands in anticipation of the new LFLRVs and the implementation of the Presto fare card.

Service on 511 Bathurst will be increased to absorb some of the traffic that might otherwise attempt to use the 510 Spadina service.

Whether this arrangement, with buses stuck in the often-jammed traffic lanes of Spadina, will work at all remains to be seen.  I cannot help wondering why the work is not staged in such a way that buses could use the right-of-way for at least part of the distance with police assistance at merge points.

Welding of new rail for the reconstruction of track on Queen’s Quay is now in progress in front of the Redpath’s Sugar site.  Tentative plans have streetcar service coming off of the 509 Harbourfront car at the end of July for the beginning of construction.

Queen Street East / McCaul Street

Work will continue on Queen near Russell Carhouse, but the reconstruction of McCaul Street will close McCaul Loop.  During this period, the branch of the 501 operating from Russell to McCaul will be extended to Wolseley Loop at Bathurst Street.  Whether it will actually reach this destination in the time allowed is quite another matter, and I expect to see a lot of cars short-turning.

Dufferin Street

Dufferin Street will be closed to transit between King and Queen for track and water main work.  The branches of 29 Dufferin which normally operate to Dufferin Loop will be short-turned at Queen via Gladstone.  The branches which operate to the Princes’ Gate will divert via Queen, Shaw and King around the construction zone.

2012.06.18 Service Changes