spotted in window of Six Penny Variety at Bloor and Euclid
spotted in window of Six Penny Variety at Bloor and Euclid
Generally, I ignore the dozens of poorly designed phone card advertisements that are plastered on the window of every corner store, but this was one that caught my eye. This MetroPass (TTC uses Metropass) probably won’t get you on the TTC, but lets you phone world wide without connection fees! Amazing! And you’ve got to love the trademark-infringing use of the TTC logo, albeit with ‘TTC’ erased, and a big bold ‘MP’ in its place. And how about the image of the new shiny TTC subway trains? They’re on the cutting edge.
Given that the TTC has gone to extreme lengths in the past to protect their name and intellectual properties - for example, the kerfuffle a few years back around the anagram subway map - I am curious what action is going to be taken against the phone card maker. Unlike the anagram map, this infringement actually could confuse customers. A visitor or a new resident could mistakenly buy this ‘MetroPass’ believing it is a Metropass for the TTC, or worse yet, a store owner could potentially sell these as transit pass/phone card combos for a substantial markup. So here’s hoping the sometimes overzealous TTC legal department will make a move.
In Peter Shawn Taylor’s opinion piece (“Public transit or a free car? The choice should be obvious”, The Record, March 4, 2010), an interesting and controversial assertion was made that it may be a better use of public money earmarked for a rapid transit line in Waterloo Region to purchase Priuses for the poor. This opinion is founded on common misconceptions and misunderstanding of the role of public transit in our communities and our cities.
First, Waterloo Region’s rapid transit initiative was conceived not only to provide faster and more reliable public transit to the residents of a rapidly growing region, but to help shape the region so this growth does not continue to expand outward in sprawling subdivisions. The Central Transit Corridor was identified by the Region in its growth plan as a logical place to concentrate future job and population growth. There are few, if any, other examples in North America where so many distinct nodes of existing and potential growth are located in such a linear fashion. The proposed rapid transit line will connect a lot more than “a shopping mall in Waterloo to a transit station in Cambridge”. It will connect three world-class post secondary institutions, the University of Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University, and Conestoga College. It will connect to the University of Waterloo’s Research and Technology Park, the incubator of ideas that will shape the future global economy. It will support the revitalization of Uptown Waterloo and Downtown Kitchener, two areas that were ignored so long but are now the heart of a great urban renaissance. And finally, it will provide a reliable and fast transit connection to Cambridge, which despite being a part of Waterloo Region, is disconnected and split from it by Highway 401 and the constant traffic jams on Highway 8.
Second, in his argument that free cars are better than public transit, Mr. Taylor completely ignores the fact that the private car, regardless of whether or not it is a hybrid, is the most costly and inefficient means of transportation to both the individual and society. The continuous cost of licensing, insurance, fuel, depreciation, parking, and maintenance negates any benefit of a ‘free’ car to any individual, let alone those with low incomes. Furthermore, he also ignores the cost of automobile dependence on taxpayers and society. The Region subsidizes drivers every year by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on road expansion and rehabilitation. The free cars under Mr. Taylor’s program will lead to thousands more cars, only increasing this burden. Public transit may cause customers to be late for work, but it is no different than a driver stuck in the very same traffic as the bus. Environmentally, cars are a massive drain on our resources in their production and use and are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. Finally, we cannot forget the price of collisions, accidents, and fatalities resulting from automobile use on individuals, families, and society.
Third, Mr. Taylor asserts that public transit is nothing more than a social service. I must agree with that assertion, although not in the same intent as Mr. Taylor. While it is true that public transit provides an essential means of mobility for low income families, seniors, students, and the disabled, high-quality public transit provides mobility choice for all people, regardless of demographics or income. This is the truest social service that transit can serve in our communities – providing freedom of choice. Nobody is served by a City or a Region dominated by the car and its dependency on it.
Since the municipal transit services were amalgamated to create Grand River Transit, service improvements, particularly the implementation of the iXpress, have elevated transit in Waterloo Region beyond a social service to a true mobility choice. One only has to see the diversity of people on a full bus – students, mothers with strollers, seniors, and yes, even suited businesspeople, to see that some of these people have made a conscious decision not to own or drive a car. If Waterloo Region is to succeed in attracting the best and brightest in jobs and people, we must continue this path to create a vibrant, diverse, and unique urban community linked by reliable and permanent rapid transit. Otherwise, we could give everyone a free car, but they might end up driving it somewhere else.
If this city is serious about pedestrian safety, how about not forcing a mid-block crossing on Richmond Street?
A new TTC System Map
An Unscientific Poll on Token Hoarding
“It cost $50,000 to print the 10-million tickets the TTC hopes will last through the rest of the year - far less than it would have cost to mint more tokens”
“Ticket hoardings were costing the TTC an estimated $45,000 a day as frugal riders bought 20 per cent more tokens than they needed”
—
Globe: Toronto transit halts sales of tokens to stop hoarding
I’ve been playing with this $45,000 per day loss figure that showed up in today’s article. Obviously, these are future losses, as the TTC is not losing anything until the fare hike takes effect on January 3rd. So some interesting (maybe?) number crunching here:
Something does not add up. The TTC continues to use the main line of “dangerously low” token supplies - an argument that makes no sense based on the numbers above. If only 180,000 are hoarded a day, it would take 222 days to deplete the supply of 40,000,000 tokens. Even if 180,000 tokens have been hoarded daily since November 6th, when the first token restrictions went into effect, that means 10.3-million hoarded tokens by January 2nd, leaving the TTC with a supply of 29.7-million (minus a couple million that may be lost somewhere).
And all of this completely ignores the fact that people use their tokens. With 1.5-million riders daily, approximately 600,000 are Metropass rides, leaving 900,000 rides on cash and token. That’s more than enough to replenish the daily estimate of 180,000 tokens being hoarded.
The TTC must stop using dwindling token supplies as the reason for this fare foolery. Whether or not these changes are justifiable by the numbers, be up front and honest about why customers are being continuously confused and inconvenienced by all these changes.
EDIT: Come to think of it, if the TTC sold 7.2 million hoarded tokens between now and January 2, that’s $16.2-million in revenue they’re gaining without having to provide the service. That has got to be worth something, no?
With news of the upcoming fare increase in January, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone that people would begin hoarding TTC tokens to insulate themselves from the increase. It’s not a new concept: token hoarding occurred with every previous fare hike (2007, 2006). The difference this time, however, is that the TTC does not have their usual back up of paper tickets, as they were discontinued last year due to counterfeiting. The result? A token shortage, with the initial restriction to 10 tokens on Nov. 6, followed by a restriction to 5 tokens just three days later on Nov. 9, and today, the unprecedented halt to bulk token sales altogether. And the “solution” (as described by Chair Adam Giambrone)? Reintroduce paper tickets, at least temporarily, until the new year.
In the context of the budgetary pressures facing the TTC this coming year, it is appropriate to limit any potential loss of revenue through token hoarding as much as possible. However, it would be nice if the Commission was up front and honest about it. The first news release on November 6 that limited token sales to 10 made no mention of revenue loss, only to “ensure enough tokens in the system” for customer use. One week later, a news release finally mentioned the issue of hoarding, but it wasn’t until today’s release that the potential loss (estimated at $5-million in 2010 — see issue with this below) of revenue was discussed. Without a doubt, the Commission was ill prepared to deal with a fare hike in a post-ticket environment, and the actions over the past few weeks clearly demonstrate this.
INTERESTING FACT CHECK:
From today’s press release:
“Without taking these steps today, the TTC could lose more than $5 million in 2010 revenues due to token hoarding.”
The TTC ordered 20 million tokens in 2008 to replace adult tickets, on top of the original order of 20 million tokens in 2006. Hoarding would have lost the TTC 25 cents per token. To make the TTC’s estimate to lose “more than” $5-million plausible, this means that every other token the TTC has would have to be hoarded. Of course, it is extremely unlikely every single token would be even in circulation, considering the number that are lost (I lost 4 in Montreal!) and the TTC likely has a large supply in reserve.
(Thanks to @anthonyschein for correcting my earlier tweet mistake!)
So now with another quick fix, it looks like we’ll have these paper tickets again. And that brings me to the main point of this post that marks my return to the blogging world.
How many quick fixes can the TTC’s fare system handle?
In a tweet earlier today, I summarized the list of changes made to TTC fare media in the past three years that have impacted the customer experience. These include:
All of these are essentially quick fixes to the fare system, all in the name of preventing fare fraud. And all these quick fixes have come with a cost:
This is a total of a minimum of $7-million for quick fixes on a fare system that is now officially obsolete, as the TTC finally adopted the Presto smartcard system that is being rolled out across the GTA last week. Adam Giambrone tweeted earlier today about a five-year timeframe for TTC Presto implementation. Given that, the total cost of these changes could be over $10-million (given additional annual cost of the new fancy holographic Metropasses). Given an nine year period between 2006 and 2015 (five year Presto target), the TTC has spent over $1.1M per year on capital alone to fight fraud. I’m curious how this cost-benefit is working out.
The worst part is, these quick fixes basically gave the TTC an excuse over the past three years to resist the adoption of Presto, a fare system that has been under development for six years. I know it is not this simple, but if the TTC had signed onto, and budgeted this $10M to actively work to implement Presto back in 2006, we would be only a year from a smartcard system that contains all sorts of security features to prevent the fraud these quick fixes have strived (and clearly failed) to do.
And now, we’re back to paper tickets, at least for the next couple months.
My comment posted on Macleans.ca blog, in response to why Tories claim Toronto’s streetcar contract is ‘not stimulus’:
Baird claims that because Toronto’s streetcar contract is over a 10 year period, it does not offer “immediate stimulus”, which is a load of crock (see, I can control my language!). The second the contract is signed, the whole chain of supply to build them will be initialized, from the engineers, parts manufacturers, and quite possibly, the construction of a new assembly facility in the GTA. The Toronto streetcar contract also has a “Canadian Content” clause as well, where at least 25% of the value of the contract must be spent in Canada.
The reason why this isn’t acceptable to the Tories is because unlike small scale road and bridge or sewer projects, this is long term, large scale thinking that they will likely not get any photo opportunities from. The first streetcar is not expected to roll off the assembly line for two years, and they’re very well aware that they need a big publicity stunt before that. Once again, the Tory mantra is not to ‘dream big’, but to resort to expediency and short-term political advantage.
While the economy was falling down, down, down, Harper was flying round, round round.
source: Macleans.ca
So Harper brought out the “Coalition isn’t patriotic because they didn’t have a flag at their news conference” card today in Question Period. By the way, this was an outright lie, there were in fact two flags at the news conference, as per the convention in displaying the Canadian flag with all the provincial and territorial flags. I pointed this out through a comment on the Macleans.ca blog, and was subsequently called a Muslim and a Terrorist (both of which I am not).
From the “Rules for Flying the Flag” Website:
“With flags of the Canadian provinces and territories
When provincial and territorial flags are flown with the National Flag of Canada, the order is based on the date of entry into Confederation of the provinces followed by the territories. In a grouping of flags that includes the National Flag of Canada and all of the flags of the provinces and territories, the order of precedence is:
1. National Flag of Canada
2. Ontario (1867)
3. Quebec (1867)
4. Nova Scotia (1867)
5. New Brunswick (1867)
6. Manitoba (1870)
7. British Columbia (1871)
8. Prince Edward Island (1873)
9. Saskatchewan (1905)
10. Alberta (1905)
11. Newfoundland (1949)
12. Northwest Territories (1870)
13. Yukon (1898)
14. Nunavut (1999)When there are more than three flagpoles/masts, the National Flag of Canada should be flown on the left of the observer facing the flags, followed by the flags of the provinces and territories. An additional National Flag of Canada may be displayed at the end of the line if desired. ”
So basically, the coalition leaders followed the rules. Because of this layout, the Canadian flags are on the outside, which means it’s really difficult to show blatant patriotism when you want to recognize that we are a federation of provinces and territories. Stephen Harper discovered how to get past this a long time ago by putting as many flags behind him as possible, as shown below:
source: PM Harper’s Flickr Site
I find it hilarious that the Tories have tried to villify the Coalition for this, when there are these examples of their poor flag-etiquette, like here, when all the provincial/territorial flags are displayed, but not at all in the order as required above:
source: PM Harper’s Flickr Site
Why are we even talking about something so trivial like this when there are much bigger things to worry about? The politics of this are really interesting, but when it comes down to accusations of treason and disloyalty to a country we all love, I have to draw a line. Grow up Mr. Harper.