TTC

The inaugural meeting of the TTC Board for the new term of Council met on December 8. As is common for the first meeting, the agenda was light, ...

The TTC is a century old, but still has to make the point that an action plan should be “based on customer priorities”. A major problem for the TTC is that if analysis does not report on known, easily observed problems, but rather concentrates on one or two metrics. The next Board meeting is on January 19 and should have a much meatier agenda including the operating and capital budgets. Moreover, bunching has become commonplace and the gaps this causes could be filled simply by managing the service that is already on the street. There is no way to prove or disprove their effectiveness or existence beyond the frequency of rider complaints about big service gaps that were clearly not filled by anything. The problem is less the mode than the abdication of responsibility for good service. The TTC has a new way of displaying reliability stats for its surface routes subdividing them into groups depending on the degree of “on time performance”. Line management, which can be poor even on “normal” routes, is often totally absent for routes with construction, notably on the streetcar network. One note is that routes affected by construction get a “bye” in this presentation, for the most part. Line 5 is a very large project, but the TTC has to deal with many others and often does a very poor job. It included a short section on ridership and plans under the the title “Key Focus on Service and Customer Experience”. He cited a recent case where the TTC achieved a throughput of 32 trains/hour at Bloor Station between 8 and 9am, an increase over the typical pre-pandemic level of 24 to 26.