TTC approves ridership growth strategy

Board member warns that transit agency must be as ambitious as possible to avoid "treading water" after three years of no growth.

Thestar.com
Jan. 25, 2018
Ben Spurr

The TTC board has endorsed a plan to increase ridership, but transit advocates and some board members warn the strategy is not aggressive enough.

At a special board meeting Thursday, the board unanimously approved a five-year ridership growth strategy, which is the first comprehensive plan aimed at boosting transit use the TTC has produced since 2003.

The document, which the agency was originally supposed to publish more than a year ago, is the TTC’s response to flatlining ridership growth after a decade of increases. The last year the TTC saw any significant growth in customers was 2014, but since then annual trips have remained stable at around 535 million.

The new plan “means improved transit immediately for riders,” said TTC Chair Councillor Josh Colle after the vote, “but it also starts to push the ball forward, sometimes uphill, to really start to make investments that we’ll need from the city, from the province, from others if we really want to keep up and expand ridership.”

The plan is comprised of 20 initiatives divided into 35 specific actions. They include two-hour timed transfers, a major policy change long-sought by transit advocates and that by Thursday had already been approved.

Earlier this week the city budget committee supported the agency’s request for $11.1 million to fund the two-hour transfer policy, which will go into effect in August. It also supported adding $1 million to the TTC’s $1.97-billion operating budget for another plank in the growth strategy: a modest increase in service to address overcrowding on the “worst of the worst” bus routes.

In a deputation to the board Shelagh Pivey-Allen, executive director of non-profit advocacy group TTCriders, agreed some of the proposals would “really benefit riders.”

But she argued the plan didn’t go far enough. The 2003 strategy made bolder recommendations, she argued, including lowering fares and ensuring a maximum 20-minute wait for buses, and the previous plan contained detailed cost estimates and ridership impacts for each proposal.
“The report is very thin on details when you compare it to 2003’s ridership growth strategy,” she said, calling for immediate investment in more service.

Councillor Joe Mihevc, who sits on the board, questioned whether some measures included in the strategy would actually increase ridership. As an example, he cited the inclusion of an initiative to install Wi-Fi service in subway tunnels.

The Wi-Fi plan, which the TTC was already pursuing, was among several more minor proposals that the agency says together could increase ridership by about 1 per cent. Other measures included in the 1-per-cent category were continuing to improve service reliability, adding express buses, introducing customer service agents in stations, and installing information screens on buses.

Mihevc argued a 1-per-cent increase amounted to “treading water,” and urged the agency to focus on plans in the strategy that would achieve a 3- to 5-per-cent increase instead.

“My encouragement to staff is let’s be bold,” said Mihevc, who represents Ward 21 St. Paul’s. “Toronto, we’re a gold city right now. We’re building like crazy. There’s a lot of money coming into this city, a lot of investment coming into this city. People are telling me left, right, and centre, when you ask what are the big issues confronting Toronto, they say mobility. We need to be able to get around in this city.”

Proposals in the strategy that together could boost ridership by 2 per cent include: enabling riders to pay their fares with a credit card, upgrading cycling infrastructure on the TTC, advertising outside the transit system, and using “big data insights” from Presto card usage to analyze customer trends.

Major projects would be required to achieve a 5-per-cent increase, such as expanding capacity by completing LRT lines on Eglinton and Finch Aves., creating a transit surface priority plan to allow buses and streetcars to operate more quickly in mixed traffic, and offering micro-transit for the “last mile” of people’s trips.

Colle, who represents Ward 15 Eglinton-Lawrence, rejected the idea that some of the plan’s recommendations will do little to attract new riders and that the TTC should stick to the basics of simply adding more service and keeping fares low.

He argued that because of the advent of services like Uber and Bike Share, the TTC needed to modernize to be more responsive to customers’ needs in order to compete.

“Yes, we need more service, we need more money, we need more buses, streetcars and subways in operation at all times to grow ridership … but it can’t just be that,” he said.

Emulating the TTC’s 2003 growth strategy would amount to “putting our heads in the sand to the way the world has changed, the way people’s mobility has changed, and the way people’s choices have changed.”