Toronto Transportation Idiosyncracies

[drum118]

Speaking of articulated buses, I'm pretty sure the Viva Van Hools fared pretty well last winter, even on the enormous hills at Clark and Royal Orchard, except for one of the first snow storms last year or the year before where they couldn't get up the hill. Regardless, that was also true of the normal, non-articulated buses that YRT used.

They are pullers and therefore will do a lot better than pushers.

Unless you have a high power engine for a pusher, they are good where no snow or very little drop in the first place.

 

[Second_in_pie]

I am not sure how the applicable legal processes work in Canada, but in some other common law jurisdictions what is needed in the situation is simply the resumption by the government of the underground strata of the affected properties. The foundation and aboveground portion of the property is not expropriated, and with the necessary engineering studies done the property will not even be largely affected.

As for deep stations, there is no indication that they will substantially affect a system's capacity or attractiveness. TTC is actually one of the shallowest subways around; many stations in the Tokyo and HK metro, for example, are between 20-30 m below ground, some of the stations to be constructed on the one of current extensions in HK will be between 50-100 m below ground, and the average depth for Moscow's is around 50 m. The depth certainly hasn't prevented these systems from becoming the busiest and most accessible metros in the world. As long as the demand is there, and the transit authority can be held to account to have escalators and elevators always functional, there is no reason that depth is concern.

Besides, having deep tunnels does not necessarily mean the stations need to be deep. The stations can still be built slightly shallower, eg under major roadway intersections or more open space, with the tunnels dipping down in between stations. This provides the additional benefit of natural acceleration and deceleration gradients for the subway.

Edit: ultimately, I don't think it is that crucial for metro lines to deviate significantly from the existing road grid, since as I've pointed out before most metro systems around the world do follow the streets since it is the cheapest way to do it. For short distances or turns, though, it certainly isn't something to be discounted.

My favorite memory of subways anywhere was going down an escalator in a station on the Picadilly Line in London (I forgot what station) and apart from taking what felt like hours to reach the platform, I couldn't see the bottom of the escalator until I got around halfway down!

But yes, Toronto's subways are VERY shallow on international standards.

 

[golodhendil]

The "lie" is not referring to you, so you don't need to get worked up by it. Recently I have heard this "urban legend" multiple times, even on transportation forums from HK (and I have certainly heard it before), so I have reason to believe it is propagated by certain people who are against public transit/railways/MTR in particular. Besides, "lie" is hardly "extreme language". Anyway:

While I would be happy to stand corrected........

In respect of MTR's operations.....I'm not sure that I'm wrong (That's HK's system for those trying to follow)

I went over to their website and read their books from the last fiscal year.

Now I will grant you they show an operating profit on their rail lines.

However....

What they include in those revenue allocations bares scrutiny.....'Station and Commercial Revenue" is a very big line item, it is also discrete from fare revenue.

As Stations do not spontaneously produce money aside from collected fares, one must assume that developments within or on-top of stations are producing revenue which is being directly attributed to the rail system.

If one were to reduce the revenue of the HK system to fare revenue (now I realize there are ads etc. ) ...

And then charge the full weight of system expenses the profit is all but wiped out.

Depreciation costs are not broken out for Rail vs property development and so hard to allocate to an outsider, but if one assumed an allocation that was even in proportion to gross revenue, then the rail system's profit is basically gone.

If, we assume from the MTR books that depreciation represents wholly a cost to rail operations, and is not charged to development (because this was done prior to showing development profits) then one would likely show a net loss for rail operations.

Stations in HK do "spontaneously" produce money, because within most stations there are a large number of shops that include everything from clothing stores to fastfood restaurants to banks to bakeries to convenience stores, and it's not even part of an "underground city" type of thing like Toronto's PATH. These shops are an integral part of the system, and exists only because of the rail operation, so I think it is perfectly valid for them to be included. Finch has done a comparatively good job with its retail, but it's more of an exception than the rule for TTC stations; in any case, rental revenue from these is also included in TTC's operating revenue.

I'm also unsure how your math works. Even if we only consider the fare revenue (11467M), taking away the operating expense (8303M) still leaves $3.2 billion HKD ($475M CAD) in profit, so it's hardly "wiped out". Even if you take out the complete amount of depreciation and amortization (2930M) you still have a profit (the merger was a one time thing so need not be counted, but still would not have been enough to dip it into the red). The only way it will show a loss is to include the interest charges, but that's only after unreasonably excluding other revenue and including expenses which are attributable to property development and which also contribute to those interest charges.

Edit:

Relatedly, I was unable to find out how much the governments initial investments represented and whether they were represented on the books as debt, and I wonder how one might value the land concessions and the benefit of expropriation which MTR has made use of in order to construct its rails and related developments.

What is being discussed here is profit/deficit from operation. (Almost) all transit constructions require substantial initial subsidy from the government and usually more favourable treatment in terms of land usage/sales/compensation and such, so for the purpose of discussing the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of a public transit operation, those costs need not be taken into account --- this is also relevant because many transit systems in the world are built by the government and then run by private organizations on contract/franchise and so the initial capital cost would not be calculated into their budget at all, and given enough years the construction cost of the systems would (could) be completely repaid and so the "steady state" would be to only consider operation costs/revenue. Bottomline is, how costly the initial construction was does not affect how efficiently the system is run. In TTC's financial statement for its operations, construction-related debt or land transactions certainly aren't accounted for (why should they when operation is being considered?), but that certainly doesn't make its books look any better. (financial statements of US transit operators do include debt, which make their deficits look worse than they already are)

 

[rbt]

Stations in HK do "spontaneously" produce money, because within most stations there are a large number of shops that sell everything from clothes to food to banks, and it's not even part of an "underground city" type of thing like Toronto's PATH. These shops are an integral part of the system, and exists only because of the rail operation, so I think it is perfectly valid for them to be included.

I wonder how they do the finances for Kowloon station? As far as I know the whole damn complex (hotels, apartment/condos, giant office tower, mall, skating rink!) are under MTR. Do revenues from all of the above fall into "station operations revenue" for the Orange/Airport express lines?

 

[golodhendil]

^No, it would fall under the "revenue from property development".

 

[GenerationW]

As long as the demand is there, and the transit authority can be held to account to have escalators and elevators always functional, there is no reason that depth is concern.

Whoa, whoa, you ask for way too much from the TTC here!

 

[nfitz]

London Underground it notorious for escalators being out of service for months and months; just like here.

But for deep tube stations, you put in 3 escalators, and often a set of stairs as well. That way, there is normally at least 2 running; and worst case scenario, at least an up can run.

 

[Disparishun]

If you look at transportation as an industry though (moving people/goods from point a to point b), the overwhelming majority of it is based on the idea that fares should be the primary source of income.

Well, no. If you look at urban, residential transportation, fares are almost none of the income -- pace highways, main arteries, and secondary roads -- comes from fares. Instead, we generally spead around the cost through universally-levied taxes, as we do for, say, national defence. Toll roads, which your argument would seem to require, are virtually non-existent here, despite the demonstrable ability to convert almost all roads to toll.

As to the military comment, if you are going to compare transportation to national defense I won't bother: Public Goods are the magic word.

But there are no magic words here, any more than there being a "public good" is something elemental as opposed to being the result of ordinary analysis.

The economic benefits of public transit far exceed the fares raised by those paying them -- health, environment, economic development, community development. There are therefore significant positive externalities that result from public transit. More, it is impossible to exclude everyone from many of these positive externalities, as the very thing that enables them (public transit) also enables people to get to them, even where the benefit has not been captured in real estate prices.

However, both coordination problems and the nature of these externalities prevent people from creating public transit as private investment. This creates a very good economic case for investing publicly in public transit, and for accounting for the benefits of public transit by looking well beyond the fares that are charged for using it. That is certainly what we do for non-toll roads, for which a much poorer economic case exists.