Service Cost and Quality

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TTC’s Revisionist History — Where Have The Queen Car Riders Gone

Today’s Star contains a pair of articles by Tess Kalinowski and Christopher Hume on the joys of the Queen car.  Recently, National Geographic listed the 501 as one of the world’s ten top streetcar rides in Journeys of a Lifetime.  Some riders may feel that’s an apt description of their typical journey.

A few nuggets from the TTC in the article show that this organization still refuses to understand and accept its own role in the destruction of riding on this line.  Marilyn Bolton, speaking for the TTC, is quoted:

Much of the 501’s ridership decline coincided with the expansion of the Bloor-Danforth subway and the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, according to the TTC.

“Riders moved up (north) to take advantage of the new subway lines and moved away from the Queen streetcar,” said Bolton.

A look at the statistics [discussed here on December 11] shows that ridership on the Queen Street corridor fell during a period long after the Bloor Subway opened in 1966 (extended to Islington and Warden in 1968, then to Kipling and Kennedy in 1980).

That old chestnut about congestion shows up again:

The sheer length of the route is also a problem. When a car blocks a streetcar by making an illegal left turn or someone parks on the tracks or some other delay occurs on the line, the reverberations travel a long way.

As my analyses of operations on streetcar routes have shown quite clearly, major blockages of service are rare and the disarray in operations can be traced substantially to poor line management and dubious on-time performance even when there is no external source of delays.  Without question, the length of the route magnifies any event, but minor delays are a fact of life for transit operations.

The article also includes a claim that it takes up to five hours to make a trip on Queen.  That’s for a round trip, not a one-way, and even then, this is a rare situation belonging to major storms and regional traffic snarls.

If riders migrated north to the BD subway, they were driven away by poor, unreliable service on Queen.  After the Fix the 501 Forum, the TTC claims it will change its operations and address reliability issues.  Inventing new excuses for driving away riding at a rate unmatched elsewhere on the system is no way to tackle the problem.

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Where Have All The Riders Gone? (Update 2)

[Updated December 14:  A chart of the top 30 bus routes has been added in response to requests from readers.  Comments on this chart are at the end of the post.] 

[Updated December 12:  Charts of ridership and vehicle mileage for most of the system from 1976 to 2005 have been added.  Comments on these appear at the end of this post.] 

My title may seem an odd choice, but my evening spent foraging in TTC statistics was quite sobering.

Some have commented here that I spend an undue amount of time on the streetcar system, and so for a moment, I will turn to the buses.  The TTC likes to believe that its system is growing, and in some very limited places, yes, that is true.  However, the service cuts of the 1990s decimated service and ridership on the entire system, not just downtown.

The count of boardings (one person on one bus regardless of whether they pay a fare or transfer) hit a peak of about 1.42-million in 1989.  This went into  long decline and by 2005, the number was 1.17-million.

Service, measured in vehicle miles, took a hit, although not as deep, through the 1990s, and by 2005 was growing back to almost the same level.  However, this masks what was really happening.  Routes in the handful of growing areas were getting more service, but the TTC was not recapturing riders it had lost.  Major routes now carry only a fraction of what they handled in 1989. Continue reading →

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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 →