Service Cost and Quality

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How Many Buses Does Toronto Need?

Toronto’s budget debate for 2012 brought many issues of transit financing into the open thanks to an ill-considered proposal by Mayor Ford to cut transit operating subsidies by 10%.  Recently the TTC put off implementing service cuts originally planned for January 8, 2012, pending a decision by Council on the final version of the budget and the level of TTC subsidy.

However, the TTC’s Operating Budget is not the only one that is constrained by City spending policies.  On the Capital Budget, the total projected City borrowing required to pay for all of the projects the TTC would like to undertake exceeds a self-imposed target on total City debt.  To bring the 10-year debt projection within that target, the TTC restructured its capital plans.

Some projects were postponed beyond the 10-year window so that some or all of the spending (and associated debt) did not count, or might be offset by future improvements in subsidy programs from other levels of government.  Other projects were modified in scope or cancelled.

I discussed the amended Capital Budget in a previous article, but the current debate about Service Standards also has a capital component.  Among the cutbacks on the capital side were a purchase of new buses and the provision of storage space to hold these vehicles.

An order for 134 new buses (of which 26 were for “contingency” to handle unexpected growth in demand) has been cancelled along with the provision of temporary yard space.  Before Transit City was proposed, the TTC had planned to build another bus garage to accommodate its growing fleet.  However, Transit City (plus the opening of the Spadina subway extension) would replace some existing bus service with rail, and reduce the total bus fleet requirement.

Even with a short-term pre-Transit City bulge, only temporary storage would have been needed.  However, now that much of Transit City has been either cancelled or pushed off into the next decade, there will be continued pressure on the bus fleet and on the need for storage space.

  • The Spadina extension will not open until late 2015.
  • The Sheppard subway, if it is actually built, will cover only the portion of the Sheppard East bus services west of Kennedy.  Service east to Meadowvale will still be provided by buses.  The original opening date for the Sheppard LRT was 2013.
  • Finch West will continue to be served by buses, not an LRT line that originally would have opened in 2013.
  • The proposed extension of the SRT to Malvern was originally planned to open in 2015.  In the revised plan, this extension has been dropped.

In a briefing note, TTC’s Chief General Manager Gary Webster states that the capital cost of restoring the bus order and storage for the vehicles could be up to $93-million.  However, in the TTC’s budget presentation, this number is stated as $73m (see Shortfall Reduction Plan on page 52).  If the order is reinstated, the quantity of buses will be smaller by at least the contingency of 26 according to staff comments at the TTC’s last meeting.

The challenge in this whole process is to understand just how big the bus fleet should be given the robust state of TTC ridership.  For this we must first go back to the bus fleet plan as it existed in 2006.

There were two competing views of the future for ridership.  In one version, growth would continue at just over 1% per year following a long trend of the past decade.  In another version, growth would be more robust at 3% per year.  The bus fleet plan had been based on the lower rate, but if the stronger trend prevailed, the TTC would need more buses sooner.  A new garage would be needed by 2012/13 even at the low growth rate, possibly by 2010 if the fleet grew faster than expected.

Indeed, stronger growth is exactly what arrived.  On the original projection, ridership was expected to grow from 436m to 469m between 2006 and 2011.  At the higher rate, it would reach 505m.  The actual number we now know will be about 499m.  The accelerated growth began just after the Ridership Growth Strategy (RGS) rolled out, a policy the current crop at the TTC would undo in the name of “efficiency”.

By 2010, the fleet planning had to take into account new factors including the proposed Transit City LRT lines and the Spadina extension.  Transit City was expected to displace 168 buses between 2014 and 2019, and a further 30 would be replaced by the Spadina extension in 2016.  This led to a plan in which there would be no bus purchases for several years, and the total fleet would actually shrink through attrition back to 2008 levels, well within the capacity of existing garages.

By early December 2011, the active bus fleet stands at 1,820 vehicles for a scheduled peak service of 1,520.  Requirements for 2012 and beyond will be very different depending on the service quality and ridership we assume in making fleet plans.

  • Service actually operated in 2011 was based on a budgeted ridership of only 487m, not the 499m Toronto actually achieved.  This is one reason why there are some routes already over the supposed loading “standards” — there is no budget to operate all of the service the standards would dictate.  Conversely, the planned cuts on some routes are impractical and this situation is tacitly admitted by the proposal to retain service on “busy” routes.
  • If the RGS service standards are retained, then the planned peak cutbacks on major bus routes cannot go forward.  In the short term, this can be handled with the existing fleet, but more buses will be needed (by the TTC’s projection) in fall 2013.
  • Multi-year projections in the TTC budget (see TTC Final Budget report for 2012 at Page 7) start from a base of 503m in 2012 and rise to 523m by 2015.  The base itself is less than 1% above 2011’s projected 499m, and the cumulative growth rate is about 1%.  By contrast, ridership is running over 4% above last year, and an ongoing rate of 3% should be easily attained provided that there is sufficient capacity and no economic catastrophe to drive down demand overall.

If we take 499m for 2011 and increase at 3% per annum, this would give a cumulative increase of about 12.5% to 2015.  In turn, the bus fleet would have to grow from 1820 to 2045.

The TTC has not published a detailed fleet plan including such an analysis, but this is as important to the future of Toronto’s transit as the fantasy subway plans.  The capital budget does not include any projection of funding needed to sustain strong transit growth, and the operating budget assumes a much lower rate of growth than we actually see.  The situation is very much like the one back in 2006.

Delaying or cancelling the implementation of Transit City created a crisis in the bus system’s ability to serve growing demand.  The Commission’s response is merely to cut service and ignore future problems with meaningless, low-balled projections of ridership, fleet requirements and operating costs.

Most of the transit Commissioners don’t want to entertain these debates because to do so counters the received wisdom that transit funding must be cut no matter what.  They might even have to admit that the course they advocate — of limiting the growth of service and capacity — is truly a “service cut”, certainly a reduction in the attractiveness and quality, such as it is, of the system, not merely an “efficiency”.

This type of “planning” badly serves Council and the citizens of Toronto because we don’t know what the alternatives are and the implications of various future paths.  Indeed, we risk hobbling the TTC with reduced service, fleet and staff, and creating a hole out of which a more-enlightened administration must first dig just to undo past errors.

Postscript:

In a Briefing Note to the City’s Budget Committee, the TTC advises that it is contemplating the purchase of 150 articulated buses in 2014-16.  If Council decides to retain higher service quality in 2012, the need for these buses could be accelerated.

Seven routes (not named) would convert to artic operation.  The fleet replacement ratio the TTC would use is 1.35:1.

The anticipated annual saving would be $60k/bus mainly in the labour cost of drivers.  The annualized saving with the 150-bus fleet fully in operation would be $9m.  Savings from this scheme have already been built into the multi-year budget projections.

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Holiday Service for 2011/12

As usual during the holiday period, service will operate at a reduced level because schools are closed and many people are on vacation.

On New Year’s Eve, most services will operate until about 4:00 am, and rides will be free after midnight until 4:00 am.  The last train meet at Bloor-Yonge will be at about 3:37 am (northbound, westbound and eastbound).  (The usual time for last trains is 1:54 am.)

The late night closing time for the Yonge subway north of Eglinton varies from day to day because of holiday schedules for the crews working there on tunnel repairs.

The hours of service through the holidays are summarized below.

Date      Service    Start End   YSNE
          Type                   Closes

Dec 19-23 Reduced    6:00  2:00  12:30
Dec 24    Saturday   6:00  2:00  2:00
Dec 25    Sunday     9:00  2:00  2:00
Dec 26    Holiday    6:00  2:00  2:00
Dec 27    Saturday   6:00  2:00  12:30
Dec 28-30 Reduced    6:00  2:00  12:30
Dec 31    Saturday   6:00  4:00  4:00
Jan 1     Sunday     9:00  2:00  2:00
Jan 2     Holiday    6:00  2:00  12:30
Jan 3-6   Reduced    6:00  2:00  12:30
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Service Changes for January 2012 (Update 6)

Updated December 22, 2011 at 7:00 am:

The service changes originally planned for January 2012 have been deferred until at least mid-February.  The schedules operated in November 2011 will be used for January 2012 with one exception.

511 Bathurst

A service increase to accommodate demand was planned in the original January schedules, and this will be retained.  One car will be added during various periods with headways improving as below:

PM peak:  From 5’30” to 5’00”
Weekday late evening:  From 10′ to 8′
Saturday afternoon:  From 6’15” to 5’40”
Sunday afternoon:  From 8’20” to 7’00”

Many other planned improvements to reduce crowding will not be implemented at this time.

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Only A Few Seconds More

Defenders of the coming service cuts minimize the effect by saying that riders will only have to wait a bit longer, a few minutes at most, for their ride to show up at a stop.  The attitude is that the change is trivial and, by implication, grumbling customers don’t know when they have a good thing.

In fact, when headways are short, a few seconds change can make a big difference.  The most striking example we can see every day is on the subway where only a slight extension of headways quickly translates to crowded platforms and trains, and long dwell times at busy stations.  The same effect on a smaller scale happens on bus and streetcar routes all over the city.

The change in peak period bus loading standards adds about 10% to the space between vehicles because the TTC now requires fewer of them to carry the same demand.  If a route runs every 5’00” today (300 seconds), it will run every 5’30” (330 seconds) in January, all other factors being unchanged.  This doesn’t sound like much until we convert the numbers to buses/hour.  The line would go from 12 buses per hour to 11, and one bus worth of riders would have to be absorbed into the remaining service.

However, the changes actually made on some routes are bigger than 10% because the TTC is compounding the new loading standard with a claw-back of “surplus” capacity.  For example, on 54 Lawrence East, the peak headways go from 3’00” to 3’30” in the morning, and from 3’20” to 4’00” in the afternoon.  Translated to buses/hour, that’s a change from 20 to 17 in the morning, and from 18 to 15 in the afternoon.  The new services are 86% and 83% of the old ones, respectively.  That’s more than a 10% cut.

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More Riders, Less Service (Update 2)

Updated November 27, 2011 at 7:00 am:  The section describing the variations from budget for 2011 has been updated.

Updated November 25, 2011 at 1:05 pm:  I have written an article for Torontoist on the pending service cuts.

Updated November 22, 2011 at 11:10 am:  TTC staff propose that the 145 Humber Bay Express bus be discontinued after February 10, 2012.  This route has never met the financial or performance criteria used to evaluate other services.  After two years of a charmed life as a local Councillor’s pet project, the route is finally being held to the same standards as the rest of the transit system.  When we are cutting services across Toronto, spending $150k/year to provide 70 people (140 trips) with their own bus service cannot be justified.

The original post follows below:

TTC ridership numbers for September 2011 are up 5.1% over 2010, a level 2.4% above the budget projection.  Under normal circumstances, this would be cause for celebration, but not in Rob Ford’s Toronto.  Here we cut service even when riding goes up, all in the name of wrestling with a fictitiously inflated City deficit.

The Chief General Manager’s Report tells us that riding will come in just a hair under half a billion at 497m for the year 2011, fully 10m more than the budget estimate.  Those riders generate more revenue for the TTC, but don’t expect to see this in service improvements.

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Service Changes for October through December, 2011 (Update 2)

This article consolidates service change information for the three schedule board periods beginning October 9, November 20 and December 18, 2011.

Service improvements continue to appear on a few routes in response to growth in riding.  Whether these will survive into 2012 with the budget and service standards cuts remains to be seen.

Updated November 17, 2011 at 10:00 am:  Effective November 20, the Kingston Road 12A service to Variety Village will be split on weekends so that half of the buses travel via the original route 12B on Kingston Road east of Birchmount, and half via route 12A.  This restores service to Kingston Road between Birchmount and Danforth Ave.

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More Icing, Less Cake (Updated)

Today the TTC announced the creation of a Customer Liaison Panel following up from the 2010 report of the Customer Service Advisory Panel.

Updated October 13, 2011 at 11:45pm:  The TTC has confirmed that the November Town Hall meeting will occur in the Council Chamber, and they are hoping for live coverage via Rogers Cable 10 and/or Internet in the same manner as Council meetings.

Chair Karen Stintz observed that “customers make our system what it is”, an intriguing comment considering what City Council and the Commission are forcing on customers in response to City funding cuts.  Yes, customers are the heart of any organization and without them, there is little raison-d’être, no matter how lofty a mission statement one might concoct.

To engage customers better, the TTC will conduct quarterly “town halls” beginning on Thursday, November 24 at City Hall.  I hope that they use Council Chambers [this has now been confirmed by the TTC], not a small committee room with limits on numbers and speakers so appallingly shown by Toronto’s Executive Committee.  TTC’s new Chief Customer Service Officer, Chris Upfold, observed that it is “dangerous to meet customers en masse … you don’t know what they will say”.  That’s precisely why you need to meet them — if you already know, or presuppose, what comments riders might have, or prejudge which ones were worthy of attention, then why meet at all?

Stintz noted that “it would take some time” to implement recommendations as “culture change” is not an overnight thing in an old organization.  This statement is odd on two counts. The age of an organization should not condemn it to bureaucratic paralysis — that’s the outcome of a lack of direction and focus on quality and improvement, an assumption that the TTC is the best on the planet.

Moreover, this doesn’t address the issue of frontline staff versus management attitudes and support.  Customers have many complaints about the staff they meet every day.  However, the way the system is operated, the priorities for improvement and the dedication to follow-through beyond photo ops and notices, these are issues for management and the Commission.  Managers must manage, and Commissioners must provide resources to match expectations.

Stintz listed five goals for improving customer service:

  • feedback to customers
  • cleanliness in stations and vehicles
  • a mission statement
  • changing practices to have a customer focus
  • encouraging customers to be advocates for transit

Stintz went on to list various projects such as the new subway cars, the York-U/Vaughan subway extension and the Eglinton line as examples of what the TTC is doing for its customers.  That’s fine, but the real issue is that in only two months, the TTC will cut service in response to budget constraints at the City.  We will get baubles, a few new lines, one almost a decade in the future, but meanwhile don’t try to get on the Dufferin bus.

Chris Upfold spoke in more detail about the TTC’s engagement with its customers.  There will be more surveys, the Town Halls mentioned earlier and the liaison panel.  A few issues are already being addressed:

  • Fare and ticket/transfer policies will be reviewed to eliminate nuisances and to prepare for the transition to the Presto smart card system.  The intent is to look at what works for customers (a novel idea in many technology implementation projects).  There are no specifics, and what might be a “nuisance” obviously varies depending on who you talk to and what form of ticket they already use.  Transfer rules, for example, have no effect on passholders.
  • The Customer Service Centre hours will be extended to reflect when people actually need information and assistance with support available via phone and online, including social media, from 0700 to 2200 daily.  The TTC will actively attempt to follow up with timely callbacks in response to problems.
  • The Request Stop Program, formerly available only to women, will now be offered to all riders looking for a safer or more convenient drop off from buses at night.

Upfold hopes that riders will recommend the TTC to their friends and family, a hope that implies considerable improvement in the typical rider experience at a time when the quality of that experience is being cut back.  Stintz tried to make the best of the situation by hoping that improvements such as cleaner stations would offset issues with wider headways and crowding.  If she really believes that, then there’s little hope for the TTC.

Stintz argues that the City has told the TTC to operate with less subsidy, but she ignores the fact that there has been no public debate about the effects and benefits of alternatives including fare increases or freezes, service standards, and the long-term problems of handling growing ridership.  The TTC may save 1% or so on its 2012 budget with the revised loading standards, but that’s at best a one-year fix.  When buses are full, they are full.  What will the TTC do in 2013?

Indeed, it’s the unseen demand, the would-be riders the passenger counts completely miss, who are the problem.  They’re the equivalent of the “silent majority” of voters who, some claim, feel that transit is oversubsidized.  These lost riders vote with their feet, their bicycles, their cars.  Their potential political support for transit is squandered in the name of municipal economy.

Steve O’Brien (who chaired the 2010 advisory panel and will sit on the liaison panel for 2012-13) was asked if he was satisfied with the rate of implementation of his reports recommendations.  He claims to be “impressed”, that the panel didn’t “expect instant results” and that he is “very proud” the TTC took the recommendations seriously.  Chris Upfold noted that about 20 of the 78 recommendations would be implemented by yearend, and that a further 25 would be rolled out in 2012.

What nobody mentioned is that most of these recommendations address problems of communication in a broad sense, but the report is silent about system management and service quality.

There has been no discussion of the service implications of the budget cuts beyond the general policy change in loading standards — we don’t yet know which routes and time periods will be affected, or how much more crowded they will be.  Chair Stintz stated that the proposed cuts, in detail, would be part of the budget process at the TTC and Council.

Chief General Manager Gary Webster confirmed that the cuts would go into effect in January 2012 to get the greatest benefit for the budget year.  Verification of riding counts is now in progress and schedule design will follow shortly.  By mid-November, the details of January service levels will be known, certainly in time for the first Town Hall.  However, if any Fairy Godmother plans to rescue the TTC from service cuts, they will have to do so quickly.  Stintz may talk about this as part of the budget discussions, but the City won’t finalize its budget until February, long after the service cuts are already on the street.

The currently proposed fare increase of 10¢ per token will only offset the roughly $29-million hole in the TTC’s budget which already includes service cuts.  If current services are to be funded through fares, then an increase of at least another 5¢ would be required.  Looking ahead, the TTC’s total operating costs will grow by about $100m annually.  This implies an ongoing need for about $67m more in subsidies and $33m more in fares (equivalent to a dime every year) just to keep the system as it is.

At a time when the world needs serious, informed discussions about finances, Toronto is again papering over its transit cracks with one-time fixes.  Those who argue for better service, even for retaining what we have, are portrayed as whiners, special interest groups who do not represent the broad voice of taxpayers.  We must wait three years for those taxpayers, those voters, to vent their true feelings on City policies.

Better Customer Service is a good idea.  Adding this to an already excellent and improving system (dare I say it, one with the kind of pro-transit outlook that brought us the Ridership Growth Strategy) would be icing on an already rich and delicious cake.  In the face of service cuts, greater crowding and an inevitable decline in staff-to-customer relations, that cake will be small, thin and bitter no matter how happy a smiling face sits on the thick icing above.

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Creeping Toward Earlier Subway Closing?

The TTC is increasingly fond of shutting down parts of its subway system for maintenance late at night.  The practice began with the project to repair the tunnel liners on the North Yonge subway (Eglinton to Sheppard) that, through a design flaw, were causing the tunnel to gradually go out of round.  Rather than work for only a few hours each night, the repair window was opened by ending subway service on the affected part of the line at 12:30 am.  This will continue until sometime late in 2012.

The Bloor-Danforth line is now shutting down at midnight for rail grinding with a rolling schedule working across the entire route:

  • September 19 to 23:  Kipling to Islington
  • September 25 to 30:  Kipling to Jane
  • October 2 to 7:  Ossington to Broadview
  • October 9 to 14:  St. George to Broadview
  • October 16 to 19:  St. George to Woodbine
  • October 20 & 21, 23 to 28, 30 to November 2:  Woodbine to Kennedy
  • November 3 & 4, 6 to 11:  Warden to Kennedy

Replacement bus service will operate overlapping the section of the route that is shut down.

This project begs the question of why there is a need to do rail grinding on a scale and with a level of service disruption we have not seen since the subway opened.  Once upon a time, there was a two-car train of PCCs used for grinding, but these are long-retired.  A problem arose many years ago on the high-speed section of the subway north of Eglinton where lateral sway of trains (a particular problem with the H1 series of cars) generated long-period horizontal equivalents of “corrugations” that reinforced the unwanted car movements.

I have asked the TTC for an explanation for this project, and also about any plans they might have for similar work on the Yonge-University-Spadina line.

It will be intriguing to see how the replacement bus service fares especially in the heavily-travelled central section of the line, and whether the crowd control and passenger information provided by the TTC at closed stations will amount to more than a few hand-written signs.

With late night services under attack in some quarters, I can’t help wondering when some bright spark on City Council will conclude that we really don’t need the subway open so late, and with it the many bus services operating to 2:00am and beyond.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, the Nuit Blanche celebrations will see limited overnight subway service on October 1-2 finishing at 7:00am Sunday.  There will be a brief interval where the subway is closed before the start of regular Sunday service at 9:00am (trains are actually out on the line building up service somewhat earlier).

  • BD line: Keele to Woodbine every 12-15 minutes
  • YUS line: St. Clair West to Eglinton every 10-12 minutes

The 300 BD Night Bus will only operate on the outer parts of the route not covered by the subway.  The 320 Yonge Night bus will have frequent service north of Eglinton, and a Spadina shuttle bus will operate north of St. Clair West.

Whether the TTC will put signs on the night bus stops advising that travellers should use the subway remains to be seen.  Even more challenging will be whether people will read them.

A 15-minute headway will operate on the following surface routes overnight transitioning to the start of Sunday daytime service:

  • 301 Queen
  • 305 Eglinton East
  • 306 Carlton
  • 307 Eglinton West
  • 504 King

The question of an earlier closing time for the subway is related to service expansion plans.  As the YUS gets longer and longer, and as the headways are shortened with automatic train control, the number of trains on the line rises considerably.  Most of these trains will originate at Wilson Yard, and there is a physical limit to the number of trains/hour that can enter service for the morning peak.  This will require the loading of service, if not revenue operations, to start earlier than it does now and will limit the time when the line is available for maintenance work.

Available alternatives include earlier shutdowns, extended weekend outages on affected sections of a route or the construction of additional storage capacity elsewhere on the line, preferably on the Yonge side to balance out service loading requirements.

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Did Wheel Trans Botch A New System Implementation?

Recently, I received an email from a reader reporting a major problem in the implementation by Wheel Trans of a new booking system.  Here is the relevant part of the note:

On August 6th, Wheel-Trans took down its online booking system to install a “New and Improved’ reservation system. Two days later the new page was up and running — sort of. Wheel-Trans had cleansed half of our list of “preregistered addresses” and, in so doing, had forced us back upon the hugely overloaded and barely functional phone reservation system.

The consequences were devastating. Bus operators, contract minivan owners, taxi drivers, reservationists and customer service agents, and the customers, all felt the effects; customers arriving late to appointments or not able to book rides or make cancellations, drivers attempting to meet an impossible schedule while driving to cancelled or abandoned calls, and agents and reservationists facing a never-ending flood of calls from frustrated, desperate, and, in some cases, irate customers. Like a locomotive shunting cars, each missed or late call rippled down the whole system; drivers run further and further behind in their schedule, customers wait longer and longer for their ride which, increasingly, as the day wears on. are abandoned or never arrive at all. And the traffic on the phone system grows and grows.

Even those not directly involved with the system— customers’ employers, physicians and therapists, hospitals and labs, friends and families—are all dealing with missed or late appointments.

Everyone I’ve talked with over the past few weeks, customers, Wheel-Trans drivers and phone staff, and health care professionals has a story to tell. And not one has a happy ending. Although everyone has different tale to tell, they all want a return to the old setup. But no one knows how to make this happen.

This has all the earmarks of a botched IT project although the exact reason has not come out yet.  In my own IT experience, this could be a question of bad specifications, of the official client not understanding how their own system works, or a badly executed data/functional migration that wasn’t properly tested before the system went live.

I am not a Wheel Trans user, although I have heard enough horror stories about the service it provides.  It’s a vital service for users, and yet the TTC and City are entertaining a cutback to the amount of service or the eligibility of riders, not further enhancements as part of the 2012 budget.

This article is intended as a repository for comments about that service, and in particular about the effects of the recent changes to the trip booking system.

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Service Changes for September 4, 2011

Many service changes are coming in September 2011 including additional service on routes that are now overcrowded.  However, the TTC will be considering lower standards for crowding (the “there’s still room on the roof” school of service planning), and many of these changes could be short lived.  (I will turn to budgetary issues in my next article.)

The service improvements are the upshot of the bargain trading little used periods of service on some routes effective May 2011 for better service where it is needed.  The budgetary headroom from the May cuts is not enough to pay for all the needed additions, and many improvements that would other be justified by current standards will not be implemented.  That justification may vanish if the standards are lowered. Continue reading →