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The Toronto Region Board of Trade continues to investigate ways to improve transportation in the region. Last week, it hosted its seventh annual transportation summit: "Ahead By A Century: Inspiring the Next Generation of Transportation," bringing together representatives of provincial and municipal governments, transit agencies, airport authorities, airlines, and private-sector suppliers to discuss the future of moving goods and people in and through the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.
To kick off the day, the Board's president and Chief Executive Officer, Jan De Silva, highlighted the Board's goals and the diverse array of speakers and perspectives it convened for the summit, all with the aim of "fostering visionary thinking, making important introductions and sharing energizing ideas for attendees."
This was a full-day event with lots of interesting discussion and ideas, too much for one article to contain. Here are the highlights of two of the day's sessions.
De Silva hosted a "fireside chat" — an interview — with the president and CEO of Infrastructure Ontario (IO), Michael Lindsay. De Silva acknowledged that Lindsay was no stranger to the Board's events, reflecting the fact, she said, that he and IO clearly see the link between business success and getting the region moving. She invited him to speak to the fact that, in the last year alone, the region saw the biggest investment in public transit in Canada; four "shovel-ready" Metrolinx projects in the GTA.
Lindsay started by describing what De Silva dubbed "the most ambitious of the four" transit projects, the Ontario Line through downtown and east-end Toronto and East York. He explained that procurement is underway for the Ontario Line south and the rolling stock, systems, and operations contracts, with proposals coming in April of this year. He said that IO also intended to go to market with the request for proposals for the northern part of the line during "the July-to-September time-frame." Dividing contracts for the line into various components, he said, was intentional, to "curate as competitive and innovative a set of international respondents" as possible, "bundling" them into appropriately sized packages that he thinks the market would respond to. IO also wanted to make sure that it "calibrated" the bundles as it brings them to market so that the sequencing and size of the contracts is appropriately "digestible" for an international set of consortia. So far, he said, the response has been "terrific".
Lindsay then shifted to explain how IO was taking advantage of new tools and strategies to complete the other three projects — the Crosstown LRT western extension, the Yonge North subway extension, and the Scarborough Subway extension — more quickly. He said that "Some of the strategies we've put into place are already bearing fruit." Much the same way as the agency created packages for the Ontario Line, it's "doing the same thing" for the other projects, separating, for example, the tunnelling contract for the Scarborough extension from the rail and station infrastructure contract. "Working with industry", he said, "we've actually come up with commercial arrangements and approaches that really incentivize getting that tunnelling commenced as fast as we possibly could... For the balance of the works, we've started to bring those to market as well."
He said, "The period of project design and development, securing of permits, figuring out what an intentionally constructed construction schedule looks like for big transit projects like [these] is where there are sources of delight." He continued, "Working actively with a qualified counter-party, competitively selected, to spend 12 to 18 months thinking actively about what risks attend the project, [thinking about] how do we divide them as to between private and public sector, how do we provision for them appropriately and how do we 'pre-bake" partnerships with municipalities and utilities [to solve] some of the technical considerations into the project plan." He said that IO thinks that these periods of progressive project development with a counter-party are going to help us expedite the projects as fast as it can.
Lindsay also updated participants on the progress of procurement for Metrolinx's GO Transit expansion project, intended to provide frequent two-way, all-day, every-day service along GO rail corridors, and the organization's role in helping develop transit-oriented communities.
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During a panel discussion, representatives of transit agencies talked about "How to Put Local Transit in the Fast Lane." Sue Connor, past chair of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, previous director of Brampton Transit and currently the director of Burlington Transit, talked about how, while working at Brampton, she was able to more than double that agency's ridership in ten years. Connor stated that travel times one of the biggest factors in increasing the number of riders using a suburban community's transit service. In Brampton and Burlington, the transit agencies moved from a hub-based routing system to a grid network. In so doing, the organizations reduced travel times for riders by no longer forcing them to waste extra time travelling to a hub before being able to continue their trips.
Burlington Transit switched to a grid network in September, 2019 and within six months was able to increase the number of riders by 14 per cent in a community that hadn't seen an increase for many years.
Connor said that frequency of service was also a big factor. She felt that most people were only prepared to wait 15 minutes for a bus. Burlington City Council has adopted a five-year business plan for Burlington Transit with the goal of achieving that 15-minute frequency along all routes.
Wendy Reuter, head of research and analytics at the Toronto Transit Commission, affirmed that the TTC offers passengers frequency of ten minutes or better along 62 routes, so that frequency of service is already embedded in the service that the TTC provides.
Durham Region Transit's Deputy General Manager of Operations, Christopher Norris, pointed out that his agency serves the Greater Toronto - Hamilton Area's largest municipality in size. While the southern part of the region is urbanized, most of Durham is rural. Norris claims that his agency serves "every square kilometre of that area."
He echoed remarks from representatives of other local agencies that DRT passengers want fast, direct and frequent service, with minimal wait times and being able to be competitive with other travel modes. Since 2016, DRT has undertaken several service strategies, including a demand-response service.
The COVID-19 pandemic drastically reduced DRT's legacy market of commuters riding DRT buses to or from a GO station between Durham and downtown Toronto, so the agency refocussed its efforts, turning to support essential workers who used DRT to commute to and from their workplaces or to travel for leisure activities. DRT has temporarily suspended service along many fixed routes and replaced them with on-demand service available 24 hours a day. "On-demand provides us with a really interesting opportunity," he said. "Right now, you can go on-line or call us to arrange a trip. In the urban areas, the average wait time is about seven minutes. That's phenomenal and that's what we really want to do to be competitive... and make transit attractive."
What can transit agencies do to help integrate services and fares in the region? Connor pointed out that the Ontario Ministry of Transportation has set up a research "table" to investigate this very issue.
Reuter said that about 12 percent of TTC passengers come from outside Toronto. The TTC is participating in the Ontario Government's transit integration panel. It's also working with other nearby agencies to improve how cross-boundary services can be improved without unnecessary duplication. However, she also pointed out that the City of Toronto has set up legislative barriers that protect the TTC but prohibit other transit agencies from serving passengers who only want to travel within the City's boundaries
After the panel discussion, attendees heard from a representative of a transit agency from beyond the Greater Toronto Area, who focussed on how better communications can help improve local transit service to passengers.
Sunny Zheng, process improvement specialist for the Long Island Railroad (an agency of the MTA, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority) described how the railroad has improved the quantity and quality of the real-time data it provides to passengers. He explained that these initiatives started in 2018, long before the pandemic. The Long Island Railroad already operated at capacity, so the issue was how to make use of the capacity that it already had by encouraging passengers to spread out through the trains, instead of crowding certain cars.
Since the LIR was already electrified and electric trains already have the capacity to measure or gather data about certain indicators of its service, including speed and weight, railroad staff decided to use this data for other purposes. They developed an application that passengers could download onto their phones that would calculate where to locate the least crowded cars of a train approaching a station. Passengers could learn this information before the train arrived so they could move along the platform to the appropriate stopping place without having to run during the train's brief dwell time in the station.
For those who couldn't use the app, the Long Island Railroad team developed electronic signs with similar appropriate information in and outside stations.
Zheng encouraged transit agencies to use existing resources to develop new information tools, instead of contracting service providers to do the same work. He said that in-house staff know a transit system much better than external consultants ever possibly could and can provide better product for passengers, although he did admit that external resources may be used for certain aspects of a project.
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Over the past few years, the Board of Trade has completed several studies and research papers on how to improve transportation in the Greater Toronto Area:
- Toronto Region Board of Trade Proposes Regional Rail Network, here;
- Board of Trade Proposes Regional Transit Fare Integration, here;
- Board of Trade Revisits, Revises Superlinx Plan, here;
- Board of Trade Poll Supports Cross-Regional Agency for Transit, here; and
- Ontario PC, TO Board of Trade Transit Proposals Cause a Stir, here.
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What do you think about the various projects this article discusses? You can leave a comment in the space on this page, or join the discussion in the appropriate Forum threads:
- Ontario Line;
- Eglinton Crosstown LRT western extension;
- Yonge North subway extension; and
- Scarborough Subway extension.
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