A proposal by mayoral candidate Olivia Chow to improve the city’s bus services raises an obvious question: Why isn’t that mode of transportation a bigger part of the transit debate?

While most of the talk these days in Toronto is about light rail transit (LRT) and subways, Chow revealed last week that if elected she would increase bus capacity by 10 per cent on the city’s busiest routes by keeping soon-to-be-retired buses in service.

The move would cost an estimated $15 million per year, adding more capacity at only a fraction of what it costs to build dedicated lanes for bus rapid transit (BRT) or an LRT.

To some, the suggestion makes sense.

“I have always argued that the surface system carries the majority of riders,” says Councillor Gord Perks. “And it’s that reliability and frequency — that backbone — that builds ridership. Not pencil-crayon planning with subways that may or not get built a decade from now,” says the councillor, who recently used that argument — unsuccessfully — to try to stop council from approving the Scarborough subway.

Among other things, Perks and others argued that the there would not be enough riders along the route to justify a subway.

The TTC will have retired 185 buses by the end of the year, and it’s debatable whether they could stay on the road.

Commission staff are looking into Chow’s proposal, but already, spokesman Danny Nicholson says there are two problems.

“The buses we’re going to retire are really old. The older ones have reached the end of their lifespan,” he says, having gone through a rebuild and in some cases put in close to 900,000 kilometres.

“The other question is, where do we store them?”

The TTC needs space at its maintenance yards for the new articulated buses that will arrive this year. Twenty are already running on the 7 Bathurst and 29 Dufferin routes and more will be added. Chow’s plan has not yet addressed the storage issue.

Video: TTC introduces new articulated bus

The longer buses will save the transit agency millions by reducing the number of vehicles it needs, but won’t provide an increase in overall route capacity because there will be fewer of them on the road.

To make Chow’s idea work, about 100 extra buses would be needed. They could run on some of the TTC’s busiest surface routes, including 32 Eglinton West, 35 Jane, 36 Finch West, 29 Dufferin and 25 Don Mills.

That number would decrease crowding levels at peak periods by 10 per cent.

But there is also the question of accessibility. The TTC thinks adding new low-floor streetcars and articulated buses will allow Wheel-Trans passengers to use the conventional system for more trips. This would not be possible with the older buses.

Chow has said the cost of the buses could be covered by the city budget.

Perks agrees it could be an easy fit and says money could be diverted away from the Scarborough subway and the 1.6 per cent property tax increase approved by council for 2016 to build it.

“The increase was just to deal with capital on a new three-stop subway line,” says Perks. “For context, 1.6 per cent is $44 million a year, forever. That is substantially more than what you would need to increase peak service by 10 per cent across the city.”

Perks, who reviewed the TTC budget years ago when he was on former mayor David Miller’s budget committee, says Chow’s estimate of $15 million for the extra buses is correct.

Some transit experts think the money could even be found internally in the TTC, by reducing the number of drivers per subway car from two to one, or by improving the agency’s high absenteeism rate, which is costly because replacement drivers have to be brought in.

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And there could be other efficiencies.

The TTC recently acknowledged it was losing up to $5 million annually in its bus maintenance and shops department because employees weren’t sending vehicles back to manufacturers for repairs covered under warranty.

At a recent commission meeting, CEO Andy Byford acknowledged the antiquated and siloed nature of the TTC, which means some departments are still reliant on paper records and are reluctant to seek help from other departments.

Buses are also a big part of Metrolinx’s Big Move regional transportation project. But instead of more service on localized routes, the agency’s plan includes dedicated bus lanes on major corridors.

One of those projects, the $1.4 billion YRT-Viva bus rapidway on Highway 7, is already proving a success despite the fact that not much of it has been built.

Buses on the small stretch that opened this year between Bayview Ave. and Highway 404 are running 30 per cent faster. The next section of rapidway, from Highway 404 to Warden Ave., opens this fall. Other rapid bus systems through the GTA are planned if the next wave of the Big Move gets funding.

These include a 40-kilometre route on Dundas St. through Halton Region, Peel Region and Toronto for $600 million; and a 36-kilometre BRT on Highway 2 through Durham Region and on Ellesmere Rd. in Scarborough at a cost of $500 million.

The transit agency’s overall plan opts for LRTs in places that need more passenger capacity, such as the line currently under construction on Eglinton, which will move passengers 60 per cent faster than buses.

It will be able to carry up to 5,900 passengers an hour at peak, compared with 2,000 passengers an hour for buses in mixed traffic.

Perks says he understands the transit hierarchy.

“Buses are the way you build ridership, and as they get full, then you look at some kind of rail-based system,” he says. “The light rail work that we were doing at council under Transit City was an incremental upgrade from areas where buses had built transit ridership, (to) where you’d look at the next technological step.”

But he says the move doesn’t erase the need for the TTC to add to its fleet of 1,900 buses.

“Transit is a pretty plain-vanilla thing,” says Perks. “Planners get excited about smartcards and big moves,” he says, but “that’s not exciting to transit riders. Transit riders want to know that if they miss a bus there’s another one coming in a couple of minutes and there will be a seat.

“That’s all they want.”

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