At its recent marathon meeting, the TTC considered an update on the Customer Service initiative.  Thanks to two other long items (Ashbridge Carhouse and Service Cuts), the actual discussion on this report did not occur until very late in the evening.  The report on the agenda contains the following recommendations:

1. Receive the attached matrix updating the status of the recommendations contained in the Customer Service Advisory Panel report, dated August 23, 2010; and

2. Approve the creation of the Customer Service Advisory Group, to include Commissioners, outside Customer Service specialists, the Chief General Manager and appropriate staff; and

3. Endorse in principle the draft Customer Service Business Plan, as detailed in the staff presentation.

[Updated February 9, 2011 at 9:50 am]

This was amended by the Commission as follows:

i)    That the TTC endorse the establishment of a skill-based
Commission and work in partnership with the city on a model for the TTC.

That consideration be given to the establishment of a citizen steering committee to oversee and provide input into the model.

ii)   That the Chair of the Customer Service Sub-Committee work to establish a process for citizen representatives on the Customer Service Advisory Panel.

The first staff recommendation merely updates the Commission on the area of responsibility and status within the organization for various ways in which the TTC will seek to improve itself in response to the Customer Service Advisory Panel report.

The second recommendation is notable for the absence of one group on the recommended panel:  customers.  To her credit, Chair Karen Stintz moved an amendment to correct this.  How the representatives of customers will be selected remains to be seen.

The third recommendation is a Trojan Horse.  The Business Plan to which it refers exists only in a presentation made at a busy TTC meeting, not available for review in advance, and not published since on the TTC’s website.  (The failure to publish material of this nature is an ongoing problem with the TTC’s site as compared to the City’s site where presentations generally appear before, concurrently with or at worst shortly after the meetings at which they are seen.)

Indeed, this is not a “business plan” in the sense that it might give an overview of how the many hoped-for improvements for the TTC’s business would be implemented. Instead it is a grab-bag of projects, many of which have little to do with short-to-medium term customer service or satisfaction, or with the original Advisory Panel’s report, and a decidedly thin attention to customer-related issues.

Commissioner Minnan-Wong favoured approval of only the first two recommendations, but lost out to the Chair’s position that the whole package should go forward.  This was a mistake, and I can only hope that we are not told in a few months that the more dubious initiatives have now been “approved in principle”.

There are good points within the whole, but they are drowned by the presence of projects that have no business in this plan.  I cannot help being reminded of the perversion of the Ridership Growth Strategy (a scheme for low-cost, short-term improvements) by amendment to insert subway construction to keep management happy.

Let’s have a look under the covers at this presentation and plan.

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Update 4 on February 9, 2011 at 9:30 am:

I have now received the official text of the amendments passed by the Commission to the staff recommendations:

i)    That staff review all of the routes and services prior to the implementation date to ensure that no routes were improperly assessed under this criteria.
ii)     That service re-allocations, including minor reductions and improvements, be reported to the Commission on a quarterly, or semi-annual basis, based on the service thresholds established by the Commission.
iii)    That TTC management staff be requested to report back to the Commission on the accuracy of ridership on transit routes that are affected and may qualify to have the service reinstated where the ridership trend may be justified.

Update 3 on February 5, 2011 at 10:30 am:

A section has been added at the end discussing the proportion of Ridership Growth Strategy service improvements that have not been affected by these service cuts.

It is fashionable in the current regime to knock anything done by the Miller/Giambrone administration at the TTC, of which RGS was a major initiative.  Saying that the vast majority of the proposed cuts are (or were) to services that were implemented under RGS gives the impression that RGS was a failure.  In fact, half of RGS additions to hours of service, and all of the headway improvements remain in place.  One might say that there is a mandate for the Ridership Growth Strategy.

One cannot expect a largely new Commission to be aware of these facts, but it is disappointing that TTC staff never pointed them out either in reports or in responses to questions at Commission meetings.

Update 2 on February 3, 2011 at 5:00 pm: A section has been added at the end of the article reviewing some of the planned cutbacks from the viewpoint of alternative ways to deliver service as well as the compound effect of several cuts on routes serving the same area.

Updated February 3, 2011 at 3:00 pm: A section has been added after the main article detailing the positions taken by each member of the Commission.

February 2, 2011, will be remembered as the longest TTC board meeting to date (and I have been attending since late 1972) starting at 1:00 pm and ending after 10:00 pm, but its infamy rests with the abuse suffered by the public at the hands of the Commission.

Beginning at about 4:00 pm (after a long series of public deputations and a vote on the proposed Ashbridge Maintenance and Storage Facility, about which more in a later post), the Commission began to hear deputations on the proposed service cuts.  The speakers list had 140 names when we began.  A few were added along the way, and by the end of the deps at 8:49 pm, many had given up waiting for their turn.  I will write in more detail about the type of issues raised, but the treatment the public received, especially by the Chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, deserves special mention.

Many people spoke to the hardships that cuts to their bus routes would bring, while many others spoke to the general issue that transit service should exist as a basic part of the city.  Some services won’t do well, but citizens deserved access to their homes and workplaces.

Some of the deputants took time off work to attend the meeting and speak out for transit service and most were not, like me, “professional” attendees at the TTC.  They waited a long time to speak, and those who stayed to the bitter end, waited even longer to find out if they had been heard.

Stintz agreed that, yes, service “reallocations” were the last choice in the tools available to a transit system in meeting growing demands on the system overall, but argued that what staff had recommended was “the greater good for riders”.  Those words will haunt her.  They should be posted on every service change notice at every affected bus stop.

For the greater good, you no longer will have service.

By the time she addressed her little homily to the multitude, thanking them profusely for their passion about transit, it was clear from other Commissioners’ comments that reversing any of the proposals was a lost cause.  We could have saved a great deal of time if, back at the start of the meeting, Stintz had announced that a straw poll of the Commission showed that all of the cuts would be approved, and the deputants should just leave now.

The real insult came in Stintz’ characterization of riders’ pleas as being from self-interest, from saving their own routes at the expense of riders on busier routes elsewhere.  That completely misrepresented the majority of the presentations.  Some spoke of special needs for residents in neighbourhoods.  Some spoke of safety walking late at night.  Some showed that TTC riding counts were clearly off because actual usage was higher than TTC stats claimed.

I will return to the arguments in more detail in an update to this article, but a common thread was that there was more to a transit route than the riding counts, counts that many did not believe anyhow.  Given the previous flagrant errors in the TTC’s analysis, it wasn’t a stretch to suggest that the counts were wrong too.

Stintz wished that all the riders who will benefit, eventually, from improved service could have attended to show their support.  Of course those riders at least have a bus, crowded though it may be.

A mark of a civilized city is that it looks out for everyone, not just those with power, or money, or those whose demands on the municipal infrastructure can be cheaply served.  We built the city as it is, hard-to-serve subdivisions and all, and we are stuck with the legacy of that built form.  As a city, we owe decent service to our residents all the way from the thousands on rush hour subway trains to the dozens on late night buses.

Karen Stintz prefers to set neighbour against neighbour with the strong, the numerous, getting not just all of the pie, but the crumbs too.

That’s not my Toronto.

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Today, the TTC held a special meeting to consider revised budget information in advance of a City Budget Committee meeting later this week.

When the Mayor announced that he did not favour a fare hike in 2011, this cut $24-million from the TTC’s projected revenue for the year.  $16m of that was made up with added City subsidy, and the remaining $8m was left for the TTC to find internally.

The proposed service “reallocation” would have saved $7m to be used for upgraded services elsewhere in the network, but the decision to roll back some of the planned changes reduces the savings to $4m and creates an additional $3m hole.  This brings us to an $11m total requirement.

The TTC has now recalculated its projected revenue based on the higher anticipated riding (487m vs 483m in the original budget) and on a higher anticipated average fare (1.5 cents more per trip).  These combine to add $7m to the projected revenue.

Additional savings will come from:

• Less overtime ($1m) and less hiring to provide for filling open work (35 positions, no dollar value).  These are related in that shifts with no assigned crews must be operated by spare operators or by overtime.  The combined effect of these “savings” may be that some service will not make it to the streets especially during bad weather when absenteeism tends to be higher and the desirability of overtime lower.
• Fewer Supervisors ($1m).  Plans to add 17 Supervisors for better on-street route supervision are deferred.
• Bus operator recertification ($1m).  The planned change in the recertification cycle from 5 to 3 years (so that bus standards match those for rail modes) will not be implemented.
• Gapping ($1m).  Vacancies will not be filled immediately as they occur, and restructuring of the workforce will be used to take up the slack.
• Escalator maintenance helpers ($.2m).  This is a program set to begin late in 2011 that would allow more flexibility in the use of trades staff for escalator repairs.
• 28 capital budget positions are dropped by reducing the scope of the Bus Rebuild Program and deferring the Fare Validation Equipment Project (about which I will write separately).
• 3 operating budget positions in IT are dropped by not converting contractors to staff and absorbing the workload within the existing complement.

Some of the items above directly affect the rollout of Customer Service initiatives which I will describe in a separate article now in preparation.

A critical paragraph is at the bottom of page 1:

“This process will … permit us to decide in June if we are in a position to recommend adding service in September to address ridership growth consistent with our 2011 projections of 487m customers.”

To put this another way, the statements, often made, that “reallocations” of service effective in May would go “for the greater good” to other routes, may turn out to be a false promise.  If ridership and, especially, revenues stay strong through the next few months, the TTC may feel confident enough to actually improve service in September.  However, what was only last week a sure thing, the deal that gave the “reallocations” a patina of respectability, may already be coming unglued.

Updated February 2, 2011 at 8:10 am:

The staff report regarding proposed service cuts is now online.  The “Justification” section is worth repeating here:

The Commission should approve the service eliminations/re-allocations, as described in this report and as detailed in Appendix 1, because ridership is continuing to increase on the TTC and is projected to reach an all-time record-high of 487-million this year, an increase of 10-million customers over 2010. There is a need to add service to accommodate these additional customers, but sufficient funding is not available, so some of this funding must be found by re-allocating resources away from more lightly-used services to other services where better use can be made of the resources.

The process which has been followed in order to identify services for elimination/ re-allocation has been objective, consistent, and data-driven – in order to ensure fair and consistent treatment of all parts of Toronto – and reflects the concerns and input expressed by the public at the Open Houses held on this matter and in correspondence provided to the TTC.

The revised recommendations achieve the best possible balance between saving costs for the purpose of re-allocation to routes in greater need of resources, and retaining services which the public strongly advocated.  [Emphasis added]

In other words, these cutbacks are implemented in response to a funding situation.  Whether we call this a “reallocation” or a “budget cut”, the effect is the same.  There is still no sign that the Commission will address the general issue of “reallocation” as a way to handle riding growth on the busiest parts of the system.

As for the remark about the “objective, consistent and data-driven” process, I must point that detailed data published on this site revealed the TTC had done a poor job of following its own criteria.

[Original post from January 31 below]

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Updated January 25 at 7:30 am:

At the TTC public consultation on January 24, officials strongly denied the claim in the Globe and Mail story quoted below that service cuts would result in job losses at the TTC.  The article was modified slightly overnight removing the reference to follow-on cuts from lost riding on routes that would remain.

The bulk of the additional staffing is at the Toronto Transit Commission, which is adding 376 jobs for capital projects such as a major rebuild of the bus fleet, and 221 jobs for operations, including more drivers to accommodate skyrocketing ridership.

That number will go up if Mr. Ford can’t persuade council to reduce hours on 48 little-used bus routes, a proposal that is supposed to save the equivalent of 87 drivers’ positions.

TTC management continues to plan for service increases addressing growing demand on the system in fall 2011.

Many attending the TTC’s consultation meeting were annoyed at the format where TTC staff approached the issue as one where people needed to be told what their alternative routes for travel might be.  The opportunity for concerted public outrage was, by this tactic, short-circuited — good for the staff and politicians, but less than satisfying for TTC riders who wanted to demand answers, not be placated.

The displays of each affected route showed the numbers of riders affected by each change, but notably they did not show the riders/vehicle hour values which, in some cases, crests the 15/hour screenline the TTC arbitrarily chose for this exercise.

Moreover, maps of overlapping routes were distant from each other so that the combined effect of removing several lines was not immediately obvious.

Later in the evening, I appeared on Goldhawk Live to discuss the proposed cuts.  Former TTC Vice-Chair Joe Mihevc was also on the show, but nobody from the current TTC Commission would come on the program.  Only three of the Commissioners were at the Metro Hall meeting.  As for the other six, they were, one assumes, too busy to appear on this popular public affairs program.

Updated January 24 at 4:45 pm:

Kelly Grant reports in the Globe & Mail about the staffing effects of the TTC’s budget.

The bulk of the staff increase for day-to-day operations come from the TTC, which proposes adding 221 total positions at a cost of just over $20-million, most for extra drivers to accommodate skyrocketing ridership.

The transit agency expects to axe 116 drivers jobs by shrinking hours on 48 little-used bus routes – 87 jobs for the route reductions and the equivalent of 29 jobs to reflect presumed decreased ridership on surviving hours on those lines – but it proposes adding 337 positions.

Of the additional jobs, 252 are operators, 41 are for training, technology and maintenance and 35 are for station managers and other customer-service enhancements.

The 221 positions mentioned above were listed in the presentation to the Commission of the TTC’s Operating Budget (table, page 8).  This is the net change in approved staffing, and it includes many operators for extra services.  There is no reference to the 116 positions, and this would, in any event, be a temporary situation if the equivalent service were to be restored elsewhere in the system in the fall.

The interesting part is the reference to presumed decrease in riding on the affected routes during “surviving hours”.  This confirms that the TTC acknowledges that when service is cut for part of the day, it can affect riding at other times.  Moreover, this implies that service at these times might be cut if riding drops enough.  This is precisely how the death spiral of a transit system begins.

We can pretend that it doesn’t matter because the affected routes are small and unimportant, and most of the cuts are late on Sundays when we should all be home in bed.  The real world doesn’t work that way.

Updated January 24 at 12:15 pm:

A detailed review of each proposed cut has been added to this post as a separate file.  If cuts are to be made, some are more obvious candidates than others.  Although the TTC claims that all of the proposals received careful evaluation, I find this hard to believe, and some of these definitely need review.  There are also cases where route and/or schedule restructuring may improve the situation without disservicing riders.  This is the sort of analysis one would expect from the TTC, but which the haste and political pressure of the moment have prevented.

2011.01.24 Why Are You Losing Your Bus

Updated January 24 at 8:45 am:

This morning, I was on CBC’s Metro Morning talking about the proposed cuts to many routes, and this interview was followed by one with TTC Chair Karen Stintz.

The podcast is now available online (11:15 am).

I talked about the TTC balancing its budget with service cuts and asked what they would do in 2012, but oddly enough Stintz replied that the cuts are not a budgetary tactic.  They are a reinvestment of resources where ridership actually is.  Two years after their implementation, the new services have not proved themselves, and the money is going elsewhere.  Riders will have, generally, a five minute walk to a nearby route.

This is all very well, but if we start talking about increasing walks for riders in areas with low demand and infrequent service, we will see the network gradually disappear.  Also, just because another route is five minutes away doesn’t mean that it is actually useful to a would-be rider.  The TTC has estimated that it will lose only one in five of the existing users of the services that would disappear, on average, although the percentages vary considerably from a low of 8% to a high of 62%.

Going in to the studio, I took the 5:15 King car from Broadview Station, and over the trip south and west to John Street, it handled 19 passengers, me included.  The peak load on the car was 12.  I am quite sure someone might suggest that a car every 15 minute is excessive and the TTC could make do with less service to be “more efficient”.  However, if that car ran every half hour, I wouldn’t bother waiting for it unless I was really a captive rider.

That’s the problem with “efficiency”: it’s easy to point to a half-empty bus or streetcar and say “get rid of it”, but that’s the path to dismal transit service, “service” in name only.  This year, we will cut 20% of the bus service on Sundays after 10 pm.  What’s next?

If Chair Stintz wants to do something really useful, she can start a public discussion about what constitutes good service.  How often should vehicles arrive at stops?  How full should they be?  Should we demand that long routes have more riders to balance off the cost of the longer trips they take?  Should we cancel little-used express buses (even if they are a Commissioner’s pet project) so that their resources can be allocated elsewhere?  Should unused subway stations close unless they generate enough traffic?

As we head into a very difficult year for the City’s budget and transit subsidies, the important question is what service we should have.  Once that is answered, we can find ways to pay for that service.  Reluctantly, we may accept less than perfection, but will know what our goal is and what we traded off for tax cuts or subsidies elsewhere.

[The original article from January 21 follows below.]

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