by

TIFF 2008 Reviews (1)

When I started to write this, Toronto’s film festival had only been over for a week.  Those ten days for me are almost an alternate universe.  Closing night always brings a mixture of relief that I won’t have to queue up for a 9:00 am screening and ennui that it’s all over.

Events of the past month in transit-land have preoccupied me, and now, in early October, I am finally getting to the business of converting rough notes into fair text.  Over the next few weeks, I will publish them aiming for completion before my personal deadline of Thanksgiving weekend.  (For those who don’t know the background, I started this practice back in 1986 when “online” meant a single-line dialup BBS with an entirely text-based interface.  The world of online reviewing is huge now, but I keep up the tradition both for friends who ask “what did you see”, but tire after I have spoken for 20 minutes and show no sign of stopping.)

The 2008 festival, for me, was good, but not great.  Three stars.  Lots of solid, worthwhile films, a few gems and a few dogs, but there was no day where I went from screening to screening buoyed on the cumulative effect of what came before.

This post contains general comments about the festival itself together with reviews of:

  • Plus tard, tu comprendras
  • Passchendaele
  • 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould

Continue reading →

by

Local Road Planning: A Challenge for Metrolinx

In previous posts about the Metrolinx regional plan, I have written about the absence of local transit service other than something assumed to grow a lot, but not on Metrolinx’ dime.  Another aspect of local planning that pops up at Metrolinx Board meetings is the road network.

To nobody’s surprise, there are many projects to expand road capacity in the 905 given that the vast majority of travel there today and in the foreseeable future will be by private car.  Yes, there may be improvements through car pooling, park-and-ride and other schemes to lower the total passenger miles carried by autos, but there will still remain a huge demand for road space.

Recently, I received a note from a reader about the challenge of fighting Environmental Assessment battles in York Region.

Background

York Region has proposed a massive arterial road widening program. The base plan is to widen virtually all existing 4-5 lane arterial roads (2 lanes each way + left turn lane) to 6-7 lanes + wide median + bicycle lanes. The extra lane would be for HOV/bus during rush hour and general purpose the rest of the time. Different roads are at different stages in the EA process. Most are going through without citizen opposition.

However, in Markham, citizen concerns, lead by me, has resulted in the EA process being halted for 5 regional roads. The Region has agreed to model a broad range of alternatives and to form a citizens’ advisory committee. This work will commence this fall. They have also renamed the program “Transit Supportive Roads”, a very disingenuous name as you will see below.

Case Example – 16th Ave

Let me use 16th Ave in Markham, as I am most familiar with that regional road.

  • runs through established low density residential/parkland neighbourhoods (95%) or commercial (5%)
  • stable adjacent neighbourhoods unlikely to intensify in next 20 years
  • one YRT bus route (Route 85) with peak service every 20 mins
  • maximum current transit ridership say 50 people/hr/peak direction
  • VIVA BRT on dedicated right of way coming soon on Highway 7 ( 2 km south)
  • heavily congested by automobiles during peak hours

The idea that this road needs investment of scarce public dollars to build a “transit supportive road” is ludicrous. Until the built form of the area changes, this will remain as a low transit ridership route (< few hundred pphpd). The project is a road widening for cars with a fancy new name.

My Request of your Readers

However, let’s play along for a minute. Do your readers have any suggestions on what could be tried (or modelled) to improve transit within the existing footprint or with minor widening? At this point, the Region seems amenable to testing a broad range of ideas. Two ideas have surfaced so far:

  1. Build a single reversible bus-only lane in the centre of the road
  2. Use the “intermittent bus lane” concept cited in Metrolinx Green Paper on Transit (pg 11) and apparently giving 50% improvement in bus speeds in Lisbon with limited impact on general traffic movement

Has anyone seen #1 anywhere in North America? Has anyone been to Lisbon and observed #2? Does anyone have other ideas?

Peter Miasek

This raises at least two questions.  First, are we facing unbridled widening of roads in the 905 regardless of whatever efforts are made to woo people onto transit?  The current situation with VIVA is disheartening in that an entire network of BRT is shut down, but it carries only 35,000 people a day.  Those people are feeling the impact, but they’re a drop in the bucket of transportation demand.  How much political clout can transit plans muster?

Second, the Metrolinx Draft plan contains some fairly strong language about the need for local municipalities to bring their plans into line with the new regional plan.  Will Metrolinx have anything to say about road projects, some of which, as Durham’s Roger Anderson pointed out, are on the verge of construction but don’t even appear on the Metrolinx maps?  How can Metrolinx formulate a regional plan when it ignores the role and impact of local road and transit decisions?

by

Influence in High Places

Elsewhere in the transit universe, allegations have been raised that I have far too much influence in decisions about how our city and our transit system should grow.

I admit it.

Tonight I was at the Toronto Consort’s Marco Polo Project, and there hanging for all to see behind the performers was an illustration from Li Livres du Graunt Caam which now resides in the Bodleian Library.  This beautiful image shows Marco Polo’s departure from Venice on his travels to the east.  (Warning: 5MB image)

Note the large white swans.

These are disguised swan boats, and my influence back into early 15th century transportation is revealed for all to see.

by

The Economics of Hybrid Buses

The City of Toronto’s Executive Committee agenda for October X contains a report on the City’s Green Fleet Plan for various agencies.  By far the biggest of these is the TTC, and in an accompanying report, we learn just what the economics of the hybrid bus fleet are.

On page 15, the TTC presents a chart showing the fuel efficiency of its fleets, and it is worth noting that fuel consumption per vehicle km is rising at the same time as the average capacity of the vehicles is falling.  This is partly due to the additional systems, notably air conditioning, that are present on newer vehicles.

Of the total fleet, just over a quarter (450 out of 1653) are hybrids, and these consume about 10 percent less fuel than their pure-diesel cousins (based on experience to date).  This implies that the increased fuel consumption on the diesel fleet is even higher, proportionately, than the consolidated figures imply because of the offsetting benefit of the hybrids.

In the longer term, the relative fuel savings of hybrids may rise as they operate on routes with dense, stop-start traffic where the benefit of electric propulsion and battery energy storage will shine.  Nonetheless, there will be a considerable net cost of owning hybrid buses relative to diesels over their lifespan.

The TTC expects to spend $110-million on diesel fuel in 2009.  This includes a saving of $3.6-million for the existing hybrid fleet, and that saving will rise to somewhere around $6-million annually by the time that the fleet is about 50% hybrid (854 out of 1864) in 2011.  That’s a per vehicle saving of  about $7,000 per year.  We do not know yet what savings, if any, on maintenance will accrue to the hybrid fleet.

The capital cost premium for a hybrid bus is about $200,000, and the hybrid saving is only about 3.5% per year on this additional investment.  In time, if the capital cost premium comes down, the cost of fuel goes up, or the average percentage saving across the fleet rises, the numbers will converge and the rate of return will improve.

Meanwhile, it’s a shame we don’t have comparative figures for the cost of trolleybus infrastructure for our major routes.  Two decades ago, the TTC sacrificed its trolleybus system on the twin altars of environmental responsibility and natural gas buses.

Postscript:  The supposed economic advantage of natural gas as a fuel was almost entirely due to the fact that it was not taxed.  A large chunk of the TTC’s annual fuel bill is in tax paid to the Province of Ontario.  Without this tax, the economics of buses in general would be rather different.  Oddly, because the dollar saving from reduced fuel consumption would actually be lower without the tax, the economics of hybrid buses would look even worse if this tax were rescinded.

by

Metrolinx: The Big Move (3) Investment Strategy

The Metrolinx Investment Strategy (Draft) is a really odd collection of documents, and as I look at the presentations, I can’t help feeling there is a mountain of background somewhere that Metrolinx would prefer to keep out of sight.

On the agenda of September’s Board Meeting, we find a glossy brochure that is clearly intended for the coming public review.  For a “draft”, it has the look of something rather final to me.  With a section titled “Your voice matters”, this is not intended for the Board’s consumption, but for the process that Metrolinx calls public consultation.

Worth noting are Rob MacIsaac’s own remarks at last Tuesday’s briefings.  On at least two occasions, he said that there won’t be much pressure for change in the plans based on the extensive consultations to date.  He is prejudging the outcome, and that’s no way to ask for public input.

The separate presentation to the Board is not available online, but I have reformatted it on my own site.  (Note to the purists:  most of this was scanned as text and then cleaned up to avoid problems with blurry copy-of-copy scanning.)

Draft Investment Strategy Presentation September 26, 2008

The heart of this “strategy” is to do next to nothing about proper transit funding for many years (at least one if not two election cycles), and to live off of the previously announced $11.6-billion MoveOntario money.  A subset of the projects in the 15-year draft Regional Transportation Plan was selected to soak up this money, and if the Tooth Fairy is feeling generous, we might even get another $6-billion from Ottawa to stave off actually making a decision about transit funding for almost a decade.

Continue reading →

by

Metrolinx: Too Many Fingers in the Pie (2)

The Metrolinx Board met on September 26, and I am pleased to report that Board members bit hard into a proposal to establish a complex process for project approval and procurement.  (See “Project Management and Delivery” in this report.)

Chair Roger Anderson (Durham Region), already in a feisty mood over omissions in the Draft Regional Transportation Plan, led off by noting that a major policy decision was buried in an “Information Report”, the CEO’s monthly status update.  He discovered this scheme when he read his meeting agenda at 1am, and clearly he was not amused.  Even more clearly, this whole idea had not been discussed at all by the Board even in private session.

Anderson moved to defer the item to a future meeting, and this triggered concerns by Rob MacIsaac, chairing the meeting.  Watching him in action, it’s obvious that he doesn’t like to lose votes, but as the debate went on, it was clear that Anderson was not alone, and MacIsaac wisely got out in front of his troops to lead them where they were already headed.

A common thread in remarks by Anderson, Mayor David Miller (Toronto) and Mayor Hazel McCallion (Mississauga), among others, was whether Metrolinx exists to work with the municipalities as a regional agency, or as a provincial overseer interfering with and dictating to local bodies.  Anderson noted that municipalities have the staff to design, manage and deliver projects, and that they should not have to fight Metrolinx to get things done.

Michael Fenn, Metrolinx CEO and author of the report, replied that Queen’s Park, through the Ministry of Transportation, has a role in project evaluation.  If so, I must ask whether Metrolinx is simply providing cover for MTO interference, and what role, exactly, is expected of a Board composed of leaders of the very municipalities that originate most of the transportation plans.

Continue reading →

by

Metrolinx: Too Many Fingers In The Pie

With all the attention on the Draft Regional Plan, another proposal lurks unnoticed in the agenda for Friday’s Metrolinx Board Meeting.

The agenda itself gives no indication, and the report of interest is called “CEO Report”, an innocuous title.  However, within that report we find a detailed description of the “Metrolinx Project Delivery Process” which the Board is asked to endorse.

First as a matter of process, substantive policy decisions should not be embedded in reports whose title implies a status update, unless the real desire is to hope that nobody will notice.  Second, the proposed process shows that Queen’s Park has no intention of letting Metrolinx operate as a truly independent regional authority, but instead will hold it very tightly under control by various Ministries.

Many have spoken as if Metrolinx would someday become the overarching authority for GTA transit planning, construction and operations.  Not true.  Even the proposed amalgamation of GO Transit with Metrolinx is sitting as unproclaimed sections of the GTTA Act, and my guess is that GO will fight every step of the way against being taken over by an agency that has never run a single transit vehicle.

Continue reading →

by

Metrolinx: The Big Move (2) Overview

Over the next few days, I will attempt to summarize and comment on the main areas of the Metrolinx Draft Draft Regional Transportation Plan.  Yes, that is “Draft Draft” because the version now online has not yet been approved by the Metrolinx Board.  Once they do that, and any changes are added, it will be the official “Draft” plan.  The final plan is to be approved in November for transmittal to Queen’s Park so that this can feed into the budget process for 2009.

For easy reference, I have posted copies of the maps on this site.  These are high resolution PDFs.

The full report is available in the agenda for the Metrolinx Board Meeting on September 26.  Look for appendix A in items 8 and 9.  (Warning: that these are big files.)

Continue reading →

by

The Tories and Toronto

Recently, I received two comments from a regular contributor here, Stephen Cheung, but did not publish them immediately.  As a pair, however, they are worth seeing if only as an indication of Tory analysis of the political and economic situation in Toronto.

In replies to this item, please don’t start attacking Stephen himself.  I personally have put up with a lot of bovine effluent here and on other blogs suggesting that I am personally responsible for most if not all of the transit planning screwups of modern history, and I find such comments (a) laughable and (b) inappropriate because attacking me avoids discussing the real issues.  I expect any who reply to this post to stick to the topic and treat both the writer and the organized labour movement with respect. Continue reading →

by

Metrolinx: The Big Move (1)

This morning, Metrolinx unveiled its draft Regional Transportation Plan at a press conference.  Coverage is already online at The Star, and the report is available on the Metrolinx website.  (That link goes to the agenda page for the next Board meeting, and the RTP is linked from there as Appendix A to Report 8.  The companion Investment Strategy is in Report 9.)

Although referenced in the draft RTP, a number of background papers are not yet online.

  • Modelling Methodology and Results for the Draft Regional Transportation Plan, September 2008
  • Climate Change and Energy Conservation, September 2008
  • Mobility Hubs, September 2008
  • Transit Technologies, September 2008

I am still digesting this morning’s presentation, the draft plan and the investment strategy, and have a technical briefing later today.  Comments on all of this will start to appear this evening.