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Customer Service On The Rocket (Update 3)

Updated January 24 at 5:30 pm:  The TTC has decided that it will accept the temporary adult tickets for refund until the end of March rather than having them turn into worthless confetti on February 1.  The original concern was with redemptions of counterfeit tickets, but few people would have any reason to have a large number of tickets on their own.  Only organizations that hand out TTC fares to their clients would buy large stocks in advance.

Updated January 24 at 8:00 am:  The TTC has added route-based advisories to its schedule pages.  47 Lansdowne now tells me about the diversion at the north end of the route.  504 King tells of the bus replacement on Roncesvalles.  41 Keele has three advisories — two for construction at Keele Station and one for the diversion at St. Clair.

This change addresses the problem of having to search in multiple locations for notices affecting the same route.

Updated January 23 at 11:00 am:  Revised and expanded to include comments on the Commission meeting of January 20 and CP24’s “On The Rocket” of January 21.

At the January 20th TTC meeting, on proposals by Chair Adam Giambrone and Commissioner Peter Milczyn, the Commission decided to seek out a “blue ribbon panel” to review customer service and improve the TTC.

What’s missing here is the very first step in any such review — a recognition that “customer service” is not just a smiling face on the front line, but an organization that really, truly, top to bottom believes that this is important.  Too much of what the TTC talks about is focussed on the employees’ interaction with customers.  Of course that’s part of the overall picture, but that relationship is coloured by the tools and support employees are given.

The TTC takes every chance to pat itself on the back, to tell Torontonians how great the system is.  Inevitably this shows up with praise for TTC management.  Indeed, Commissioners are loathe to publicly criticize management’s efforts.

That’s a huge shame because it sends the message that management is just fine, thank you, and doesn’t have to change the way they do business. Continue reading →

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Put Transit City On Ice: Rocco Rossi (Updated)

At the Empire Club today, Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi proposed that all of Transit City, except for the Sheppard East line, be put on hold pending a financial review.

Rossi may not be familiar with local issues, but he should at least know that Queen’s Park (and, for Sheppard, Ottawa) is paying for these lines, not the City of Toronto.

There are issues with Transit City about which I will write in coming days, but stopping the projects is hardly the correct approach.  It smacks of simplistic anti-Miller campaigning — whatever David Miller did must be wrong and so we’ll stop, or at least slow down, the plan.

I will be generous and assume that the candidate may be badly advised, but this is the second gaffe of Rossi’s platform (the first is the proposal to sell Toronto Hydro), and I can’t help thinking he’s headed for an electoral graveyard.

Updated 11:30 pm:  I am advised that Rossi is aware of funding from other levels of government, but is concerned about future operating costs.  He might start by looking at the extension to Vaughan which is expected to increase net TTC operating costs after any incremental fare revenue by well over $10-million annually when it opens.  The projected riding north of Steeles Avenue is lower than on the Eglinton LRT.

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Flexity Cars Running in Vancouver

Stephen Rees blog has an article about the two Bombardier Flexity trams loaned from Brussels for operation in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics.  These cars are similar to those Toronto will see, but with a few important differences.

  • The Brussels cars are 2.3m wide because, as with many European systems, they run on a streetcar network built for smaller cars.  The Toronto “legacy” cars will be 2.54m wide, the same as the CLRVs.  When you look at interior shots from Vancouver, remember that there will be slightly more room on the Toronto cars.
  • The Transit City fleet may be wider still than the legacy cars, but this has not yet been decided.
  • The interior view from Vancouver shows the front entrance right beside the operator’s cab.  This is not the layout currently planned for Toronto because of the different placement of the front truck.  This change, visible in the standard shot of the proposed cars, was required to deal with clearance and derailment issues on our system and its tight curves.

As for the Transit City fleet, I understand that Metrolinx will decide whether Bombardier will, in fact, get the add-on car order in the near future.  This matter needs to be settled so that cars will be available by the time the first Transit City line opens.

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Queen 501 Operational Review

The supplementary agenda for January’s TTC meeting includes a report on the various experiments with Queen car operations.  Unsurprisingly, it concludes that the split route operation was an abject failure, and recommends that the “step forward” crewing technique be formally implemented on the route during periods when the line is subject to disruption.  This scheme keeps operators on time but allows vehicles to continue without short turning.

I will not comment in detail on this report until after the Commission meeting and any discussions there.  At this point, I am still waiting for vehicle monitoring data for October and November 2009 so that I can perform a detailed analysis of the split and “normal” operations.

Because this report deals only with the various operational models actually tried to date, there is no discussion of alternative route structures such as splitting off the 507 in some form as a dedicated Long Branch service.  I suspect that any mention of this would trigger a “we tried to split the route and it didn’t work” response even though the Dufferin/Broadview split was a completely different design than, say, a 507 service to Dundas West Station.

This post will be updated with further comments or information when available.

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Starting Finch West LRT Construction in 2010

At the December 2009 TTC meeting, a question arose about the proposed delay of the Finch West construction to 2011 when so many projects serving the east end were to be accelerated in the name of the Pan Am Games.

TTC staff explained that Metrolinx had wanted to defer the Finch West start date, but this didn’t sit well with the Commission.  A report on the situation is on the TTC agenda for January.  This report makes three important points.

  1. Some preliminary construction work for bridge widening at the West Don River (east of Dufferin) and the Humber River (at Islington) is possible in 2010 subject to funding.  Property acquisition is another task that can be undertaken early in the project.
  2. Metrolinx wants the Finch West project to be handled as Design-Build-Finance (DBF) where a bidder accepts responsibility not just for constructing a line, but for a substantial part of the design work and project financing.
  3. The TTC wants to keep some of the project in house (notably the junctions between the Finch LRT and the YUS at Finch and Finch West Stations).

The TTC and Metrolinx have exchanged letters (Appendices A and B in the report), and I am intrigued to see that Metrolinx is worried about cash flow if work planned for 2011 is brought forward.

The FY 2010/11 budget for Finch West assumed continuing preliminary engineering, real estate acquisition and some early utility relocation activities to clear the way for the design-build contractor, but no major construction activities.

[later]

… our overall funding and cash flow assumptions may not allow advancing some construction activities to 2010.

It’s amusing to see that even Metrolinx, an agency that once talked of multi-billion dollar plans as if money grew on trees (or rather the money that would come from “Alternate Financing” sources), is now worrying about cash flow just like every other government.  The problem here is that the bridges are already City property, and Metrolinx cannot wish away the cost of widening them as an accounting trick where the infrastructure is held as a long term asset by Queen’s Park rather than paying for the widening as a current expense.

As for the method of tendering and managing construction at the two subway interfaces, the TTC appears unhappy with giving away control of this work.  At Finch West, this would really make sense if the station and the LRT interface were to be tendered as one piece of work within the subway extension project.

The station design is included in the printed agenda distributed to the media last week as item 2b, but it is not included online.  At this point, the design shows only a proposed connection between the two stations.

The desire for control at Finch Station no doubt relates to underground construction around the existing subway station.  However, as I have discussed elsewhere, there is still good reason to rethink the placement of Yonge Station on the Finch line, and a final decision about who will actually manage this part of the project is not needed immediately.

From a political point of view, the TTC and City are more than a little miffed that Metrolinx is suffling the construction schedules around.  To a point, I sympathize, but only in that these events show just how constrained Metrolinx is by the money Queen’s Park is making available.  AFP was supposed to solve this financing problem, but clearly Metrolinx plans are in the same cash flow straightjacket as the TTC’s.

What will this mean for the future of transit expansion in the GTA?  Are we back to “everybody loves transit, but nobody wants to pay for it”?

TTC staff will brief the Commission on their discussions with Metrolinx at the January 20 meeting, and I will update this post with any additional info when it is available.

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A Post Mortem for St. Clair’s Construction

The January TTC agenda includes a report about the lessons learned from the St. Clair construction project and their implications for work on Transit City.

While it is refreshing to see anything the TTC does held up to the cold light of review, I can’t help feeling that the tone avoids the question of why this project ran out of control for so long.  The covering report states:

TTC considers the St. Clair Streetcar experience as an important stepping stone in the evolution of LRT in Toronto which began with the Spadina LRT, then Harbourfront LRT to the St. Clair project. This invaluable experience is an important guide in the delivery of the Transit City program.

That’s not saying much.  Toronto has now built three pseudo-LRT lines over two decades.  The first, Harbourfront, is due for a major redesign with the reconstruction of Queen’s Quay.  That line also features a connection at Union that was woefully inadequate for the demands placed on it, despite claims to the contrary by TTC engineers.

The Spadina LRT, a scheme that took 25 years from proposal to implementation, was a bit better, but like Harbourfront, still suffered from traffic signal timings that favoured road over transit operations.  This has still not been fully addressed even though the line opened in 1997.

Much was expected for St. Clair, a chance to “get it right”, but this project was plagued by:

  • conflicting and changing demands for the use of road space
  • a design process that produced detailed plans too late for proper public review (they appeared while the work was already out to tender), and that inevitably led to construction periods spanning winter months
  • a construction process involving multiple agencies and contractors with nobody in overall control

St. Clair did not “get it right”.  Now that the line is open to Lansdowne, we can see just how appallingly the TTC manages service on a route where there is no excuse for chronic bunching, wide gaps and short turns.  This comes just as the TTC attempts to gain credibility for Transit City as an improvement in suburban transit services.  St. Clair is not a shining example. Continue reading →

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Still Waiting for Transit Priority Report (Updated)

Updated January 15:  The TTC agenda for this month reveals that the report requested in June 2005 may now be presented in March 2010.  I am not holding my breath.

In case you’re wondering, positions 2 through 4 in the queue are occupied by three requests from Vice-Chair Mihevc dating from 2007.

Original post from December 14, 2009:

Continue reading →

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Where Ottawa’s Stimulus Spending Is Going

In my articles about the TTC budgets, I have been remiss in not reporting on the effect of the Federal Infrastructure Stimulus Program.  The TTC had a presentation on this topic at its meeting in September as part of the Capital Budget report, but I never wrote up the information.  (The presentation is not available online.)

I have summarized the financial information for easier access.

Stimulus Funding Summary 2009 to 2011

This summary contains two sections corresponding to two parts of the presentation.  One is for Operations and one for Construction.  There was more financial breakdown in the Operations section, and I am not going to try to explain why.

The TTC (and City) budget years correspond to the calendar years, while the Federal Government fiscal year starts on April 1.  That’s why all of the stimulus work to be billed to Ottawa must be completed by March 31, 2011 — nothing can spill over into the 2011-12 budget year.  (As an aside, I might note that both Queen’s Park and Ottawa happily include this non-recurring spending when they talk about the deficit as if it will go on forever.  This makes the deficits look bigger than they really are in the long term, and magically they will fall for the 2011 budget year when the stimulus ends.)

For the Operations projects, the budget is broken down into each TTC fiscal year showing the original and revised spending level for each project line (these correspond to lines in the full TTC Budget).  Of particular note is the fact that the change, if any, varies in each year and in some cases the change in 2011 is quite large.  This indicates work that was brought forward into 2011 from future years, but which won’t be completed by March 31 and is therefore only partly eligible for stimulus funds.

The three-year total for Operations is $68.1-million, up by $25.1m over the original plans.  Of this, Ottawa will contribute $10.8m or about 43% of the increase.

For the Construction projects, only the three-year numbers are given, and in each case Ottawa is assumed to pay 1/3.  Note that the Warden Station project, included in the list, was subsequently cut as part of the City’s budget review and, therefore, Ottawa’s $4m share has been foregone.

Looking at the Grand Total, Ottawa will contribute $61.1-million, about 28%, to projects with a total value of $219.0m.  The remainder will come from the City and Queen’s Park.

This is only part of the total stimulus package coming to Toronto as most projects are in the City’s own budget, not the TTC’s.

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When Things Go Wrong (1) (Updated)

CBC Radio 1 will be looking at the issue of TTC customer service starting on Monday, January 11, and I will be on Metro Morning dark and early sometime before 6 am.

Updated January 11:  The Metro Morning interview is now available online.

The chats with story producers got me thinking about the TTC’s eAlert system as well as other sources of information.  Knowing we won’t possibly cover all the details in a short interview, and that other aspects of the discussion will certainly come from readers here, I have started this thread.

A long-standing complaint about TTC service is that nobody knows what is going on.  At the best of times, one might peer into the mists on Queen Street and hope that somewhere there is a streetcar, or listen down the subway tunnels for the familiar rumble of a train.  Far too often, the TTC is not at its best, and the lack of information can drive people into a fury, one that may be visited on hapless TTC staff who are no better off than the rest of us.

The TTC’s website can be hit-or-miss depending on whether it is being updated regularly.  For example, the 501 Queen car’s route description was not changed back from the Shaw/Parliament split until quite recently (thanks to feedback from a reader on this site).  However, the 512 St. Clair route description gives no hint of the split streetcar/bus operation.

Diversions pose a special challenge because some are implemented thanks to emergencies such as fires or major collisions, but the most annoying are those implemented locally by the route management team, and not reflected on the website or on notices at bus and car stops.  The 41 Keele (local) service is diverting around construction at St. Clair southbound, but it took a few weeks for this to show up online, but only in the route description.  The schedule page and map still show the route running via St. Clair, and you can look up times for a stop that in fact has no service.  The info is on the “Diversions” page, but there is no alert on the route’s own page to indicate that readers should also consult the diversion information.

The subway, the main target of this article, has additional information sources for would-be riders, although all of these can be quite frustrating.

If you are at platform level, and your station has a working video screen (dead screens are becoming common), and you’re standing close enough to read it, and Transit Control considers a delay to be serious enough to put up a notice, then you have a fighting chance of discovering that something is amiss.  There may even be PA announcements, but they tend to occur only for very long-running delays.  (As I write this, there is no subway service east of Victoria Park, and info about this comes over the speaker systems regularly.  It also appears on the “Service Advisories” on the TTC website.)

If you are anywhere else, and you have cell/internet signal, you may get information from various sources:

I get both the eAlerts and the Facebook updates, and compiled a log of information from both sources.  My apologies to those who don’t like “busy” displays as there is a lot of info consolidated in one place. Continue reading →