Once again, the TTC participated in the Easter Parade through The Beach from Neville Loop westward. This year, I only photographed the departure from Russell Carhouse rather than walking the entire parade route.
Peter Witt 2766 led the fleet followed by PCC 4500, CLRV 4125, ALRV 4217 and Flexity 4412.
The Witt was driven by operator Frank Hood who after 31 years is retiring today.
The Easter Parade fleet at Russell Carhouse: 2766, 4500, 4126, 4217 and 4412
The TTC Board met on March 23. In earlier articles, I have already reviewed the agenda, and discussed ridership statistics.
Arising from the debate on ridership, the Board passed a motion to revisit the whole issue of actively pursuing ridership growth. The motion by Commissioner Shelley Carroll reads:
That TTC staff report back to the Commission by the third quarter of 2016 with a development plan for a comprehensive multi-year strategy to address current ridership stagnation and to achieve a steady rate of ridership growth annually thereafter.
This is particularly important going into the 2017 budget year when there will be pressure to accommodate both the start of new expenses for the Spadina subway extension (TYSSE) and strong growth in the Wheel-Trans budget. Debates and decisions about which options might be pursued to improve transit and attract riders need to have more background than the annual need for politicians to have something to announce. At the very least, changes should be thought out with specific benefits beyond the photo ops.
Updated March 25, 2016 at 1:45 pm: Charts and commentary have been added at the end of this article regarding monthly ridership statistics published by the TTC through the CEO’s Report.
In a previous article, I wrote about a TTC management report giving a “Ridership Update” for early 2016. This was triggered by concerns that overall ridership had stagnated, and the obvious question management might hear: “what are you doing about this”.
During the debate at the March 23, 2016 Board meeting, it became clear that to some extent, management was making up the story as they went along. The report includes data for the first two months of 2016, and February was particularly bad with a drop against both the budget target and against results in 2015.
However, once the debate was well underway, management reported that March to date was almost on budget, and was up 2.5% over 2015. Why was this information not in the report, or at least in a supplementary paper published before the meeting got underway? The entire tone of the debate would have changed with the sense that, maybe, things were turning around and ridership was growing again.
The situation was further complicated by repeated claims from management and from TTC Chair Josh Colle that ridership was not on a decline, but that it simply did not achieve its budget target. This quite flatly is not true as anyone capable of reading TTC reports can see.
The TTC’s Ridership Update report will be discussed at the March 23, 2016 Board meeting. Its publication triggered an unwelcome round of hand-wringing about transit service and financing that could well undo momentum seemingly regained by the Tory regime at City Hall. How did we get so quickly from a pro-transit stance to one where just avoiding cuts will seem a victory?
Fun With Budgets at City Hall
During the Ford years, TTC ridership continued to climb despite the best efforts of Council to throttle the TTC budget, but a good deal of that growth came at the margins, filling up less crowded routes and time periods, and stuffing the busier ones to the extent any new riding was possible. John Tory ran on a platform that SmartTrack would fix absolutely everything, but once in office acknowledged that day-to-day service had taken a hit and needed fixing. Improvements to date have not addressed peak capacity for the simple reason that there were no spare vehicles, and that is only now being addressed.
Some of the new buses bought by the TTC will not directly address capacity shortfalls, but instead will be used to bolster the pool of spare buses so that maintenance standards can improve and fewer vehicles will fail in service. The streetcar system remains hobbled by a car shortage thanks to Bombardier’s missed deliveries, and this cascades down into the bus fleet. On the subway it is physically impossible to run more trains, a problem that will not be eliminated until 2019-20, and then only on Line 1 YUS. Riders might be forgiven for wondering if things will ever improve, especially for peak period travel.
Schedule adjustments have reduced the amount of short-turning on some routes, but gaps and bunching of vehicles remain a problem.
The TTC is far from out of the woods on service quantity and quality, and this situation cannot be fixed overnight.
In previous articles reviewing the quality of service on various routes, I have concentrated on long, major lines such as Queen, Dufferin, Finch West and Lawrence East. However, a review of a few shorter routes has been on my “to do” list for a while because the problems that beset longer routes should not be present.
This brings me to routes 6 Bay and 94 Wellesley (the subject of a future article). Both of these routes are quite short, and they operate in the “old” city of Toronto mostly south of Bloor Street.
6 Bay went through the travails of construction at Union Station and, to a lesser extent, on Queens Quay, but that is now finished. 94 Wellesley didn’t have construction to deal with, but until September 2015, it had an old schedule which the bus operators could not meet.
How are these routes running today?
At the February TTC Board meeting, Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat took the Board through the road show presentation she and her staff have been taking around Toronto with the proposed new Toronto transit plan. This issue was held over to the March Board meeting because, for procedural reasons, there were limited questions in February.
One major issue here is that the body actually charged with setting transit policy, the TTC Board, was being briefed on a plan they had not seen before, and to which they had given no input or direction. This is only partly explainable by the fact that any long-term transportation plan would form part of the city’s Official Plan, and the Planning Department “owns” that document. However, one would hope that members of the TTC Board would have at least a passing familiarity with what was in the works. This situation is complicated by the presence of “citizen” members who are not also Councillors and are not part of the information flow, such as it is, at City Hall.
The plan and supporting reports will go to City Council a week after the TTC meeting.
A major problem, of course, is that “planning” in Toronto consists of catering to the whims of the Mayor, influential Councillors, the Minister of Transportation (and his government), and senior members of the government caucus. To describe planning in this context as unbiased and purely “evidence based” is something of a stretch.
That said, the situation is better today than in recent years because, at least, all of the proposals are on the table at once, and it is more difficult to dress up a bad proposal when it must compete for attention and analysis with many others at the same time. This does not prevent Councillors from making the attempt at advancing their pet projects, but some degree of comparative evaluation might keep them in check.
The TTC Board will meet on March 23, 2016 at 1:00 pm in Committee Room 1 at City Hall. The agenda includes many items of interest:
At its meeting on March 23, 2016, the TTC Board will consider two reports on major revisions to transit service in the Waterfront and on King Street.
The changes will address a backlog of route and service issues in one package:
The changes will be implemented on June 19, 2016. The detailed service plans have not yet been published, but there is some information in the staff reports.
The TTC will be rebuilding the track at the intersections of King & Charlotte and Adelaide & Charlotte beginning on March 29. Charlotte Street forms the eastern part of the loop used by 510 Spadina cars at King Street.
For the period from March 29 to April 10 while King & Charlotte is under construction:
For the period from April 11 to 26 while Adelaide & Charlotte is under construction services will operate on their normal routes, although 510 Spadina cars will continue to operate to Queens Quay rather than turning at Adelaide.
Updated March 11, 2016 at 11:00 am: A section has been added commenting on the TTC’s claim that a two-hour transfer would result in a revenue loss of $20m/year.
Recent discussions about a proposed Toronto transit plan have included, almost as a minor sideshow, the Metrolinx study of regional fare integration. A basic tenet of this study is that “rapid transit” would be a separate fare zone or structure from everything else, but the exact mechanism by which this would be done is as yet unclear. GO Transit fares might be lowered and subway fares increased for certain trips, but there is no worked example to show how various trip types inside and outside the City of Toronto will be affected.
Although City and TTC staff are working with Metrolinx on this study, neither the TTC Board nor Council has been presented with a definitive proposal, and there is limited direction from either of them on guiding factors staff should use.
The only context in which Council has decided anything was for SmartTrack, and their wishes included lots of stations, frequent service and the ability to ride SmartTrack for a TTC fare. We know now that many stations and a good deal of service are no longer part of the package. As for fares, there has been some equivocating about this by staff as to just what a “TTC fare” might be by the time SmartTrack (or more accurately GO Regional Express Rail) begins operating.
As for the TTC Board, there has been a series of reports and decisions evolving over the last year. None of these sets a definitive policy, although the motions passed could be misread to imply this has happened.
Steve Munro 