Service Cost and Quality

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TTC Announces a Customer Charter

With a modest fanfare (but no flourishing of trumpets), the TTC proclaimed its Customer Service Charter on February 28, 2013, at a press conference held at the busy Bloor-Yonge Station. This is a “good news” story, at least for the TTC for whom “customer service” is the new mantra. Senior management at the TTC seem to be headed in the right direction, but I couldn’t help feeling that I had been offered a banquet and found, instead, a snack.

The question of customer service reaches back into the days of the Miller/Giambrone administration. I have written at some length on this issue before.

Although the earlier exercises were well-meaning, this process has been underway for over three years.  In August 2010, an advisory panel produced a report that included more recommendations for ways TTC passengers could improve their behaviour than ways the TTC could provide better service to riders.  The effort had all the earmarks of a self-serving justification for inaction from an organization far too set in its ways.  Indeed, a panel member confirmed to me that TTC management had a large influence in the report, an obvious conflict where the customer viewpoint should be paramount.

In October 2011, TTC Chair Karen Stintz said that “it would take some time” to implement recommendations as “culture change” is not an overnight thing in an old organization.  That’s a fair comment, but this argument cannot be trotted out forever to imply that some changes will come eventually, just not now.  “TTC culture” is a phrase I have heard for years well back into Adam Giambrone’s term as chair, and it is wearing rather thin after so long.

Those of us who have a long history of TTC watching are inevitably suspicious of this process, and it is with that background I approached the announcement.

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TTC Meeting Preview: February 25, 2013 (Update 2)

Update 2 on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 10:00 am:

Additional information from presentations and debates at the Commission meeting has be added to this article.

The Toronto Transit Commission will meet on Monday February 25, 2013.  This month’s agenda is a tad on the thin side, but there are some reports of interest.

  • CEO’s Report (updated)
  • Status Report on TTC Accessible Services
  • Second exit planning & consultation / Response to Ombusman’s report
  • Leslie Barns connection to Queen Street
  • Accommodating strollers
  • Purchase of 126 articulated buses (updated)
  • Amending the Automatic Train Control System contract to include Spadina/Vaughan extension (updated)
  • Update on Bus Servicing and Cleaning Contract (new)
  • Deputation by Merit OpenShop Contractors Association of Ontario (new)

There was also a presentation on new shelter maps and stop poles.  This item is likely to generate a strong response in the comment thread, and I will create a separate article for it.

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Queen Street and New Streetcars: Less Service, Fewer Stops, Wider Gaps?

The Beach Metro Community News reports on a recent meeting to discuss traffic problems on the east end of Queen Street.  Some comments echo the type of remarks one hears elsewhere in the city about increased traffic from redevelopment, the absolute essential nature of parking to prevent business bankruptcies, and the need to rebalance road space to serve all travellers, including cyclists, not just motorists.

Most troubling are comments by the TTC:

TTC’s Manager of Planning Mitch Stambler talked to the residents about plans to change the Queen Street route. With the new streetcars being introduced next year, two or three of the stops will be eliminated, said Stambler. This is a result of the length of the new streetcars.

Stambler also admitted that less streetcars will run along Queen Street because of its increased capacity. Cost of operation and studies related to ridership will dictate how many and how often the new streetcars will run.

One resident who lives at the east end of Queen Street expressed concerns with streetcars stopping idle near the Neville loop. Stambler said he hopes that with the decreased frequency of the bigger streetcars the issue will be eased.

The TTC has been inconsistent in statements about how the new cars would affect service.  Initially, the idea was that larger cars would provide more capacity, badly needed on many routes including Queen.  A few years later, thanks to the penny-pinching budgets of Mayor Ford and TTC Chair Stintz, the idea of actually improving service capacity vanished.  Indeed, the TTC has already relaxed its off-peak loading standards for streetcars to allow more standees in a bid to save on operations.

Add to this the highly irregular headways on Queen and other routes, any proposal to run fewer streetcars can only mean one thing: service, which declined substantially when headways were widened for the 75-foot long articulated light rail vehicles (ALRVs), will get even worse with the new larger low floor cars (LFLRVs).

The TTC likes to talk about how running fewer cars will improve service by reducing the bunching inherent when cars are scheduled more frequently than traffic signal cycles.  This does not, and has not, applied to Queen Street for many decades.  Indeed, the TTC tries to make virtue out of wider headways by generalizing an hypothesis originally developed for a simulation of operations on the busy King streetcar downtown during peak periods.  There is no comparison to the Queen car in The Beach.

As for stop spacing, there have been many comments on this site about the excessive number of stops on Queen and other routes.  Among the most likely to vanish are the Sunday stops especially if any special sidewalk treatment or fare machine installations would be required.  (All of the Sunday stops on Roncesvalles came out as part of that street’s redesign.)  Some other stops are simply too close together, and these are often leftovers of historical traffic patterns dating back to the 50s and beyond.

With all its emphasis on “Customer Service”, the TTC owes streetcar riders in Toronto a clear statement on its intentions for service with the new cars.  Moreover, as a long series of service analyses here have demonstrated, the TTC must aggressively improve its line management to ensure that the headways it advertises are actually delivered to customers.  No more excuses.  No more “mixed traffic, congestion and TTC culture”.  No more bogus stats that use averages to hide the widespread TTC failure to deliver reliable service.

[Thanks to James J. for sending me the link to this article.]

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Service Changes Effective Sunday, March 31, 2013

The TTC budget provides for a spring and a fall round of service improvements in 2013.  In the “March” schedule period (which actually starts at the end of the month), service hours will increase by about 1%.  After a dip for the seasonal reductions over the summer, the September budget includes another 1% increase with a few smaller increments in October and November.

Almost all of the current round of improvements are in off-peak periods because of the limited number of spare vehicles for better peak service.

2013.03.31 Service Changes

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Service Changes Effective Sunday, February 17, 2013

The February schedule period brings only minor changes to TTC service.

The 192 Airport Rocket will be rerouted northbound to use Highway 427 rather than Highway 27, and buses on this route now have luggage racks opposite the rear doors.  For more information on the background to these changes, see TransitToronto’s article.

The schedule for 38 Highland Creek will be revised to minimize layovers at the loop at UTSC and resulting conflicts in bus traffic.

The schedule for 41 Keele will be revised to remove some of the additional running time provided for construction delays at Finch West Station.

The 123 Shorncliffe route’s crew break and relief point will be moved from Sherway Gardens to Kipling Station to reduce time lost by these changeovers.

The schedule for 90 Vaughan will be revised to shift some layover time from the north to the south end of the route to avoid having buses blocking traffic at the north loop.

The following routes have running time adjustments.  These consist of changing layover times into driving time with no alteration in scheduled service:

  • 49 Bloor West
  • 54 Lawrence East
  • 168 Symington

The following routes have time point adjustments that are meaningful only in the sense of measuring whether a bus is “on time” at intermediate locations along the routes.

  • 25 Don Mills
  • 26 Dupont
  • 34 Eglinton East
  • 100 Flemingdon Park
  • 30 Lambton
  • 56 Leaside
  • 51 Leslie
  • 67 Pharmacy
  • 53 Steeles East
  • 112 West Mall
  • 95 York Mills

Service improvements are planned for many routes effective March 31, 2013.  These will be covered in a separate article.

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Headway Reliability on 501 Queen for November 2011

This is the first in a series of posts about service on the Queen car following on from my article about evaluating the quality of transit service.  Queen is a major TTC route that includes many problems including its length, traffic congestion in certain parts of the route, and a general dissatisfaction among riders.

Just how bad is the service?  A common observation from riders is that they can walk to their destination without being passed by a streetcar.  On the outer ends of the route, service can be unpredictable especially west of Humber Loop where only half of the service is even scheduled to travel and some of that is short-turned.

The TTC’s goal is to operate 70% of streetcar service within 3 minutes of the advertised headway.  On Queen, scheduled headways at most times lie in the range from 5 to 7 minutes, and this translates to an acceptable band of service that treats gaps of up to 10 minutes as “punctual”.  In practice, the route rarely attains that 70% score.

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How Should We Measure Transit Service Quality?

Introduction

The question of service quality has been a central thread on this site more or less since its inception.  It is not enough to have service on a street (or even in a subway or on a private right-of-way) if it shows up unpredictably, or can’t be used because it is overcrowded or short-turning before it gets to many riders’ destination.

For as long as I can remember, the TTC’s stock excuse for poor service was “traffic congestion” coupled with “it is impossible to provide good service with streetcars running in mixed traffic”.  When detailed information about vehicle movements on the transit system became available, it was quickly evident that congestion was only one problem.  Moreover, some bus routes on wide avenues exhibited service qualities almost indistinguishable from streetcars tethered to rails on narrow streets.

After a period when the Toronto supported more spending on transit to improve loading standards and hours of service, the city swung to the right treating transit service as a waste of taxpayer dollars.  Despite cutbacks that could throttle demand, transit riding continues to rise, and with it the problems of service quality.  Much of the service improvement we do see is funded not by subsidies but by fare revenue, not to mention by overcrowding.

The TTC has focused much effort the “soft” improvements — cleanliness, information systems and customer relations — but for the really important one — service they actually provide to riders — the jury is still out.  The situation is compounded by budget constraints of the Ford/Stintz era, of just getting by with trims around the edges, but with no sense of a plan to make substantial improvements.

The time is overdue for a clear direction on improving transit service.  The answer is not just to run more buses or build more subways, although service improvements are needed.  We must also run the buses and streetcars we have more reliably.

The common thread through measurement schemes is that a transit system must be viewed from the passenger’s point of view.  They are the people actually riding and telling their car-driving friends how good or bad transit is.  In Toronto, at least, the riders are also substantially paying for the service.

How should we measure how the system is performing now and in the future?

For those who do not want to read to the end, no, I do not have a grab bag of solutions, a “right way” to do things.  What we do need is a better understanding of how the system behaves at a detailed level — are there specific problems on individual routes that can be removed or at least lessened, and are there systematic problems with transit operations?

Some issues are external — there really is traffic congestion — but the question to answer is how we will deal with it.  Will transit priority really take precedence at a possible cost to other road users?  Some issues are internal — is there really enough service on the road, and could these vehicles be better managed?  What improvements will riders accept with glee — service reliability — and which will they regard as “nice to haves” that don’t address the underlying problem that “my streetcar never shows up when I need one”.

Detailed reporting together with measurements that riders can understand are essential to maintain the transparency and credibility of a transit agency.  One common element through this review of many systems and papers is that any measurements should be based on what the rider sees, not on management’s view and goals.  The purpose should not be to trumpet how good Toronto’s transit is, but to find how to make it better.

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TTC Service Changes for January 2013

The TTC will make a small number of service changes in January 2013 that will reduce service on a few routes during underutilized periods.  This change is required because the service improvements in fall 2012 overshot the budgetary mark, and the January 2013 service budget does not cover all of the additions.

Improvements to the budgeted weekly hours are planned later in 2013:

               Budget     Scheduled
November  2012 161,990    163,772
January   2013 163,148    163,242
March          164,763
September      166,289
October        166,799
November       167,119

The numbers above do not include service provided to compensate for construction projects.

2013.01.06 Service Changes

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TTC November 2012 Meeting Wrapup

At its November meeting, the TTC considered various matters other than the 2013 budgets on which I have already reported.

New Commissioners

The new “citizen” members of the TTC were sworn into office: Maureen Adamson, Nick Di Donato, Alan Heisey and Anju Virmani.  Ms. Adamson was elected Vice-Chair of the Commission under a new Council-approved structure where the Vice-Chair is chosen from the citizen member ranks.  At this point we know little of where the newcomers will take the Commission beyond background articles such as one in The Star.

Although they may claim to be focused on customer priorities, whether this will survive the political onslaught of budget constraints and the organizational morass of “TTC culture” remains to be seen.  Commissioners tend to catch a “TTC disease” when it becomes easier to defend what the TTC has done and the official management outlook than to ask difficult questions, publicly, about how things could be better.  At least there is a CEO in place whose goals lie in improvement, not in justifying more of the same.

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