Saturday, September 18, 2010

Half-formed idea: algorithmic approach to TTC expansion

This post arises from a combination of ideas.

1. A number of very loud political candidates want to wreck Transit City because they want subways. They seem to think LRTs now preclude subways later.

2. There is a sysadmin approach whereby hardware upgrades are algorithmic. They make a rule (presumably based on some calculations or intelligence or standard procedure) that if the system reaches X% capacity Y% of the time, they upgrade capacity.

3. It is possible to do vast 20-year economic projections of population growth, service use, and revenue generation, and to project how all of these will be affected by certain factors. They can then use these things to work out random crazy things like "If mortgage rates jump sharply today, how will that affect passenger loads at Pearson a year from now? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?"

So we combine all three of these things, and we get an algorithmic approach to TTC expansion. They determine that if a bus hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into an LRT, and if an LRT hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into a subway.

We know that better transit service will eventually lead to intensification, which will lead to a broader tax base and more transit users. This is the sort of thing economic forecasting can quantify, which can be used to cost out the upgrades, determine which will be most profitable most quickly, and ultimately work out an algorithm for prioritizing them.

So they get a bunch of smart people to figure all this out in specific terms and make a massive plan specifying conditions under which transit lines are upgraded and a method for determining which lines will be upgraded first. They make a plan to grow using internally generated revenue, and another plan for outside funding from other levels of government, so transit improvement isn't paralyzed by withdrawl of outside funding. Maybe internal funding is used to target the areas most in need, and external funding is used to target areas with most revenue-generation potential, so it can be presented more as an investment on funding applications. The plan could of course be tweakable as new factors come into play, but in general it should come down to "Once a route reaches X capacity, it gets upgraded."

Then this approach, and the algorithms and economic forecasting used to work it out, are all made publicly available, so people can see what exactly is driving specific expansion decisions, and can see that, yes, they will get a subway eventually. Hopefully this will protect our transit system from politicos who want to dismantle existing plans and remake it in their own image every election cycle (or at least make their plans look foolish) and encourage more long-term thinking.

Now, it's quite possible that the TTC already does this. I'd be very surprised if they didn't already have an economic forecast. If so, they should publicize this information - post it on their website and make people aware of its existence, to give more credibility to their plans and make "NO! Kill it and build a subway to my house!" politically unviable.

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