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Metrolinx: Other Items (catch all)

Undead said:
Noob question--what are the pros and cons of contracting out bus routes?
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Pro: Maybe lower cost, at least in the near-term, if you get multiple bidders, most of whom will lower cost by paying drivers less in either hourly rate, benefits or both; but may also be somewhat more efficient, maybe.

Con: Lowering wages to the least possible is corrosive for society, part of that savings is also recaptured by the profit of the bidder. Often, there are few bidders, and less on subsequent go-arounds, meaning the savings may lessen with time, or even evaporate all together. Finally, with lower wages, and separate direct employers, comes the risk of attracting and retaining less qualified or committed staff; and the effective employer (TTC/Mx in this case) loses direct control of operations.
 
Northern Light said:
Pro: Maybe lower cost, at least in the near-term, if you get multiple bidders, most of whom will lower cost by paying drivers less in either hourly rate, benefits or both; but may also be somewhat more efficient, maybe.

Con: Lowering wages to the least possible is corrosive for society, part of that savings is also recaptured by the profit of the bidder. Often, there are few bidders, and less on subsequent go-arounds, meaning the savings may lessen with time, or even evaporate all together. Finally, with lower wages, and separate direct employers, comes the risk of attracting and retaining less qualified or committed staff; and the effective employer (TTC/Mx in this case) loses direct control of operations.
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isnt the biggest con with outsourcing the same as with services like canada post.

places or people that need service arent always profitable.
 
generalcanada said:
isnt the biggest con with outsourcing the same as with services like canada post.

places or people that need service arent always profitable.
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Well, in this case, few, if any of the TTC' surface routes make a profit; that was equally the case for TfL in London.

The profit for operators will come by way of a public subsidy. The bid process is essentially who will lose the government the least money for the service.

But there is a real question as to whether that saves $$$ in the long term; and whether service may suffer in some key ways.
 
I don’t have a problem with transit workers having the compensation package that they have. I would far rather see transit labour costs set at (hypothetically) $30/hr with all of it going to the worker, than with a contractor charging $25/hour with the worker paid $20 and pocketing $5 for themselves.

What is disappointing are the occasional lapses in “work ethic” (for want of a better term) where there is abuse of benefits etc. And having seen public sector arbitration first hand….well, anything that gets handed over to lawyers seldom retains any semblance of “justice”. I do think public sector employment needs to be managed with the taxpayer/customer in the room, and our labour laws don’t achieve that - arbitrators become a power accountable unto themselves.

Abuse of paid absence provisions is what prompted CN/GO to contract out GO operations to Bombardier (now Alstom). The operation remains unionised and really doesn’t run any differently than before, but there are better checks and balances and more attention to detail. I suspect TTC is well aware of where it needs to exercise control…. but the arbitrators may not back that up. If that one element were changed, there would be no need to contract out.

- Paul
 
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drum118 said:
Talk in 2007 was moving to London UK model over time and that has change much since then. This applies to all systems connected to Metrolinx. Even TTC looking at doing this now.
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TheTigerMaster said:
What challenges would be involved with getting this past the TTC?

I will say as a general comment: Metrolinx and the TTC are both losing a lot of institutional knowledge thanks to outsourcing. This is an unfortunate situation. Once institutional knowledge is gone, it's gone for good. I'm really not comfortable with our transport system depending on a small handful of external firms.
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This just popped up in the Crosstown thread (thanks @Steve X), and is a perfect example of why I'm so uncomfortable with the amount of outsourcing:

The TTC had to pay BBD $600,000 to upgrade the voice announcements on the Rockets:

The TTC says the name change will cost approximately $800,000. About $600,000 of that will be used to reprogram the announcement system to include the Sheppard West station and the five other new stations that will make up the Line 1 expansion.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ttc-downsview-station-sheppard-west-1.4103576

Now I know it's "just" $600,000, which is small peanuts even to the TTC. But if BBD is charging this much to change a handful of station announcements, imagine how much they're going to milk taxpayers for upgrades of actual significance?

I also look at the Crosstown signage debacle as another cautionary tale. MX has essentially said that we're stuck with their poorly designed signage because the contracts with the consortium do not permit MX to change the signage. And I presume the consortium would likely milk us dry if we ever did decide to change the signage. This is completely absurd. We don't even have control of the signage on our own damn properties! This would never be an issue on TTC properties, where they actually have the institutional knowledge to produce signage. Amazing!

With much of our new infrastructure, it seems that we're locking ourselves into multi-decide marriages with these vendors, where we are completely dependant on them. These firms control what we can do with our systems, and thanks to our dependancy on them, they seem able to charge us whatever they like for servicing or upgrades.
 
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One problem with contracting out public services is, as soon as the question is asked, the message is that somebody with deep pockets wants out of the game and will do literally anything to make that happen to show a savings in today's dollars. The second is the terms of whatever contract is signed, because the terms of the contract is what the contractor will serve, not the public interest ('want some buses to show up at a disaster as transport or shelter? Here's the bill'). Governments and their agencies have a history of either drafting poor contracts or not enforcing their rights. What government wants to see the headlines that Company X is going belly-up or employees are laid off because they have been 'forced' by the government. I can think of several examples in my time of public service and as a resident but the one that comes readily to mind is the contracting out of highway maintenance, which was an absolute s*** show for several years of poor and non-performance, but the government got hundreds of staff off the books.
 
I can see benefit of some contracting in certain circumstances. If, for a simple example, they wanted to set up regional feeder bus services in, say, the Grey, Bruce, Huron region under the GO banner. It might be more practical and cost effective to have a local carrier do it rather trying to set up storage, maintenance, driver, etc. infrastructure in an area that can't practically served by its existing, at least in the near term.

I know that ONTC was struggling with this when they expanded to and west of Thunder Bay, an area far removed from their core operations. I don't know how they ultimately resolved it or if they have yet.
 

Study: Driving to Save Time Just Slows Everyone Down​

From link.

Call it the rush hour paradox.

In a new study that confirms something that’s blindingly clear to anyone who’s ever gotten in a car, researchers have found that transportation planners who try to decrease travel times by making driving more convenient are basically ensuring that their communities will be choked by gridlock, and everyone will have a slower route to their destinations.

A coalition of academics from around the world modeled what would happen if all residents of a car-centric city made their transportation choices solely on the basis of how much time they would save by taking the fastest mode available to them — which, for most of them, would be a personal car. Paradoxically — but unsurprisingly — the model showed that when everyone tries to speed up their commute by hopping in the whip, they create traffic jams, slowing down average travel times about 25 percent compared to how fast they’d be if there were no other traffic on the road at all.

And thanks to the well-known law of induced demand, there’s simply no way to cut that congestion by building more lanes along the most popular routes — affirming that the only way to get rid of excessive traffic is to incentivize drivers to start using other modes of transportation by making them as fast, safe, and affordable as possible.

Surprisingly, the lead researcher behind the study, mathematician Raphael Prieto Curiel, says the paper was inspired by a long queue at a transit kiosk rather than a long wait in a traffic jam. While at a conference at Medellín, Colombia, he and his co-authors marveled at the region’s robust and speedy public transport network, but were less impressed by the 30-minute wait to pay their fares.

“We said, ‘This isn’t going to work, we need to do something different,'” Prieto Curiel said. “But then we said, ‘Wait: but do we really want to push people to use cars instead?'”

An avowed sustainable commuter himself, Prieto Curiel says that transportation planners often under-estimate the tools at their disposal to speed up transit service — like adding a contactless payment option at that over-crowded kiosk, or adding a bus rapid transit lane — while over-estimating their tools to speed up driving commutes, which quickly becomes mathematically impossible in a contained city environment.

Making transit speedier and active modes safer doesn’t mean cities have to ban cars from their streets altogether — though some think the study suggests they should. But it does suggest that cities should stop over-focusing on the rare occasions when driving really is necessary, and start thinking about how to get people where they need to go as quickly as possible on mass modes.

“When you talk about mobility and public transport, people’s minds tend to go to very special cases very quickly,” Prieto Curiel said. “Once I started talking about this article, people immediately said, ‘But how is my grandma going to go the hospital when she has a broken leg?’ Obviously, there are journeys that can’t be done by walking or on the Metro. But it’s not the outlier, special sort of journey that you need to think about — it’s the average one. It’s millions of people going to work and coming back, going to school and back, going to the grocery store and back.”

For megacities with many millions of travelers to keep moving, it’s even more critical that transportation leaders acknowledge the rush hour paradox — and the harsh reality that driving can only take them so far, even if all they care about is reducing commute times. In Prieto Curiel’s native Mexico City, which has a slightly larger population than New York City, about 23 percent of daily trips are taken by personal cars, a number that he says is still too high. (In bike-friendly Portland, for contrast, it’s 57 percent.)

Of course, that number is probably higher than it needs to be for reasons that have nothing to do with speed at all. Prieto Curiel acknowledges that the biggest shortcoming of his model is that it doesn’t adjust for how safety, comfort, cost, and other factors impact mode choice; taken together, those obstacles can make getting people onto transit an all-too-literal uphill climb.

“On some of the lines in Mexico City, you have to go down 300 steps just to get to the platform, and then back up those steps at the end of the ride,” he said. “And in some of the stations, the escalator broke two years ago and never got fixed. So for two years, you see these poor people climbing and climbing, and once they reach the top, they have zero oxygen, and they never want to ride the Metro again. … We need to look at how to make every journey on the public transport not just fast, but also comfortable, easy, and secure, which is an especially big problem for women in my city. [Note: the women of Mexico City face some of the world’s highest rates of sexual harassment and violence on transit.] That has to be on the top of the agenda for public transport.”

Despite all the work to be done, the paradox at the heart of the paper is still a critical one for planners to remember — especially if their number one goal is decreasing congestion.

“If there’s a lot of traffic, we can do so many things to fight that,” said Prieto Curiel. “We can reduce the number of lanes for cars and give more space to bikes, or pedestrians, or public transport. We can ave fewer parking spaces, fewer shared lanes, and gradually increase the incremental costs of driving in all these ways. We just need to stop designing cities for cars.”
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Northern Light said:
This could be comparatively innocuous, to see if there are ways to extend small scale services to outlying, more rural areas, such as through van-sized transport, or even integration with taxis.

OR

It could be a step towards the wholesale privatization of bus services seen in London, UK.

I'm open to the former, but would assertively oppose the latter.
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drum118 said:
Talk in 2007 was moving to London UK model over time and that has change much since then. This applies to all systems connected to Metrolinx. Even TTC looking at doing this now.
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Seems like they'd want to potentially do something with longer distance GO Bus Routes? I am pretty sure they wouldn't be going after municipal buses . . . that would be a can of worms beyond even uploading the Subway
 

Metrolinx installing special fencing at top GTA trespassing spot​

Jul 21st, 2021
The fence will be made of special eight-foot-tall anti-climbing material that is also designed to be difficult to cut or damage.
Related To: Metrolinx



An example of what the new fence will look like.
An example of what the new fence will look like.


Metrolinx officials are breaking out all the stops to increase safety around the Port Credit rail bridge. As dozens of people continue to jump into the shallow waters, staff are working tirelessly to make things safer.
Metrolinx News recently covered the partnership between Metrolinx and Peel Police in working together to prevent people from jumping off the Credit River rail bridge in Mississauga’s Port Credit community. In response to this, Metrolinx is in the early stages of installing new high-security fencing along the property line around and under the bridge to limit future trespassing. Installation of the fence will begin in the coming weeks.
Tanya Caruso, an acting right-of-way officer for Metrolinx’s corridor maintenance team, is overseeing the work.

“Essentially, we are removing all existing fencing, clearing the area and installing new upgraded fencing that will help prevent people from accessing the tracks and rail bridge,” Caruso explained.

Caruso says the fence will be made of special eight-foot-tall anti-climbing material that is also designed to be difficult to cut or damage. She says contractors will start the work on the south-east side, near Port Credit Area. The work is expected to be done by the fall.

Sue Milos, Metrolinx’s Transit Safety operations assistant manager, has been working hard to make the area safer and has been one of the people leading Metrolinx’s partnership with Peel Police.
“The improvement to the fence surrounding the bridge is great news for the local community and for us,” Milos said.

Milos says the area is the top hot spot for trespassing across the entire GO Transit network. Over the May long weekend alone, 160 people were removed or prevented from accessing the Port Credit rail bridge.
Installation of the new fence builds on numerous other measures Metrolinx is working on to help make the community safer.

The transit agency has put in anti-trespassing mats at the nearby Stavebank Road train crossing and is increasing the number of warning signs in the area, monitoring the corridor with a nearby camera, increasing patrols. As well, GO trains are slowed down at various times when going through the Port Credit area.

Metrolinx Community Relation teams have also made numerous trips to the nearby Port Credit Memorial Park to speak to the public, and especially parents who may not be aware of the risks jumping off the rail bridge poses to young people.

The transit agency has also reached out to schools in the area to help raise awareness about the issue.
“It is important for anybody who thinks about entering any rail corridor to remember that train traffic can be diverted onto any track, at any time, without notice and trains are surprisingly quiet when approaching at high speeds,” Milos said.

While the focus is on educating people about the dangers and deterrence, Metrolinx Transit Safety official say officers will also not hesitate to charge people with trespassing. The maximum fine for this offense is $5,000.
During the installation of the new fence, Metrolinx contractors will ensure that temporary fencing as well as other safety measures are in place. Metrolinx officials ask that people are cautious around the construction area while enjoying the summer weather in the park.

Similar fences are planned around other popular trespassing access points throughout the network in the future.

GO Transit Safety asks that people report trespassers at the Credit River rail bridge or anywhere on GO train tracks, by calling the 24-hour GO Transit Safety Dispatch number at 1-877-297-0642. In case of an urgent life-threatening emergency, always call 911 first.
 
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