The Toronto Mayoral By-Election is just under a month away, and candidates pump out announcements daily, often with a transit spin. In this article I will look at the transit-related issues they are trying to address (or in some cases avoid).
All of this takes place in a strange world where the availability of money to pay for anything is suspect. Is a promise is even credible let alone affordable? Many of the platforms overlap, and so I will take related issues in groups rather than enumerating and critiquing each candidate’s platform.
A month ago, I wrote about what a transit platform should look like:
That sets out my philosophy of what I seek in a candidate, and the short version appears below. If you want the long version, click on the link above.
Service is key. Run as much as possible, everywhere, and run it well.
Build budgets based on what you want to see, not on what you think you can afford. Just getting by is not a recipe for recovery and growth. If the money doesn’t come, then look to “Plan B” but aim for “Plan A”.
Fares are a central part of our transit system, but the question is who should pay and how much. Strive for simplicity. Give discounts where they are truly needed. Make the transit system worth riding so that small, regular increases are acceptable.
Focus on ease of use among transit systems in the GTA, but do not equate “integration” with amalgamated governance.
Transit property: parking or housing?
Foster a culture of advocacy in management and on the TTC Board.
Beware of lines on maps. A “my map vs your map” debate focuses all effort on a handful of corridors while the rest of the network rots.
Plan for achievements in your current term and make sure they actually happen. Longer term is important, but the transit ship is sinking. You are running for office in 2023. Vague promises for the 2030s are cold comfort to voters who have heard it all before.
Full disclosure: I have always maintained an “open door” to anyone who wants to talk transit, and in this round I have been approached by both the Matlow and Chow campaigns for information and advice, as well as some media outlets. This I provided pro bono and without any “leakage” of who asked me what. No other candidates asked. How much of my input shows up in platforms is quite another matter. We shall see as the campaign unfolds.
In a previous article, I presented a proposed way to display service frequency on a route in a manner that, I hoped, would convey the pervasiveness of irregular service, be clear to casual readers, and in a consistent format. Several readers commented on this either on Twitter or via email, and I thank all for their contributions.
One immediate change, which I included in an addendum to the article, was to replace the vehicles/hour counts (which indicated how many buses or streetcars passed a point each hour) with an average wait time for a would-be rider. That time was calculated on a weighted basis to penalize long gaps in service.
The average wait time stat has other uses which I will explore later in this article.
My intent in developing this new type of chart is to add to the repertoire of charts I publish when reviewing a route’s performance and to show how, or if, changes the TTC makes to schedules affect service riders actually encounter.
For those interested in the details, read on. Again, comments are welcome. I would like to nail down the format before launching into a series of route reviews.
Updated May 26, 2023 at 5pm: In response to a reader’s suggestion, I have added a sample chart that includes average wait times for would-be riders in place of the count of vehicles. To jump directly to this update, click here.
In the many articles I have published trying to review service quality on the TTC, one topic has eluded presentation: how to chart service quality over a long period while preserving the hour-by-hour, day-by-day character of the data? That question has several dimensions because a quality metric is not simply a matter of pooling stats and saying that overall things are not too bad, or even worse that service meets some sort of standard on average.
In the past I have published charts showing headways, and others showing how organized (or not) service on a particular day might be, but it has been more difficult to condense months of data for multiple times and locations.
The TTC standard for surface routes is:
On-time performance measures vehicle departures from end terminals. Vehicles are considered on time if they depart within 59 seconds earlier or five minutes later than their scheduled departure time. (-1 to +5)
The intent is to hit this target 90% of the time, but the TTC does not achieve this with values typically falling in the 70-to-85 per cent range. At an individual route level results can be considerably worse. Streetcar routes fared worse with a 50-to-85 per cent range, and the higher end was achieved during the pandemic era when traffic and demand were light. The numbers have fallen since then.
The TTC’s metrics have big credibility problems because they bear little relation to what riders actually experience.
There are three major reasons:
Quality is measured on an all day basis, or worse on longer periods such as months. Variation by day and time is completely obscured by this approach. Reliable service at 10 pm is cold comfort to a rider whose bus has not shown up for 15 minutes in the peak period.
Quality is measured only at terminals, not along routes where various factors can degrade service that might begin well, but quickly deteriorates with bunching and gaps.
Service is measured relative to schedule on the assumption that “on time” performance will automatically be reliable. However, there is considerable leeway in that standard allowing irregular service to be considered “on time”, and the TTC does not even hit their target levels in many cases.
The CEO’s Report tries to work around the limitations of the metric by noting that some routes do farly well while others encounter a variety of problems. With respect to the bus network, the report notes:
Network performance was negatively impacted by the inclement weather the weeks of February 20 to March 10, where over 60 centimetres of snow fell on the city during this time. Weekday On-time performance was 88% for Weeks 7, 11 and 12. During weekends for the period, OTP was 82%. During February, 32 of 159 weekday routes were impacted by construction for at least three weeks of the period. Overall weekday OTP was 88% for the 127 routes not affected by construction:
48 routes were “On-Time” (90% OTP or better).
53 routes were “On the Cusp” (85-90%).
26 routes were “Not On-time” with OTP less than 85%. In summary, 80% of the routes not affected by construction scored 85% or better.
This still does not address reliability issues at the level riders experience. Moreover, for frequent service, riders do not care if a bus is “on time”, only that service is reliable. TTC assumes that on time service will, by definition, produce reliable service, but they don’t actually operate on schedule and fail to measure service as riders see it.
Irregular service also affects crowding because passenger loads are not evenly distributed. If most riders are on full buses, the following half empty vehicles are not part of their experience (except possibly their frustration with a long wait for the advertised “frequent” service). Average crowding stats do not reveal typical riding conditions. (Analysis of crowding is complicated by the limited availability of automatic passenger counter data outside the TTC. I have tried for a few years to obtain this without success.)
The charts show that bunching (headways of two minutes or less) and large gaps (20 minutes or more) are common, and that they exist across the four months of data here. They are not occasional effects, but a basic feature of TTC service. The stats at terminals, where the TTC takes its on time performance measurements, are less than ideal, but the service degrades as buses and streetcars move along their routes. Most riders do not board at terminals.
This article presents a proposed method of charting service quality on routes to provide both the detail of day-by-day, hour-by-hour conditions and a broader overview. The charts are an experiment in condensing a lot of data into a manageable size, but I am not wedded to the format. Comments are welcome. Regular readers will recognize the format from a previous attempt, but I hope this is an improvement.
The goal is to produce something that can track the quality of service over time so that the decline or recovery of TTC routes is clearly visible along with the effectiveness (or not) of any changes to schedules, transit priority or route management.
There are a lot of charts in this article, and it is a long read for those who are interested. Feedback on this method of presentation is most welcome.
Among various problems that became evident with the many route changes on May 7 was the deep mismatch between advertised and delivered service.
Both the 501 to Neville and the 505 to Bingham Loop were often missing in action short turning usually at Woodbine Loop (Kingston Road & Queen, named after the former racetrack).
Aside from the scenic tour the 501 Queen car takes via McCaul, Dundas and Broadview, plus the usual congestion on Dundas Street, another congested location was Broadview northbound between Queen and Dundas.
In that segment, three services, 501 Queen, 505 Dundas and 506 Carlton, were all queuing for the left turn at Dundas, compounded by 504/505 buses attempting to serve the northbound stop while blocking both lanes of traffic.
Under these conditions, it was impossible for any of these services to stay on time. The situation has been partly remedied by using traffic wardens to manage the intersection, but even that depends on ensuring that streetcars get priority all of the time despite the signal setup there.
As the week of May 7 wore on, I noticed that a lot of 506 Carlton cars were not getting east of Broadview. Riders complained about cars going out of service, and I received a tip from a reader about scheduled travel time changes.
This sent me into the electronic versions of TTC schedules which are published for use by trip planning apps and which also are the source for info on their own website. These files give a stop-by-stop schedule for each vehicle on a route and allow very fine-grained examination of the schedule design. What I found was quite surprising.
Over the portion of 506 Carlton common to the March 2023 schedules when all streetcars ran through to Main Station and the May 2023 versions with service diverting to Queen Street East, the running times were substantially shorter in May than in March. The schedule as designed could not be operated, and it has become common practice to turn most of the service back westward from Broadview. Here are charts comparing the scheduled travel times.
The eastbound comparison on the left covers the route from High Park to Broadview where streetcars turn off of their usual route. The westbound comparison covers the route from Parliament, where cars rejoin the route, to High Park. Each dot is one scheduled trip plotted with the departure time on the X-axis (horizontal) and the trip length on the Y-axis (vertical). Values move up and down over the day based on expected conditions on the route.
In almost every case the March travel time is longer than the May time. It is no surprise that streetcars have to be short-turned when the schedules work against them. How the schedules came to be designed this way is a mystery, but it creates big problems for riders.
This sort of thing cannot be corrected overnight, but in the meantime the TTC should formalize the route change and post notices everywhere so that riders know how the route will actually operate. New schedules will come in late July when Metrolinx closes Queen at Degrassi for preparatory work for GO corridor expansion and the Ontario Line, and all of the streetcar routes will shift north to Gerrard. With luck, they will reflect actual travel time requirements.
Shifting the westbound Carlton cars off of Broadview at Dundas reduces the number of turns that the intersection must handle per hour. A related issue will be the degree to which traffic wardens intervene to move transit vehicles through this choke point in the network. Both of these changes improve travel times for 501 Queen and 505 Dundas cars and could contribute to more reliable service east of Queen and Kingston Road to the two terminals. I will be monitoring this over coming weeks.
Footnote:
For the benefit of readers who don’t know the whole context, the 506 Carlton car normally operates to Main Station via Gerrard. During construction at Coxwell, it has been diverted via Broadview and Queen eastbound to Woodbine Loop. The westbound diversion runs via Queen, Broadview, Dundas and Parliament including a north-to-west left turn at Dundas because there is no track for a left turn northbound at Gerrard. (The TTC was planning to add one, but the message was lost somewhere in planning when the intersection was rebuilt.)
Darwin O’Connor has left a comment noting that you can get comparisons of scheduled and actual running times from his site TransSee.ca. Here is a chart comparing the situation for eastbound travel from High Park to Broadview in March (green) and May 2023 (red). The dots show actual travel times while the lines show the scheduled values.
Note that the green dots (March) are almost all below the green line, while the red dots (May) are almost all above the red line showing that with the new schedule cars would always be late, sometimes by a wide margin.
O’Connor notes that this type of analysis chart is available on his site free for the Toronto streetcar routes.
“What would it cost to put service back to pre-pandemic times?”
That question comes my way as riders deal with another round of service cuts, and would-be mayors vie for attention. The answer is not simple, but an unexpected statement at the recent TTC Board meeting surprised me at how low the barrier to full service was claimed to be. Responding to a question from Commissioner/Councillor Chris Moise, the TTC’s CFO stated that the cost would be $69.5 million/year.
Although hardly small change, that is a lot less than the depth of service cuts might imply. That sent me on a dive into TTC budgets and stats to validate the TTC’s claim.
Effective Monday, May 8, the TTC has restored late night service on Lines 1 Yonge-University-Spadina and 2 Bloor-Danforth to every six minutes, seven days/week. This will be done with extra trains to supplement the scheduled service. The change will be formally scheduled in a future update.
Also, with the disappearance of the 503 Kingston Road car and its temporary replacement by the 505 Dundas, the TTC is now operating a supplementary bus service from Queen & Kingston Road to downtown via Queen and King from 7am to 7pm weekdays.
A direct streetcar service will not be possible until work on the Queen Street Don Bridge finishes sometime this summer, but there is another wrinkle. In the summer, Queen east of Broadview will close for Metrolinx bridge work at the future Riverside Station on the Lake Shore East Rail Corridor forcing all streetcars to operate via Gerrard. In turn that cannot begin until water main and track work at Coxwell & Lower Gerrard completes.
The additional subway service is made possible by an unexpectedly lower absentee rate among operators compared to budget. The TTC made a larger provision for covid-related sickness and finds itself with more available staff.
Although month after month of service reductions to fit the available budget dominate transit debates, the TTC forges ahead with their “5-Year Service Plan & Customer Experience Action Plan”. The intent is to develop priorities and strategies for the 2024-2028 period.
Also underway is work on the 2024 Service Plan. This will focus on issues arising from many construction projects.
The work will take place until October 2023 in various stages beginning with a survey available online (it is also available by mail on request).
The elephant in the room through all this is, of course, the future funding status of the TTC and the level of service they can hope to operate with whatever money comes their way. Part of the survey asks which aspects of service should be enhanced or trimmed depending on the availability of funds.
The objectives of the plan are described with this text:
“We consider two major objectives when planning transit services in Toronto:
Maximize mobility and satisfy changing travel needs by ensuring public transit is provided in the right places, at the right times; and
Ensure all TTC transit services are efficient and cost-effective (and therefore affordable).
As we work towards these objectives, we strive to balance the benefits of transit services with the cost of providing them.”
This says quite clearly that money will rule the planning, but what has consistently been missing in TTC plans is a sense of advocacy. “Cost effective” is a term that depends very much on the frame of reference. Service convenience, speed, reliability and comfort all have a value as part of an overall push to move people to transit from cars. It is pointless to trumpet a move to greener buses if those buses provide poor service, or worse, sit in the garage because there is no money to operate them.
“We can’t afford that” is a common response when people ask for better service, but too often we are not told what improvements might cost. We might not have the money today, but good political debate should be informed on the options.
Twenty years ago, an essential part of David Miller’s Ridership Growth Strategy was to say “don’t tell us that we cannot do anything, tell us what our options are and what they will cost”. The decision should be up to politicians and their constituents, not pre-empted by management. Of course, if plans are built under direction to avoid spending more money, then management does what they are told.
Parts of the survey could use more granularity. For example, the response to construction and diversion requirements is very different depending on which part of the city one talks about. Where there is a fine-grained street grid, it is much easier to keep service near its normal route than in areas where through streets are widely spaced.
There is no recognition that service reliability interacts with service frequency and speed. There is no point in spending great effort on transit priority schemes only to reduce service and ignore reliability. Travel time savings on paper can be offset by unpredictable wait times, not to mention longer walks to stops.
The survey recognizes the importance of communications. I wrote recently about problems in navigating the TTC’s website and confusion in presentation of updates. A related problem is that that riders have different needs for accessing information. In some cases, it will be “what should I do tomorrow” planning, but a lot of access is for “where is my bus right now”. Finding accurate info quickly is vital whether this is via a smartphone app, an in-shelter next vehicle display or a poster hanging by a string from a stop pole.
The challenge is to get from recognition to implementation, a big problem in an organization that has too many information silos and no apparent single point of responsibility.
“Customer experience” is a slippery term that has, in the past, revealed a lot about how some at the TTC regard what might entice riders to the system. The emphasis has been on nice-to-haves like WiFi (only recently elevated as a safety issue), elaborate waiting stations at transfer points and shops in subway stations. The most basic part of the experience – the wait for and crowding on board vehicles – is rarely discussed. As extra service for the pandemic era winds down, this is the central debate.
Updated May 4, 2023: The High Park bus service erroneously mentioned in the media release below is supposed to go into service on June 18 according to the Seasonal Services page on the TTC’s website.
The TTC has issued a press release as a general announcement of the planned changes on May 7, 2023. It puts a rather generous spin on what is about to happen. First, here is the unedited text.
Starting this Sun., May 7, the TTC is introducing new schedules on some routes to improve reliability along busy corridors, add seasonal service to key city attractions, better align capacity with ridership demand and accommodate construction across the city.
“We are investing more than ever before as a City government in the TTC to continue to support transit service as it comes back from the unprecedented impact of the pandemic. The TTC is continuing to provide more service than ridership and to increase service on the busiest routes at the busiest times,” said Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie. “Thank you to all TTC workers for continuing to provide safe and reliable service across our city for residents and visitors.”
“These service adjustments are a direct result of extensive consultation with communities and customers,” said TTC Chair Jon Burnside. “On behalf of the TTC Board, I commend the TTC for their focus on service improvements to important City corridors, including Markham Rd., Finch Ave., Wilson Ave., and Jane St.”
“The TTC is continuing to focus on delivering more frequent service to the areas across the city that need it most. This is all part of our strategy to match service to demand and ensure that we are meeting the needs of our riders,” said TTC CEO Rick Leary. “I’d like to thank everyone who engaged with us and provided feedback as we developed this latest schedule, and we look forward to continued feedback from our customers.”
Among the adjustments being made:
• Reduced wait times on overnight routes along Finch Ave., Jane St., and Wilson Ave., to every 20 minutes from 30 minutes. • Enhancing reliability on the Markham Rd. corridor – one of the TTC’s busiest – by extending service on the 902 Markham Rd Express to connect to busy employment areas at Morningside and Steeles avenues. • Launching seasonal routes to popular parks and attractions such as Cherry Beach, Bluffer’s Park, High Park and the Toronto Zoo.
The TTC will also continue to monitor service in real time and have additional, unscheduled vehicles available across all modes to fill gaps in service when and where possible.
TTC Media Release May 3, 2023
Let’s take these points in order.
… better align capacity with ridership demand …
That sound very productive, but it hides the fact that many service cuts both in May and in March were made on this basis. A related change in crowding standards implemented by management enabled service cuts on many routes, particularly in off-peak periods.
The TTC is continuing to provide more service than ridership and to increase service on the busiest routes at the busiest times …
Riders on those “busiest routes” might choose to differ. TTC has cut service on several trunk routes over the past months.
In March:
Line 2 Bloor-Danforth
501 Queen weekdays
25 Don Mills
29/929 Dufferin
35 Jane
36 Finch West
41/941 Keele
943 Kennedy Express
905 Eglinton East Express
In May:
Line 1 Yonge-University
501 Queen (weekend afternoons)
512 St. Clair
52 Lawrence West
85/985 Sheppard East
“These service adjustments are a direct result of extensive consultation with communities and customers,” said TTC Chair Jon Burnside. “On behalf of the TTC Board, I commend the TTC for their focus on service improvements to important City corridors, including Markham Rd., Finch Ave., Wilson Ave., and Jane St.”
I suspect one would be hard pressed to describe what the TTC did as “consultation” considering that they actively withheld information on service changes from City Councillors during the budget debates. The information only came to light thanks to a Freedom of Information request by TTCRiders. The official version of the May 7 changes was only released on the afternoon of May 1, although this existed in draft months earlier.
As for service improvements listed by Chair Burnside, yes Markham Road sees better service. However, the only changes on Finch, Wilson and Jane are to overnight service. Two of these routes saw daytime service cuts in March.
Among the adjustments being made:
[…] • Launching seasonal routes to popular parks and attractions such as Cherry Beach, Bluffer’s Park, High Park and the Toronto Zoo.
The Cherry Beach, Bluffer’s Park and Zoo services run every summer. They are not additions to the network but simply revivals of regular seasonal services under new branding. As for High Park, there is nothing in the announced changes of summer service into the park previously provided by 30 Lambton. High Park Station is now served by 189 Stockyards and 30 High Park, and there is no mention of an extension in the service memo for May 7, nor is there any mention on the TTC’s website.
Updated May 4, 2023: It turns out that there are plans effective June 18 for a 203 High Park bus. The existing 30 High Park will be renamed High Park North
The TTC will also continue to monitor service in real time and have additional, unscheduled vehicles available across all modes to fill gaps in service when and where possible.
The TTC has cited its “Run as directed” buses as a catch-all fix for service irregularities, but is unable to show how these vehicles have actually been used. At its last meeting, the TTC Board was told that there would be a presentation to their May 8 meeting on the use of RAD buses, but nothing has appeared on the agenda. With luck it will be a “walk in” report presented as part of the CEO’s report.
The TTC would attract better regard from those who try to support their work by being less secretive and defensive. Providing timely information allows debates about the city’s priorities to occur in context rather than with only vague rumours.
The TTC’s job is to provide good transit service. If as an organization it turns into a good news mouthpiece for the Mayor, the Board members, the CEO, it has lost its way. Toronto needs open debates about the future of so many services, not self-serving puffery.
On May 1, 2023, the TTC released the final version of the service changes planned for May 7. These are substantially the same as the draft version obtained via a Freedom of Information request by TTCRiders. See Draft of TTC Service Changes Effective Sunday, May 7, 2023.
Back in January during budget debates, some Councillors asked for details of the service cuts that would be implemented due to increased crowding standards and financial constraints. TTC staff agreed that this information could be available within a week, but an unseen hand at a higher level (either the TTC CEO Leary or then-Mayor Tory’s office) blocked this. Actually admitting the effects of a budget before it was approved simply was not part of the TTC’s agenda.
The official, final version allows comparison with the draft version. Although the TTC suggested that TTCRiders publication of the draft could be misleading because of changes in the final version, in fact there is very little change.
This article includes only the updates since the draft version, and readers should look to the article linked above for the full list. The spreadsheet (linked later in the article) detailing all of the changes has been updated to reflect the differences between the draft and final versions.
Updated May 2, 2023 at 10:10 am: A overview of all routes showing which get more service and which get less has been added.
Two months from now, on June 26, Toronto will elect a new Mayor thanks to John Tory’s unexpected departure. There will be at least fifty candidates on the ballot, although most of them will garner only a handful of votes.
I am not one of them, and have no ambitions to high office. That said, I certainly have hopes that our new Mayor will have a strong pro-transit agenda and will actually care about the City rather than brown-nosing their way to small favours from Queen’s Park.
For those who are interested, here is the campaign-sized version of my advice and platform were I running:
Service is key. Run as much as possible, everywhere, and run it well.
Build budgets based on what you want to see, not on what you think you can afford. Just getting by is not a recipe for recovery and growth. If the money doesn’t come, then look to “Plan B” but aim for “Plan A”.
Fares are a central part of our transit system, but the question is who should pay and how much. Strive for simplicity. Give discounts where they are truly needed. Make the transit system worth riding so that small, regular increases are acceptable.
Focus on ease of use among transit systems in the GTA, but do not equate “integration” with amalgamated governance.
Transit property: parking or housing?
Foster a culture of advocacy in management and on the TTC Board.
Beware of lines on maps. A “my map vs your map” debate focuses all effort on a handful of corridors while the rest of the network rots.
Plan for achievements in your current term and make sure they actually happen. Longer term is important, but the transit ship is sinking. You are running for office in 2023. Vague promises for the 2030s are cold comfort to voters who have heard it all before.
That’s more than will fit comfortably on a leaflet, but, hey, I am the blogger who writes long form articles about transit. As a commentator, my biggest worry lies with those who say “TL,DR”. In the following sections I will expand on the bullets above. Thanks for reading.
How much would all this cost? In many cases the answer depends on the scale and speed of implementation. Although I have a sense of at least order of magnitude costs, I am not going to be foolish enough to put specific dollar figures here. For too long, City policy has started with a budget rather than a philosophy, an aspiration to be great, and settled for just good enough. We almost certainly cannot afford everything today, but we need to know what tomorrow we strive for.
If the 2003 Ridership Growth Strategy taught us anything, it was that we should first talk about aspirations, about what the transit system might be, rather than precluding debate with the classic “we can’t afford it” response. It’s amazing what monies can be found once information is out in the open. We commit tens of billions to construction, but are terrified, at least politically, by far lower costs to improve transit for everybody today.
I have deliberately omitted a discussion of security and related social services here. These are not just transit issues, but part of a city-wide, society-wide problem that will not be solved with a simple show of force. Recent trends both in public opinion and official responses at the City and TTC show an emphasis on providing support for those who need it: the homeless and the mentally unwell. This should continue and expand.
An inevitable question is who will I endorse? That will come later in the campaign as candidates flesh out their programs. Some make their beds with the provincial Tories. As enemies of the city, collaborators, they deserve only contempt. For others, we are in promising early days.
Steve Munro 