The TTC’s Audit Committee recently considered the Draft Financial Statement for 2010, a report that will likely show up on the regular meeting agenda in May. As usual, the interesting parts are buried in the notes.
Last fall, I wrote about the manner in which the TTC is financed and the baffling array of programs and reserve funds through which money flows to various parts of the TTC operating and capital budget. This article continues with the info for 2010.
The Ford Administration and its followers at City Hall would have us believe that transit developments in Toronto can be had essentially free of public cost and that the private sector, whatever that means, will pony up the investment to build the subway.
Almost as soon as the scheme for a privately financed Sheppard Subway was announced, the wheels started to come off the plan. Actually, “come off” assumes that it had wheels to begin with, and statements by the Fords showed clearly that they had not worked through the details.
Oddly enough, their hands were out for any public sector funds that might be available including $330-million or so originally earmarked by Ottawa for the Sheppard LRT, up to $650m in “left over” funding that might not be needed for the Eglinton tunnel project by Queen’s Park, and whatever investment could be pried loose from Ottawa’s “PPP Canada”. Additional money might come from a quick sale of waterfront lands by the City to would-be developers.
The scale of the Sheppard project may well shrink to only the eastern leg from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre so that the total cost stays in the $2-billion range.
Recently, I learned that Queen’s Park had offered $2b toward the Sheppard Subway provided that the Fords would allow the eastern part of Eglinton to remain on the surface, but this was turned down flat. So intransigent is the Mayor on the subject of incursion by transit into road space that the possibility of substantial funding for his pet project was not an option worth embracing.
You may have noticed by now that there isn’t a lot of private sector money in this story, except for the buy-out of waterfront lands, and that’s a sale of public assets, not a private sector investment in transit.
Meanwhile, we hear a lot about private sector investment elsewhere, usually with little context. Vancouver’s Canada Line comes up now and then, including in comments on this site, and some people think it’s a private sector show all the way. In fact, various public agencies have over $1-billion in the project, more than half of the total cost. Even the “private” partner, a joint venture, includes investment agencies that manage public funds including pension plans.
Probably the most successful example of investment-supported transit is in Hong Kong, but this must be seen in the context of local conditions. Not only is Hong Kong an extremely dense city, it is one in which the land ownership and planning are firmly in public hands. Private buildings abound, but they sit on land leased from the public sector which reaps the benefit of land development. (For an extensive look at the Hong Kong system’s financial and planning development, see Rail+Property Development by Cervero and Murakami [14MB]).
Leaving aside whether Toronto would ever support densities such as those found in major Asian cities like Hong Kong, there are important issues that do not get discussed here.
PPPs are notorious for requiring careful structure of contracts, performance criteria, penalties and ongoing management. Toronto’s political culture prefers to walk away from such responsibility in the public sector.
One way or another, Toronto will commit a pot load of money to a Sheppard subway of dubious value, and force Queen’s Park to bury the entire Eglinton line at great cost. Billions will disappear into these projects while other parts of the transit system beg for funding.
The private sector may wind up funding some portion of the Sheppard project, but transit overall is still very much a public issue. Long term funding will depend on public revenues. We cannot avoid the debate on fares, tolls or taxes, with the assumption that magically money in the private sector will build, operate and maintain our transit system. Somewhere, the public will spend more, or sell assets, or give away benefits as a tradeoff. Nothing is free.
On April 6, NextBus introduced a new data feed structure. The major change in this version is that the stop nomenclature used internally by the application has been revised to match the stop numbers used for the TTC’s vehicle arrival text message system. Other updates include some schedule related information in the data feed (run, crew and trip numbers) that will probably be of more use to an internal app that “knows” about the schedules.
This change has side-effects both for users of the NextBus site, and for 3rd-party applications based on the data feed.
Any NextBus user who has bookmarked a stop for easy retrieval will find that the bookmark does not work. The reason is that the bookmark includes the old stop identification, and this does not exist any more. You will need to recreate the bookmark.
Users of Whereismystreetcar will find that it is working, sort of, while the author adapts his code to the new data feeds. There is a similar problem with old bookmarks on this app, and any you have created must be redone.
I don’t know about other apps based on the NextBus feed, but if users could let me know what’s working and what’s not, I can maintain status info here.
Updated April 6, 2011 at 7:20 pm:
I forgot to mention in my earlier update that there was talk going around the meeting that only half of the Sheppard Subway scheme (the eastern half) might be pursued in the short term (the next decade) to keep the cost down to $2 billion and change. This echoes a comment by Vice Chair Peter Milczyn in yesterday’s Toronto Sun.
Updated April 6, 2011 at 5:00 pm:
At the Commission meeting, very little happened.
The new, but not yet official, Chief Customer Service Officer was introduced and he made a few remarks about his hopes for the new position. He has a real challenge in front of him. Customer Service may be the kind of thing Commissioners love to smile brightly and gush about, but wait until we start talking money, or the negative effects of cutbacks on the perceived quality of the system.
As expected, the proposed split of the 12 Kingston Road bus so that half of its service would run via past Variety Village (via Birchmount and Danforth) was approved. This will begin operation on May 8, but the community shuttle bus (run by Wheel Trans) from Main Station will continue to run until Victoria Park Station (route 12’s terminus) becomes accessible later this year.
Unlike the previous meeting, Commissioner Minnan-Wong did not belabour the public session with inquiries about contract cost changes. Some of these questions should be asked, but without implying that every change is a sign of waste and incompetence. Whether he was equally silent in the private session before the main meeting, I don’t know.
However, in what must be the greatest example of how petty the new Commission (and the Ford regime) can be, there was continued discussion of the fact that former Chair Giambrone overspent his 2010 expense allowance by approximately $3,400. The issue will come back to the May Commission meeting, and there were dark hints that more serious measures would be taken. Considering that for many years, none of the Commissioners or Chairs has used all of their expense budget, this is really small potatoes. However, it’s more important than worrying about how to pay for a $4.2-billion subway with magic beans.
The big issue, relatively speaking, was the new Toronto Transit Infrastructure Limited report. This company, renamed and resurrected from an older, inactive TTC subsidiary, will be used as a home for work on the “Toronto Subway Project” (the official name for the Sheppard Subway extensions in the Memorandum of Understanding with Queen’s Park). It has $160,000 sitting in the bank from the original setup capital out of TTC when it was created, and retained earnings from work performed years ago. This nest egg will allow it to operate without any funding approvals for the short term.
We learned that Gordon Chong, a former Councillor and Commissioner, has been retained at $100k/year as President, CEO, Secretary, Treasurer and Co-Chair. The other directors and officers who are members of Council will not be paid for their work on TTIL.
A rather convoluted motion was passed by the Commission stating that it would approve paying invoices on TTIL’s behalf provided that a mechanism was set up for Council to fund them. Presumably this would be required once they burn through their $160k nest egg.
Former Vice-Chair Mihevc spoke as a deputant, and raised a number of issues about the Sheppard Subway notably the lack of detailed information on the way it will actually be funded, what the effects will be for ongoing system subsidy requirements (as compared with the Transit City LRT lines originally proposed), and what type of service would be offered to those areas where the LRT plans have been cancelled.
A report on what to do with Finch West is expected back later this year, and the 2012 budget review will include provision for whatever is recommended. Obviously, this won’t involve any significant construction such as a BRT lane and stations.
The Commission swatted these requests aside, and Vice Chair Milczyn said that “we don’t need to know what future subsidies might be” because in every past case the TTC has always just opened new lines and absorbed the cost. The desire to not debate the wisdom of the Sheppard proposal, which hasn’t been approved by anyone yet other than the Mayor, was quite clear. After the meeting, a press scrum with Chair Karen Stintz was notable for its evasiveness. In the end, it all comes back to “the Mayor wants it”.
As long as Council has enough cheerleaders who let Mayor Ford get away with this sort of thing, it’s hard to understand why we even bother holding public meetings.
The original post from April 2 outlining major agenda issues (most of which were not discussed at all), follows the break.
To everyone’s great surprise, the TTC recently discovered that fare evasion is a rising problem on the transit system, according to reports in the Globe and the Star. Is Toronto becoming a city of transit cheaters, or is something more subtle at work here?
Over many years, when the subject of fare evasion came up at Commission meetings, the standard line from management was that Toronto has a very low evasion rate compared to other cities. Indeed, a 2007 report on the “Business Case” for Smartcards talks about Toronto’s low fare evasion rate and the role new fare technologies might play. Counterfeit media are considered to be more of a problem than evasion, and the TTC worries that Smartcards for concession fares may be abused at automatic entrances.
The low evasion rate was routinely cited as a reason that the TTC did not aggressively pursue fare inspections because the cost was greater than the potential revenue gain.
Times have changed. Finding “waste” is the flavour of the day. Moreover, as the stories linked here make clear, this debate is in the larger context of the TTC’s Special Constable force. In 2010, the City Budget Committee and Council directed the TTC to reduce this force, and the Toronto Police Service has taken over their function for Criminal Code and other aspects of policing. This issue came up again in the 2011 Budget, and a City report gives the background information.
It is quite clear that TTC fare inspectors do not require the full powers formerly accorded to Special Constables, but TTC management is exploiting the current financial situation and calls for crackdowns on freeloaders as a wedge to reopen the question of having their own, dedicated force.
Strangely, we find that fare evasion, long considered a non-issue in Toronto, is suddenly a problem. Have the numbers really changed, or is the jump from past results simply the effect of better enforcement?
Recently, I was riding the Queen car and was asked to show my pass. This is the first time in over a decade that this has happened. All door loading is regularly used on Queen, and the occasional freeloader will hop on for a short trip — after all, with almost no inspection, the odds of getting caught riding for five minutes is quite small.
According to the Star’s article, transfer fraud has jumped. TTC transfer enforcement was simplified some years back by the inclusion of a prominent day number on all transfers, and different colours for each day. However, a parallel evolution was for operators to avoid confrontation with passengers over fares. Indeed, even with polite riders, when 30 people all board in a crowd, checking all of their fares is not easy.
For those who do pay fares, we know that over half of all adult trips are done using a Metropass, and there tend to be more passes used on frequent downtown routes because the population of heavy transit users is greatest there. This begs the question of what the evasion rate is among those passengers who don’t have a pass, those for whom there is an incentive to cheat.
The Queen car’s 50,000 daily riders represent annual revenue of about $30-million, but over half of this will be from passes and various forms of discount media. If the TTC is really losing $1.2m annually from transfer fraud, this is a large proportion of the riders using transfers. Catching them should be like the proverbial fish in a barrel, but two fare inspectors working the entire line won’t bring in a big haul.
The move to any new fare system with any kind of self-service validation (e.g. Presto) requires that the system be enforced, and even the TTC acknowledges that it should start more aggressive fare inspection on the streetcar routes, at least, as a prelude to the introduction of the new fleet where all-door loading will be standard.
Oddly enough, the TTC still wants to keep its Special Constables (or whatever they are to be called) deployed on the subway system, with a few left to handle the Queen car on weekdays. That’s not a scheme designed to catch fare cheats, but simply a continuation of the way the Special Constables have been used since their inception. If the TTC really wants to improve their haul of fares, then Special Constables should actually spend more time on this activity.
Otherwise, it’s hard to believe that “fare evasion” is anything more than the latest excuse to perpetuate the TTC’s own security service.
In past articles, I have reported the growth in TTC capital spending and the concurrent problem in funding for the system. Over coming months, the City of Toronto and its agencies, including the TTC, will struggle to create a viable financial plan for 2012 and beyond. This will include a five-year projection on both the operating and capital sides, an exercise that will (or should) frighten those concerned with the survival of public services. However, it should also bring some discipline to year-over-year budgets and project approvals by demanding better accuracy in projections and clear justification for “surprise” projects in the out years.
The TTC capital budget is a formidable document with details in two binders of over 1,600 pages. The summary form is tens of pages long. Parts of the public presentation are so dense that one page brought a laughable comment from Vince Rodo, the TTC’s General Manager — Executive: “You’re not supposed to be able to read that”. A joke, yes, but a sad comment on the level of detail the Commission and the public see when confronted with a multi-billion dollar budget.
I have already written at length about the 2011 Capital Budget, and in this article I will focus on changes to the budget as it passed through the City’s approval process as well as the outlook for 2012 and beyond. Continue reading
The recent TTC meeting saw Commissioner Minnan-Wong digging into questions about rising costs on two TTC projects, the design of Finch West Station and the resignalling of the south end of the Yonge subway.
Reports asking for increased spending authorization come through the Commission quite regularly, and Minnan-Wong has raised the question of “out of control spending” at Council on past occasions. Just to declare my political leanings, I have never been a fan of the Councillor, even though there are certainly legitimate questions to be asked when project costs rise unexpectedly.
Unfortunately, Minnan-Wong tends to approach these issues as if someone is trying to pull the wool over his eyes and implies outright incompetence as the starting point for discussion. This approach brings more confrontation than information. Let’s have a look at the two projects in question and consider how information about them (and their many kin in the overall budget) might be better presented.
The Globe and Mail and The Star report that David Gunn will return to Toronto as an unpaid consultant to review and advise on the TTC’s budget problems going into the difficult 2012 year.
I have two articles in the works discussing some of the budgeting issues, the first of which should appear later this evening.
(To my regular readers, sorry that I have not been posting much lately.)
Updated March 1, 2011 at 7:00 pm:
To no great surprise, the TTC Board today endorsed the staff proposal to do away with Post-Secondary Student Passes for part time students. This was done after a few hours of well presented, cogent deputations from a variety of speakers who, for their troubles, were greeted with a Blackberry wielding board who spent little of their time paying attention. In one case, a presenter was finishes, but Chair Karen Stintz was so busy with her email that she didn’t notice for some time.
The common thread through the deps was that the concept of “part time student” is not consistently defined either between institutions or even programs within the same university or college. About 20% of students today are “part timers” mainly for economic reasons (they cannot afford to pay the fees for a full time program in one go) or because the program they are in is defined as “part time” (regardless of its actual course load). This cohort of students is growing, and they are also penalized by being ineligible for various loans and grants offered to “full time” students.
Yet another group not covered by the policy are those who are in “certificate” programs which may have just as heavy a course load, but don’t lead to a degree.
As one speaker put it, “students are students”, but the convoluted definitions and practices lead to artificial distinctions between them.
At the end of the deputations, Commissioner Palacio put forward a motion in the best tradition of appearing to be supportive while doing precisely nothing. He wanted the Commission to reiterate that part time students have access to the “VIP Pass” discount program, and wanted the staff to write to university and college administrators urging that they extend their current VIP Pass program for staff to the part time students.
This proposal, which passed, of course, insulted the speakers who know perfectly well that a VIP Pass (which costs about $10 more than a student pass) was available, provided that their institution actually was part of the VIP program. The problem is that this is not universal, and depends on an institution (or a group like a student union) setting itself up as a VIP Pass vendor.
Finally, Chair Stintz thanked everyone for “making their voices heard”. “Heard” is not the word I would use, as “listen” was certainly not what much of the Commission was doing most of the time. If she had really “heard”, she would have acknowledged that there is a problem with definitions, not to mention the larger issue of other groups who make claims for discounted fares, and sent the whole issue off for a detailed report. This change won’t have much effect until fall 2011, and there was no need for a definitive decision today.
But no, that’s not what happened. Mayor Ford’s minions were in and out of the meeting to ensure that the vote went the right way, and the students didn’t have a chance.
[The original article from February 28 follows the break below.]
The list of changes for the “March” (actually almost April) schedule period is rather short because the TTC deferred implementation of service cuts on lightly used routes to May 8.
One intriguing side-effect of that decision is that the amount of service operated will be “over budget” because the cuts were incorporated in budget plans in November 2010, long before there was any public discussion, and at a time when rumours of cuts were met with denials from the TTC.
In our wonderfully new “transparent” Toronto, how many other changes are lurking, unpublished, in the budget?
Changes in Hours of Service
53F Steeles East Staines Express: Two new morning trips will be added weekdays from Morningside at about 5:21 and 5:48 am.
Diversions
505 Dundas: With the resumption of watermain work on Dundas, streetcars will divert via Spadina and College until late June. Headways at all times will not be changed, but one car will be added to the route to handle the longer round trip times. There will not be any replacement bus service on Dundas.
504 King: Reconstruction of Roncesvalles Avenue will resume to allow work by Enbridge Gas as well as completion of the sidewalk reconstruction. During this period, the same bus shuttle that operated in 2010 will run from Dundas West Station to Sunnyside Loop, and King cars will loop through Roncesvalles Carhouse. The Jane night bus, which runs on Roncesvalles, will not be affected.
In May, work is expected to begin on track replacement and paving between Roncesvalles and Close on King Street. This will complete the rebuilding of the King route to the new resilient track standards. While this is in progress, King and Lake Shore cars will divert via Queen and Shaw. The work is expected to be completed before the CNE (with associated traffic problems in Parkdale) opens in mid-August.
Unlike the period of watermain work on King West in 2010, there will not be any replacement bus service on King west of Shaw. I can’t help wondering why the TTC doesn’t simply route the 504 to Dufferin Loop so that service would be maintained for riders from Shaw to Dufferin whose access to Queen is limited by the rail corridor.
Steve Munro 