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When Is A New Tax Not A New Tax?

The Ontario Tories have decided that they want to fund transit and roads through gas taxes!

Cue the cheering peasants dancing in the streets … well, er, um, ah … maybe not yet.

John Tory has discovered that about a third of the tax collected on fuel does not actually go to funding roads and transit.  His solution to transit’s funding problems?  Just redirect that missing third to transportation (a little over $1-billion per year).  However …

We will have to wait up to five years for this to actually happen (beyond the 2011 election) as the provincial budget digests that level of hit on programs that use the “missing” billion.  I wonder how John Tory plans to pay for this while delivering on the usual Tory promises to cut taxes and reduce overall government spending?  This is almost as bad as waiting forever for Greg Sorbara to figure out that the province had money to spend on transit beyond his pet subway scheme.

So what do we have?  “New” funding for transit based on gas taxes, but no new gas taxes.  Efficiencies will be found elsewhere in government.  A billion a year is a lot of efficiency, and over five years, the Tories would no doubt find their own boondoggles to spend on.  With that kind of money, you could bury an “adscam”-sized project in the paperclip budget.  Maybe something like changing the provincial colours to Tory Blue to match their Ottawa cousins.

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Analysis of Transit Route Operations

Over the next month or so, I will be posting a series of articles here about the operation of surface routes and will concentrate on lines in the King and Queen corridors.  This analysis will look at the way the line actually operates — how the vehicles move around (or not) — as opposed to the question of whether service is adequate to demand.  These topics are related by the long-standing question of why service is so bad:  congestion, number of vehicles, operational screwups, or some other factors.

This work arises from the TTC’s oft-cited claim that they can only improve transit service with exclusive lanes.  That is a self-defeating position because the TTC will never get reserved lanes on most transit routes.  Rather than figuring out how a route might be improved, the TTC claims its hands are tied.  This is not a useful stance, but it’s sadly typical of an organization whose first response to criticism is (a) you’re wrong and (b)  someone else is responsible.

I remember the initial reaction to the Transit’s Lost Decade report that I did with Gord Perks (then at TEA).  The TTC huffed and puffed and said that service had not been cut so badly and how dare we say things like that … then there was a little pause … and finally they realized that this was just the ammunition they needed to beat the drum for better funding.  Suddenly then-CGM Rick Ducharme was quoting our figures as an example of how badly the system had deteriorated.

Service on major routes was cut through the 1990s by from 25 to 40 percent, and only recently have we seen some of this restored despite ongoing ridership growth.  One major constraint is the size of bus and streetcar fleets that declined to match the lower levels of service.  This only affects peak service capabilities.  Another change has been in the operator workforce through a combination of re-sizing to current service levels and of work rules restricting the length of the work day.  (This is due both to Provincial labour standards and revisions to the collective agreement.)

Traffic congestion is a problem in many areas, and the length of the peak period has definitely grown longer over past decades.  However, is congestion the only reason service is bad, or are other factors at work?  Are there problems with regularity of service and line management?  How often is scheduled service cancelled?  How often are there major blockages (especially a problem for streetcars) as opposed to random events, delays at busy stops for overcrowded vehicles and general congestion?

How effective is the TTC’s current vehicle monitoring system, CIS (Communications & Information System), in tracking vehicles and how well is the service managed?  The TTC is seeking information for a possible “next bus” announcement system.  Will this be compromised by an attempt to recycle decades-old CIS technology?  Will it include features needed to properly manage and report on actual service and operations?

In Setember 2006, I asked the TTC for sample data from CIS in an attempt to learn how vehicles actually behaved on various routes with the hope of identifying problem areas both for congestion, where it really exists, and in line management.  CIS is incapable of reporting on vehicle loads, and its data are not fine-grained enough to allow reporting on stop service times in most cases.  Therefore, my analysis has to concentrate on vehicle movements.

Through the fall, I worked through various sample sets of data refining the process of converting it to various usable formats, and by the end of the year had a workable version.  Based on this, I have obtained CIS data for all streetcar routes plus a number of major bus routes for December 2006.  This month contains a variety of days with good and bad weather, pre-Christmas shopping and a holiday week.

The King route received the first detailed analysis, and I will present excerpts from this here over the next few weeks.  I have begun work on the Queen line (and related routes Lake Shore, Downtowner and Kingston Road) and will comment on these as well.

All of the posts will be linked via their own topic “Service Analysis”.

Please stay tuned.

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We Get Complaints

From time to time, I get notes asking why someone’s comments have been trimmed or deleted.

This is not a blog intended to be a wide-open forum for anything someone posts.  If you write to the Globe and Mail, you can’t demand that your letter be printed.

From time to time, someone gets repetitive and there is no point in publishing this sort of material.  Other times, people say things that deserve a new thread and I hold onto the comments as a starting point for that discussion.

On many, many occasions, I fix up the layout of comments, the atrocious spelling and grammar by some writers who have good things to say, but whose text would put off some readers by its style. 

That’s what editors do.

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A Strange View of Transit Priority

At last night’s Community Liaison Committee meeting on the West Don LRT project (aka Cherry Street streetcar), I heard a rather bizarre definition for “transit priority” that will be used to evaluate various design options:

“Transit Priority” means that transit will get at least as much green time as the through auto traffic at an intersection.

Hmmm.  Let’s compare this with what we have today.

On the Harbourfront line, the streetcar has to wait for its own green cycle which is much shorter than the green time for traffic, and is so short that it sometimes prevents more than one car from getting through on a cycle.  Clearly not a model for transit priority.

On St. Clair, the detectors don’t seem to be working everywhere, and there are left turn phases blocking the streetcars (and through traffic) even when there is nothing waiting to make the turn.  If this blockage occurs in only one direction, then one of the through road movements gets more green time than the streetcar.

On Spadina, the detectors actually work, and if there is traffic waiting in the queue only for one direction, the other one gets a green for the cars before the green for the streetcar.  If there are left turns both ways, the streetcar and other traffic get the same green time.

On a regular street in mixed traffic, everybody gets the same green time although left turns can block the movement of both through traffic and streetcars equally.

Nowhere in this list is there a model where the streetcar pre-empts the left-turning movements and is able to cross the intersection for the majority of the cycle.  Instead, the emerging standard appears to be that left turns pre-empt everything in their path.

Maybe we should call it “left turn priority” since these are the only moves that really benefit from this scheme.

“Transit priority” means “transit first”, not transit in the five seconds we grudgingly spare from everyone else.

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I Told You: Swan Boats Are The Answer!

TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, reported to be off at his cottage, may be getting too much fresh air for his own good.  The National Post reports that our fearless leader has asked newly-minted Chief General Manager Gary Webster to investigate setting up commuter ferries to downtown from Etobicoke and Scarborough.

In a related story Mayor Miller is less than ecstatic.  Maybe the air is different where he is today.

The idea is to run fast ferries from two locations — Bluffers Park in Scarborough and Humber Bay Park in Etobicoke — to downtown.  I am not going to waste time on a clever jokes about this idea, much as the idea of putting swan figureheads on the new craft and getting one of them named after me has its merits.

Here are the reasons this is a cockeyed scheme:

  • This is a commuter service requiring a parking lot at both terminals.  Aside from my feelings about park-and-ride services which have been discussed elsewhere, this would require lots of all-day parking in locations where we want to encourage pedestrians to congregate on sand and grass, not asphalt.
  • Bluffers Park is at the bottom of the Scarborough Bluffs at the end of a long road which may not be negotiable in winter.  This would definitely be a terminal only accessible by auto.  Unlike Humber Bay Park at Lake Shore West, Bluffers Park is nowhere near Kingston Road.
  • I believe that the beaches at both locations are shallow.  Unless we plan to build new quays out into the lake, the ferries won’t just pull up to the shore as they do at the foot of Bay Street.
  • Someone travelling to downtown must (a) get to the ferry terminal, (b) wait for the scheduled departure, (c) travel to the downtown terminal, (d) walk over to Queen’s Quay Station, (e) wait for the 509/510 service to appear, (f) ride one stop to Union and then (g) get to their office.  Commuter ferries make sense where there is a comparatively large body of water to cross, and if the time saved by the ferry trip is substantial compared to other routes.
  • The length of time for these trips will easily exceed the time that even a lumbering CLRV would take to get from Park Lawn and Lake Shore to downtown.  To the east, we won’t provide a direct service from Brimley and Kingston Road to downtown on the TTC, but there is a GO station nearby.  If the TTC really wants to provide an express service, all they need to do is run an express bus.
  • The service would not be able to operate frequently, and GO transit will almost certainly have better headways.
  • This would be a completely new mode for today’s TTC.  Experience from over 50 years ago of running the Island Ferries does not translate to this type of commuter ferry operation.

The TTC has two Environmental Assessments in progress, one for Kingston Road and one for Waterfront West, addressing travel from exactly the same locations as the proposed ferries.  Maybe we should have towed the Trillium up from Queen’s Quay to Dundas Square last week instead of the Bombardier mockup!  A network of canals in place of Transit City would make Toronto a tourist paradise.

Part of me really wants to see a marine division in the TTC if only to see how badly they would screw it up.  Common sense, however, has a shorter answer: 

The Transit Commission, when formally asked to approve a study of this plan next week, should tell Adam Giambrone to figure out how to run his streetcar network before he branches out to ferries.

If you want to get people from the lakeshore to downtown, run better service on the system you’ve got.

For more information about potential marine services:

Swans on the Don

More Swans on the Don

In another thread, Dennis Rankin wrote:

Hi Sarah and Steve:-

If today’s CFMX Radio news report was real and not part of my awaking dreams, then I will suspect a high level of collusion between you two and Adam Giambrone if any of those proposed Scarborough and/or Etobicoke to the Downtown Ferry Terminal high speed ferries have swan figure heads.

Could the first one launched be christianed ‘Hans C. Andersson’? Which of the two of you will be appointed Admiral? Will the Trillium be retrofitted with ultra high pressure boilers and after burners? Possibilities worth pondering? Maybe not!

[Note:  Sarah and I were co-authors of Swans on the Don.]

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Say “Presto!” and All Your Cares Will Vanish

Lately, with one announcement after another out of Queen’s Park (or is it Liberal Headquarters), I’m having a hard time deciding just what Rob MacIsaac’s job at the GTTA really is.

The push is on to make announcements now, to have photo ops now, to show caring Liberals fixing transit, environmental and traffic problems now!

Alas, the real world is not that simple.

The latest event was the unveiling of the Presto Smart Card out in Mississauga.  I am not going to duplicate a lot of good comments made by several writers on the thread at spacing wire, but the core of this debate lies the following issues:

  • The cost to implement Presto on the TTC is very large and has grown from $150- to $250-million in the past few years.  A detailed report was prepared by consultants for the TTC covering many of the issues.  The projected cost for the TTC implementation was actually cheaper, relatively speaking, than similar projects on other large transit systems.
  • The alleged reason for Presto is to allow seamless movement between many transit systems.  However, there are much more basic impediments to such movement notably the service quality (or lack of it) at boundaries, and the existence of multiple separate fares in each system.  Any fare integration that reduces costs to riders will require higher fares overall or improved operating subsidies.

The implementation to date between Missisauga, GO and TTC at selected locations is miniscule and has a tiny fraction of the technical requirements of a GTA-wide scheme.  A great photo op, but not nirvana.

Absolutely essential to any farecard implementation will be a unified fare structure.  Should we charge by distance?  Should we charge by time of day?  Should we treat one fare as a limited time pass eliminating the concept of a transfer per se?  Presto can make any of these possible, but we need to know what we want to accomplish and the potential effect on future and present riders.

The TTC has no pressing need to replace its fare collection system and is moving increasingly, for frequent users, to flat-price passes rather than charging for each trip.  Should we invest a fortune in a system to track details of passenger movements and calculate fares if a pass system (electronic or otherwise) will handle the majority of the transactions?

Some cities have used Smart Cards to replicate and expand byzantine fare structures already in place.  If anything, the GTTA is all about simplification and flattening of our fare structure.  Presto can help with this, but the important policy choices must come first.

This project has been around for quite some time as a technology looking for a problem and using the sham argument that fare collection technology is the answer to interregional transit.  This is total nonsense.  Better service, better fare structures and better subsidies (all of which are inextricably linked) come first.  How you collect the fare is a distant second.

After all, we already have the GTA pass, and that didn’t require any technology at all.  What it’s missing is the network and the service levels to make it widely attractive.

Queen’s Park may have scored a hit with MoveOntario, but Presto will do little to improve transit in the GTTA for years to come.

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Kingston Road Transit Improvements EA

The draft terms of reference for the Environmental Assessment of improved transit service on Kingston Road from Victoria Park east to Eglinton are working their way through City Council approval.

One bizarre aspect of this process is that the Kingston Road study was already underway when Transit City was announced, and for some reason, no line was included on the Transit City map for this corridor.  This is rather odd considering that the proposed St. Clair extension to Jane was included in Transit City even though it is little more than an intriguing add-on to the overall St. Clair project.

Furthermore, the Kingston Road study is proceeding under the old EA process soon to be replaced by a new, streamlined “Class EA” that will be used for the Transit City studies.  Some processes, once started, are hard to stop, but it’s important after the MoveOntario announcement that the various studies now in progress for Transit City, the Waterfront and any other bits and pieces proceed as a co-ordinated effort.

The draft Terms of Reference and Supporting Documents are available online. 

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GO Transit’s Addiction to Parking Lots

The GO Rail system has for years depended on parking lots small and large to bring riders to its trains.  Local bus services do some of the work, but the parking lots are the mainstay of GO ridership.

With the recent announcement of substantial increase in GO capacity and reach, especially on the Lake Shore corridor, the linkage between parking lot construction and GO rail service must be drastically reduced.  There is an upper limit to the amount of land available for parking, and huge lots poison the land around stations — natural focal points for communities — by limiting development.  I have even heard a politician complain about the opening of a GO station because of the traffic it will generate through her community enroute to the parking lot down the road.

GO has started to think about developing the land around its stations, but this is still in the context of even more parking.  Garages are expensive, and GO hopes to defray this cost by including them in condo developments or office buildings.  This is a very short-sighted view.

A major gap in MoveOntario is the absence of funding for local transit operations, especially lines that will feed new and expanded regional services.  Many families cannot afford to have enough cars that each person can drive to the GO station as and when they need to use the service.  GO’s ridership is already at a level where they cannot provide parking for everyone, and even before MoveOntario was announced demand was expected to double over the next 20 years.

Today, I learned that about one third of the riders boarding at Oakville Station come by transit.  The rest drive in either to park or be dropped off.  As the Lake Shore line becomes a frequent, all-day service, accessing GO by car will not be a realistic way to travel because the lot will be full early in the morning.

MoveOntario forces all of the GTTA to change the way it thinks about transit both regionally and locally, although I’m not sure Dalton McGuinty’s advisors thought that far down the road when they cooked up this scheme.

GO must break its dependence on parking if it is to grow out of its role as a peak-period commuter network, and the local systems must expand to complement the regional improvements.  I am not saying we should close GO parking lots, but we have to think hard about stopping expansion plans, especially on heavy routes with present or soon-to-come all-day service.

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My New Streetcar [Updated]

This has already been covered in other blogs such as spacing and Transit Toronto, but there are a few observations I want to add to others’ comments.

The TTC launched their public consultation for a new streetcar design (stop already folks — I know it’s a “Light Rail Vehicle”, but real people out there call them “streetcars”) at the last TTC meeting.  Information flyers appeared on TTC vehicles and a website sprang to life.  This is an excellent example of the sort of co-ordinated announcement that is possible when an organization actually thinks about getting its message out.

The TTC wants to show people examples of modern car designs and ask their input on what’s important for the fleet that will serve Toronto for many decades to come.  Bombardier has a partial Minneapolis car in town that will be on view at Dundas Square on Thursday, June 28 from noon to 8:00 pm.

Other public sessions (at this point it is uncertain whether the demo car will be on site) will be held at Finch Station (June 25), Scarborough Town Centre (June 26) and the Albion Centre (June 27).

[James Bow has advised that the mockup car will only be at Dundas Square, not the other locations.]

As someone who works at STC, I will be thrilled to see a display of possible new streetcars just outside the door (I can see the existing ones at Broadview Station from my living room), but it will be bittersweet.

The SRT line was supposed to be an LRT line originally and parts of it were engineered for that technology — the loop and the original low platform at Kennedy — and the signs at Kennedy even had LRT pictographs on them on opening day.  Instead we got an expensive orphan technology, and the planned extension to Malvern was never built.

The TTC studied the question of replacing the RT with LRT and their consultant, Richard Soberman, was clearly leaning to that conclusion at the public meetings.  Then something changed, and the idea of LRT conversion was presented in as negative light as possible.  With the recent funding change relieving the City of responsibility for capital spending on major lines like this, the decision on technology really is out of the City’s hands.  Nominally, it’s the GTTA’s decision, but I fear that the need to prop up the reputation of the technology will trump any other issues.

On Tuesday the 25th, we will have the irony of a display about new streetcars at a location they will never serve.