New year, same old crowded commute. Will it ever change?

On that score, transit patrons in the Toronto region confronting the post-holiday grind could be forgiven for being skeptical. After all, they’ve faced more than 20 years with little more than a plethora of political promises and a dearth of action on transit improvements.

There won’t be any new transit lines opening this year, but the TTC and Metrolinx do project a somewhat brighter commuting outlook for 2013. Here’s some of new things you’ll see:

• Affectionately called Artics, 27 new bendy buses should be running on the TTC in the fall. At 60 feet (18 metres) long versus a standard 40-foot bus, the Nova LFS Artics will hold about 112 people, compared with 65 on the usual bus.

• The TTC’s makeover of Pape Station will be complete this fall, making it fully accessible with new elevators, sliding doors, tactile surfaces and granite-edged stairs. It will also have a brighter look, thanks to new tiles and lighting. But it’s the Tim Hortons window that’s really expected to make commuters smile. The actual footprint of Pape Station is being enlarged, too, making for an easier transfer between bus and subway.

• TTC CEO Andy Byford expects to roll out a new customer charter this year. It won’t offer riders a money-back guarantee, but it will hold the system accountable for delivering on about 20 performance points such as punctuality and response times.

• Six new group station managers will be named early this year to oversee customer service and behind-the-scenes operations in their designated territory. “Their first job is to set up a structure underneath them which will include the conversion of collectors into station supervisors,” Byford said.

• Next-vehicle arrival information will be installed at 200 Toronto bus stops, and all TTC stations should finally have screens at their entrances that will inform riders about service interruptions before they put their tokens in the box.

• • More Presto readers at Union Station will accommodate the growing number of cards since GO Transit has discontinued its monthly paper passes.

• Construction of the York concourse at Union Station should be complete later this year, improving accessibility and allowing access to the PATH and the Great Hall.

• Acton’s new GO station opens Monday.

• There will be more parking on GO, as it opens new decked lots with 1,200 spots at Pickering, 1,000 at Ajax and 1,500 more spaces at Erindale Station.

• • A new 125-space park-and-ride lot at Highway 8 and Sportsworld Dr. officially opens Friday Jan. 4 for GO, Greyhound and Grand River Transit riders in Waterloo Region.

• The first segment of the Mississauga Transit Way will finally open along Highway 403 between Square One and Cawthra Rd., and the first phase of enhanced bus rapid transit service along Highway 2 in Durham Region is supposed to begin in July.

Major construction projects underway but not opening this year:

Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT: The first of a pair of giant tunnel-boring machines will be dropped into a launch shaft near Black Creek Dr. in February. It will begin digging east in late April. The second machine will begin tunneling in late June. They’re expected to take about a year from their launch to reach the end of the first phase of tunneling near Allen Rd.

A delay in tunneling, which was originally supposed to begin last summer, isn’t expected to affect the 2020 completion date of the line, which will run to Kennedy Station.

Construction of station walls is also expected to begin this year, and crews will begin building new shafts at Allen Rd., where the boring machines will be lifted out of the ground and re-launched.

Union Pearson Express: Construction will also continue along the airport rail link on the Georgetown South corridor and on a spur into Pearson. That service is expected to be running by summer 2015.

Spadina subway extension: Construction into York Region has just passed the halfway mark. The line is on track to open in late 2016.

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