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TTC 2011 Capital Budget

TTC management unveiled its Capital Budget and 10-year forecast on January 12 with a presentation to the Commission, and followed up with a presentation at the City’s Budget Committee on January 14.

Online information about the budget is incomplete.  More troubling, however, the “Blue Books” which contain the details of all capital projects have not yet even been issued to members of the Commission, let alone Councillors or, it would appear, the City’s Budget Analyst who is supposed to digest all of this on Council’s behalf.  Full consideration of the TTC budgets was held over to January 20 by the Budget Committee to await the Analyst’s Notes.

TTC Capital Budget Report

Appendix A: Ten Year Summary

Appendix B: Sources of Funding

Appendix C: Project “Packages” For New Funding Requests

Presentation to City Budget Committee (See Pages 49-70)

Meanwhile, the TTC presented a budget with previously unknown major capital projects and additions to existing ones, but with little explanation of why they are here.

Oddly enough, the City’s Executive Committee only yesterday was in turmoil over unexpected increases in the cost of hosting the Pan Am Games due to unplanned costs for soil remediation and the fact that the project estimate was in 2008 dollars.

The TTC would do well to understand that surprises in budgeting will not be warmly greeted by the City, and moreover that they can have a compounding effect of squeezing available funding for other projects.

In this article, I will give an overview of major points in the budget along with specific comments on a few major issues.  When the “Blue Books” become available (expected later this week) and I get a chance to review the full budget, I will write on major topics such as subway fleet planning and system expansion in detail.

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TTC Operating Budget 2011 (Update 3)

This article provides additional details on the TTC’s 2011 Operating Budget including information in a presentation given at the January 12 meeting, but not available online.

Updated January 17, 2011 at 2:30 pm:

A table listing cost recoveries for Canadian transit systems has been added at the end of this article.

Updated January 15, 2011 at 10:30 am:

On January 14, the TTC made its presentation to the City’s Budget Committee.  The linked document covers all three budgets: operating, Wheel Trans and capital.

The budget information is reformatted into the standard layout for City departments and agencies starting at page 26.  A projection through 2012-13 on page 30 shows the estimated growth in revenue, expenses and subsidy requirements, and the effect of a fare freeze on total cost recovery.  (Note that the projections do not include the effect of cancelling the proposed 2011 fare increase.)

Much supporting detail that was included in the TTC’s own budget presentation on January 12 is not in this document.  The detailed presentation is still not available online.

I will comment on the Capital Budget in a separate article.

Updated January 14, 2011 at 9:45 am:

Information has been added to the “Cuts & Additions” section regarding the annual savings from proposed cuts and their value expressed on a per vehicle hour and per passenger basis.

[Original post from January 13 below]

Revenue/Cost Ratio

The TTC’s revenue/cost ratio continues to run well above that of other cities and for 2011 will be about 70%.  Farebox revenue for 2011 is budgeted to rise by about $53.5-million relative to the 2010 budget which underestimated ridership.  Actual farebox revenue for 2010 is expected to be $40m above budget and, therefore, almost 80% of the jump for 2011 is attributable to strong ridership in 2010.

Advertising revenue for 2011 is expected to rise from $15m in 2010 to $20m in 2011 as a direct result of the improving economy and stronger demand for ad space on transit vehicles.  This is an example of a revenue stream where the ebb and flow of income has a non-trivial effect on fare and subsidy debates, although it is rarely mentioned.

With a projected farebox revenue of $941.5m and expenses of $1,429.1m, the farebox will account for 65.88% of total expenses.  Other non-subsidy revenues will bring in $58.7m or 4.11% of the total.  The remaining 30.01% will come from city-funded operating subsidy.

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TTC Budget 2011: Service Cuts Definitely, Fare Increase Maybe (Update 6)

Updated January 12, 2011 at 5:30 pm: Today the TTC decided to defer the matter of the proposed service cuts to its meeting on February 2.  I will comment in more detail on both the Operating and Capital budget presentations that were made today (they are not available online).

Meanwhile, details of the service cuts are available.  A few notes about this table (which comes from the TTC):

  • Vehicle reductions:  This is the TTC’s estimate of how many vehicles will be saved, and these numbers won’t always be the same as in the table I produced because of assumptions about interlining.
  • Customers affected:  These are the people who now use the service.  Equivalent to “boardings” used in a calculation below.
  • Customers lost:  This is the TTC’s estimate of the riders who will be lost.  Generally this is much less than the number affected because the TTC assumes people will walk to another route rather than abandoning the system.
  • Boardings/service hour:  For some reason, this appears only for a subset of the cases shown, although you can calculate the values.  If the proposed cut is 2 vehicles for 3 hours, then this is 6 service hours.  Divide that into the number of people affected to get the boardings/hour.  The screenline for cuts is 15 (not 12 as previously reported) boardings/service hour.

The TTC has already noticed one “oops” — the Downsview Park bus on early Saturday evenings carries 267 riders in the three hours between 7 and 10 pm, or almost 90/hour.  Saturday daytime, it carries 176 in the 13 hours from 6 am to 7 pm, or 13.5/hour.  However, it is likely that a good deal of this riding is concentrated later in the day, and it will be easy to get over the screenline by taking this into account.

I will digest this chart with additional calculations in a post tomorrow.

The methodology has a certain prejudice depending on the type of route.  For example, very short routes tend to have a lot of turnover and rack up boardings quickly.  Long routes handle longer trips, and the resources used per boarding are proportionately greater.  This means that a long route has to have a higher average load to meet the boardings/hour criterion and escape cuts.

For routes that don’t do well, this is something of a moot point because they are never going to the cut, but this sort of systemic error in analysis becomes important if, in 2012, the bar is raised to cut more “unproductive” services.

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Service Cuts Coming in 2011? (Updated)

Updated January 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm:

CITY-TV reports that according to TTC Chair Karen Stintz, the City’s budget allocation for operating subsidy to the TTC will remain at the same level in 2011 as in 2010.  This would be an increase over actual spending in 2010 because the TTC ran a “surplus”, at least on paper.

From the Chief General Manager’s Report up to the end of October 2010 we know that the projected subsidy requirement was running about $60-million below the originally budgetted level.  Of the expected $430m subsidy, only about $370m would actually be needed.  Some of this “surplus” arises from better than expected riding and fare revenue, and partly from some operating cost savings that may not be repeatable (an unexpected dip in fuel cost, for example).

If the TTC had been required to take a 5% cut relative to budget levels, this would have meant a $21.5m cutback in subsidy, but since they actually only used $370m, they would still be ahead of the game.  Getting the whole $430m is a bonus.  However, the total TTC budget is about $1.37-billion, and a 5% increase would not be unexpected given the combined effect of wage, service and materials increases.  That would eat up roughly $64-million.

Stintz confirmed that there will be some service cuts in 2011.  One important budget pressure is the “Customer Service” file which will trigger new spending in many areas.  This is a challenge for the TTC and a delicate balancing act — if service gets worse, it will be hard to deliver that service with a smile.

The bigger challenge for the TTC and for Council is the multi-year view of budgets.  There won’t be a big “surplus” (actually underspending relative to budget) in coming years, and real dollars will have to be found either on the revenue or expense side of the ledger.  Council is supposed to be moving to multi-year budgeting, but there is not yet anything definitive on this nor on the effect for medium range transit policies.

As I write this, a special TTC meeting to deal with budget matters is rumoured for next week, but it has not yet been publicly announced.  The City Budget Launch meeting on Monday, January 10 may provide more details.

The original article from December 23, 2010, follows below.

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A Grand Plan: 2011 Edition

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a long paper about the role of transit and what a truly regional plan would look like.  To avoid extensively quoting myself, I suggest that any newcomers to this site read that as a starting point as it contains not just a list of routes, but a philosophy of how one should look at transit.

Since 2006, we have seen Transit City, MoveOntario2020 and The Big Move.  The GTA appeared well on its way to real progress in transit although problems, notably the question of local service funding, remained.

Now we have a new Mayor in Toronto, and plans that came from years of work and debate lie in pieces on the floor.  Metrolinx and Queen’s Park seem content to “plan” by carving up funding that’s already committed and redrawing their map to suit the whims of a new regime at City Hall.

The fundamental problem in this exercise is the phrase “funding that’s already committed”.  When you draw a map with a half empty pen, you make compromises, and you run out of ink leaving huge areas bereft of service.

If redraw we must, then let us do so with a view to a transit network and to a view beyond the end of next year.  What does Toronto and the GTA need?  How much will that cost?  How do we pay for it?  If we start with the premise that we cannot afford anything, we should stop wasting our time on planners, engineers and the myth that transit can actually transform travel for the next generation.

The discussion below is Toronto centric because this is a Toronto blog, and that’s where most of the GTA’s transit riders are.  All the same, the philosophy of what transit should be affects everyone, especially in those areas where so much transit growth is needed just to catch up with the population.

Some of the info here will be familiar to those who read my commentaries regularly, but I wanted to pull it all together as a starting point.  My comments are not intended as the one, definitive “solution”, but to show the need for debate on a large scale, integrating considerations from many parts of various schemes.

[While I was writing this article, the Pembina Institute published its own critique of the Ford transit plan.  I do not intend to comment on that document here because it addresses only one part of a much larger collection of transit issues.]

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Operations for July 2010 — Part III (Headways)

In two previous articles, I have reviewed the St. Clair car during its first month of operation on the new right-of-way over the complete route from Yonge to Keele.  Running times during busy periods are down compared with April 2007, when the only right-of-way was between Bathurst and Yonge Streets.  However, the situation with headways, an important factor in how riders perceive service quality, is quite another matter.

For the entire period of construction, the idea of regular, scheduled service was something of a fairy tale on St. Clair, and both the streetcars and buses made their way such as they could along the route.  One would commonly see vehicles taking long terminal layovers, and headways were not a big priority.

In analyses of other routes, there is a common factor that is independent of the route’s length, the time of the year, the weather, eclipses or any other phenomena:  vehicles do not leave terminals on a regular spacing.  They leave when they get around to it, a practice abetted by the TTC’s standard that ±3 minutes is considered to be “on time”.  Pairs of vehicles can travel together on routes with short headways and remain within this standard.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Operations for July 2010 — Part II (Link Times) (Updated)

In the first article of this series, I gave an overview of the data for one day’s operation on the 512 St. Clair route in July 2010.  Here, I will review link times (the time taken to get from one location to another) on the route for the entire month, and compare this with data from April 2007 when the St. Clair car last ran over its full length from Yonge to Keele.

Updated December 29, 2010 at 9:50 am:

A set of charts has been added comparing the running times between Keele and Yonge for April 2007 and July 2010.  See the end of the article for links and commentary.

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Where’s My Stop? (Updated)

Updated December 28 at 11:45 am: I have received a note from Brad Ross at the TTC advising that there is an unspecified issue being worked out between the TTC and the supplier of the stop announcement system.  Once this is settled, the backlog of changes will be implemented.

This post is intended as a container for reports about inaccurate stop announcements.  Given the legal hassles the TTC went through about their implementation, it’s odd that they don’t bother to adjust the info in the GPS-based units when stops are moved.

I have relocated two comments about this from another thread to this one just to keep the info separate, and in the hope that someone at the TTC will actually read and act on this.

The single largest problem I have seen in years of watching TTC’s attempts at customer service is the complete lack of co-ordination between departments, and the concurrent lack of credible or accurate public information.

For example, there are still signs at Bloor-Yonge Station telling you that the subway doesn’t run north of there late at night, although the project that triggered this operation ended some time ago.  The line remains closed north of Eglinton for tunnel work, but south of Eglinton, the line is operating.

Other diversion notices remain in place months after they are obsolete.  Even if they contain an end date, a reader may not notice this, especially if they are unfamiliar with the system.  Construction notices acquire a layer of stickers telling us when projects will finish, some day, eventually.  At least they are now real printed notices, not hand-written (mostly).  And, yes, the elevator at the east end of Yonge Station is finally back in service.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Operations for July 2010 — Part I (Introduction)

Updated at 3:20 pm, December 27: The scale on the headway charts has been changed to 30 minutes with 3-minute gridlines, and on the link time charts to 18 minutes with 3-minute gridlines.  The intent is to spread out the data points to give a better view of the fine details.

[My apologies for the appearance of this series many months after the fact.  It took quite a while to get the GPS-f0rmat data from the TTC for reasons unknown.

I look forward to the plans for an Open Data access to data for all routes as a regular online service so that this type of analysis will not require special requests for data extracts.  Whether the “new” TTC goes ahead with providing this data remains to be seen, although “transparency” is supposed to be a watchword in the new administration.]

June 30, 2010, brought streetcar service to the full St. Clair route out to Gunn’s Loop for the first time since 2007.  In an earlier article, I reviewed the line’s operation in April 2007.  This was a “before” snapshot intended as a comparison to the “after” construction line behaviour for which we have waited so long.  Now we can look at the “new” St. Clair to see the benefits, such as they might be.

On two weekends, service did not operate over the entire line due to street festivals.  No sooner was streetcar service restored to Keele, but it vanished again on July 3-4, and again on July 17-18.

This article reviews the basic information available and some of the analysis I have done using a single weekday as an example. Continue reading →

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Let Them Ride Buses

In case anyone missed the latest word from City Hall, here is Mayor Ford talking about transit to Rexdale in today’s Globe:

“Eventually, I’m sure we can build the subways. It’s more expensive, but that’s what the people want. People in North York and Scarborough, they want that line connected to the Scarborough Town Centre. If I heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

Even if that means cancelling or postponing indefinitely rapid transit in his own former ward of Etobicoke North?

“They have transit,” he laughed. “It sounds like we’re – we have transit. People get to the slots, they get to Woodbine racetrack, people get to Humber College. There are buses that run up there.

“Eventually, I’d like to have subways running through the whole city. But what we can afford realistically, right now, is just Sheppard, right?

People will wait a long time for their pet transit lines, and all those fine words about the importance of transit to Toronto’s economy are just so much hot air.

Cake, anyone?