It pains me to write this, but this post by Mayor Chow is simply not true. Either her spin doctors cannot read a budget, or she has been bamboozled by TTC's misleading use of "restoring" service. (1)

https://twitter.com/MayorOliviaChow/status/1757538557206360409

(2) This chart is right out of the TTC budget and shows the planned service restoration by mode. Note that *only* the bus network gets back to 100%.

Here's a challenge to the Councillors who during the election said they would oppose TTC service cuts: the process of designing new schedules for April will have started already because there is a three-month lead time especially for big changes. (1) (2) This is especially for Councillors who sit on the TTC Board. Demand that management produce a preliminary list of the potential changes including the level of service changes, route by route, time period by time period, along with ridership data to support these plans.

The TTC will get a bit more money from the City in 2023, but it's the details that matter. stevemunro.ca/2023/01/04/ttc… (1) (2/2) The TTC expects to publish its budget for 2023 soon, and I will add to this article when more info is available.

In the Star, @GraphicMatt calls for a TTC board that will address the decline in service quality. thestar.com/opinion/contri… As a city, Toronto has to ask why John Tory's handpicked TTC board has so little experience as advocates for transit. (2) For far too long, the TTC board has been content to let management spin fairy tales about problems with "construction" and "congestion" while doing nothing about bunching and huge gaps in service. It's always somebody else's fault.

There are various threads currently about the very large planned jump in development charges that will come to Exec Committee's next meeting. What is missing from the threads is the "why" of the big jump. I don't plan to answer that, but throw some material out for discussion. Calculation of DCs is a black art informed by very long studies that appear every five years. The background includes population, jobs, development, etc projections as well as estimates of future capital programs. (2)

Yesterday morning, there was a short exchange between me and the TTC about the absence of service on the 504 bus shuttle on Broadview, and I wondered whether the buses had been "borrowed" for an emergency on Dundas at the time. It turns out that was not the case. (2) What was really going on was that nobody was minding the store on the 504 and the buses were running in packs. This chart is from @TransSee tracking actual vehicle movements.

The federal announcement of transit funding is heartwarming, but only to a point. It includes $5.9 billion in funding starting in 2021 and a $3 billion annual plan beginning in 2026. What is not clear is which "commitments" already made are part of that $5.9b already. (1) (2) For a five year period, that's a paltry amount of money when it's divvied up across the country and especially if some of it is already spoken for. Next there's the question of how Ontario's portion will be distributed. Will provincial projects like the SSE and OL eat it all?

On @metromorning there was a discussion about the destruction of Little Jamaica on Eglinton West by the LRT construction. This area is particularly hard hit because it has closely spaced stations along the underground section: Bathurst-Allen-Oakwood-Dufferin. (1) (2) In the section between Bathurst and Yonge there are stations at Chaplin and Avenue. East of Yonge, there is only one intermediate underground station per 2km segment at Mt. Pleasant and Laird respectively.

@humantransit 1. There are important parallels and differences in the Greater Toronto Area. The distribution of population by race and income is different here with a wealthy downtown surrounded by a partial ring of lower income, and then the big outer ring (beyond Toronto proper). @humantransit 2. There are big issues with the relative quality of transit to that low income ring, but things get really bad beyond it where transit is far below the level people might associate with the name "Toronto".

1. With all of the misinformation about "free transit", most recently amplified by BlogTO's usual high standards of reporting, I'm going to put this out here again: 2. Transit fares bring in $1.26 billion dollars to the TTC in 2020. At $1/day or $365 per year, there would have to be 3.44 million people paying.

1. An intriguing contrast: Everyone kvetches about fare evasion at the TTC and points to a direct line between enforcement (or rather the low chance of being caught) and evasion behaviour. Some riders are playing the odds. 2. It's amazing, therefore, that this kind of linkage is not so obvious when we talk about motorists' reckless behaviour and pedestrian/cyclist deaths which, frankly, are a hell of a lot more serious than whether someone paid their fare.

1. Every so often, something so jaw-droppingly astounding crosses my path that I sit and have a conversation with the screen in front of me. The words are incendiary and it's amazing the screen is still here. 2. As my regular followers know, I analyze TTC vehicle tracking data from time to time. My interest in route 70 O'Connor was piqued a few weeks ago when someone complained on Twitter about a very long wait for a bus.

1. Without naming names, it has come to my attention that some bright spark at Create TO thinks that ATC (automatic train control) will double the capacity of the subway. This is a complete fantasy, and that's being polite. 2. The subway now operates every 140 seconds, and the best case scenario will get that down to 110 seconds. That's a 27.2% increase in capacity assuming no other constraints prevent actually getting to that level.

TVO's The Agenda featured three interviews on the subject of Toronto's transit and the proposed subway "upload". In the first, Minister @JeffYurekMPP sounds ever so reasonable, but @spaikin let him get away with some howlers about the system. 2. Shortly into the interview, Yurek claims that any rider today will agree that "the system isn't working", but that's the existing system, and provincial plans are silent on how that will be improved.

@CBCQueensPark @metromorning I was just listening to Mike Crawley's Mar 28 interview about the rationale behind the Ford subway plan. There is a howler of an error fairly early in the piece. cbc.ca/listen/shows/m… 2. Mike says (at about 1:45) that according to his sources trains would turn off of line 2 onto the RL in effect providing a through service from the Danforth subway to downtown. This is **NOT** true. The proposed track layout does not even support such an operation.

@gordperks And furthermore, there is a very good chance that Ford & co. have no idea just how big the future capital needs of the subway will be and that this represents a substantial net increase in "subsidy" to the city. (1) @gordperks (2) However, if they wind up "leasing" the subway to us (or whatever scheme is used), that could turn into a revenue stream for whoever owns it to finance capital repairs, to the extent that they even bother to undertake them.

Michael Warren argues that what the GTHA needs is a region wide transit system. thestar.com/opinion/contri… 2. He ignores the fact that the major problem today is the lack of financial support for "integration" from Queen's Park. Fare boundaries exist because of low municipal transit subsidies. Regions with poor service have no incentive to improve.

The Tory campaign claims that Keesmaat's plan is the same as what he supports. Hmmm. Let's look at the Issues page on Tory's site: johntory.ca/Issues and Keesmaat's plan: jenniferkeesmaat.com/keesmaat_netwo… First up is the DRL. Of course they both support it. The difference is the timeframe. Also it's important to remember that 4 years ago, SmartTrack would make the need for a DRL vanish into the mist. Also Keesmaat is very strong on taking the DRL up to Sheppard.

1. Once upon a time, Iain Dobson's company, SRRA, proposed the "Regional Relief Line" in one of many research reports. srraresearch.org/research-1/ 2. This proposes a heavy rail "surface subway" linking Markham, Union Station, the airport and points west with a line having a capacity of 70k/hour (that's 35k each way). A clear goal was to improve access to office parks in the 905 from the 416.