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AlvinofDiaspar
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From the Star:
Who has the better way?
After an illegal strike against the TTC brought Torontonians to their knees, David Bruser examines what we can learn from cities like Singapore, Madrid and Paris
Jun. 3, 2006. 09:40 AM
DAVID BRUSER
BUSINESS REPORTER
In the 15 years Paul Yong has been a student, then a financial analyst in his humid hometown of 3.5 million people, he's noticed one immutable characteristic of his transit service.
"There's never been a stoppage. Not due to a strike," he says. "It's pretty much run like clockwork."
Not like in Toronto, where a wildcat strike Monday left hundreds of thousands of commuters stranded in the haze and stress of rush hour.
"I think if you put that (scenario) to someone on the street, they would think you were crazy," Yong says.
Welcome to Singapore. Home of a better way?
Or what about Madrid, where the subway system has doubled in eight years?
Or Paris, where subway infrastructure is built in anticipation of demand?
The Toronto Transit Commission, critics say, is sluggish to expand, not generating enough non-fare revenue, and, as was made clear this week, vulnerable to labour strife.
Some blame an engineer-dominated management team that is good at controlling costs but lacking in business growth skills.
Some decry the lack of will of those controlling the public purse who could help put the TTC on the right foot.
Others brood not much can be done for a system coursing through a city populated by people hopelessly devoted to their cars.
A brief look to Singapore, Madrid and Paris — while it may not offer a cure-all for the TTC's ails — reveals what makes world renowned systems function smoothly and respond quickly to their customers.
***
Granted, Singapore is where the U.S. State Department says officials enforce strict laws against jaywalking, littering and spitting, mete out canings for vandalism, and the People's Action Party has ruled for nearly 50 years.
But Yong, an analyst with DBS Vickers Securities, adds the city's transit system differs from Toronto's in almost every significant way.
Two publicly listed firms, including state-controlled SMRT Corp. Ltd., operate the subway system. The other firm, ComfortDelGro Corp. , whose largest shareholder is the co-operative Singapore Labour Foundation, operates a fleet of buses.
Yet the two systems interface well, he says, offering a seamless citywide 68-stop service constantly in demand in a densely populated city where 80 per cent of inhabitants live in flats.
The government builds the infrastructure, sometimes building new subway stations in anticipation of growth, as at Buangkok, then mothballs them until needed.
"We actually have a lot of stations that aren't even open yet. The government sees it more as something that is necessary," Yong says. "You have to invest in infrastructure if you want your economy to develop."
Through effective marketing, spending to make over stations and renting property to restaurants and shops, SMRT, whose CEO Saw Phaik Hwa came from the retail sector, has shown consistent growth, Yong says. Though he adds the firm's taxi business has so far been unsuccessful as it glutted the market.
SMRT's profit after tax in the 2005 fiscal year was $127 million (Singapore), or about $89 million Canadian as of yesterday's exchange rate, more than double what it was in 2002.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his office in Madrid, transportation planner Carlos Cristobal-Pinto shuffles through papers, looking for the numbers detailing his city's stunning subway growth. He's a busy man these days, in demand by conferences around the world wanting to hear how he helped Madrid to double its tracks and stations in eight years.
That's 110 km to 220 km of tracks — 55 km every four years between 1995 and 2003 —and 74 new stations to meet the demands of a growing city. About half of the new tracks and stations were built in the suburbs.
It wasn't cheap.
Through a formula that has the city paying 20 per cent, the nation 30 per cent and the region 50 per cent, taxpayers were on the hook for 4.4 billion euros.
And Cristobal-Pinto, of the Madrid Transport Consortium says the new publicly run system doesn't pay for itself. About 60 per cent of its costs are covered by the farebox, with the remaining 40 per cent paid by government subsidies, which are only rising as the system expands, he adds.
"It's a priority of the politicians. We have in the regional government three policies: One is education, the other health and the last transportation," Cristobal-Pinto says. "The president of the region decided to extend the metro because we have money to pay for the debt. In the last 10 years, we have a good economy. We've increased population 1 million in 10 years, from 5 million to 6 million."
In Toronto, transit consultant Ed Levy of the BA Group, who's studied transit systems around the world, is jealous. "It's just enough to make you cry. Nobody can tell me that if a city like that can do it that we can't here."
Back in Madrid, Cristobal-Pinto notes an important similarity.
"From time to time we have a strike," he says. "In the last month we had some problems with the (subway) drivers."
But he says a law recognizes the subway as a "social service" and disallows all drivers to strike at once. That means at least half of the drivers are operating a "minimal service."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Travers looks longingly across the English Channel and wishes his government would learn from the French.
"The way it tends to happen here is a great deal of pressure builds up for a new line, then it gets built," says the director of the Greater London Group research centre at the London School of Economics. "It's not the kind of rational planning of the kind that's gone on in Paris."
In a lather at the mere mention of his hometown's mass transit, Travers rails against London's byzantine and diffuse system of private bus operators, public subways and "clever" unions that frequently paralyze the city to get what they want. Absent, he says, is a strong central leadership focused on serving the public.
The mayor, as chair of the transport board, sets service levels and fares for buses and the underground, Travers explains. Bus service is provided by several private firms. The underground is owned and operated by the city, but between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., when the system is closed to the public, private maintenance firms go to work.
When the Canary Wharf business district was being developed, Travers says developers had to lobby hard to get subway service to the area via the Jubilee Line. Meanwhile, in Paris, "the equivalent project — La Defense — was all done by the edict of the state with public transport infrastructure from the beginning. They built a station, then built the business district around it.
"There's simply a lot more public money in France."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in Toronto, as blame searches for a home in the wake of the wildcat strike, Richard Soberman, former University of Toronto professor and now a transit consultant, wishes for a labour law similar to Madrid's.
"This is crazy that people should be able to hold the public up for ransom. There's got to be a better way. We (should) have groups of employees who are categorized as essential and are not permitted to strike."
TTC chair Howard Moscoe marvels at Madrid's system that stretches into the suburbs. But an "essential service" law that ensures not all drivers walk off the job would have been toothless in the face of an illegal strike like the city experienced this week, a frustrated Moscoe notes. "You take away the right of workers to strike and you have to pay them as if they're essential. And that's why police and fire salaries have gone through the roof."
Bob Brent, former TTC chief marketing officer, commends the TTC's cost management, but says the efficient managers fail to generate the kind of revenue more business-minded leaders could. "They see marketing as a cost. No one wants to come out and say they want to grow. They tend to favour a low-ball budget (because) they want to get a better subsidy."
Though the TTC already recovers 80 per cent of its operating costs from the farebox, Moscoe concedes the commission could do more to increase revenue, such as landing more stores or coffee shops inside stations.
"I push the staff to be more entrepreneurial," he says.
But even if the TTC recovered 100 per cent of its costs, Moscoe says it could not operate as a self-sustaining system without subsidies for upkeep and improvements. Without public money, fares would go up, driving riders back into their cars. "We'd strangle the system. People would stop riding it."
Might the TTC save money and headaches if it privatized, say, its bus operations?
Ryerson University professor and urban planning expert James Mars fears not.
"The idea of that, it just scares me," Mars says, adding the most lucrative routes would probably fall to high-bidding private firms, leaving low passenger loads for less popular routes run by the public operation and leading to reduced service or hiked fares. "It would hurt low-income people, people that do shift work, students, the people that are transit-dependent. They would be in the less lucrative times and routes."
Why not, Mars wonders, privatize some functions, not customer relations or security, but maybe maintenance or IT? "I think they could get some cost savings, some cost certainty. Some of this would move out of union domination. You would have fewer things at stake if there were a strike. It's a little hedging."
Moscoe is doubtful such a move would be tolerated, only saying, "It's been contemplated, but we operate in a very heavily unionized environment."
Meanwhile, a despondent Levy fears the road to a better way is elusory in a vast city overrun with cars and trucks.
"(People) want their SUVs and their houses with picket fences. That's what they've been taught since childhood," he says. "The GTA is more like Los Angeles than New York City. It's not as centralized as it once was. It's like exploding outward, and we're halfway to Lake Simcoe."
AoD
Who has the better way?
After an illegal strike against the TTC brought Torontonians to their knees, David Bruser examines what we can learn from cities like Singapore, Madrid and Paris
Jun. 3, 2006. 09:40 AM
DAVID BRUSER
BUSINESS REPORTER
In the 15 years Paul Yong has been a student, then a financial analyst in his humid hometown of 3.5 million people, he's noticed one immutable characteristic of his transit service.
"There's never been a stoppage. Not due to a strike," he says. "It's pretty much run like clockwork."
Not like in Toronto, where a wildcat strike Monday left hundreds of thousands of commuters stranded in the haze and stress of rush hour.
"I think if you put that (scenario) to someone on the street, they would think you were crazy," Yong says.
Welcome to Singapore. Home of a better way?
Or what about Madrid, where the subway system has doubled in eight years?
Or Paris, where subway infrastructure is built in anticipation of demand?
The Toronto Transit Commission, critics say, is sluggish to expand, not generating enough non-fare revenue, and, as was made clear this week, vulnerable to labour strife.
Some blame an engineer-dominated management team that is good at controlling costs but lacking in business growth skills.
Some decry the lack of will of those controlling the public purse who could help put the TTC on the right foot.
Others brood not much can be done for a system coursing through a city populated by people hopelessly devoted to their cars.
A brief look to Singapore, Madrid and Paris — while it may not offer a cure-all for the TTC's ails — reveals what makes world renowned systems function smoothly and respond quickly to their customers.
***
Granted, Singapore is where the U.S. State Department says officials enforce strict laws against jaywalking, littering and spitting, mete out canings for vandalism, and the People's Action Party has ruled for nearly 50 years.
But Yong, an analyst with DBS Vickers Securities, adds the city's transit system differs from Toronto's in almost every significant way.
Two publicly listed firms, including state-controlled SMRT Corp. Ltd., operate the subway system. The other firm, ComfortDelGro Corp. , whose largest shareholder is the co-operative Singapore Labour Foundation, operates a fleet of buses.
Yet the two systems interface well, he says, offering a seamless citywide 68-stop service constantly in demand in a densely populated city where 80 per cent of inhabitants live in flats.
The government builds the infrastructure, sometimes building new subway stations in anticipation of growth, as at Buangkok, then mothballs them until needed.
"We actually have a lot of stations that aren't even open yet. The government sees it more as something that is necessary," Yong says. "You have to invest in infrastructure if you want your economy to develop."
Through effective marketing, spending to make over stations and renting property to restaurants and shops, SMRT, whose CEO Saw Phaik Hwa came from the retail sector, has shown consistent growth, Yong says. Though he adds the firm's taxi business has so far been unsuccessful as it glutted the market.
SMRT's profit after tax in the 2005 fiscal year was $127 million (Singapore), or about $89 million Canadian as of yesterday's exchange rate, more than double what it was in 2002.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his office in Madrid, transportation planner Carlos Cristobal-Pinto shuffles through papers, looking for the numbers detailing his city's stunning subway growth. He's a busy man these days, in demand by conferences around the world wanting to hear how he helped Madrid to double its tracks and stations in eight years.
That's 110 km to 220 km of tracks — 55 km every four years between 1995 and 2003 —and 74 new stations to meet the demands of a growing city. About half of the new tracks and stations were built in the suburbs.
It wasn't cheap.
Through a formula that has the city paying 20 per cent, the nation 30 per cent and the region 50 per cent, taxpayers were on the hook for 4.4 billion euros.
And Cristobal-Pinto, of the Madrid Transport Consortium says the new publicly run system doesn't pay for itself. About 60 per cent of its costs are covered by the farebox, with the remaining 40 per cent paid by government subsidies, which are only rising as the system expands, he adds.
"It's a priority of the politicians. We have in the regional government three policies: One is education, the other health and the last transportation," Cristobal-Pinto says. "The president of the region decided to extend the metro because we have money to pay for the debt. In the last 10 years, we have a good economy. We've increased population 1 million in 10 years, from 5 million to 6 million."
In Toronto, transit consultant Ed Levy of the BA Group, who's studied transit systems around the world, is jealous. "It's just enough to make you cry. Nobody can tell me that if a city like that can do it that we can't here."
Back in Madrid, Cristobal-Pinto notes an important similarity.
"From time to time we have a strike," he says. "In the last month we had some problems with the (subway) drivers."
But he says a law recognizes the subway as a "social service" and disallows all drivers to strike at once. That means at least half of the drivers are operating a "minimal service."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Travers looks longingly across the English Channel and wishes his government would learn from the French.
"The way it tends to happen here is a great deal of pressure builds up for a new line, then it gets built," says the director of the Greater London Group research centre at the London School of Economics. "It's not the kind of rational planning of the kind that's gone on in Paris."
In a lather at the mere mention of his hometown's mass transit, Travers rails against London's byzantine and diffuse system of private bus operators, public subways and "clever" unions that frequently paralyze the city to get what they want. Absent, he says, is a strong central leadership focused on serving the public.
The mayor, as chair of the transport board, sets service levels and fares for buses and the underground, Travers explains. Bus service is provided by several private firms. The underground is owned and operated by the city, but between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., when the system is closed to the public, private maintenance firms go to work.
When the Canary Wharf business district was being developed, Travers says developers had to lobby hard to get subway service to the area via the Jubilee Line. Meanwhile, in Paris, "the equivalent project — La Defense — was all done by the edict of the state with public transport infrastructure from the beginning. They built a station, then built the business district around it.
"There's simply a lot more public money in France."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in Toronto, as blame searches for a home in the wake of the wildcat strike, Richard Soberman, former University of Toronto professor and now a transit consultant, wishes for a labour law similar to Madrid's.
"This is crazy that people should be able to hold the public up for ransom. There's got to be a better way. We (should) have groups of employees who are categorized as essential and are not permitted to strike."
TTC chair Howard Moscoe marvels at Madrid's system that stretches into the suburbs. But an "essential service" law that ensures not all drivers walk off the job would have been toothless in the face of an illegal strike like the city experienced this week, a frustrated Moscoe notes. "You take away the right of workers to strike and you have to pay them as if they're essential. And that's why police and fire salaries have gone through the roof."
Bob Brent, former TTC chief marketing officer, commends the TTC's cost management, but says the efficient managers fail to generate the kind of revenue more business-minded leaders could. "They see marketing as a cost. No one wants to come out and say they want to grow. They tend to favour a low-ball budget (because) they want to get a better subsidy."
Though the TTC already recovers 80 per cent of its operating costs from the farebox, Moscoe concedes the commission could do more to increase revenue, such as landing more stores or coffee shops inside stations.
"I push the staff to be more entrepreneurial," he says.
But even if the TTC recovered 100 per cent of its costs, Moscoe says it could not operate as a self-sustaining system without subsidies for upkeep and improvements. Without public money, fares would go up, driving riders back into their cars. "We'd strangle the system. People would stop riding it."
Might the TTC save money and headaches if it privatized, say, its bus operations?
Ryerson University professor and urban planning expert James Mars fears not.
"The idea of that, it just scares me," Mars says, adding the most lucrative routes would probably fall to high-bidding private firms, leaving low passenger loads for less popular routes run by the public operation and leading to reduced service or hiked fares. "It would hurt low-income people, people that do shift work, students, the people that are transit-dependent. They would be in the less lucrative times and routes."
Why not, Mars wonders, privatize some functions, not customer relations or security, but maybe maintenance or IT? "I think they could get some cost savings, some cost certainty. Some of this would move out of union domination. You would have fewer things at stake if there were a strike. It's a little hedging."
Moscoe is doubtful such a move would be tolerated, only saying, "It's been contemplated, but we operate in a very heavily unionized environment."
Meanwhile, a despondent Levy fears the road to a better way is elusory in a vast city overrun with cars and trucks.
"(People) want their SUVs and their houses with picket fences. That's what they've been taught since childhood," he says. "The GTA is more like Los Angeles than New York City. It's not as centralized as it once was. It's like exploding outward, and we're halfway to Lake Simcoe."
AoD