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Paul Bedford’s Valediction to Metrolinx

Paul Bedford, former Chief Planner of Toronto and recently-former member of the Metrolinx Board of Directors, had a few words of wisdom for that board at its February 2012 meeting.

A short version of his thoughts appears in today’s National Post in an interview with Peter Kuitenbrouwer.

The full bullet-point version of Bedford’s notes is available here.

Bedford urges the board to be bold and speak publicly about major issues.  We are not going to get public and political buy-in to difficult decisions is we pretend the problems don’t exist.  I will return to this topic in another article later today.

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TTC Coup Planned for March 5 Council Meeting (Updated)

Updated Mar. 2, 2012 at 8:45pm:  It now appears that rather than proposing a slate of potential new Commissioners, the process will be to have open nominations from the floor and an election.

The Globe and Mail’s Kelly Grant reports that there will be a move by TTC Chair Karen Stintz and her supporters to unseat the Gang of Five responsible for the firing of Gary Webster at next week’s Council Meeting.

Updated:  Tess Kalinowski and Paul Maloney from the Star weigh in on the story.

The original “compromise” allegedly worked out with Mayor Ford for an updated TTC had been for an 11-member board with 5 “citizen” members and 6 Councillors, one of whom would be appointed as Chair by Council.  Any upheaval would wait until June after the choice of citizen members was completed.

Recent news from the Mayor, his brother Doug, and other supporters shows that “compromise” is the last word on their mind when it comes to transit planning.  In quick succession, recent days brought us proposals for new taxes and fees, development charges, a casino, a lottery and even a new set of toll expressways to allow Doug to get downtown without congestion.  Each of these schemes has been more outrageous, ill-considered, hare-brained and short-lived as its predecessor.

Clearly, the Fords’ policy brains-trust is spinning out of control in a desperate attempt to find any way to bring credibility to a Sheppard Subway funding plan.  A few Councillors are gullible enough (or still afraid enough of the Mayor) to go along with this charade, but we will see how all that works out at a special Council meeting of March 21.

Meanwhile, housecleaning now, not in June, is absolutely essential at the TTC to prevent the Commission from highjacking Council’s transit priorities.

Stintz now proposes to dissolve the existing Commission and replace it on an interim basis with seven Councillors.  Four citizen members with transit expertise (not, I fervently hope, the political hacks such as Gordon Chong who once graced that board with the dubious value of their presence) will be added in June once the search process completes.

The proposed new Commission would include current Chair Stintz, former Vice-Chair Mihevc, current Vice-Chair Milczyn, current Commissioners Augimeri and Parker, plus Councillors de Baeremaeker and Colle.  Only one of these, Milczyn, hails from the former Ford camp, and his position has been wavering.

Updated:  Although the procedure now appears to be nominations and votes from the floor, we can expect that Council will divide into two camps, and that serious lobbying will occur for the handful of swing votes in the “mushy middle”.

Procedurally, this is possible because a report discussing the makeup of the Commission is on the March 5 agenda.  Its original intent was to help Ford bolster his control of the board, but the timing has blown that scheme up in his face.  If the left-centre group on Council succeeds in ripping the TTC from Ford’s control, we can be sure to see more moves to box in the Mayor and strip him of powers granted by Council.

A vote to replace the Commission will also be a straw vote on the future of the Sheppard LRT and of LRT plans in general because to lose the TTC will be a major political and strategic blow to Mayor Ford with more to come.

Some may argue that this will give him exactly the platform he needs for re-election (“they won’t let me fulfill the mandate you voters gave me”), but that argument will only play to Ford’s dwindling base.  What Toronto, and any potential challenger to Ford, needs is a demonstration that Ford’s way is not the only option, and that the city can be a better place if run with a more progressive and collegial outlook at Council.

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TTC Meeting Review February 29, 2012

The February 29th meeting of the Toronto Transit Commission was one of the shortest in my long memory of these events.  The agenda was trivial with an utter absence of meaty issues for debate, and the real action would follow in press scrums.

Accessible Transit Services Plan: 2011 Status Report

This generally upbeat report was approved without debate.

Notable by its absence is any mention of the operating budget challenges faced thanks to cutbacks in funding by the City of Toronto.  Recently, the Commission diverted $5-million intended to support regular bus service quality into the Wheel Trans budget.  For the long term, Council must address the fact that cutbacks to the Wheel Trans subsidy have much more severe effects, proportionately, than cuts to the regular system.

The TTC may be improving its accessibility, slowly, but basic questions about whether the service is adequate to meet demand receive little public debate.  This is not just a question of Wheel Trans for those who cannot use the conventional system, but of recognition that mobility affects many who are ambulatory, but whose neighbourhoods and destinations may not be well served by surface routes.

What’s In A Name?  Stations on the Spadina Extension in Vaughan

The Commission adopted “Highway 407” and “Vaughan Metropolitan Centre” as the names for the two stations north of Steeles on the Spadina subway extension on a 5-2 vote.

For some time, staff and some Commissioners have pressed for the simpler “Vaughan Centre”, but the City of Vaughan Council prefers the longer (and somewhat more pretentious) name.  Sadly, the opposition to the long version came from Commissioners whose credibility leaves much to be desired, although their comments might in other circumstances be cogent.

Norm Kelly mentioned the “conceit” of former cities within Metropolitan Toronto which created “town centres” such as in Scarborough, Kelly’s home turf.  This is deeply ironic considering that it is the failure of Scarborough Town Centre to attract employment that is part of the argument against the Sheppard Subway extension which Kelly supports.  Frank Di Giorgio worried that everyone will make a case for special consideration on station names.  Di Giorgio, it should be remembered, is the advocate for total obedience to Mayoral fiats by city staff, and if Rob Ford had a position on station names, it would take precedence over everything.

Meanwhile Maria Augimeri had hopes her “Black Creek” would get equal consideration when it comes to formally naming “Steeles West” station.

After the meeting, a group of my colleages agreed that one of my local stations, Chester, should be renamed as “Riverdale Metropolitan Centre”, although I might add the word “Organic” in deference to the neighbourhood.

It is unclear how the TTC will handle placing the long version of “VMC Station” on its maps and other signage.

St. Clair at Keele/Weston

Commissioner Palacio asked for a report on improving traffic conditions at the St. Clair and Keele intersection where, because of the rail underpass just to the east, traffic is constrained to a single lane by the streetcar right-of-way.

Restructuring the Commission

In a scrum after the meeting, Chair Karen Stintz announced that she had reached a compromise for the proposed change in the makeup of the TTC.  A report coming to Council on March 5 (whose origin lies in the machinations of the Ford camp to enhance control of all agencies by the Mayor) recommends a nine-member Commission (as at present) with five citizen members and four Councillors.  The Chair and Vice-Chair would be a Councillor and Citizen member respectively.

The new proposal would see an 11-member Commission with six Councillors.

After the firing of Gary Webster by Ford’s Gang of Five, many Councillors have talked about restructuring the Commission to be more representative of Council as soon as possible, including at the March 5 meeting.  Stintz feels that she has the votes for the compromise arrangement, and that a major shuffle of the Commission would not occur until June when the citizen appointments are confirmed by Council.

The next move is up to Council itself on March 5.

Subways and only Subways

While the TTC was meeting, across on the other side of City Hall Mayor Ford was hosting a bevy of developers for a luncheon discussion of subway funding.  After the TTC meeting completed, there was a scrum outside of the Mayor’s office (with Chair Stintz nowhere in sight) in which the Mayor and his circle claimed that there was broad support in the development industry for subways.  When pressed about funding, Mayor Ford didn’t want to get into the details beyond pointing to the Chong report, but claimed that the development community was totally onside.  Onside maybe, but the developers all slipped out the side door and avoided the media lest they have to go on record supporting or, worse, opposing the Mayor.

Of course developers love subways because they offer an opportunity to squeeze higher densities out of the city than they would get otherwise.  We have been down this path before with the Sheppard Subway.  However, don’t ask the developers to pay for subways, certainly not through development levies that would make their brand new condos uncompetitive with buildings downtown, the really hot part of the condo market.

See Robyn Doolittle and Royson James in the Star (the photo suggests Ford is less than engaged in the event), and Elizabeth Church and Kelly Grant in the Globe.

The strangest part of the whole scheme is that funding the subway depends on new revenue sources many of which Ford is on record as hating, and one (the vehicle registration tax) which he killed early in his term as a swipe at Toronto’s alleged appetite for higher revenues rather than reduced expenses.  Even the normally supportive Toronto Sun cannot believe what their hero is up to.

All of this leads up to a March 15 21 special Council meeting where the “expert panel” convened to look at Sheppard options will report that LRT is the preferred option.  Will Mayor Ford have a credible financing scheme in place, or will this be more smoke and mirrors, more claims that the money is there without any commitment to actually raising the levies needed to build the project?

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Sheppard Panel To Recommend LRT, Not Subway

Various media outlets have reported that the Expert Panel struck by Toronto City Council to review options for the Sheppard East line will recommend the original Transit City LRT plan, not a subway extension.

To the amazement of many, Mayor Rob Ford appears to be trying for a compromise, but given his history, that word probably has a different meaning for the Mayor and his circle than for the rest of us.  The essential problem is to decide whether the subway will end somewhere west of Scarborough Town Centre (Don Mills?  Victoria Park?) or if the “compromise” plan would presume getting to STC some day.  If that’s the “compromise”, them building an LRT to meet the subway would come under fire as a waste of money, and we would be back, essentially, to Ford’s all-subway plan for Sheppard.

Meanwhile, TTC Chair Karen Stintz and Councillor Josh Matlow held a packed meeting in North Toronto to explain and advocate for the LRT option endorsed by Council.  Although there is good support for LRT, an uphill battle remains to counter the Ford camp’s pro-subway spin.

City Council will meet in March 15, 2012 to consider the panel’s report which, if the agenda process runs true to form, should be available in advance of the meeting.

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Service Changes Effective March 25, 2012 (Corrected)

The TTC will implement several service changes on March 25, 2012.  These are mostly in response to growing demand on the bus network, although this also includes slightly better service on the Bloor-Danforth subway at weekday midday and early evening.

Actual average loads for current service and the projected values following the changes are no longer included in the memoranda issued by TTC Service Planning.  This means that we cannot see how close to the line ridership is, or to what degree it already exceeds service standards.

Correction:  The average load information has been moved to a completely separate section of the service change memorandum, and I did not catch this.

Updated:  The table of service changes linked here has been updated with the loading information.

Although many services will improve, the amount of service to be operated falls within the currently-approved budget.  Looking further out, the budget includes the usual summer reduction in service levels, but there is provision for increases in the fall.  By November, the TTC will be back at a service level slightly better than in January, just before the most recent round of cutbacks.  That is on an overall basis with cuts in some services and loading standards going to pay for improvements elsewhere.

2012.03.25 Service Changes

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The Secret Sheppard Subway Report

On February 15, 2012, the Star’s Royson James wrote about a TTC report prepared in March 2011 for Mayor Rob Ford on the Sheppard Subway.  The article included a photo of the report’s summary.

Royson James graciously provided me with a copy of the document, and it is available here for those who want to see the whole thing.  I suspect that it is only part of an even larger report because this material only covers one big question: why are the assumptions from the Network 2011 study done back in 1986 no longer valid?  There is no discussion of construction costs, project financing, or any comparison of alternative schemes.

2011.03 Transit Technology Summary and Background

2011.03 Transit Technology Table

Note:  These files were prepared by scanning the copy I received, which itself was a previous generation copy including a lot of marginalia.  The text was imported into and formatted as a new Word document with approximately the same layout (and typography) as the original.  This allowed it to be “printed” in PDF format (the files linked above) rather than a much larger set of images of the scanned sheets.

The report contains a few rather intriguing comments that won’t sound new to regular readers of this site, but which raise questions about the planning assumptions underneath decades of work by the TTC, City Planning and other agencies.

Planners and politicians make grand statements about how policies, official plans and zoning will focus development in locations and patterns of their choice.  In practice, this does not actually happen because the best intentions are inevitably diluted by political reality.  Developers build where there is a real market, not where a plan tells them they should build.  Jobs move around in complete ignorance of city, regional and provincial goals.  Do you own some land that doesn’t fit the plan?  Just sit on it until a friendly government comes to power and get a brand new, as-of-right zoning upgrade.

The idea that transit will shape development is demonstrably false because so many parts of the city with subway stations have not, in fact, developed at all.  This may be due to neighbourhood pressure, or to a policy of preserving the “old” parts of the city because that character has a value greater than massive redevelopment.  A neighbourhood may simply not be ready for development, or may have the wrong character.

This is particularly striking for residential development where local amenities and the “feel” of a neighbourhood are more important than with an industrial/commercial/office development.  People may work in office towers surrounded by pedestrian-hostile roads and parking, but they want to go home to something friendlier.

Because the market for commercial real estate and the jobs it brings has shifted to the 905, much of the development in nodes originally intended for employment has been residential.  This completely changes the transit demand pattern.  Instead of many commuters travelling “in” to a few nodes, we have residential areas that spawn outward trips all over the GTAH.  Subway plans presumed the concentrated trip making that nodes full of employees would create, and these have not materialized.

We are now seeing this pattern even in downtown Toronto with the growth of the condo market.  Many residents live and work downtown, but a considerable number are “reverse commutes” out to the 905, trips for which both the local and regional systems are very badly equipped.

The idea of “downtown North York” or “downtown Scarborough” has simply not materialized in the form expected three decades ago.  Actual employment levels at these two centres are about 1/3 (North York) or 1/5 (Scarborough) of the 1986 projections.  This should be a lesson for today’s planners and politicians who think they can forecast and direct future growth patterns with the aid of a few maps and regulations.

The employment growth projected back in 1986 for “Metropolitan Toronto” (now the City of Toronto) was a rise from 1.23-million to 1.9m.  In fact, employment grew only to 1.30m by 2011 with the lion’s share of the jobs going instead to the 905.  With the absence of strong nodes for new jobs, there was little chance of improving the modal split to whatever commercial development did occur.  Combining lower than predicted growth and a failure to achieve the projected transit modal split leaves us with demand projections that are completely meaningless.

Far too often, there is a political imperative to make the future look better than it might be, or at least to do a proper sensitivity analysis, a “what if” scenario for conditions that don’t match what we would like to see.  Any subway financing scheme that depends on future ridership must answer basic questions:  will those riders actually arrive, and will land development occur in a manner that will generate trips the subway will serve?

We have already seen development in the Sheppard corridor, but it is unclear whether this attracts buyers because it is near the 401 and DVP (and thus to a wide set of GTA destinations), or because it is near the subway.  That development is generating many car trips because, for most destinations, auto travel is the only real option.  The market share for transit at the North York and Scarborough centres is barely half what was projected in 1986, and the compound effect of much lower employment means that transit demand to these centres is a trivial fraction of what Network 2011 was intended to serve.

One item caught my eye in the section of “Public’s travel patterns and behaviour”.  Not only were the employment and mode share values used to model demand considerably above what actually happened, assumptions were  made about the way the Sheppard subway would get its passengers.  Regional and local bus services would be gerrymandered to force riders onto the Sheppard line (at least in the model), but riders actually preferred to go to Finch Station where there was a chance of getting a comfortable spot on a train.

Another assumption in the demand model was that the cost of driving would rise substantially both through higher gas prices and the cost of parking.  Neither of these materialized, although based on typical motoring behaviour, without a very  good network of transit alternatives, the pricing of auto trips does not discourage much travel.

This begs a vital question for all regional planning — can we trust the models?  What assumptions went into the model for our new transit  network, and have these been tested against actual patterns of development and of the regional economy?

The projected demands on new transit lines made back in 1986 were substantially higher than today’s expectations:

  • The Sheppard subway was expected to have 15,400 peak riders by 2011, but the actual number on the existing line is 4,500.  The projected peak demand for the full line in 2011 is now 6-10,000.
  • The Eglinton subway was expected to have 17,600 peak riders by 2011, but the LRT projection is now reduced to 5,200 (based on having the central section underground).
  • The Downtown Relief line was projected to have 11,700 peak riders by 2011, and the demand projection today is 12,000.  This is no surprise given that the DRL would serve a demand that actually existed 25 years ago, rather than a notional demand in a regional plan.

In previous articles, I have discussed the matter of the TTC’s Capital Budget and the mounting cost of simply keeping the subway system running.  Nothing lasts forever, and many systems are wearing out.  We are now on the third major generation of vehicles, there are problems everywhere with station finishes and equipment, water penetration and damage is an ongoing headache, and the signal system must be completely replaced.  Contrary to statements by some subway advocates, subways do not last for 100 years without major investments in rehabilitation.

Back in 1986, the TTC had not yet reached the point where the subway had started to wear out.  The oldest line (Yonge from Eglinton to Union) was only 32 years old, and much of its first generation equipment was still functional.  The TTC now knows that the subway system has an ongoing cost of $230m operating (routine maintenance) and $275m capital (major systems replacement) every year.  Looked at another way, simply maintaining the subway system consumes about 1/6 of the annual operating budget, and a substantial slice of the non-expansion related capital budget.

There is a large backlog of needed capital repairs with a shortfall of $2.3-billion in the 10-year capital budget thanks to provincial cutbacks in capital funding.  Building more subway lines will only add to this set of maintenance costs a few decades in the future.

Finally, we have a bit of creative history writing.  Why, the TTC asks, was LRT not embraced as an option back in 1986?  They claim that at the time it was a poorly understood mode with only limited use, particularly in North America.  What we now think of as “modern” LRT had not yet evolved.  This statement ignores the LRT renaissance in Europe and suggests that despite new LRT systems in North America (notably Edmonton’s and Calgary’s), it was too soon for the TTC to embrace the mode.

I will not dwell on the fact that the Scarborough ICTS system was brand new, and the idea that an “intermediate capacity” system between buses and subways already might exist was simply not in accord with provincial policy.

In fact, the TTC’s love for LRT is a very recent phenomenon.  When the Ridership Growth Strategy was first proposed in 2003 for “short term” service improvements, TTC subway planners were terrified that their pet projects had fallen off of the map.  The RGS was hastily amended to include a commitment to the Spadina and Sheppard extensions, and this move has been cited ever since as “proof” that the TTC supports the Sheppard line.  It would be another four years before the Transit City scheme was launched.

LRT was well-established around the world before the Transit City plan was announced, but it took a major rethink of Toronto’s transit network at the political level, combined with the economic constraints against subway building, for LRT to get the consideration it deserved.  Transit City was not perfect, but it got Toronto thinking about what might be built.

This report is a year old, and its existence shows that the pro-subway forces in Toronto, notably in the Mayor’s office, did not want an informed, public discussion of subway plans to occur.  Observations about the changing growth patterns in Toronto raise important questions about the future role of transit, indeed of the ability of transit to serve the region as we have actually built it.  Far too much effort is concentrated on the subway-vs-LRT battle in a few corridors when the real challenge lies “out there” in the growing and very car-oriented 905.

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“So are they all, all honourable men”

Rob Ford’s Gang of Five turned its knives today on Gary Webster, the much-respected Chief General Manager of the TTC.  At a special meeting called for the purpose of discussing “personnel matters”, the Commission thrashed out Webster’s future and, it is rumoured, that of other senior staff at the TTC.

After three hours in private session, the Commissioners emerged to confirm what had been decided, that Webster’s contract would be terminated in accordance with its “without cause” section.  Although we don’t know the details, this almost certainly means that Webster will earn not only his pay for the remainder of the contract, but a penalty payment for early termination.

The recently recruited Chief Operating Officer, Andy Byford, takes over as interim CGM, an utterly thankless task in the poisonous environment of City Hall.  Whether he will be chosen to replace Webster, or would even want to, remains to be seen.

The TTC will launch into a search for a new CGM, but no sane, let alone respectable senior manager from another transit agency will want a position whose primary role is to kiss the mayor’s ass.

Before the vote, some of the Commissioners spoke to the issue.  Maria Augimeri spoke passionately about the role of the Commission asking “who do you serve”.  Does the Commission exist as puppets of the mayor, or as a responsible body serving the citizens of Toronto?  John Parker spoke extremely briefly merely noting the words “without just cause”.  Both Augimeri and Parker would join Chair Karen Stintz and Vice-Chair Peter Milczyn in voting against the termination.

Ford’s minions — Frank Di Giorgio, Denzil Minnan-Wong, Norm Kelly, Vince Crisanti and Cesar Palacio — could have kept their mouths shut, but no politician can resist a chance for a sanctimonious speech.

Di Giorgio talked about the relationship between previous mayors and CGMs noting that both David Gunn and Rick Ducharme had left under strained relationships with past administrations.  What he neglected to mention was that Webster was threatened not by a professional disagreement, but by Mayor Ford’s mistaken belief that staff owe him a personal allegiance supporting whatever position he might take.  Di Giorgio actually said that excellence in a CGM means the ability to perform tasks set by the leader of the city, by the Mayor.

That’s not how professional staffs work in Canada, and indeed this concept violates both Council’s code of ethics (which provides that staff work for all members of Council without favour) and the Professional Engineer’s code that regards tailoring advice to suit the opinion of the hearer, rather than facts and the professional opinion of the engineer, as a form of misconduct.

Norm Kelly praised Webster, but tempered this by saying that his good deeds lay in the past, while the TTC needs someone to “lead us into the future”.  That will be a very dark future if this decision stands without a change in TTC governance.

In the best tradition of stories with black-hatted villains, there were boos, hissing and calls of “shame” from the public.  This is the most disgusting example of political manipulation, of abuse of power, that I have seen in 40 years of TTC and Council-watching.  Toronto is soiled by this action.

Council now faces the task of bringing Mayor Ford and his lackeys to heel, of driving home the basic fact that power rests with Council, not the Mayor no matter how delusional he or his toadies may be in thinking him Rob the First, The Great and Powerful.

The next opportunity will come at the Council Meeting of March 5-6 when a proposed change in the makeup of the Transit Commission, recently passed by the Ford-dominated Executive Committee, comes to Council for discussion.  The outcome may not be to Ford’s liking.  His actions, the moves of a spoiled child, a bully who cannot stand losing a fight, will only harden opposition to his reign.  Council can and should act to strip the TTC of Ford allies, especially the five responsible for Webster’s dismissal.  There will be no transit progress in Toronto while a tinpot potentate interferes with the execution of Council’s will, strangles the transit system for funding and service, while promising subways he and the City cannot possibly afford to build.

[The title of this article is from Marc Antony’s speech from Julius Ceasar, Act III, Scene 2, in which he mocks Caesar’s assassins and their dubious self-justification.]

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TTC Board May Try To Fire Chief General Manager

The Toronto Star reports that a special meeting of the TTC Board has been called for February 21 to consider the firing of Chief General Manager Gary Webster.

In a clear retaliation against the block of Council who endorsed an LRT plan for Toronto, the block of Commissioners dominated by Mayor Ford have called for this special meeting using a procedure similar to the one used by Karen Stintz and her allies to call a special Council meeting on the LRT plans.

If correct, this will be a clear retaliation against TTC’s Chief General Manager Gary Webster who has spoken against proposals for expansion of the subway network, and by extension against Stintz who has defended Webster from previous attacks by the Ford administration.

From the viewpoint of political strategy, now is the time for Council to hold yet another special meeting to seize control of the Transit Commission.  This could be done either by prematurely ending the terms of sitting members, or by increasing the size of the Commission and diluting Ford’s influence with enough extra members to ensure a majority that represented the broader view of Council rather than of the Mayor.

Will Council make such a move, or will they sit on their hands?  This is the first challenge, but certainly not the last, in taming Mayor Ford’s control of the City’s agencies.

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Metrolinx Meeting for February 2012 (Updated)

Updated February 17, 2012 at noon:  The original article from February 13 has been updated to include additional information and comment at the Board Meeting.

The Metrolinx Board will meet on Thursday, February 16.  Among items on the agenda is a “Toronto Update”, but there is no published report.  Given recent events, I suspect this report won’t get beyond the draft stage much before the meeting.

Updated:  The Toronto report and discussion on it are covered in a separate article.

Other items include:

GO Transit Update

This report begins with a review of 2011 operations and updates on ridership to the end of November.

  • On the rail system, weekday riding is up by almost 6%.
  • On the bus system, weekday riding is up by over 6%, and weekend riding is up by 18%.
  • Total weekday ridership is now 243,600, up 13,600 from November 2010.

Looking ahead, GO expects rail ridership to grow by 22% over the next five years while bus riding will go up by 30%.

Although the presentation does not say this explicitly, one constraint on rail growth is the limit on peak capacity GO can provide.  This shows up in GO’s continuing inability to meet its target for passenger comfort with 80% or more of rush hour passengers getting seats on trains.  The number today is 64%, and there is little hope of this improving with demand growing faster than GO can provide capacity.

Updated:  Director Lee Parsons asked where there were capacity constraints in the network.  GO President Gary McNeil replied that demand was high on all corridors, but that Barrie has the strongest growth.  Milton is running at 110-120% of capacity.  GO will put additional trains wherever there is an opening in network schedules because there is strong demand everywhere.

Director Richard Koroscil asked what problems are at the top of GO’s “worry list”.  McNeil replied that the greatest need is for Federal and Provincial support for infrastructure.  Demand for GO service is there whether governments provide funding or not.  Planning where to spend is complicated by the need to keep activity going in many areas at the same time lest riders feel that their part of the network is being ignored.

Director Rahul Bhardwaj worried that people might feel that transit growth has stalled, and asked how GO could get more positive stories out.  McNeil replied that the magnitude of the Toronto debate has overshadowed GO even though they have good news in the 905.  Chair Rob Prichard noted that Metrolinx has to make the same progress in Toronto as they do elsewhere in the GTHA.

I could not help thinking back to the departing remarks of just-retired Director Paul Bedford who, among other parting comments, noted the relative size of the TTC and GO’s operations.  What is big news in the 905 and for GO itself would be small change on the scale of the TTC because GO is, comparatively, such a small operation.  Simply publishing sunny press releases (something GO is very good at) will not make up for the lower presence and mode share that transit generally has in the 905 compared to the 416.

Changes to Ticket Cancelling on the GO System

The title of this report is somewhat misleading as this is actually a report on the phase-out of paper 10-ride and 2-ride tickets and completion of the system’s conversion to Presto.

After May 31, 2012, the 10-ride and 2-ride tickets will no longer be sold.  Those remaining in circulation will be valid up to July 31, 2012 after which they will be refunded or converted to Presto.

Monthly, daily and group passes are not affected by this change.

Presto Update

Presto continues to gain users with a 22% growth in the number of cards issued over the November-December 2011 period.  About $14.4-million in fares were paid using the fare cards during the same period.  What has not been reported is how this lines up against overall fare revenue on GO and on participating regional transit systems.

A major new market for Presto will arrive in June 2012 with the rollout in Ottawa with the “Presto Next Generation” (or “PNG”) card.  PNG will become available in the GTHA in late fall 2012.

Concurrent with the rollout of PNG, the Presto website will be revised with added functionality and an improved layout, according to the report.

Meanwhile on the TTC, Metrolinx expects the Commission to grant authority for a contract with Presto at its March meeting.  Notable among the features to be included will be “Open Payments” allowing cards other than Presto and mobile devices to be used.  However, the exact details are not explained and it is unclear whether this will simply provide the ability to pay a fare with a credit card, or whether that card can be used as an alternative to Presto and receive discounts such as multi-trip incentives or equivalent-to-pass functionality.

A long section originally this article related to questions about Presto arising from the January Board Meeting.  This has been moved to a separate article.

Updated:  Director Rahul Bhardwaj asked how many “free rides” are taken thanks to the discounting system of Presto.  Staff pointed out that there are “free” rides on passes by design, but they are not counted or reported as there is no mechanism to capture pass use comparable to the Presto readers.

Director Lee Parsons noted that a commuter line in New York City saw a jump in counterpeak and weekend demand when it moved to all day service, and a fare tariff that allows for extra trips at little or no cost helps drive this demand. 

A view of transit riding as “free” and somehow undesirable is troubling because it implies that encouraging use through lower “frequent flyer” fares may not be a good idea.  This is the basic philosophical problem of fare structures:  do we purport to charge people for what they use, or do we encourage higher utilization through fares that reward frequent travel.  Is transit a service we wish to make as attractive as possible through the perception that it has a low marginal cost just as autos are thought to be “cheap” until one pulls into a gas station or receives an insurance bill.

After the meeting, I sent questions to Metrolinx asking how the two generations of Presto cards and supporting systems will interoperate.  For example, what will happen if an Ottawa user with a “PNG” card comes to Toronto and attempts to ride GO Transit?  I await answers to my questions.