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The Vanishing Business Case for Regional Fare Structure

Anyone who deals with Metrolinx from the outside knows that getting information can be a real struggle, but every so often the veil of secrecy lifts, although not always intentionally.

The implementation of “regional fares” is supposed to happen in March 2024, but this will be on a fairly limited scale, at least according to anything published so far. The TTC will come into the same arrangement as the 905 systems with recognition of each other’s fares across the 416/905 boundary, and the reinstatement of a GO Transit cofare.

Like the elusive Toronto sun of recent weeks, a report appeared, and then disappeared on the Metrolinx website called Regional Fare Structure Initial Business Case Final April 2023. This is not a draft, but gives a sense of Metrolinx thinking on the subject and how little some of their fare objectives have changed over the years.

To be blunt, fare planning at Metrolinx has always eyed the Toronto subway as a “regional” facility and its riders as potential cash cows who will help fund other parts of the system. I wrote about this back in 2017-18.

A major problem with earlier proposals was that the Toronto subway was treated as a premium service, like GO, where riders should pay more for the speed and comfort compared to the surface system. This utterly ignored the fact that the TTC system is designed as a single network with subway lines as the backbone and feeder/distributor surface lines. The underlying reason for pushing up subway fares was to make the model revenue-neutral, in effect, to subsidize the elimination of extra fares for cross-border trips with more expensive subway rides.

That scheme would have seen any trip longer than 10km charged an extra fare, and that would have affected the vast majority of suburban commuters who already complained of long bus+subway trips to get to work and school. This idea appeared to die off, and with the ascension of the Ford government in 2018, nothing more was heard. Ford concentrated on large-scale capital projects, not on tinkering with fares.

In the Final version of the business case, the subway fare proposal has changed so that it would only apply to cross-border trips of 10km or more. This would have the effect of undoing part of the supposed benefit of the pending 905/416 fare boundary elimination where riders will not face an extra fare for the subway portion of their journey.

Future Richmond Hill riders look forward to a single fare to central Toronto, but this scheme might not be attractive as a 10km ride will only get them to roughly Yonge and Sheppard (8km for the Yonge extension, plus 2km on the existing subway). In the tariff modelled in the Final Report, the fare to Union Station would be $7.50. Similar issues face trips in other parts of the future rapid transit network.

Removing of the 416/905 fare boundary so that the TTC’s relationship with systems in the 905 and with GO becomes the same as every other system remains an option, but it is presented as the least attractive choice. The clear intent is to pave the way for higher subway fares for “regional” travellers while preserving the flat fare, for now, within Toronto. The political considerations are obvious, but so is Metrolinx’ intent to move forward in their implacable way. Both the Draft and Final versions of the report speak of a path from the current fare arrangements to a totally “integrated” future, albeit one that is not clearly defined.

Options with further levels of “integration” perform well as riding stimulants because they involve significant reduction in GO fares at a time when service will be increased through the GO Expansion program.

A major barrier to fare-by-distance on the subway is the need to “tap out” from the subway fare zone. This is not simply a question of putting Presto readers on the “inside” face of every fare gate, but of establishing fare lines between the surface and subway portions of stations. This has a substantial cost and creates a barrier to free flow for the vast majority of trips that would still pay a flat TTC fare, Moreover it would be a Trojan horse making future conversion of the subway within Toronto to a separate fare zone much simpler.

This is not a “fare integration” scheme, but rather a plan to increase GO rider subsidies while also setting the stage for subway fare increases. The idea of a revenue neutral change in the tariff has been abandoned, at least for now. The historic pattern emphasizing GO capacity for longer trips has been turned on its head to give GO rail a larger part in local travel within Toronto.

In order to sell this concept, Metrolinx now includes rebalancing the GO fare structure under the “integration” rubric. This is a completely separate issue and it should have been addressed years ago on GO independently from the cross border fare problems.

An intriguing caveat in all of this is that the Ministry of Transportation is listed as a “partner” in the study, and its conclusions will be referred to MTO for review. One has the sense of Metrolinx being on a short leash.

It is not surprising that this report was pulled from public view, but it is worth discussing because it reveals Metrolinx’ thinking. A document does not become a “Final” report, even if it is only a “Final Initial” version, without a lot of policy signoffs along the way.

Note: In this article, I use Draft and Final (capitalized) to refer to the two versions of the Initial Business Case.

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Scarborough RT Busway Funded in Mayor’s Budget

On February 1, 2024, Mayor Olivia Chow announced her version of Toronto’s 2024 operating and capital budgets at Scarborough Town Centre Station. There are many parts to this budget, including a slight reduction in the proposed tax rate, but the location of the event was no accident.

After much hand-wringing, political gesturing and activism by would-be users, the uncertainty over the busway in the former Scarborough RT right-of-way is gone. Toronto will pay for the project, and the delaying tactic of waiting for provincial funding is over. The text below is from the Mayor’s proposed budget at pages 35-36.

This is a fairly common shuffle of funding allocations between projects, something that is relatively easy because:

  • the amounts involved are small on the scale of the overall capital budget,
  • some of the spending is beyond 2024, and
  • the primary source is a placeholder for future as-yet uncommitted work.

What is needed now is a sense of urgency by the TTC to make every possible change in their project timetable to get things moving now. This could include:

  • Identifying work that can proceed without the mini Environmental Assessment known as a “TPAP” that will consume six unexpected months. Obvious candidates for this are the removal of existing SRT infrastructure – track, power, lighting – and demolition work at Lawrence East Station so that buses can pass through the station.
  • Examining whether the project can be split into south and north stages with the Lawrence to Eglinton section opening first. This would give some of the busway’s benefit including direct access to Kennedy Station as early as possible.

A change in focus is needed from delay, a common tactic in the Tory era to sweep budget problems under the rug, to creating the most expeditious project plan.

Transit planning should be about ambition and what we can achieve, not endless excuses and the deadly words “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …”.

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The Scarborough RT Derailment Technical Reports

Back in September 2023, TTC management presented an overview of the investigation into the July 24, 2023 accident that marked the end of the SRT’s life. See also my article Line 3 SRT Replacement Service and Derailment Investigation.

At the time, detailed reports from the technical investigation were supposed to appear in “a few weeks”, but there has not been any public presentation of this material to the TTC Board.

To my surprise while hunting down reports about the Scarborough RT busway, I found the derailment investigation reports well hidden on the TTC’s site. To see them, you have to:

  • Go to the Projects and Plans page which is accessed through a footer menu on every TTC page. Yes, right down at the bottom.
  • Scroll down to The Future of of TTC’s Line 3 Scarborough (SRT).
  • Click on View Details.
  • Scroll down within that page to News Releases, Reports & Community Updates
  • Open that section and scroll down to November 16, 2023 (there is also one report listed under December 11, 2023)

Here you will find links to the following reports (which I provide here to save you the bother of chasing through the path above). The dates of the reports are shown together with those for earlier drafts in the change logs, where present.

There is a lot of reading here, but the reports are more thorough and informative than the brief TTC overview since the accident. An important distinction the reports reveal is the degree to which identified issues were not at the single derailment site, but common to other parts of the line and to TTC maintenance practices.

Various reviews concluded that the problem lay with the reaction rail mounts and the ability of segments of this rail to move due to forces from the linear induction motors (LIM) on the SRT trains. Several factors contributed to this including:

  • The inherent tight clearances of the LIM design,
  • variations and errors in the selection and installation of reaction rail supports and rail components,
  • an inspection scheme that underrated the severity of problems and the necessity for prompt repairs,
  • the difficulty of inspecting reaction rail mounting hardware, and
  • the need for training of inspection and maintenance staff so that they understand the behaviour of track systems and the failure modes that they must prevent.

Of particular concern is that a reaction rail defect was reported two weeks before the accident at the derailment site, but it was assigned a low priority in the maintenance hierarchy likely because the severity of the problem was not understood.

There are lessons here for maintenance practices in general and I cannot help thinking that the recent detailed review of subway track geometry, resulting slow orders and repairs is partly in response to the problems discovered on the SRT.

I know that readers will not have time to plough through the full reports, but they contain details beyond what I have included here for those who are interested. This article is a summary of the main points together with an introduction to the SRT propulsion technology to put the other material into context.

Source: Hatch LTK Report
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Eighteen

January 31, 2006 saw the first post on this blog, a compendium of film festival reviews I wrote going back to the dark ages of 1986 on another platform, the long-departed “Artworks” BBS. Many readers will recall text-based systems and the whine of 2400-baud dial-up modems connecting us to the outside world.

Among other films in that 1986 batch were Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Itami’s Tampopo which brought new meaning to the term “spaghetti western”, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. (Try to imagine seeing that film for the first time when nobody in the audience knew what to expect.) There was also a little film called Malcolm about a reclusive lad who had an inordinate fascination with Melbourne’s trams.

I stopped doing reviews years ago because major political events kept getting in the way, and more recently I prefer to see films on a more leisurely basis without the lineups. Toronto’s cultural scene has been through many ups and downs over the years, but the reps survive somehow, and even the gorilla on King Street, TIFF, hopes to weather the combined effects of the pandemic, film industry strikes, and the fall in tourism. There’s enough to keep me out and about (now that we can be out and about again) on many evenings and quite a few matinees.

The second post went up on Groundhog Day 2006, A Bold Initiative for Don Valley Transport with a plan for Swan Boats, the product of much 2am hilarity with a dear friend. Newcomers to the scene ask about my Twitter/X handle. If only they knew. Fantasy transit maps have nothing on our imagination!

At the risk of really dating myself, 2023 was the 60th anniversary of my first non-trivial computer programming. It was on an LGP-30 that was on loan to the Toronto Board of Education for enrichment classes. My program was a random sentence generator that would spit out grammatically correct, albeit totally nonsense text. This was not on a par with teaching HAL to sing, but it gave me a healthy suspicion of the claims for AI when that field started years later.

2023 brought departures of friends and transit colleagues, not uncommon for someone of my generation, and they are much missed. But there is much new blood with a strong interest in making a better city. A particular strength is that transit activism is now city-wide and cannot be dismissed as the preserve of downtowners and railfans.

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Will There Ever Be A Scarborough RT Busway?

At its meeting of January of January 25, 2024, the TTC Board received an update on the status of a busway in the former SRT corridor.

The news was not good. For various reasons, the opening date for this facility has slipped to 2Q2027. This is quite a change from the original plan for construction through 2024 and 2025 with a year-end opening, roughly 18 months sooner than the updated projection. Here was the plan back in April 2022 when the project was approved by the Board. At the time, the assumed shutdown date for the SRT was mid-November 2023.

TTC Project Chart for Line 3 Bus Replacement Construction, April 2022

The Board’s discussion was unusually heated, and much criticism fell on TTC Management for an unplanned delay required to conduct a Transit Project Assessment (aka TPAP) even though the corridor is not changing use. The problem lies with planned acquisition of new lands to provide station and corridor access, and they are subject to a review including for cultural/archeological purposes. (Detailed station plans appear later in this article.)

Construction will also require a barrier between the busway and the adjacent GO line because Metrolinx wants to protect from buses accidentally coming onto their corridor. This adds cost, but should not substantially affect the construction schedule.

Total cost is now forecast at $67.9 million, up $12.2 million from the earlier estimate of $55.7 million which is part of the TTC’s 2024 Capital Budget. Of this, $4.3 million is due to the Metrolinx barrier, and $4 million goes for a grab-bag of items that appear to have been omitted in the original estimate. This increase is compounded by other cost lines which are calculated as a percentage of the base.

A far more important source of delay was the foot dragging by Council and the former Mayor about funding the design work which should have been finished by now, but sits at the 60% stage. Essentially Council sat on its hands crying out for Provincial money as part of the subway extension project, and the busway just sat waiting for aid that never arrived from Queen’s Park.

There has certainly been no sense of urgency to get design finished and construction underway as quickly as possible.

The delay, cost increase and a sense that travel time savings might be less than expected have combined to raise the question “why do it at all”. This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy if those responsible for the project, including the politicians, really did not have their hearts in the idea. There is no quicker way to sandbag a project than to deny critical funding, watch the price rise and the due date vanish into the misty future.

While awaiting a formal funding approval, the TTC will redirect $15.2 million from other capital projects to pay for enabling works and property acquisition. This can proceed in parallel with the remaining detailed design and TPAP.

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Analysis of 903 STC Express: September-December 2023

This article is an update to my review of the 903 Express bus that replaced the Scarborough RT. The previous article here: Analysis of 903 STC Express: September-November 2023.

Additions in this round:

  • Data for December 2023
  • Performance of the 903 service to Centennial College east of STC (Scarborough Town Centre)
  • Travel times between STC and Ellesmere & Midland
  • A review of terminal layover times at Kennedy Station
  • The screenlines for arrivals and departures at Kennedy Station have been moved from Eglinton at Midland and at Kennedy to points on Eglinton just east and west of the loop entrances. This ensures that any delays at the intersections are counted in travel time, not in terminal time. The change has been applied retroactively to charts for September through November.

Correction: References to a 934 Progress Express should have been to route 913. This has been corrected. Thanks to a reader for pointing out this gaffe.

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Travel Times on RapidTO Corridors – December 2023 Update – Part I

This article updates tracking charts of travel times on three proposed RapidTO bus corridors with data to the end of 2023. The routes covered are:

  • 29/929 Dufferin from King to Wilson
  • 35/935 Jane from Eglinton to Pioneer Village Station
  • 39/939 Finch East from Victoria Park to McCowan
  • 54 Lawrence East from Victoria Park to PortUnion

I will turn to other RapidTO corridors including the existing Eglinton-Kingston red lanes in Part II of this series.

Without going into a lot of interpretive detail, the purpose of these charts is:

  • To show the travel times under “best case” conditions of low road traffic in Spring 2020 (the covid pandemic onset), and the changes since that time.
  • To show the variation in travel times day-by-day and at varying times of the day.

If RapidTO can flatten out variations in travel times and get the typical time to a consistently lower level, bus service should not only be faster but more reliable. That was the goal on King Street which, for a time, achieved it’s purpose of improving transit.

The focus of too much transit politics is on saving time getting from point “A” to “B” and not enough on ensuring that this time is consistent from day-to-day, hour-to-hour. This includes both on-vehicle travel time and reliability of the interval between buses, a frequent topic on this site.

Toronto’s Executive Committee will consider a report RapidTO: Surface Transit Network Plan at its meeting on January 30, 2024. I will report on the full document after their discussion and additional information, if any, from the meeting.

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How Slow Is My Streetcar: Part I

At its November 2023 meeting, Council passed a motion proposed by Councillor Chris Moise whose ward covers the east side of downtown, and who also sits on the TTC Board:

1. City Council direct the General Manager, Transportation Services, in consultation with the Toronto Transit Commission, the Toronto Police Service, and the City Solicitor to review and report back to the Executive Committee in the second quarter of 2024, including:
a. an update on streetcar performance over the last five years;
b. suggested improvements to the public realm along King Street until the permanent capital project can be delivered; and
c. the feasibility of implementing automated traffic enforcement on the King Street Transit Priority Corridor, including details on what legislative amendments would be required to provincial legislation including, but not limited to, the Ontario Highway Traffic Act.

This article addresses point “a” with a review of streetcar lines over the past five years. It is important to go back to 2019 before the pandemic fundamentally shifted traffic and transit patterns downtown as a point of reference.

From time to time, there are calls to expand a “King Street” redesign to other parts of the network, but there are two “cart before the horse” issues to address first:

  • Figure out how to make King Street operate as it was intended and return at least to its pre-pandemic behaviour, if not better, as a model.
  • Understand how other streets operate including where and when problems for transit performance exist.

An update on transit priority will come to Council in February 2024, although this will look more widely at the city, not just downtown. In previous articles I have reviewed the growing problem of transit travel times as traffic builds on the proposed RapidTO corridors, some of which exceeded pre-pandemic levels some time ago. In future articles I will refresh these analyses with data through to the end of 2023.

An important distinction between most RapidTO bus corridors and the downtown streetcar system is the design of suburban vs downtown streets. In the suburbs, the streets are mostly wide, have relatively few points of access (e.g. driveways) or pedestrian oriented uses (e.g. shops), and travel distances tend to be longer. In the core, streets are narrow, mostly four lanes with no possibility of widening, access points are more frequent, there is a strong pedestrian orientation, and trips tend to be short. Even if buses were running, express operations would be almost impossible and would save very little time on the downtown routes.

There are exceptions such as some older parts of the inner suburbs that bring physical challenges for transit priority, but also the political challenge that the transit share of road use is lower as one moves outward from the core. King Street is a very different place from Steeles, and Dufferin is somewhere in between depending on which section one considers.

An important message in all of this is that “congestion” (put in quotes because it is so often cited as a get-out-of-jail-free excuse for all transit woes) varies from place to place and time to time. Simply putting transit priority everywhere will not solve all problems and could even be overkill (even assuming that it is true “priority” and not a sham to keep transit vehicles out of motorists’ way). It is simple to colour a bunch of key routes end-to-end on a map, but much harder to identify changes that will actually make a difference. Meanwhile, a focus on “priority” could divert attention from badly-needed improvements in headway reliability and more reliable wait times.

This article begins with a comparison of scheduled travel speed on each route, and then turns to actual travel speeds by route segment. In the interest of length, I will leave a discussion of headway reliability to future articles. This is an important component of total travel time, especially for short trips or trip segments.

I have also included tables showing the constant change in route configurations on the four major east-west corridors thanks to a never-ending procession of track and water main work, rapid transit construction, and overhead changes for pantograph operation. Some of this work was accelerated to take advantage of lighter traffic conditions during the pandemic, and some to bring forward work to keep staff employed.

However, the rate of route changes persisted well beyond the heart of the pandemic and threatens the credibility of transit service on major corridors leaving riders constantly wondering where their streetcar or replacement bus might be. Some changes occurred without the planned work actually taking place, or work started and ended later than announced (sometimes much later as in the never-ending KQQR project).

An important change over recent years, separate from the pandemic, has been the move to larger streetcars on wider headways. What might have been a tolerable unevenness in service when streetcars arrived every 4 or 5 minutes simply does not work for scheduled headways of 10 minutes with much wider swings. Bunching when it occurs leaves much bigger gaps between vehicles. A laissez faire attitude to route management, and especially the assumption that routes under construction cannot be managed, has led both to unreliable service and basic questions of how or if the TTC can recover the quality riders expect.

For all the talk of project co-ordination, the last people who seem to count are the riders. Simply studying raw travel times be they scheduled or actual does not capture the frustration, delay and despair from the ever-changing and unreliable services, be they by streetcar or bus.

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36 Finch West: Travel Times Between Keele and Humber College

In a recent thread on X/Twitter (and no doubt other venues) there has been some controversy about the relative speed of 6 Finch LRT versus the bus service it will replace. Writers have based their arguments on speeds published in the Scheduled Service Summaries, although these are not always reliable for various reasons:

  • The speeds shown are over the full route. For the 36 Finch West service west of Keele Street (Finch West Station), this includes the portion south of Humber College to Humberwood Loop.
  • Actual speeds vary from the scheduled ones, and there is a fair amount of scatter around these averages. An important factor in any reserved lane implementation, regardless of technology, is the hope that, as on King Street originally, better reliability can be brought to travel times and hence to service quality.

The purpose of this article is to review actual travel time data on weekdays for selected months between 2017 and 2023. The specific months were chosen both for variety, but also within the limitations of data that I have been collecting for several years. 36 Finch West fell off my radar, so to speak, in 2022 and I was not tracking it, but began again in 2023 in anticipation of the LRT opening to get some “before” data.

The data are shown in two formats.

  • Weekly average travel times by hour together with the standard deviations in data values, a measure of the scatter in the data.
  • The raw data points to give readers a sense of the range of travel times that can occur on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis.

The challenge for the LRT line is to both reduce the averages times, and to narrow the band in which these times lie.

The section measured is from west of Keele Street to Humber College. This is chosen to ensure consistent data for departures from Finch West Station in the post-TYSSE era, and coincides roughly with the LRT portal from Finch West Station. This also eliminates station time which can vary considerably, especially for the bus service, due to the station’s location.

Data for October 2017 and April 2018 precede the opening of the TYSSE and the start of construction on Line 6, and they are included as a stating point against which any improvement might be compared.

Westbound and eastbound data are shown side by side, and the charts move forward in time from top (2017) to bottom (2023)

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Searching for TTC Reports

Finding old TTC reports can be a challenge thanks to the organization of their website.

As convenience to readers (and myself), I have built an index to TTC reports organized by topic going back to January 2020. This covers the period from the pandemic onward.

The index is available here and in the Reference Material pulldown from the navigation bar.

I will update this index as new meetings occur. As for 2019 and before, that may or may not appear at some future time as I have many other current-day affairs to report on.