Johnny Au
Senior Member
Uhhh... Coxwell does not go to Bloor. It goes to Danforth. Not just that, but Gerrard Street has a jog on Coxwell as well.
|
|
|
nfitz
Superstar
It should be very available, given that GRT asks Waterloo, Kitchener, and Cambridge for operational funding (at least it used to).
I'm sure that is why he was upset. I think the explanation would be on how much lower transit usage is in Cambridge compared to the other 2 cities.
diminutive
Active Member
Streetcars are a lot more expensive. If the vehicles are going to be stuck in traffic behind left turning cars constantly, what's the point of investing in a super-expensive fleet of streetcars and overhead wires? May as well just use a (relatively) cheap bus.
Most of the routes you're talking about don't even have super frequent bus service so there's no vehicle-capacity argument to be made.
rbt
Senior Member
Drivers are a large cost. Having 3 buses (3 drivers) stuck in traffic isn't really cheaper than a single tram (1 driver).
innsertnamehere
Superstar
doesn't come anywhere close to the cost of infrastructure for streetcars.
rbt
Senior Member
No, the total budget doesn't make sense.
Political finance and power turnover, however, causes it to make perfect sense (to me at least).
Drivers are easy to reduce (see Miller's proposed and funded 2010 bus service versus what Ford's budget actually provided), and the capital budget is treated entirely separate from operations (Land Transfer Tax goes mostly to capital debt payments; Ford's policies prevent it from going toward ongoing operating expenses). If as a politician you want to have a lasting impact, you go the large capital expense route rather than the man-power route. PPP agreements are particularly favoured because they're damn hard to cancel; there is no evidence they save money, especially when you factor in the occasional cancellation like the Ontario gas plant debacle.
Miller's bus improvements were actually of roughly an equal or higher value as the downtown tram network improvements. Ford cut them (cancelled the garage, eliminated the jump-queue items, laid-off the drivers) but was unable to cut the downtown tram order due to 3rd party contracts being involved.
This certainly isn't just a City of Toronto thing, or even just a government thing as large companies do it too. Retiring CEO's have been known to commit the company to decade long contracts with 3rd party outsourced services to prevent the new CEO from changing the company too much.
It's a byproduct of `blame the last guy` and undo what they were doing. If you assume the next person will try to undo what you were doing, steps are taken to prevent it. The NDP has taken longer to pick this up than the Conservatives; Conservatives have become very good at locking in policy decisions for decades after they leave power (highway 407 century long lease rather than hiring a company to toll on their behalf or an ongoing revenue sharing agreement; much lower government revenue but the long-term policy lock-in was virtually guaranteed).
It's also why the province was looking at a transit specific tax and having Metrolinx borrow against that revenue stream. This helps locks in the revenue for the long-term where something coming out of general revenues can and probably will be rolled back by Hudak.
Last edited:
diminutive
Active Member
That would only work on busy routes, when the vehicles are full, though. Most of these "new" streetcar routes I was responding to wouldn't justify more than a couple buses per hour. If services went from one bus every 10 ten minutes to one tram every 30 minutes, maybe things would even out, but then the route would be unusable.
Isn't the demand threshold for LRTs having lower operating costs than buses upwards of 3,000 pph/pd?
rbt
Senior Member
That value assumes the system is somewhat free flowing. At highway speeds the threshold is quite a bit higher (which is why Highway 407 BRT makes sense with 10,000 pphpd) and it gets lower and lower in stand-still mixed traffic. The necessary total capacity of all vehicles on the route is inversely proportional to travel speed.
It's also a peak period, peak direction value. Transit, water, sewer, internet, and most other services are designed for peak usage otherwise people complain. The average ridership on Yonge is could be accommodated with three dozen buses; the peak is a completely different problem.
I have no idea what the threshold for King or other downtown streets are for optimal vehicle cost with their current mixed traffic format. We have a handful of numbers for King in a ROW, which expected nearly triple the ridership, but that's it.
A few Manhattan bus routes like the M15 SBS have ridership in the 50k to 60k people per day range but that is the closest to King's ridership that I'm aware of; the M15 has reserved lanes during peak periods and curbside fare machines. Worth noting, bus lane enforcement is done via bus mounted cameras and is quite effective.
Last edited:
diminutive
Active Member
Yes, presumably this would also weigh against a more capital intensive mode like trams. E.g., maybe a tram would be more cost efficient than buses 8am-9am, but the rest of the day you'd have millions of dollars of underused trams, overhead wires and rails. Better to suck up some peak-hour inefficiencies (buses with fewer passengers per driver) and enjoy a better capital utilization the rest of the day.
I'd also note this isn't exactly a TTC thing, either. As far as I know, no city on Earth is building significant mixed-traffic streetcar systems. There are some US cities building small tourism lines, but those are hardly transit projects.
Towered
Senior Member
What about LRT ROW's on Richmond and Adelaide? Both streets are densifying at an incredible rate and would provide much needed relief for the packed King and Queen streetcar lines.
rbt
Senior Member
The amount of capacity used off-peak really doesn't matter as far as design is concerned. If the job of the sewer is to take the peak load and basements get ruined if it can't, that it's at 1% of capacity for most of the year isn't a sign the sewer was overbuilt. The vast majority of our infrastructure is well under capacity for most of its lifetime.
~50% of our bus fleet is idle in garages at mid-day; I'm certainly not going to encourage selling buses and closing garages because of it.
60% of our power plants are idle overnight, some are only used at 100% capacity for 1 or 2 days every several years. That's not a design flaw, it's simply the price we're willing to pay for electricity to always be available.
Nobody looks at Highway 407 at 3am and calls it a waste of asphalt because it isn't full.
The number of idle seats at mid-day doesn't change with form of the vehicle. 3 buses sitting in a garage is no better or worse than 1 empty LRV; either you have the need to have those seats available at certain times, or you don't. Either it's worth the price to serve peak usage requirements or it isn't and some customers go without.
If you want to dig into costs of off-peak service then capital should be fully removed from the equation (subway too). Capital is a sunk cost absorbed entirely by the peak-period customer due to their specific demands. Incremental operating expenses apply such as electricity/fuel, vehicle/roadway wear and tear, operator manpower, etc.
Last edited:
diminutive
Active Member
I wasn't trying to say we should just abandon demand. My point was that, even if a route achieves a demand of X in peak hour, and X being a level where LRVs would result in more efficient operations, if for the rest of the day demand is Y (where buses would provide more efficient operations), the most efficient overall solution would likely still be buses.
And nobody looks at the 401 at 5pm and thinks we should triple it so there's never any congestion
There are tons of instances where its irrational to build around peak demand, hence why it's normal to have cues at the grocery store. There are really only a few instances where service outages produce such huge externalities that we overbuild (and, even if its justified, its still overbuilding). Things like power, for instance.
Last edited:
rbt
Senior Member
I doubt the incremental costs of running an LRV off-peak are more than running buses off-peak. Once you remove the capital investment from the equation, there isn't much left for expenses for either mode.
The numbers the TTC publishes in their reports includes capital. I'm not aware of broken out numbers.
Building/extending a subway parallel to the highway is a rather popular proposal on this forum and among certain politicians.
I would argue that Highway 407 was infact an expansion of Highway 401. Also, Highway 401 has had a number of widenings over the last few years.
It's not only something that people think, but something we put billions into trying to achieve over the last 30 years.
Yeah, that's true but absolutely nobody has proposed solutions to cut the top off congestion like giving corporations a tax-break for shifting their standard work hours or giving tax-credit to people to work from home and don't commute at all (or infrequently).
You get a tax-credit for parking or for using transit, but not for walking and leaving those other expensive resources available to others.
Last edited:
diminutive
Active Member
You can't just ignore capital costs, though. Any operation will lead to depreciation of several capital assets (vehicles, rails, power delivery systems ect...). If the TTC tried only outlaying money for wages and power/fuel, the system would fall apart in a couple days and be completely unusable within a year or two. All of these things need ongoing maintenance and refurbishment.
Within certain limits, sure. But nobody, anywhere, is proposing investing the hundreds of billions it would take to eliminate peak hour congestion. (or, alternatively, no demand for road pricing/TDM)
rbt
Senior Member
This is exactly how the accounting works. The capital cost is incurred entirely by the 4 hours per day that requires the TTCs $10B worth of infrastructure. Small amounts of off-peak usage never justifies a higher fixed cost (capital expenditure in this case)) manage peak service; peak service needs to do that on its own.
To determine whether it's profitable to run off-peak service you only consider the incremental costs of running that additional service; without affixing any percentage of the capital toward it (peak period already absorbed it). The asset being used is free as it would be unused in storage otherwise.
If the TTC shutdown between 10am and 3pm, it would have very little impact on the capital budget.
Last edited: