Service Cost and Quality

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Ridership and Service Since 1976 (Updated)

At the 501 Queen Forum last week, I and others talked about the declining service and ridership in the Queen Street corridor.  This post reviews the published statistics from 1976 to 2005, the latest information available so far.

Streetcar Ridership and Mileage 1976 to 2005

These data are taken from the annual Service Plan and related documents.  The most recent counts are on the TTC’s website.

Updated December 11:  A consolidated count has been added for the Queen services (501, 502 and 503) to show the ridership and mileage in the three routes serving this corridor. 

Continue reading →

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Transit Service in Ottawa

For those who have been following my analyses of problems with TTC streetcar operations, David Cavlovic has sent along an article from today’s Ottawa Citizen. 

Toronto may have its problems, but Ottawa sounds even worse, including a lacklustre attitude by senior management.  At least here, there is a glimmer of recognition that service could be better.

One comment from the article struck a chord with me:

The company has spent a lot of money on a GPS system, but it lacks the software to analyse where service problems actually lie.

TTC’s signpost-based CIS has been in place for over two decades, but analysis of its data waited until I undertook it and started publishing results here.  CIS will be updated to use GPS information from vehicles where this is now available thanks to the stop announcement system, but we have yet to see whether the TTC will actually analyze its operations with all of the data at its disposal.

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TTC 2008 Operating Budget & Service Overview

On November 14, the TTC gave approval in principle to the proposed 2008 Operating Budget.  A short report is available online but it is missing one critical page, the table the table giving the details of the budget by major revenue and expense area.

You can read the details in the report including a line-by-line discussion of the changes.  Overall, the TTC’s operating expenses will rise about $74.6-million or 6.8% over 2007, and this does not include provision for wage settlements in the coming contract negotiations. 

Each 1% increase in wages translates to about $8-million in annual costs, of which $6-million would affect the current budget year because the new contract will take effect on April 1, 2008.

Ridership and service will both increase in 2008, and the cost of new and improved services accounts for over one quarter of the year-to-year change ($20.9-million). Continue reading →

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Where’s My Streetcar? (Updated)

Today, TTC Chair Adam Giambrone gave a press conference at noon at 1900 Yonge Street about the Transit City Electronic Customer Communications Plan and the Next Bus Arrival Project.

A report on this subject will be discussed at tomorrow’s Commission meeting, and it went online this morning after the original version of this item was posted.

At the risk of prejudging the announcement, I can’t help thinking this is another wonderful example of millions of dollars worth of technology being used in place of the basics: running frequent, well-managed transit service.

The report addresses several related projects:

Next Bus Arrival

This system, to be integrated with both the City’s new standard street furniture program and with the TTC website, will provide estimated arrival times of approaching vehicles.  A critical part of such an undertaking will be accurate knowledge of a vehicle’s position and movement along a route, and in turn this depends on converting the antiquated vehicle monitoring system now in use (CIS) to use GPS data rather than “signposts”.  (For more information about how CIS works, please refer to this article.)

Also needed will be information about the alleged destination of the vehicle.  In the case of buses, this could be obtained if the code for the current route sign display were available to the monitoring system, although keeping CIS in sync with the frequent updates to the database in bus signs would be a challenge.   For streetcars, there is no way to know what sign is set by the operator, and drivers would have to key in a destination code to the CIS unit for each trip (and every time they are short turned).  I doubt that this information would be reliable and a next car display would proudly announce a car to Long Branch that was in fact turning at Shaw Street.

My real concern about this system, aside from the dubious value of building it at all when there are far worse problems with service quality and management, is that the TTC will undertake a typical design that works only when everything runs as it should.

The pilot will involve 12 bus stops, and I will bet that they will be on a sleepy route such as Bayview that was the testbed for the on board stop announcement system.  Figuring out when the next Queen car will show up and where it is going is a much bigger challenge.

The total project cost is $5.2-million, but it is not clear whether this is just for the central system and additional costs both for shelter-based equipment and on-vehicle system changes will be add-ons to the project.

E Commerce

The TTC is planning to contract with an external agency for online sale of passes.  This project has a budget of $1.2-million, but there is no detail about what this covers.

TTC Website

Evaluation of responses to the Request for Proposals is now underway and approval of a vendor is expected in January 2008.  The new site should be rolled out in “late spring 2008”.

Wheel-Trans Remote Trip Booking

The ability to make, inquire about and cancel bookings via the Internet should be available in February 2008.  It is unclear whether this is a real-time booking system, or simply a portal allowing users to queue up emails to Wheel Trans staff.  Further clarification is needed.

I will update this page based on whatever presentations or discussions occur at Wednesday’s TTC meeting.

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Private or Public?

Ian Folkhard wrote recently with this question:

Is there a website that objectively lays out the effects of privatization on formerly publicly controlled operations?

It would be very interesting to see if any of the savings and efficiencies that the supporters of privatization claim will result have actually been passed back to any group of taxpayers. Something that referred to the British experience with public transit and the railways would be really interesting reading.

I hunted around on the net and, alas, there are lots of papers written extolling the virtues of individual projects, but very little by way of an objective overview.  One paper was written for the OECD as a 30-year retrospective in January 2007.  The information in it is reasonably current, although the recent meltdown in London is not included.

[Note that this is a long paper with 35 pages of text, 14 pages of citations and 72 footnotes.  Be sure to read the footnotes as many of them contain important additional information.]

The author proceeds from the premise that some degree of private operation of public transit is becoming the norm rather than the exception, and that privatization is an attempt by the transit industry to become more competitive with the rising use of the automobile.  I don’t agree with that premise for reasons that will become obvious, but the presentation covers the subject and is not unduly doctrinaire about the wonders of free enterprise.  Continue reading →

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The Mythology of “Poor Performing Routes” (Updated)

[This article has been linked from torontoist.com where there is another thread of comments.] 

Whenever there is a budget crisis, the TTC trots out its annual report in which they claim to show the costs and revenues associated with each route in the system.  By implication, the routes at the bottom of the barrel are “poor performers” and candidates for service cuts if not outright extinction.  The calculations in this table can be charitably described as creative writing.

Why?

In a flat fare system, it is impossible to allocate fare revenue in any way that makes sense and produces meaningful comparisons between routes.  Continue reading →

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Ride The Dundas Bus While You Can

Track construction on Dundas Street, a long overdue project to replace decrepit rails and roadbed, has diverted the Dundas car for much of its length up to the Carlton route.

One particularly hard-hit area is Regent Park where streetcar service was removed long before road work actually started, and where streetcars will not return until late fall after completion of work on the bridge at the Don River.

In early May, at ward Councillor McConnell’s request, the TTC approved a shuttle bus to provide a clockwise loop via Broadview, Queen, River, Dundas, Parliament and Gerrard.  The problem with this scheme is that the bus runs every 15 minutes, and there is not much point in waiting for it unless you happen to be at the stop when the bus comes by.  Walking from a nearby route on Queen, Broadview, Gerrard or Parliament is generally faster and these routes, unlike the shuttle, actually go to real destinations like the subway or downtown.

The bus was implemented at a projected, unbudgeted cost of $350,000 to run through to November when the bridge will re-open and streetcars will return to Dundas between Parliament and Broadview. 

According to the staff report, this bus has carried an average of two passengers per trip and often runs empty.  The most I have ever seen is one.

Today, despite an attempt by Chair Giambrone to advocate on behalf of Councillor McConnell, the Commission had the good sense to kill off this waste of service.  The last day of operation will be Sunday, July 15. 

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Analysis of Transit Route Operations

Over the next month or so, I will be posting a series of articles here about the operation of surface routes and will concentrate on lines in the King and Queen corridors.  This analysis will look at the way the line actually operates — how the vehicles move around (or not) — as opposed to the question of whether service is adequate to demand.  These topics are related by the long-standing question of why service is so bad:  congestion, number of vehicles, operational screwups, or some other factors.

This work arises from the TTC’s oft-cited claim that they can only improve transit service with exclusive lanes.  That is a self-defeating position because the TTC will never get reserved lanes on most transit routes.  Rather than figuring out how a route might be improved, the TTC claims its hands are tied.  This is not a useful stance, but it’s sadly typical of an organization whose first response to criticism is (a) you’re wrong and (b)  someone else is responsible.

I remember the initial reaction to the Transit’s Lost Decade report that I did with Gord Perks (then at TEA).  The TTC huffed and puffed and said that service had not been cut so badly and how dare we say things like that … then there was a little pause … and finally they realized that this was just the ammunition they needed to beat the drum for better funding.  Suddenly then-CGM Rick Ducharme was quoting our figures as an example of how badly the system had deteriorated.

Service on major routes was cut through the 1990s by from 25 to 40 percent, and only recently have we seen some of this restored despite ongoing ridership growth.  One major constraint is the size of bus and streetcar fleets that declined to match the lower levels of service.  This only affects peak service capabilities.  Another change has been in the operator workforce through a combination of re-sizing to current service levels and of work rules restricting the length of the work day.  (This is due both to Provincial labour standards and revisions to the collective agreement.)

Traffic congestion is a problem in many areas, and the length of the peak period has definitely grown longer over past decades.  However, is congestion the only reason service is bad, or are other factors at work?  Are there problems with regularity of service and line management?  How often is scheduled service cancelled?  How often are there major blockages (especially a problem for streetcars) as opposed to random events, delays at busy stops for overcrowded vehicles and general congestion?

How effective is the TTC’s current vehicle monitoring system, CIS (Communications & Information System), in tracking vehicles and how well is the service managed?  The TTC is seeking information for a possible “next bus” announcement system.  Will this be compromised by an attempt to recycle decades-old CIS technology?  Will it include features needed to properly manage and report on actual service and operations?

In Setember 2006, I asked the TTC for sample data from CIS in an attempt to learn how vehicles actually behaved on various routes with the hope of identifying problem areas both for congestion, where it really exists, and in line management.  CIS is incapable of reporting on vehicle loads, and its data are not fine-grained enough to allow reporting on stop service times in most cases.  Therefore, my analysis has to concentrate on vehicle movements.

Through the fall, I worked through various sample sets of data refining the process of converting it to various usable formats, and by the end of the year had a workable version.  Based on this, I have obtained CIS data for all streetcar routes plus a number of major bus routes for December 2006.  This month contains a variety of days with good and bad weather, pre-Christmas shopping and a holiday week.

The King route received the first detailed analysis, and I will present excerpts from this here over the next few weeks.  I have begun work on the Queen line (and related routes Lake Shore, Downtowner and Kingston Road) and will comment on these as well.

All of the posts will be linked via their own topic “Service Analysis”.

Please stay tuned.