The TTC Board met at City Hall on Wednesday, February 27.
There was also a meeting of the Audit and Risk Management Committee at TTC Headquarters, 1900 Yonge Street, at 9:00 am on Tuesday, February 26 with many items that are also on the full Board’s agenda.
The City Auditor General’s report on Fare Evasion was on both agendas. Given its length and detailed content, I reviewed it in a separate article. An update on actions taken by the Board is included below.
Also in this article:
TTC service changes for the schedule period running from the end of March through to mid-May 2019 are comparatively minor.
The reconstruction of King-Queen-Roncesvalles, originally planned to start this spring, has been delayed to 2020. Planned changes in affected streetcar services will not occur, although some revisions to 504 King are expected in May to address service reliability. The schedules for 29/929 Dufferin service have been left as originally designed for this period with all service extended to the Princes’ Gate Loop. This change will be reversed in May.
Construction begins on the CNR bridge over Coxwell Avenue. Half of the underpass will be closed at a time, and this begins with the northbound roadway. 22/322 Coxwell services will divert via Woodbine and Danforth.
Reconstruction of the bus roadway at Jane Station was planned to begin with these schedules, but work has been deferred until May. The new schedules provide for extension of the 26 Dupont and 55 Warren Park routes to Old Mill Station, but they will actually operate to Jane Station pending start of construction. At that time, the 35/935 Jane services will shift to on street loading on Jane Street.
On line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina, the crew relief and break point will move north to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station from Sheppard West Station.
Route 95/995 York Mills will be revised with weekday midday 995 express service added to the schedule. The midday 95B service to UTSC will be replaced with 95C service to Ellesmere Station as in the peak periods.
There are minor changes on several bus routes (see the linked summary for details) to adjust running times and headways.
Updated March 14, 2019: The number of vehicles on 167 Pharmacy North has been corrected in the spreadsheet linked below.
Toronto’s Waterfront Transit Reset planning has been underway since 2016, and most of the decisions about routing were settled by early 2018.
A major outstanding issue was the link from Queens Quay to Union Station. Three options were originally under consideration:
In the two latter schemes, the original idea was to keep the streetcars on the surface at Queens Quay with links down to a station below.
The walkway/moving sidewalk option was discarded early in the process because there was not enough room for a bidirectional ramp (akin to what used to be at Spadina Station) and walkway, and a unidirectional ramp would pose accessibility problems.
Two technologies remained – streetcar and automated people mover (APM) – for the tunnel with sub-options for the interchange between APM and streetcar.
Streetcar with expanded Union loop and Queens Quay Station (modified EA)
APM with streetcar below grade at Queens Quay / Bay
APM with streetcar at grade along Queens Quay
The design of a surface station at Queens Quay proved to be unworkable because of:
For both remaining schemes, an underground station would be required at Queens Quay although the design would vary depending on whether the streetcar or people mover option was selected for the Union link.
Overall Evaluation
The two options were evaluated for various factors including user experience, overall network benefit, construction effects, and cost. On balance, the streetcar option won out, and the people mover option was not as simple and cheap as its proponents had thought. The one criterion on which the PM did rank better was construction difficulty.
This recommendation will go to Toronto’s Executive Committee, the TTC Board and Council in April along with reports on other major projects including SmartTrack and the Scarborough Subway Extension. How much attention the Waterfront will get in the midst of debates on larger projects remains to be seen, and of course there is always the problem that available funding falls far short of paying the bills for every project on the table.
Toronto talks a good line about “transit first” development, but never puts up real money. The waterfront is always a project for some indefinite future time, but not now. As a city, we love new buildings and crow over the number of cranes in the sky, but we assume that travel demands these buildings create will magically flow over the existing network. On a regional scale, this has delayed needed growth in GO Transit and the Relief subway line, and on a local scale it limits transit growth to a handful of very expensive subway extensions whose value is counted first in votes.
Development at a scale many parts of the GTA can only dream of will occur within a few kilometres of Union Station, and there is a great danger that transit will not be ready as buildings come on stream.
With official ridership stats flat or falling over the past few years, and the annual pressure to raise fares to balance the budget, the issue of fare evasion comes up regularly as an untapped revenue source. This became a particular concern with the move to all-door loading on, primarily, the streetcar network where the absence of a fare check at vehicle entry gives more scope for evasion than on buses or in subway stations.
Toronto’s Auditor General (AG) has issued a report and a video on this topic. They will be discussed at the TTC’s Audit & Risk Management Committee meeting on Tuesday, February 26, and at the full Board’s meeting on Wednesday, February 27.
The political context of fare management comes in on a few counts, and should be remembered when reading about dubious decisions and practices as flagged in this report.
Through all of this, there are many examples of poor co-ordination between Metrolinx/Presto and the TTC, of poorly thought-out implementations of procedure and of operational practices that simply do not achieve the best possible results. There is plenty of “blame” to go around, but a fundamental problem is that the system “must work” for managerial and political credibility.
The AG conducted a six-week review of actual conditions on the subway, streetcar and bus networks in November-December 2018 and found that the actual evasion rate was substantially higher, especially on the streetcar system.
The dollar values shown here are built up from mode-specific evasion rates and the level of ridership on each mode.
Problems with Presto contributed about 5% to the $64.1 million total in lost revenue, but this does not include issues with fare gates or TTC practices regarding “crash gates” in stations which allow fast entry for riders with media that can be checked visually. The proportion of such riders has dropped substantially with the end of Metropasses, and will fall again when tokens and tickets are discontinued later in 2019.
The report contains 27 recommendations all of which have been accepted by TTC management. The challenge will be to see how they are implemented.
Summary
The Auditor General’s findings fall into broad groups:
A related issue is that the way the TTC estimates ridership might not accurately reflect conditions in the field. The reported drop in “ridership” in the past few years could lie as much in the methodology of counting multi-trip (pass) usage and shifts from old-style passes to Presto as in a real loss of riders and system demand. Moreover, a weakening in the rate of growth is clear going back longer than Presto has been available on the TTC, or Proof-of-Payment was in widespread use.
Updated February 28, 2019: The TTC has confirmed that schedule and routing for 504 King and 501 Queen will not change at the end of March as originally planned. However, the 29 Dufferin schedule had also been changed to send all buses to the Princes’ Gates loop anticipating streetcar congestion at Dufferin Loop. This schedule change will remain for one schedule period and then be backed out in mid-May.
The City of Toronto announced today that the work planned for this summer at the King-Queen-Roncesvalles intersection and westward on The Queensway to Parkside Drive would be deferred to 2020 because of complications with the project.
Email from Chief Engineer, Michael D’Andrea.
“As you know, in early February, the City issued the tender for the planned project at the intersection at King / The Queensway / Queen / Roncesvalles. This project included: sewer and watermain replacement, replacing the entire TTC overhead and track infrastructure within the intersection and west along The Queensway, Streetscaping, road and intersection works along the Queensway, rehabilitating the bridge over Parkside Drive, removing the right-turn channel at Queensway and King Street and overall intersection / road improvements within the area. Based on feedback received to date from contractors considering the tender, there are areas of construction and design that require additional review and clarity to ensure the construction delivery schedule and budget can be upheld and delivered according to plan.
As a result, the City of Toronto is rescheduling the delivery of this project to 2020.
Efforts are underway between several City Divisions and TTC to firm up the design, schedule, and tender and reporting to the Infrastructure & Environment Committee. We expect to provide additional information to all stakeholders involved (Parkdale BIA / Roncesvalles BIA / St. Joseph’s Health Centre) in April – with more details to follow for the residents in the area at a later date.
We understand that the wait and anticipation for this construction has been a long time coming; however, the City and TTC wanted to ensure that the planned construction will be delivered according to the plan, schedule and budget that works to mitigate traffic and TTC service impacts as much as possible. We look forward to meeting with you and stakeholders soon, to further discuss these measures.”
I await clarification from the TTC whether the route changes contemplated to go into effect with the March 30 schedules will or will not take place. They are probably far enough away from finalization of those schedules to avoid having an inappropriate service design for diversions that are not required now.
When I hear definitively, I will update this article.
Meanwhile, the expected release of streetcars from the west ends of 501 Queen and 504 King will not occur, and this will prevent the change back to streetcar operation on other routes until more of the new cars are available.
The Waterfront East LRT (streetcar) is a years-overdue project. Development marches east from Yonge to the Don River along Queens Quay while transit service amounts to a handful of infrequent and unreliable bus routes. I strongly support the LRT plan, and participated in various advisory groups at Waterfront Toronto and the recently disbanded Sidewalk Labs Mobility Advisory Committee with the hope of seeing the LRT project come to life.
Toronto as a city talks a good line about “transit first” in the waterfront, but does nothing to support this. There is always some other project more important. During the early days of SmartTrack, there were even claims that it would make the Waterfront East LRT unnecessary. That was complete balderdash, along with claims that ST would replace every other project, including a Relief subway line.
Now Mayor John Tory has shifted his position on ST’s benefits somewhat, but keeping his personal project alive diverts attention and funding. A Waterfront Reset study now underway by City Planning, Waterfront Toronto and the TTC owes more to the demand for better transit to the Humber Bay Shores than to the new developments in the eastern waterfront. Political dynamics on City Council are such that the western extension could be first out of the gate leaving the eastern waterfront high and dry, so to speak, for better transit. Design for an extension of the existing streetcar track at Exhibition Loop west to Dufferin with provision to go further is already underway. [See the Exhibition Place Streetcar Link tab within the Waterfront Reset page.]
The most contentious part of the Waterfront Reset has been the link to Union Station. One might think that simply expanding platform space there would be the obvious solution, but there are competing interests. Some residents and other activists argue for a surface LRT straight through the Bay & Queens Quay intersection to the eastern waterfront, while the existing Bay Street tunnel would be repurposed for various other technologies including a moving sidewalk or some form of “people mover”. For a while, Waterfront Toronto’s former CEO was pushing for a “funicular”, although the term is more applicable to transit routes on steep hills than in a relatively flat tunnel.
The existing underground streetcar infrastructure, consisting of a ~540-metre long tunnel under Bay Street from Queens Quay Station to Union Station, opened in 1990. This existing link provides connections between the central-western waterfront, TTC Line 1, GO trains and buses, and the lower downtown core. The existing streetcar loop at Union Station is currently inadequate for present service levels, to and from the west only, because of its single, curved streetcar platform, on a single track, with insufficient space for present volumes of waiting and alighting customers, and the loop would not function effectively or safely if additional service from the east was added.
Currently, options for the link between Union Station and Queens Quay have been narrowed down to a short list of technologies: expanding the underground streetcar capacity at Union Station (loop expansion); or, repurposing the existing underground streetcar tunnel with an automated dual-haul cable-pulled transit system. The study area for the Union Queens Quay Link is illustrated below. [Waterfront Reset web page]
Two designs were presented at a recent public meeting, but I did not report on them here as there are still many details to be worked out. Drawings for these options are not available online.
It is ironic that the impetus for removing streetcars from Bay Street came from the hope that the existing portal between Bay and York streets could be filled in, and that a new portal east of Yonge would not be required. However, the People Mover option, with its underground station, does not achieve this goal.
The next public meeting of the Waterfront Reset project will be held in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront, 235 Queens Quay West, from 6:30 to 8:00 pm on Monday, March 4, 2019.
A third route into Union, the Bremner LRT, did not appear in the City proposals. It would, in any event, be impossible in the People Mover configuration. This proposal never made sense as Bremner is not wide enough to host an LRT route separate from Queens Quay West. A third service competing for platform space and track time at Union would make that interchange even more challenging than with only the west and east LRT services. City Planning could do everyone a favour by formally removing the Bremner route from their maps. This would also end a rather contentious debate about how a this route would affect the area west of Bathurst and south of Fort York.
The Union loop should and could have been expanded during the extended shutdown of streetcar service for the reconstruction of Queens Quay West and the nearby work on GO’s Bay Street Concourse (to which the expanded loop will connect), but there was no political will to spend money on streetcars at Union.
The Union Station connection will be the most expensive part of any upgrade to waterfront transit facilities, and this cost has been a drag on political decision-making. The Waterfront Reset is supposed to report to Council in April as part of an omnibus report on transit projects in Toronto. Once again, the waterfront could take a back seat to the favoured projects: SmartTrack and the Scarborough Subway Extension.
This is the context in which Sidewalk Labs and their proposed Quayside development join the story.
Quayside
Development of the waterfront has followed a standard pattern. Waterfront Toronto, funded jointly by all three levels of government, upgrades infrastructure (mainly utilities and roads), and manages the process for inviting development on public land that is serviced by the new facilities. Private developers bid for the sites, and Waterfront Toronto maintains input through its desigmn review process. (Some privately owned sites ignored WFT, but the majority of the land is in public hands.)
The Quayside site spans Queens Quay mostly between Sherbourne and Parliament Streets. What is quite striking here is the huge size of the Port Lands to the east and south compared with Quayside itself. [Map from Sidewalk Toronto website] The Port Lands are almost 30 times the size of Quayside and the same size as a large chunk of downtown’s business district. A share in any development there is a big prize.
Waterfront Toronto took a different tack with invited bids for a futuristic centre where new technology would be at the heart of the Quayside development. This would not simply be another new set of condos on the water. The winning bidder was Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. which is also the parent of Google. This company has very deep pockets. Sidewalk Toronto is their local presence.
Original concepts for the area stirred both excitement and skepticism, but the debate quickly focused on technology issues related to invasive monitoring of activities at Quayside, the ownership of data collected, and the role of technology generally including autonomous vehicle (AV) technology from Waymo, another Alphabet company.
Central to the Quayside proposal is the reduction of the carbon footprint both through building design (construction and operating effects) and by shifting much transportation demand to modes such as walking, cycling, shared vehicles and transit. Transit is particularly important because the projected volume to and from the eastern waterfront exceeds 3,000 passengers per hour. The origin-destination pattern for these trips is not conveniently within the Quayside precinct, but spread over downtown. Incoming school and work trips originate even further afield. This is not a demand that autonomous vehicles can touch both for capacity and for reach of service in the foreseeable future, certainly not in the period when the waterfront will develop and be populated.
For me, the Mobility Advisory Committee was a frustrating experience. There was a clear conflict between Sidewalk telling us about their wonderful technology and the committee’s ability to review and comment critically, if only thanks to time constraints, the number of committee members and infrequent meetings. There was far too much “sizzle” and far less hard detail, not to mention a sense that Sidewalk was rather full of themselves about their brave new technology world. The design for Quayside includes provision for AVs, and to some extent the proposed road layout was gerrymandered to increase the contiguous territory where AVs could operate without having to deal with a major artery such as Lake Shore Boulevard.
A fundamental problem with any discussion of AVs is that Quayside is quite small, and most of the local trips within it would be taken on foot or by cycling. AVs might be handy for some journeys, but they would not be the backbone of travel because most trips started or ended well outside of the Quayside area. If AVs were going to have any meaningful presence in Quayside, the project scope had to expand, but how this would occur was not obvious until the Star’s revelation of Sidewalk’s and Google’s designs on the wider waterfront.
A parallel and much more high profile controversy related to the data that would be collected by a very technologically active environment integral to the Quayside proposal. This is a transit blog and I will not delve into all of the threads that debate took, but the discussion served an unexpected purpose. With all of the focus on privacy and the integrity of personal data, other aspects of Sidewalk’s scheme and their wider designs faded into the background. The cynic in me suspects that for all that this might have annoyed Sidewalk, there was an advantage that the bigger picture of development scope and infrastructure funding did not receive the same attention, at least until the Star broke the story.
There was always a nagging suspicion that the real prize for Sidewalk was the wider waterfront, but most discussions looked only at the comparatively small Quayside district. The problem with only reviewing that small precinct is that neither transit nor any AV scheme will rise or fall on the comparatively modest demand of one development district, but of the combined effect of building throughout the waterfront.
A Leak at Sidewalk
On February 14, the Star’s Marco Chown Oved revealed that Sidewalk had designs on the entire Port Lands. His article is based on a presentation deck that has not been released. I asked, and he replied:
A revised presentation was issued by Sidewalk, but it does not include some of the more contentious text cited in Oved’s article.
The foundation of Sidewalk’s proposal is that they would not only finance infrastructure installation throughout Quayside and the Portlands, but that they would be repaid by tapping into future municipal revenues. They would not become developers, but would reap their reward as others built in the area they had serviced.
Internal documents obtained by the Star show Sidewalk Labs plans to make the case that it is “entitled to … a share in the uptick in land value on the entire geography … a share of developer charges and incremental tax revenue on all land.” … estimated to be $6 billion over the next 30 years. [Oved]
This sounds promising if you are a politician accustomed to finding someone in the private sector to take costs off of your hands, at least in the short term. However, it is a form of borrowing just like any debt, and there is no indication of the return Sidewalk (or its funding parent, Alphabet) would expect on its investment. Moreover, there is a risk that economic circumstances will change over coming decades and development could slow or stop in Toronto. Would that risk be part of any deal, shared with Alphabet, or would they expect payment even for infrastructure supporting vacant lots?
Development Charges are poorly understood in Toronto. They are levied city-wide against all new buildings, both residential and commercial, to recoup part of the cost of infrastructure upgrades. They are not site-specific, and buildings everywhere pay the cost of new infrastructure regardless of where it is needed. For example, new buildings downtown helped pay for the Spadina subway extension. (Provincial rules on the DC formula require that the portion of any benefit to existing properties be excluded from the calculation.) It is far from clear that the DC revenue from the Port Lands would be needed only to pay for infrastructure there.
As for tax revenue, property taxes support many municipal services of which only a small portion is capital debt service. Scooping marginal new revenues to pay back Sidewalk’s investment would starve the city of money it needs to support the new population, and this would also dilute the funds available to service City debt overall. (I will avoid the black hole of explaining how City debt financing works here.)
The idea of “Tax Increment Financing” (TIF) has been floated before and it was central to John Tory’s SmartTrack scheme. This something-for-nothing mirage has evaporated. We will now see the City investing substantially in new GO stations while having no control over the service provided to them or the fares charged. Indeed, some of the waterfront lands Sidewalk eyes for TIF benefits were likely also part of the original SmartTrack scheme. One can only collect a tax increment once, and one might even debate which of several projects (SmartTrack, GO RER, Relief Line, Waterfront LRT) contribute to the uplift in land values and taxes.
The revenue streams Sidewalk seeks are municipal, and their proposal is silent on any investment from the provincial or federal levels. Waterfront Toronto, by contrast, is built on a tripartite arrangement with all governments, notably in its signature project the Don Mouth regeneration. If Sidewalk expects to be repaid for its contribution, where are the other “partners”?
Looking more broadly, other financing entities might be interested in this project, and Sidewalk/Alphabet should not be given any preference. One way or another, the investment has to be paid back, and the affected governments will have to get the best deal (including possibly some self-financing) among whatever is on offer.
Earlier I mentioned that it was clear that Quayside alone was too small to be significant in its own right for some of Sidewalk’s goals. Oved quotes Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff:
“We don’t think that 12 acres on Quayside has the scale to actually have the impact on affordability and economic opportunity and transit that everyone aspires to,” Doctoroff said.
This is not exactly news, but a great deal of “consultation” took place on the basis that only the 12 acres were under consideration.
Brand new in the Sidewalk proposal is a new Google Canada headquarters located on the west side of New Cherry Street, a prime spot within “Villiers Island”, a new island that will be created as part of the Don Mouth project. [From p. 10 in the updated Sidewalk presentation deck]
This would have an interesting effect on the initial size of Sidewalk/Google’s presence by placing a major employment node on Villiers Island. If Google/Waymo want a testbed for AVs, this would put their HQ firmly in the neighbourhood and would increase the initial scope of “AV territory”, although this requires that streets be “AV friendly”.
One big concern about AVs is their co-existence with the LRT line. In an illustration of the new Queens Quay, an AV is clearly shown in front of a streetcar on the “LRT” right-of-way. Bad enough that there is a conflict with AVs stopping on the right-of-way, but with the expanded scope possible to serve the Google HQ, will Waymo expect to use the LRT right-of-way throughout the eastern waterfront? Would this be a condition of the contract for any financing of the LRT project?
Sidewalk knows that the LRT is an important component of waterfront development.
To encourage development, Sidewalk will finance an LRT expansion through the area and fund the construction of “horizontal infrastructure” such as “the power and thermal grid, and waste removal.”
…
“This is something that is on nobody’s realistic drawing board. We would ensure it gets financed and all we want to do is get paid back out of the increase in value in terms of property taxes and developer charges that are only possible when that LRT gets extended,” said Doctoroff.
“To be clear,” Doctoroff said. “We would not own the LRT. It would remain public.” [Oved]
However, it is not clear how much of the LRT Sidewalk would actually finance, and if this were only the eastern end through Quayside, this could leave the critical link to Union Station in doubt.
In the wider scope, Sidewalk envisages a second phase with an LRT extension south of the Ship Channel to serve land that is now intended to be primarily industrial (at the east end) and recreational (at the west). There is no sense of whether this is a tactic to increase future returns, or simply blue-skying by Sidewalk’s planners. Going over the Ship Channel (twice) will be an expensive proposition as lift bridges will be required to provide clearance for ships entering and leaving the channel. (The existing bascule bridge on Cherry Street will remain, but it cannot carry an LRT line.)
Conclusions
I cannot avoid the sense that Sidewalk has badly overplayed their hand, and in the process has compromised whatever discussions were in progress on their plans.
According to Oved:
One slide states there have been “weekly briefings with officials from the three levels of government,” and “regulatory dispensations,” have been drafted to allow the plan to go ahead.
The whole Sidewalk process has been shrouded in confidentiality agreements, and this has not engendered trust with folks like me, not to mention Council members, who try to keep tabs on what is happening. It is a classic problem of public-private partnerships where all critical debate and decisions happen behind closed doors beyond the ability of anyone outside an inner circle to review.
How much has actually been committed is impossible to know. Sidewalk may have been told “if you want to do X, then you will need dispensation Y”. What we do not know is whether those dispensations are simply for discussion or have the active support of staff and politicians in the various governments.
Sidewalk’s position is further undermined when they reveal that they view problems with public perceptions to be related to the narrow issue of technology use and control [see Oved]. The broader implications of a runaway development scheme cooked up behind closed doors are not mentioned. Implications of widespread information technology presence are understood by a relatively small group, but questions of “done deals” and influence in high places are political issues everyone understands.
The entire proposal contains many sweeteners including sustainability, support for the emerging industry of wood buildings, and supposed improvements in the infrastructure of delivering services to a community. These may offset concerns about invasive technology, but are all of these simply a smokescreen for a much bigger grab for control of the Port Lands?
The ink was barely dry on the Oved story when David Rider reported that a source at Queen’s Park told the Star’s Robert Benzie that the plan “had no chance of proceeding”.
“There is no way on God’s green earth that Premier Doug Ford would ever sign off on handing away nearly 500 acres of prime waterfront property to a foreign multinational company that has been unable to reassure citizens their privacy and data would be protected,” confided the high-ranking Progressive Conservative insider.
All public agencies and officials involved in this project need to go on record about their knowledge of and support for the Sidewalk proposal. This is not the time for bromides about the wonders of new technology and much-needed development.
If we are giving away control of the waterfront, it’s time we all knew what is going on.
The City of Toronto and Province of Ontario have published the Terms of Reference [TOR] for the “uploading” of subway planning, assets and funding to the provincial government.
The Ford Conservatives ran on a platform that included uploading the subway to Ontario while leaving day-to-day responsibility for it in Toronto’s hands.
The scheme is intended to confer various benefits:
Leaving aside the enmity between Premier Ford and his former colleagues on Toronto Council, this is a classic case of debate over “governance” (who is in charge, who does what) while completely avoiding critical questions about “who pays”. There is a cottage industry in this sort of thing. “Governance” studies replace serious discussion about backlogs both of expansion and maintenance born of a lethal of combination of “we deserve” and “nobody pays”.
“Expedited implementation” has two basic requirements: decisiveness and financial commitment. Neither of these has been present in governments for some time, even without fundamental changes in political philosophy. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how a government so burdened with the need to drive down spending can talk about financing multiple concurrent transit megaprojects, let alone take over the cost of an existing system.
A “more efficient regional transit network” means different things depending on who is speaking. To some, “efficient” means significantly lower costs and is a red flag signalling union busting and privatization. Integration of service and fares has nothing to do with the ownership of transit systems, but rather with the rules under which they operate and are funded. If Queen’s Park wanted to let Mississauga Transit carry passengers in Etobicoke, this could be done with a simple amendment of the City of Toronto Act. The problem of a double fare between 905 systems and the TTC is a question of funding. If the total fare to carry someone from Richmond Hill to Bloor and Yonge is to fall, something has to make up the difference. Who actually owns the services (bus or subway) has nothing to do with it.
“Greater fiscal flexibility” for new transit projects and deferred capital maintenance is certainly available to Queen’s Park whose accounting regimen is very different from the one imposed on the City of Toronto, not to mention provincial access to a wider range of revenue streams. Toronto’s capital plans are hamstrung by two factors: one is the cap on borrowing costs relative to property tax revenues, and the other is Toronto’s decision to use up borrowing headroom on a few major projects. Ontario would simply borrow and leverage this debt against the “asset” of the transit system, or alternately would bury debt in the future cost of a partnership with a private company who would finance, build, operate and maintain provincial assets.
This is a politically motivated takeover, and the real questions lie in just what mechanism will be used, who will own and maintain what, and what potential exists for lasting damage to transit in general.
Updated February 10, 2019 at 9:00 am: Notes from the Board meeting have been added at the beginning of this article.
Relief Line Business Case
When the agenda was released, the Relief Line report created quite a stir with an apparent shift in Metrolinx’ position on the staging of subway expansion projects. Where “relief” taking precedence over the Yonge north extension only referred to the southern section (Pape to Osgoode), Metrolinx now shows a shortfall in capacity if the northern section (Danforth to Sheppard) is missing from the network.
This prompted a letter from Frank Scarpitti, Mayor of Markham and Chair of the York Region Rapid Transit Corporation Board. The heart of Scarpitti’s objection is that the Metrolinx report uses a mixture of demand models and assumptions to arrive at its conclusion, and that this is out of step with previous studies and approvals.
The Relief Line Business Case Development presentation paints a flawed picture of the ridership modelling work being undertaken by Metrolinx, in conjunction with York Region and City of Toronto staff. The vague and contradictory information being used to update the public on slide 7 regarding Line 1: Ridership Demand and Network Effects has, once again, pitted two critically needed infrastructure projects against one another, namely the Relief Line against the Yonge Subway Extension. This positioning is not supported by the ridership modelling analysis and is at odds with the advice and information presented by Metrolinx at a recent meeting.
…
On June 25, 2015, Metrolinx released the results of the Yonge Relief Network Study to the Board. Supported by a Stakeholder Advisory Committee and a Peer Review Panel, the Board endorsed the finding that “With the Yonge North Extension, the Yonge Subway will still be under capacity.”
The Relief Line Update uses a blend of data and methodologies to make broad assumptions about future ridership. Each subsequent ridership model claims to have better information, more detail and more sophisticated analysis. Some models include independent findings and more recently, to our objection, some have been relying heavily on market driven employment and population data, contrary to the required obligation of all municipalities to follow the Provincially-mandated “Growth Plan” numbers.
The Relief Line Update being presented to the Metrolinx Board on February 7, 2019 has, according to Metrolinx staff, blended the findings of at least three different models and does not accurately represent any of the individual modelling analyses. Slide 7 suggests that, in 2041, Line 1 will be below capacity and then over capacity when the Yonge Subway Extension is added. This is completely inaccurate – current Metrolinx modelling shared as recent as January 21, 2019 demonstrates that the Yonge Subway Extension adds a relatively minor number of riders to the peak demand location and, in no case, is it the cause of Line 1 becoming over capacity.
…
The facts are that only 20% of the new riders on an extension of the Yonge Subway line would be headed south of Bloor. Ridership growth on Line 1 is directly related to population and employment growth in Toronto. In fact, models show that ridership on Line 1 will exceed capacity regardless of whether the Yonge Subway Extension is constructed. We believe that by promoting the shift of as little as 10% of people from peak hour travel from the Extension to the Richmond Hill GO Line, and by using fare structure and level of service incentives, that substantial relief on Line 1 can be achieved while the Yonge Subway Extension is being constructed.
Modelling also shows that the majority of riders (80%) on the Yonge Subway Extension are headed to Toronto’s uptown employment centres north of Bloor, including St. Clair, Eglinton and York Mills. Furthermore, the Yonge Subway Extension will also serve a large number of Toronto residents that work in York Region Other initiatives are underway, or should be underway, to alleviate Line 1 capacity problems. Metrolinx’s 2015 study concluded that a number of planned and funded initiatives such as Automatic Train Control, more Rocket Trains, GO Expansion, and the opening of the Line 1 extension to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre will add capacity and offload the Line 1 demand.
These are serious challenges to the professional quality of work presented by Metrolinx planners.
The June 2015 report cited here was the Yonge Relief Network Study and it contains the quotation about the subway remaining under capacity even with the Yonge North extension. However, this depends on a number of factors:
The reported projected that the volume/capacity ratio would have been 96% (2031) over the peak hour meaning that the super-peak would be above the line. The claim that the subway would still have capacity is “true” only on average and with no headroom for growth. Metrolinx planners should have known better to make that statement in 2015.
Metrolinx staff pointed out:
Staff also reported that although the Relief Line South approved concept (Pape to Osgoode via Carlaw and Queen) has a positive Business Case, the value is only slightly above 1.0. All six of the options were close to 1 and so the distinction between them is not as strong as the simple over/under status in the report might imply. With only a small positive margin, factors such as cost control and encouragement of Transit Oriented Development along the line will be important to maintain the supposed benefit.
CEO Phil Verster argued strongly that building the Relief Line does not preclude building other projects. His concern is to build more transit and build faster. Metrolinx is looking at (unspecified) new technology and innovation from industry to speed up the process. More than one line could be built concurrently, but the critical point is to open them in a sequence that causes the desired redistribution of demand.
Verster admitted that Metrolinx has not done enough to look at the Richmond Hill GO corridor for its potential contribution to relief.
A Board member asked whether the staff have identified a “tipping point” in safety for their studies. There is not a single value, but rather a variation from one location to another depending on local demand, station geometry and passenger flows.
Unspoken through all of this was the years of delay in admitting that a problem even exists, let alone of doing something about it. GO’s ability to provide relief has been downplayed for various reasons including the need to regrade the south end of the line to make it flood-proof, the winding valley route’s limitation of travel speed, and operational conflicts with CN’s freight traffic that limit GO capacity to Richmond Hill. Meanwhile, candidate John Tory’s SmartTrack campaign claimed that his scheme would eliminate the need for a Relief Line, and TTC projections did not raise alarms about capacity and safety issues until the situation at Bloor-Yonge could not be ignored.
“Relief” will not come from any one line or project, but from the contributions of several.
Financing and deliverability studies will be reported in spring 2019 for the Relief Line South, and a preliminary business case for the Relief Line North will be available by year-end.
This entire exchange shows the problems brought on by oversimplified presentation decks for the Board. In their oral remarks, Metrolinx staff displayed a more extensive grasp of the issues and details than contained in the Powerpoint deck.
Today, January 31, 2019, this blog celebrates its thirteenth birthday.
Looking back over the past year is a dispiriting exercise, and I have been rather despondent through much of the fall thanks to political events at Queen’s Park and City Hall.
Transit limps along after years of underspending. Tax fighters cling to the idea that even an increase just to cover inflation is excessive, and constantly seek “efficiencies” rather than looking for improvements our city so badly needs. Marquee projects get the political attention, but they vacuum up available dollars while leaving promised new lines years, if not decades, away. Toronto has been running on hot air, and the deep freeze is more than a passing winter storm.
This will not be easy to fix especially when many politicians more than a few kilometres from Queen and Bay regard spending on Toronto as a provincial or national embarrassment, if not another chance to say “fuck off” to the city. If there is a silver lining to that dark cloud, it is the long-overdue recognition that transit needs far better funding than it receives. The backlog of unmet investment simply to keep the lights on and the wheels turning is much larger than transit officials would acknowledge in the past. The risk is that the hole is so deep, the time needed just to show a credible improvement so long, that as a city and region, we will just give up on transit. That would be a disaster.
In 2006 when I started this blog, the economy was buoyant, David Miller was Mayor, and there was a sense that Toronto might actually build a transit network. Despite its faults, the Transit City plan came out in early 2007, and gave Toronto something to aim at beyond eternal fights over a few kilometres of new subway.
Civic activism, especially among a new generation, was on the upswing, and the blog was born from the repeated question “what would you do”. The comment threads became as important as the articles themselves, and there are times I feel as if my online living room is a long-running salon for a mixture of political activists, professionals, transit geeks and city watchers. Note that these categories are not mutually exclusive and it’s OK to talk about recent sightings of 4523 while pondering the future of the transit universe.
Yes, this is unashamedly a pro-LRT site, and by “LRT” I most emphatically do not mean that piece of technological crap foisted on Scarborough by the Tories so many years ago. Queen’s Park pols of all stripes have a lot to answer for in the perversion of Toronto’s transit growth, and they showed no sign of changing over the decades.
There is a role for both streetcars in the most conventional sense and for LRT (streetcars on a semi-exclusive right-of-way) in Toronto and other cities. While Toronto agonized, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa built their lines. Within the old TTC network, growing population density will feed a revived streetcar network if only we ever get enough cars to serve it properly, and give them the street priority over other traffic the riders deserve. Toronto’s tragedy is in Scarborough where years of political posturing, of selling a subway as the only thing worth building, the line that Scarborough “deserves”, will leave riders waiting for buses for years to come. On Toronto’s waterfront, better transit awaits the will to make a comparatively small investment to support huge population growth and a gaping hole in mobility to what was to be a “transit first” neighbourhood.
For all my love for rail transit, the case for much better bus service cannot be shouted too loudly. Buses carry over half of all transit trips in Toronto, and the subway would starve for riders without them. The TTC’s goals for better service are modest, and that is being kind. Showing a major change requires both a larger fleet and more garage space neither of which we will see in the near future. Only limited increases are planned over the coming decade. The TTC is content to advertise “express” services that, for the most part, already existed and now have only a new route number, not more buses. This is a sham, and both the TTC and Council should be embarrassed by the repeated claims that the express bus network is an “accomplishment”.
Fare policy in Toronto and in the GTHA needs a major revamp, but this should not be left in the hands of Metrolinx planners who see Toronto’s riders and their fares as a handy way to balance the books on cross-border travel costs. Queen’s Park looks to take over Toronto’s subway, although they have yet to commit to funding at the level it really needs. Never far in the background is the Metrolinx scheme to treat the subway as a “premium” service.
What we never discuss as a city is what transit should look like. This does not mean drawing your favourite fantasy map regardless of the modes you prefer, or the colour of lines. How much mobility should be available to everyone? How broadly should this be supported by public funding?
Should transit investment be hostage to whatever “private sector” financing scheme is the flavour of the day, or should transit be provided as a basic service funded from taxes on the economy as a whole? Should Scarborough, just as one example, be told it can’t have a new route or station because no developer is willing to put up the money?
All of this is very dark, gloom-and-doom stuff, and we must not lose sight of the fact we activists are all trying to make things better for transit and many other parts of city life. The swan at the top of my posts, and my Twitter handle @swanboatsteve, come from a sense of humour, even if that whimsy is only a defense against what passes for political leadership these days.
Thanks to all the readers whether you leave comments or not (the lurkers know who they are) because robust discussions about the future of our transit system are important.
The Swan Boat Salon remains open!
The City of Toronto launched its 2019 budget on January 28 and as usual the overwhelming preoccupation is to keep property taxes down. This has pervasive effects throughout the budget in ways that are not always obvious.
The TTC has been granted an increased subsidy for 2019 (matching the one built into their own recently-approved budget) of $22 million. This is a combination of a $25.3 million bump for the “conventional” system and a $3.3 million cutback in Wheel-Trans funding because ridership growth has not been as strong as originally projected for 2018.
Another big bump lies in the Toronto Police Service who will get $30.3 million more for 2019. An important difference between the police budget and the TTC subsidy is that the City only funds about one third of total TTC costs, and so the proportionate increase on the gross TTC budget is much lower. Every City dollar going to the TTC has to be matched by two dollars from riders.
Across most other City departments and agencies, the money dedicated to the large agencies drains the pot available to everyone else.
Operating Budget and Property Taxes
The City budget process begins with the presumption that residential tax rates will go up by the rate of inflation which, for this year, is 2.55%. Other property classes rise at a slower rate as a matter of policy (a practice dating back to the Mike Harris era) driving down the ratio of non-residential to residential rates to make Toronto taxes on businesses more competitive with the 905 municipalities.
Eventually (projected at 2023 in last year’s budget), the commercial and industrial ratios to residential will reach their target, and these taxes will start to rise at the same rate as inflation. However, in the meantime, although we have an “inflationary” tax increase, the City does not get the full benefit of that across all property classes and the overall revenue increase is only 1.8%. In turn that applies to the 37% of the total budget that comes from property taxes. The rest comes from user fees like TTC fares and transfers from other governments which might not rise at the rate of inflation, if at all. Any shortfall in that 63% of non-tax revenue directly eats away at programs and creates demand for better support from the property tax base.
The TTC gets its $22 million (one of the smaller increases in subsidies in recent years), but the budget problems are far from over.
Within the TTC budget, as I previously reported, there is a $24 million unspecified reduction that is hope to arise from various sources that together are worth about $32 million. The TTC has to “win” on 75% of these to find the savings they need, but they start behind the 8-ball with about 25% of the total being a claim against Metrolinx for the cost of supplementary bus service thanks to congestion from the Crosstown project. If Metrolinx doesn’t pay up, the TTC will have to run the table and get every other potential saving to break in their favour.
On the City side, there is more creative accounting.
Although the solid waste rate increase looks as if it is “inflationary”, the rebate reduction is a hidden tax increase because it involves $35 million in cost (the rebate) that in previous years was paid from the property tax. The City’s intent is to roll back all of these rebates over the next three years so that all solid waste fees represent the full cost of sevice rather than a subsidized one. The effect is somewhat like reducing transit subsidies while failing to mention that fares were going up. This dodge was picked up immediately by the media, and is among the many bits of sleight of hand Matt Elliott describes in his new City Hall Watcher blog.
The refugee contribution is hoped-for subsidy from Ottawa matching their 2018 payment toward housing refugees. The issue is under discussion between Mayor Tory and the Feds, but if this does not come through, it will leave a big hole to fill with cuts elsewhere.
The Capital contribution reduction relieves the spending pressure in the Operating Budget, and hence on property taxes, but this comes at a cost. More capital works are paid for with debt rather than from current revenue, and the projected jump in 2020 to get back on track with this item will make balancing that budget harder. Capital-from-current, or CFC, is the equivalent of renovating your house, but paying some of the cost out of today’s income to reduce borrowing. If you get in the habit of borrowing more, it is much harder to return to a budget where you pay-as-you-go at a comfortable rate. The 10 year Capital Plan foresees CFC rising from $340 million in 2019 to $426 million in 2020 and more than doubling to $754 million by 2026.
Finally, there is $10 million in an unspecified reduction that the City Manager hopes to find within management staff, and indicated that similar savings might be attempted in future years.
Not shown in this list is the Land Transfer Tax (LTT) because it is assumed to bring in the same revenue for 2019 as it did in 2018 even though the monthly numbers have been falling through the latter part of 2018. City staff offered little beyond fond hopes that this revenue stream will recover through 2019.
Collectively between the City’s and TTC’s budget, there are many changes that cannot be reproduced year-over-year, or which depend on economic luck to work in our favour. We might muddle through 2019, but in 2020 we could be in for a shock.
One cut that was buried in the details is that the transit Fair Pass program, Phase II, will not be fully implemented as originally planned. In this phase, recipients of Child Care or Rent Supplement allowances were to become eligible, but in fact only those getting the Child Care allowance will join the Fair Pass program in 2019. Another problem with the Fair Pass pricing – many “eligible” riders don’t use transit enough to make buying the pass worthwhile – is a separate problem not even addressed in the budget.
Capital Budget
The Capital Budget faces severe funding problems in the 2020s because the City’s appetite for new projects, not to mention needed ongoing State of Good Repair (SOGR), exceeds its available borrowing headroom. The City’s target is that debt service costs not exceed 15% of tax revenues. This used to be a hard cap so that no individual year could crest above the line, but is now treated as a moving average.
The problem with this chart is quite obvious. Years 2020 to 2026 are all “above the line”, while 2019 is “below the line”. This means that no borrowing can be added until years beyond 2028 while the Cit digests the years of higher borrowing. The future poverty of our capital budget is baked in to this chart.
That bulge in the 2020s also matches the bulge in the TTC’s capital needs, most of which are unfunded, in its 15 year Capital Plan.
During his presentation, the City Manager observed that the City was taken by surprise by the TTC plan which represented a five-fold increase over spending the City “knew about”.
Horsefeathers.
The TTC has been producing a Capital Budget for some years that clearly shows about $6 billion in funded projects plus another $3 billion in unfunded items, and many more that are “below the line”, not even formally in the 10-year budget. To this must be added an extra five years’ worth of spending in the 15-year budget, and the long overdue acknowledgement of some capital projects that were no secret to any TTC watcher.
The change simply is that the City can no longer pretend that only the approved $6 billion worth of projects actually exist.
The City’s overall SOGR level appears to rise moderately over the next decade, but this too is an illusion as City staff pointed out during their presentation.
In the chart below, the green line shows the total backlog which rises from $7.759 to $9,506 billion, a modest 22.5% increase over 10 years. However, the other lines split out three components:
Without the $3.5 billion backlog from the Gardiner and Toronto Water, the 10 year increase in the SOGR deficit is far from modest, and shows a city unwilling to pay to maintain what it already owns.
Looked at in more detail, the situation for some accounts is even more dire.
To put the TCHC backlog in proportion, it is only slightly less than the cost of the Scarborough Subway Extension. Why do we have money for a new subway, but not for housing?
[Adapted from City Budget Presentation at p. 46]
The City Budget Appendices break down planned spending into departments, agencies and projects. The last page includes planned spending and borrowing.
The Scarborough Subway Extension is near the bottom at a cost for the next 10 years of $3.328 billion. This is based on the current SSE cost estimate which is to be revised in April 2019 based on current design work. Note that there is comparatively little borrowing for the City’s share of this project thanks to the accumulated revenue from the SSE levy which is bringing in about $40 million annually.
SmartTrack does not appear explicitly in this budget because it is currently bundled in the line for Facilities Management under Corporate Services. The project estimate will be updated in April, and at that point the project line, at least for funding purposes, will be moved to the TTC budget.
The Gardiner also does not appear here with its own line because it is part of the Transportation Services budget.
There is no money for any other substantial TTC expansion, only for design work on a few projects included within the TTC’s budget.
In April 2019, City staff plan to bring forward a compendium report on all of the major projects (SSE, SmartTrack, Waterfront, Gardiner and others) with up to date estimates. This will obviously trigger changes in the Capital Plan as published here.
As yet there is no sense of how the City of Toronto and other governments who help to fund transit will actually pay for everything the politicians have put on maps, and for everything Toronto needs.
Steve Munro 