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In Case You Haven’t Noticed

With the recent emphasis on Customer Service as the TTC’s new mantra, I am rather harder on them for certain types of issue than I might otherwise be.

One important part of CS is accurate information.  Not only is it useful to riders, it gives some indication that the organization cares to make their journey more comfortable with alerts about unusual conditions.

Sunday, May 15 is the date of the Goodlife marathon, and the TTC helpfully tells us about delays and diversions with posters and e-alerts.  Here is one I just received:

SUNDAY: Rolling road closures for GoodLife Toronto Marathon impacts TTC routes: 5, 14, 33, 65, 72A, 94, 97-320, 127, 504. Expect delays.

Last updated May 14, 2011 18:59:30

Route 33 Forest Hill no longer operates on weekends.  “Expect delays” is something of an understatement.

Meanwhile in another part of the world, the service change notice and revised schedule have finally appeared at Broadview Station for route 8 Broadview.  The TTC appears to be slowly catching up with the backlog from service changes implemented a week ago.

At times, I feel like I’m just kvetching, but one would hope that the TTC folks responsible for maps and service notices paid attention to timeliness and accuracy.

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TTC Meeting Wrapup May 2011

The TTC Agenda for May 11 contained a number of items of interest.  In a previous article, I reviewed the preliminary report for the Finch bus service improvements.

Items detailed below the break are:

  • PRESTO Update
  • Adam Giambrone’s Office Expenses
  • Station Ambassadors
  • Chief General Manager’s Report for January-February 2011
  • 510 Spadina Additional Service South of King Street
  • Additional Commissioners

Continue reading →

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Secret Service Cuts

Today, the money-saving service cuts went into effect on many routes.  At this point, the TTC’s magnificent customer service efforts have not seen fit to post notices at stops on the affected routes, nor to change the posted schedules.  They have managed to place small yellow stickers saying “hey, no service”, but left the old schedules in place.  I don’t know if the yellow stickers are up system wide because checking that out is lots of work.

So far, the TTC’s effort consists of:

  • A “good news” press release and media event stressed the service additions (almost all of which were routine seasonal changes) while omitting any mention of the service cuts.
  • Updated schedule info is online, but not on schedules posted at stops.
  • There are “no service” stickers on affected stops, but I don’t know how extensive this work is, especially where routes with different hours of service share the same stop.
  • System maps have not been updated to show route segments with limited hours of operation.

At Broadview Station, there is no indication that 62 Mortimer and 8 Broadview no longer operate after 10pm Sundays.

On a related topic, the TTC must dust off its Service Standards and address issues on which they were silent earlier this year:

  • Will the screenline of 10 riders per hour continue to be applied for future service cuts?
  • Will walking distances to service be considered both as they apply to future cuts, and to reviews of the cuts that have been implemented?
  • What mechanism will be used to monitor and, if justified, to reintroduce service, and what standard will apply?

Please use comments on this post to help track the degree to which missing or incorrect information about the service cuts is a system-wide problem.

And remember to tell all your friends that this is “for the greater good”.

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hotdocs 2011 part i

Yes, folks, it’s that time of year when a transit blogger burrows into dark theatres to watch documentaries for eleven days.  Our regular programming will resume in due course.

This year’s hotdocs has 199 films and the most dedicated won’t see even half of them.  Me?  I manage two or three a day with the odd foray to other events such as concerts and even the occasional political/transit meeting.  Hard to break old habits.

This post covers days 1-3 of hotdocs and includes reviews of:

  • POM Wonderful Presents:  The Greatest Movie Ever Sold ***
  • A Hard Name ***
  • How to Make a Book with Steidl **½
  • That’s Life ***
  • Our Persian Rug ***
  • Mighty Jerome ***½
  • Battle for Brooklyn ****
  • The National Parks Project *½

Continue reading →

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Eglinton-Crosstown Public Meeting (Updated)

Updated April 27, 2011 at 4:10pm: The presentation from the April 26 public meeting is now available on the Metrolinx website.

Original post from April 21:

There will be a public meeting about the Eglinton-Crosstown project on Tuesday, April 26 from 7:00 to 8:30 pm in the auditorium of St. Clement’s School, 21 St. Clement’s Avenue.

For those who don’t know the area, this is roughly a 3/4 km walk north from Eglinton Station, or you can transfer to the 97 Yonge at Davisville (indoors) or Eglinton (on-street) Stations. The service runs roughly every 15 minutes, at least on paper.

All the attendees will arrive by transit, won’t they?

This meeting is a joint presentation of several Councillors along the Eglinton line.

One can only hope that the public will actually get a chance to speak, a rare event in our fine city these days.

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TTC Fouls up Variety Village Service Plan (Updated)

Updated April 26 at 2:30 pm:

I received a note from the TTC castigating me for the “gotcha” nature of this article.  In effect, in my zeal to show this as a staff error, I left out information that would have painted a different picture.

The background for this is that at the December 2010 meeting (the first of the new Commission), there was a presentation on the options for serving Variety Village.  This presentation is not available online, but was sent to me with the complaint.  Given its size, I have excerpted the portion relating to the proposed 12 Kingston Road split in which it is clear that (a) service would be removed from Kingston Road at some hours and (b) staff do not support this option.

2010.12 Variety Village Route 12

The December report accompanying the presentation includes an earlier report on Variety Village which mentions the split 12 Kingston Road service as an option, but recommends against it.  There is no mention in the 2004 report that a split service would remove buses from Kingston Road completely during some periods of operation.

The loss of service with this option is not mentioned in the April report or recommendation approved by the Commission, nor in the “Commission Highlights” posted after the meeting.  It is quite clear that this was seen as a “good news” story, and that the Commission did not understand (or if they did, care to acknowledge) that a service cut was involved.

The original post from April 25 follows below.

Continue reading →

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Reading the Fine Print

The TTC’s Audit Committee recently considered the Draft Financial Statement for 2010, a report that will likely show up on the regular meeting agenda in May.  As usual, the interesting parts are buried in the notes.

Last fall, I wrote about the manner in which the TTC is financed and the baffling array of programs and reserve funds through which money flows to various parts of the TTC operating and capital budget.  This article continues with the info for 2010.

Continue reading →

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The Vanishing Eglinton Right-of-Way

Serious policy geeks like me spend our time delving into the more arcane reports on various agendas.  This can be tedious work, but every so often, something interesting turns up.

On the May 2, 2011, agenda for the Government Management Committee, there is an item regarding the transfer of various city properties to Build Toronto, the agency charged with making money off of surplus City lands.

Among the properties to be transferred are three strips of land along the north side of Eglinton Avenue:

  • West of Widdicombe Hill Blvd
  • East of Widdicombe Hill to Kipling
  • East from Kipling to Wincott Drive

These lands form part of the original reserve for the Richview Expressway for which plans were abandoned decades ago.  A strip of land will be kept along the south edge of these properties for road widening should an Eglinton LRT project (or similar work needing more road space) ever proceed.

Disposal of this land by the City effectively blocks any scheme for using the expressway lands for a transit line either on the surface on in a ditch.

Another block of land to be transferred lies on the northeast corner of Don Mills and Eglinton.  The report notes that this is the planned location for a bus terminal connecting with the Eglinton LRT line at Don Mills, and this would certainly be a good place for an integrated development.

Elsewhere in the list of surplus properties, one can see remnants of the Scarborough transportation corridor and the Front Street extension.  It is ironic that an administration so bent on auto transportation is giving up lands that once might have been part of an extensive highway network.

Transfer of Properties Report

Appendices including detailed property descriptions

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The Mythical Private Sector Subway

The Ford Administration and its followers at City Hall would have us believe that transit developments in Toronto can be had essentially free of public cost and that the private sector, whatever that means, will pony up the investment to build the subway.

Almost as soon as the scheme for a privately financed Sheppard Subway was announced, the wheels started to come off the plan.  Actually, “come off” assumes that it had wheels to begin with, and statements by the Fords showed clearly that they had not worked through the details.

Oddly enough, their hands were out for any public sector funds that might be available including $330-million or so originally earmarked by Ottawa for the Sheppard LRT, up to $650m in “left over” funding that might not be needed for the Eglinton tunnel project by Queen’s Park, and whatever investment could be pried loose from Ottawa’s “PPP Canada”.  Additional money might come from a quick sale of waterfront lands by the City to would-be developers.

The scale of the Sheppard project may well shrink to only the eastern leg from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre so that the total cost stays in the $2-billion range.

Recently, I learned that Queen’s Park had offered $2b toward the Sheppard Subway provided that the Fords would allow the eastern part of Eglinton to remain on the surface, but this was turned down flat.  So intransigent is the Mayor on the subject of incursion by transit into road space that the possibility of substantial funding for his pet project was not an option worth embracing.

You may have noticed by now that there isn’t a lot of private sector money in this story, except for the buy-out of waterfront lands, and that’s a sale of public assets, not a private sector investment in transit.

Meanwhile, we hear a lot about private sector investment elsewhere, usually with little context.  Vancouver’s Canada Line comes up now and then, including in comments on this site, and some people think it’s a private sector show all the way.  In fact, various public agencies have over $1-billion in the project, more than half of the total cost.  Even the “private” partner, a joint venture, includes investment agencies that manage public funds including pension plans.

Probably the most successful example of investment-supported transit is in Hong Kong, but this must be seen in the context of local conditions.  Not only is Hong Kong an extremely dense city, it is one in which the land ownership and planning are firmly in public hands.  Private buildings abound, but they sit on land leased from the public sector which reaps the benefit of land development.  (For an extensive look at the Hong Kong system’s financial and planning development, see Rail+Property Development by Cervero and Murakami [14MB]).

Leaving aside whether Toronto would ever support densities such as those found in major Asian cities like Hong Kong, there are important issues that do not get discussed here.

  • Who profits, and how soon?  If land is held in the public sector, the profit from  appreciation thanks to transit construction remains there too.
  • Will the City simply hand over land to developers to do with as they please, or will there be a recognition that city building involves us all?
  • Will new neighbourhoods to be planned both as attractive, pedestrian-friendly spaces where people will want to live even at high densities, or will we see a continuation of the tower-in-a-parking-lot so common in many developments?
  • Will we build car-oriented suburbs, generating even more congestion, along what is supposed to be a major transit corridor?
  • Will the Sheppard line be funded only with development along its corridor, or will other parts of the city, such as the waterfront, have development revenues siphoned off leaving them bereft of transit?
  • How much of the scheme depends on the City fronting the initial construction cost in the hope of future development revenues to pay the capital and operating expenses?
  • Will Council be allowed to perform, in public, a full review of the terms of any arrangement, or will we sell our transit system’s future in a back room deal?

PPPs are notorious for requiring careful structure of contracts, performance criteria, penalties and ongoing management.  Toronto’s political culture prefers to walk away from such responsibility in the public sector.

One way or another, Toronto will commit a pot load of money to a Sheppard subway of dubious value, and force Queen’s Park to bury the entire Eglinton line at great cost.  Billions will disappear into these projects while other parts of the transit system beg for funding.

The private sector may wind up funding some portion of the Sheppard project, but transit overall is still very much a public issue.  Long term funding will depend on public revenues.  We cannot avoid the debate on fares, tolls or taxes, with the assumption that magically money in the private sector will build, operate and maintain our transit system.  Somewhere, the public will spend more, or sell assets, or give away benefits as a tradeoff.  Nothing is free.