On the subject of bus shortages at MiWay, over the past couple years MiWay has been experiencing a seemingly never ending shortage of buses out of the Central garage. So let's break things down so you all can better understand the situation.
Central garage is
currently assigned 316* local buses (all buses except for 2 2003 D40LFs, 2 2005 D40LFs, all 2006 D40LFRs, 12 2008 D60LFRs and 5 2007 Eldorado 30 foot buses which compose Malton's fleet) and all 78 express buses. *Come the September board period Central is losing 4 runs to Malton, 3 rush hour runs on the 51 and one base run on the 35. Let's just assume that Central will give up 6 buses to Malton, so we'll play with 310 local buses at Central come September.
Effective September 7th out of Central there will be:
308 AM runs (59 Express runs and 249 local runs)
303 PM runs (59 Express runs and 244 local runs)
With 310* local buses and with a 249 bus AM peak requirement and 244 bus PM peak requirement, that means Central is running with a local bus spare ratio of 24.5% in the morning and 27% in the afternoon, ratios the TTC would be envious of. With 78 express buses and a 59 bus peak requirement, that brings a whopping spare ratio of 32% for the express fleet. The TTC is budgeted to run with a 18% routine maintenance ratio and a 5% capital spares ratio for a combined 23% spare ratio as of next year, currently the routine maintenance ratio is 16.8%.
Yet we still see express buses on local runs and sometimes, but not as often, we see local buses on express runs.
If you're seeing local buses on express runs, it is likely because that run pulls out of the garage late into the rush hour period at which point express buses have already been allocated to local runs to fill in for their local counterparts, sometimes late starting express runs are outright cancelled and sometimes they are able to get a local bus out of maintenance to cover the run. Sometimes those local buses will stay out all day, sometimes they get replaced by an express bus later in the day. Another occurrence is when an express bus breaks down and a local bus which sits as the spare at Square One replaces it to minimize delays, once again sometimes these local buses are left out all day and sometimes they are replaced with an express bus later in the day.
Local buses are the real culprit here though, for whatever reason there never seems to be enough to cover all of the local runs. By all means with the spare ratios they have, they should have more than enough buses available for service, yet more often than not we see express buses on local runs.
I have considered a few different theories behind this odd shortage, one of those is the setup of the Central Parkway garage, which essentially operates as two storage facilities operating out of one property, CP (the older storage building) and CX (known as the Annex, the new storage building that opened in 2009). CP stores all express buses, articulated buses along with some of the 30 foot and 40 foot buses. CX stores all of the hybrids and the rest of the fleet. Since runs are scheduled to pull out of either CP or CX, I figured this was a case of them running out of local buses at CP and instead of sending drivers over to the other storage site, they were simply sending out drivers with express buses from CP instead. Turns out runs scheduled out of CX have also been allocated express buses, so that debunks that theory.
Another theory I had was that with the amount of split crews on the rise, there are a lot more driver reliefs occurring during the startup of the PM rush and since there aren't enough relief cars to go around, buses are used and thus tying buses up as PM rush hour service builds up. Since this only goes on in the PM rush, this clearly isn't the root problem here and
may simply contribute to the shortage in the PM peak period which has a slightly lower peak requirement.
Not too surprisingly my last theory is the subcontracting out of maintenance activities to various sublet repair shops. A while ago the city established a pre-authorized list of vendors (vendors of record) to supply various parts and sublet repairs for transit buses. If the sublet repair shops could execute the repairs quicker and/or cheaper than in-house staff, then the buses would be sent to their shops for repairs rather than simply sending the parts to MiWay. I have witnessed a fair share of buses spending more than a couple of days parked in these various repair shops lot's and wouldn't doubt that buses being sent offsite for maintenance aren't being fixed as quickly as we are lead to think and is contributing to these shortages. Information regarding these vendors can be found in this general committee agenda:
http://www7.mississauga.ca/documents/agendas/committees/general/10_23_2013_GC_Agenda_.pdf
6 years ago the city put to tender consulting services to develop and implement what we now know as the MiWay brand with the express and local bus distinction. Being able to see a color of a bus from a far and being able to tell if it's your bus or not is great and all, however when we have this blatant mismanagement of fleet resources causing those expected colors of buses and routes not to match up, that simply erodes away at the brand that taxpayers paid to create and that is a shame.
