This right here is such a great microcosm of why our transit system is terrible. Spending $300M on a streetcar that then costs $9M a year, serving something that today doesn't apparently warrant even a bus every 20 minutes.
Here's an operating cost estimate for this using the current MAX infrastructure. What does it cost per revenue hour for a transit bus? It used to be a convenient $100 an hour, but a few years ago had trended closer to $125 and adding in inflation, let's say $150 per hour as a reasonable estimate. (It's depressingly hard to find these sorts of basic metrics here in Canada, but this is based on at least one study I've seen.) It takes about 15 minutes to go from Westbrook to MRU; the existing Teal MAX service is scheduled at 11 to 13 minutes, but it's good to round up so that there's a little margin for driver breaks / headway maintenance and because it makes for easy to remember schedules. So each round trip from Westbrook to MRU takes 1/2 an hour and costs $75.
Currently, the MAX runs a bus every 23 minutes on weekdays, from roughly 6 AM to 11 PM, and a bus every 30 minutes on weekends, from 6 AM to 8 PM. (Universities are famously quiet on Saturday nights.) This is not particularly effected by COVID cuts; the opening day frequencies for MAX on weekdays were 18 minutes peak, "20-25" minutes offpeak, but only 6 AM to 9 PM -- it's probably the exact same number of buses, with a few extra trips for late evening service rather than a few extra peak trips. Weekends have seen a cut in service, from "20-25" minute (read 23) headways up to 30 minutes; I'm actually not sure whether waiting on average 3 minutes less for a bus is actually better for most customers than having a bus come with a predictable schedule, on the half hour. In any case, today's schedule has 44 daily trips on weekdays, and 29 on weekends (and holidays) for a total of 7,168 hours of service, which costs about $1,080,000 per year.
Let's consider increased service; if we go to 15 minute headways, with the same hours, then that's going to cost $1,760,000 per year. Okay, let's go to 10 minutes on weekdays and run an extra hour later; let's run weekends 3 hours longer, until 11 PM. That's $2,610,000 per year. What if we go to 5 minutes for peak periods on weekdays, and 10 minutes otherwise, and run until 1 AM? That's better service than the Blue Line! It's $3,430,000. Which is barely one third of the operating cost above. Even a (ridiculously) intense service of 5 minute headways, 5 AM to 2 AM; more frequent at 1 AM than the LRT at rush hour is only $6,900,000. This table shows the cost estimates:
So why would a streetcar cost $9.3 million per year for operating cost? My guess is two main things: 1). streetcars just plain cost more to run - signalling, track maintenance, etc.; the TTC runs streetcars for around $320 per hour, although they also have expensive buses (Toronto is not a cheap city to operate in), streetcars are about 50% more expensive per hour than bus. 2). All of the extra overhead associated with running a bespoke transit service with a handful of vehicles unlike everything else in the fleet; there will need to be a garage (where?) and dedicated mechanics and so on, where adding buses number 151-156 in a depot is a much smaller marginal cost.
The column on the right of my table is 4 times the operating cost; what that represents is the cost to operate the entire Teal MAX at that frequency, since the route takes about 53 minutes one way; round it up to 60 minutes. $9.3 million in additional operating cost (the difference between 'current' and 'frequent') has the entire Teal MAX route running at the 'frequent' service -- 5 minutes in the peaks, 10 minutes offpeaks and weekends, better service than the Blue Line LRT.
That could be done today, without $292,000,000 in capital funding. (It could be done for free by putting $292,000,000 in an endowment and spending the return.) Yes, we'd need to find the operating money, but guess what? We'd need to do that to capitalize on the benefit if a streetcar was built anyways. Or we could do what we did with the MAX lines; waste tens of millions of dollars in capital funding because we can't find the operating money to provide actual decent service. We insist on crippling our transit system because of arbitrary accounting rules dividing between capital and operating. Analogies between government budgets and household budgets are often silly, but can you imagine a household deciding they could afford to buy a BMW SUV because it came out of their ample capital budget, then turn around and decide there was no money in their operating budget for gasoline?
pub-calgary.escribemeetings.com
calgarytranspo.wordpress.com
