The Forest On Chow's Bus Pledge Problems

How did we let our bus fleet get into this bad a shape and why is Chow the only "major" candidate proposing anything to fix it?

The Toronto Star has today published a piece finding problems in the feasibility of Olivia Chow's promise to improve bus service if elected Mayor.  To be specific, Chow promises to immediately improve peak hour bus service, the busiest times of day.  The Star article casts doubt on whether this is feasible, quoting a TTC official who claims there would be no additional buses available for this. 

The Election Forest: Making Buses a Priority is a Signal

A big reason I favour Chow in the Mayoral election is that she appears to be the only (major) candidate who will dedicate much attention to the bottom economic half of the city.  This is fairly unsurprising when you consider we have four conservatives running against one progressive (being fair, Soknacki has some ideas helpful to lower earners).  Buses are the biggest portion of transit time for many of the city's "left behind" areas and people, who don't tend to be very near any of the existing rapid transit lines.  This is a matter of social and economic justice.  Buses will never be the most desirable mode of transit, and we can't build LRTs or subways everywhere so of course many transit users are going to need buses for some part of their trip, but we can keep service levels high enough that when you go to get the bus, you know it will come soon, and not be jammed full when it gets there so that you can get on it.

Chow's bus promise is not the stuff of campaign consultants.  Bus service isn't sexy, we just sort of expect it to work, but under Ford (and Stintz as TTC Chair) bus service has been cut back.  The working class people and students most reliant on them now have to wait longer for their bus, and face more frequent buses too full to board.  So it is a very good thing that someone is putting this on the agenda, just as a signal that "transit is not all about who will build the most choo-choos, bus service matters"  Finding problems in the specifics of Chow's bus service plan is fine and all, it's the kind of scrutiny that should be applied to political campaigns, but at least Chow has buses in mind.

The Trees: Less There Than the Star Thinks

The Star's TTC source, Chief Service Officer Rick Leary presents a case where all the buses are already in use at peak times, and even the extra buses currently servicing under-repair streetcar lines are only available because service demand slows in the summer, but they'll be needed in the fall when school starts.  He further seems to announce a new initiative (news to me anyways) to take more buses off the road to do more preventative and less post-breakdown maintenance.  He does allow there "might" be buses available to improve off-peak service. 

I'm in no position to make expert assessment of his claims in this regard, but I do note that the Queen's Quay streetcar has been off service for considerably longer than just the summer.  Apparently the TTC had buses to serve that line prior to the end of school this year somehow.  But, turning to those actual experts, let's check in with Steve Munro, who previously (March 2014) looked at TTC surface short term service improvements:

The TTC plans to retire over 200 buses in 2014-15 (the lift-equipped Orion V and Nova RTS buses). These could provide a pool of vehicles during the two years it would take for expansion-related new bus orders to arrive.

It would have been nice if the Star has known about this, and asked Leary. As the TTC is busy getting new buses, it is strange he plans to do more preventative maintenance with a fleet of newer buses, but mainly it means there are buses that could be used for Chow's pledge.  The TTC does not generally run buses to the literal end of life of the vehicles, they just get more expensive to maintain once they pass a certain point.

(Munro also notes that progress in the York subway extension should by 2015 release some buses currently needed for "supplementary service" and that there is a major construction hiatus for the Pan Am games so no streetcar lines should be out of service.)

Ok, So There are Buses: Where to Store them?

This is a real problem, the article correctly points out the TTC has no additional storage grounds, and the planned one won't be ready before 2019 at the earliest (currently not even funded to begin, so almost certainly later than that).  Per Munro (ibid):

The TTC has already looked at leasing storage space for its fleet while awaiting the construction of Tapscott Garage, although this need was offset by the reduction of bus requirements made possible with less generous crowding standards. (Note: Munro is here referring to the Stintz/Ford era service cuts)

We are, ultimately just talking about parking lots here. Yes, I'm sure it's operationally easier for the TTC to run from dedicated storage/maintenance facilities but in a pinch, any big enough lot should do.

Ok, So There Are Places To Store Them. But Drivers?

Yes, the TTC might have to hire more drivers to implement Chow's improved service levels.  What of it?  Buses need drivers and our ever growing population will eventually necessitate more buses & drivers anyway.  Every candidate's plans to expand transit will entail hiring staff.  In the very short term I expect some additional drivers can be found by paying overtime to existing ones who would ordinarily be off shift. How long does it take to hire & train bus drivers?  Chow assigns $15M to this whole promise, which presumably includes money to hire and pay new TTC employees to drive the buses.

Off Peak Service Matters Too

All the challenges aside with finding more buses, drivers & storage for peak service, improving off-peak service matters too.  Plenty of people (like seniors) ride the bus outside of peak hours and 15 minute service instead of 30 minute service matters when you're out waiting at a stop in the middle of the day or in the evening. 

The Other Forest: Why is The TTC's Bus Fleet in Such Dire Straights?

The biggest takeaway I get from the Star's piece is that we've allowed our TTC surface fleet to get to such a terrible place where TTC management is (in effect) telling reporters during an election they simply can't improve peak service before something like 2019.  Mayor Chow or no, our population is growing and demand for buses will grow too...or maybe it will simply peak at some level of "just absolutely full" on many routes where additional commuters are forced to find other means to get around (cars) and making our gridlock problems worse.  Rather than viewing this as some big scandal in the Chow campaign, the scandal is that we let ourselves run out of breathing space on our bus fleet.  Whoever is mayor will have to grapple with this, and at least Chow is already interested in the problem.  The worst thing would be to just "muddle through" with degrading service and ever more peak capacity buses leaving people behind.  Supporters of other Mayoral candidates should ponder, what will my candidate do about this?

What a Free Market Municipal Transit "System" Looks Like

Former Rob Ford chief of Staff Mark Towhey gained some notoriety in the 2010 mayor's race for a blog post he wrote prior to joining Ford's team where he advocated the city simply shut down the TTC and sell off whatever assets that anyone wants to buy.  For anyone familiar with internet libertarians, it is a familiar refrain of blind ideological faith in the free market to provide for all needs, and that government cannot do so.

Sometimes libertarians are operating in the realm of sheer fantasy with no actual real-world examples of the magical benefits they claim will happen out of their various privatization schemes, but in this case there is a contemporary example of a major city that largely left the free market to determine its surface local transit, Seoul, South Korea prior to 2004:

 

The likely libertarian excuse for all this will be the government controlling the fares and providing operating subsidies - of course the fact that the government found it necessary to control the fares to keep transit affordable to the people most in need of it, the working class & poor won't register with them.  Instead the price controls & subsidies will be some do-gooder activist government intervening apropo of nothing, lacking adequate faith that eventually the free market will cure all its own self created ills.

Nonetheless, even if we accept that fare controls & subsidies have some negative effects, the multiplicity of coordination problems and unethical competitive behaviour are inescapably the consequences of running transit as a for-profit business.  Each transit company still competes for passengers and has incentive to overcrowd, rush & avoid unprofitable passengers. 

All of this goes into why in 2004 Seoul found it necessary to greatly extend the level of government control over the surface transit system, taking control over schedules & routes in addition to fares (while leaving the private companies to still operate the system).

Some context about Seoul is important here - today it is a (groaning as I type this overused moniker) "World Class City" and biggest city in a prosperous rich-world democracy, but that is quite a recent development.  South Korea's income per capita rose tremendously in recent decades so the fact that its bus system was very nearly fully private is an artifact of a developing world governance structure & capability, it also takes place in the context of a society that mostly couldn't afford cars, and thus most people had no other options than transit, however unsafe & inefficient it was.  Once prosperity rose to the level of mass car attainability, use of this wild west bus system fell precipitiously (ibid):

The alternative is to realize that transit is a natural government function as roads & rails are natural monopolies - there's only so much land to build them on, and use is rivalrous, so each competitor on the network makes the network worse.  Government must govern these things if they are to work for the people who need them (rather than for shareholders).  The actual drivers & operators may not need be government employees but the system as a whole needs to be, well, centrally planned or it will be a disaster.  Public transit is a utility, a necessary and proper function of government.

 
This is really quite common for libertarian fantasies - you usually find that their fantasy system used to exist in the early stages of societal development and the government intrusive/managed systems were introduced to solve the obvious, real and pervasive problems that leaving whatever function to the free market created.  Liberal do-gooders and socialists don't win these arguments to have government intervene unless there are already big problems with the status quo.  That government runs transit in most places is no different from why every rich world society found it necessary to have government manage health care, the US being just the latest (and very late) example:  If you want these things to work, government must be involved. 

As usual libertarians, it has been tried your way, and it failed, which is why the government is in there to begin with.  

Incidentally the article I'm quoting is an excellent look at Seoul's stupendous transit system, and more importantly how it got that way, as opposed to "transit porn" pictures of the subway route maps without any context of how it was all funded and built.

What Might A Finch Subway Look Like?

Rob Ford says he wants to replace the in-flight project to build the Finch Ave West LRT with a subway.  No details of any plan have been released.  What could such a subway look like?

First, here is the planned Finch LRT, running between a yet-to-be-built subway station at Finch & Keele, and Humber college's north campus.

This route is about 11KM long, and Metrolinx has $1B in 2010 dollars budgeted to build it. How much subway does this buy?

Steve Munro suggests a planning figure of $300M/km of subway, assuming stations every 2KM and $350M/KM for stations every KM.  I will take the former, and maybe let's throw in a bit of Federal cash from that same municipal infrastructure program now partly funding the Scarborough subway extension, let's round up to $1.5B in funding (current dollars).  That gives us 5KM of traditional below ground subway with 2 additional stations.

The picture above shows where that gets you.  Basically just past Weston road. Not even half way to Humber college.  For that, we are talking another $1.8B for 6KM more tunnelling.

Steve also noted over twitter that Finch subway enthusiasts seem to favour not a line running west from the Spadina subway line, but instead a line connecting the Spadina and Yonge lines.  What does that look like?

This too, at 6.3KM, is not attainable even at the generously rounded up budget I have suggested.  Here we're only something like $400M short.

Is this what Ford & co have in mind?  I don't know.  Ford's 2010 campaign platform called for BRT on Finch along the hydro corridor running slightly north of it.  You can see it on the third map in particular (the hydro corridor veers south at Weston road in the first two maps, making it an impractical approach for getting transit to Humber college).  Perhaps the subway could run on the surface between the Yonge and Spadina lines.  If so, it might be attainable within something like the $1B (2010) budget for the LRT.  Would the residents adjacent to the hydro corridor like a rail line there?  During the Scarborough transit debate there was considerable angst over the idea that any form of rapid transit wouldn't run below ground, and Ford pushed very hard to bury the whole Eglinton LRT for pretty poor reasons.

Such a route also comes at cost of course of providing actual transit not just to Humber college, but as well the designated low-income "priority neighbourhood" of Jane-Finch, people who could benefit immensely from access to fixed link rapid transit.  Much like the Scarborough Subway expansion passes over two priority neighbourhoods that would have been served by the LRT, there is a social justice aspect to all this not reflected just in raw ridership numbers.  Against that we have some advantage (maybe) of allowing some amount of Yonge line traffic diversion to the underutilized Spadina line (that is, if the amount of traffic from the Spadina line to the Yonge line doesn't make the overcrowding on the Yonge line worse).  Of course, as a rider on the Yonge line, you need to transfer 1-2 extra times in order to move over to the Spadina line, so while I'm sure some people who detest the crowds would do so, it's not clear how many.  Again too, Finch station is the current north terminus of the Yonge line - the people getting on at Finch are not generally facing overcrowding, that happens further down at Eglinton and especially at Bloor stations.

I dearly hope that the TTC puts together some actual mock ups of what options exist for this, with better numbers than this kind of hasty estimate, because absent some official numbers, Ford will be free to demagogue the issue and use highly speculative & unrealistic numbers.  We are talking about a guy who thought he could get the private sector to build him subways despite the lack of any viable business model to do so (especially given the low density areas he wants to build these subways - no for-profit transit company would build subways in the places Ford wants to build them, because the economics wouldn't support it).

Transit surrealism won in Scarborough, but that doesn't mean it has to turn out that way again.