posted on October 08, 2009

Fun With Figures at Metrolinx

By: Steve Munro
Published: October 7, 2009
Source: Steve Munro’s Web Site

Monday’s approval of Metrolinx’ plans to run diesel trains on the Weston/Georgetown corridor stirred up lots of discussion here, in the mainstream media and at City Hall. If this approval rested on solid data and projections, we could simply argue the fine points and debate rollout plans. However, the claims made by Metrolinx for emissions from the project, comparisons with auto travel and supposed reductions by redirected auto travel depend on calculations that are transparently wrong.

In brief, Metrolinx assumes that every GO train trip, both ways, every day, all day in the corridor will be completely full of passengers, all 1,900 of them (a fully seated load on a 12-car train). This absurd premise overstates the likely ridership by a factor of at least 4, probably greater (details follow later in this article) with the following effects:

• Pollution caused by the trains is a fixed number determined by how many trips they make. If there are fewer passengers, the pollution per passenger trip is much larger than claimed by Metrolinx.
• If there are fewer passengers, then fewer auto trips are diverted to rail. This does not affect the pollution saving per trip (presuming that one even agrees with this premise), but the total saving is greatly reduced because so many fewer trips are diverted.

Opening day (2015) traffic projected for the corridor is 184 GO trains and 140 UPRL (Airport) trains. The total trips calculated by Metrolinx for the corridor GO services is 349,600 per weekday. To put this in context, the entire GO rail system carries about 180,000 passengers per day today. In practice, the trains will carry nowhere near 1,900 per trip on average. Peak travel will be heavily inbound in the AM and outbound in the PM, with lightly loaded trains in the counterpeak. During the off-peak, loads will be much lower than at peak, and some trips (notably inbound late evening runs) will be almost empty. The same patterns can be seen on the Toronto subway system.

I am inserting the break here for those who don’t want to read the gory details, although the conclusions are down at the end.

The source material from Metrolinx on which this discussion rests includes background material on the calculations of emissions.

What is the All-Day Demand?

At this point, I must engage in some “back of the envelope planning”. Transit lines have a fairly predictable demand curve through the day, and this can be used to extrapolate from peak period demand projections to all day loads.

Peak hour demand generally represents half of the peak period demand given that the shoulder peak hours carry fewer passengers. A three-hour peak can be estimated at twice the peak hour. Double this to get both AM and PM peak demands.

The off-peak service on a well-used line (such as urban routes in Toronto) carries about half the all-day ridership provided that the service is reasonably frequent.

If we have a peak hour ridership of 1,000, then the all-day number will be somewhere around 8,000. (Double the peak hour to get the peak period, double again for AM and PM, double a third time to include off-peak riders.) The 8:1 ratio will be lower if the service and/or travel demand is strongly skewed to peak travel due to other factors such as an inability to reach the line thanks to poor feeder services or full parking lots.

Note here that I am trying to be as generous as possible in adjusting the Metrolinx figures to avoid overstating my case.

If GO will be carrying 1,900 per train at peak on a 15-minute headway, that’s 7,600 per peak hour. The corresponding all-day ridership would be 60,800. This number could be affected by various changes in the assumptions:

• If peak service runs at 12- or 10- minute headways, and off-peak demand stays at the same ratio, then all-day ridership would go to 76,000 or 91,200.
• If off-peak demand behaves more like commuter rail as we know it rather than like a heavy urban line, then the all day riding will be substantially lower. A fifty percent reduction in projected off-peak demand would reduce the ratio from 8:1 to 6:1 and the figures above would scale accordingly. This would reduce the 60,800 number to 45,600.
• Some counterpeak demand will exist (again by analogy to the subway system). However, counterpeak riders will almost certainly need frequent local transit at the outer end of their trips.
• The ability of GO to attract riding strongly depends on good transit service at the outlying stations and intensive development within walking distance of them. This is vital for counterpeak trips as well as for eliminating the need for parking for all inbound riders. (Again, compare to the subway network.) Nothing in Metrolinx’ plans suggests that this will actually occur or be funded, but it should be an integral part of their plans. They talk about “Mobility Hubs” but don’t make any provision for actually bringing them into existence.

This gives us a range of all-day demand between roughly 45,000 and 90,000 trips, not 349,600. Therefore demand-based calculations are off by a factor somewhere between 4 and 7.5.

By contrast, the demand modelling backgrounder to “The Big Move” projects much higher peak hour demand on lines in this corridor. However, this could only be achieved with headways in the 5-6 minute range (10-12 trains per hour per direction) which is substantially more service than the model parameters for the emission calculations.

Those 184 GO trains are not all destined for Brampton and beyond, but would also run on the Milton and Barrie lines (all day) and the Bolton service (peak). If the Metrolinx demand estimates are believed (many planners feel they are exaggerated), then the combined peak point demand for the peak hour is about 55,000 passengers. This is considerably more than the subway which strains at much above 30,000. At 1,900 per train, this would require one full GO train every two minutes, or 30 per hour. Clearly, the opening day 184 trains will handle far fewer passengers.

Adjusting for Demand Levels and Tier 4 Diesel Standards

For the sake of argument, I will take the base data used to calculate emissions at face value and will not challenge the calculation of pollution outputs from the diesel trains nor from the autos they might replace. The real issue here is the overstatement of demand.

• The NOX per passenger trip (see page 2 of the document linked above) for GO trains is shown as 5.71 grams versus 6.61 for autos. However, this is for a Tier 2 diesel. If we adjust for Tier 4, the train value drops to 1.14. However, correcting for the actual demand places the per passenger value at between 4.56 and 8.55.
• Particulate Matter (PM) per passenger trip is shown as .20 grams for Tier 2 diesels and .56 grams for autos. Tier 4 diesel is expected to drop this by 90% to .02 grams. Correcting for the demand level gives a range of .08 to .15.
• Carbon Dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is shown as .51 kg per passenger for diesel (the engine tier has no effect on CO2) and 6.08 for autos. Correcting for demand raises the diesel value to a range of 2.04 to 3.83 kg.

In brief, PM and CO2 are still better than autos, but not by as much; NOX may be better or worse depending on assumptions regarding demand.

Pollution from the Airport Link

The Airport service is in a much worse situation because the ratio of horsepower to passengers is much higher and, with that, the pollution per trip. Metrolinx uses Tier 3 ratings for their calculations. Even without adjusting for possible overstatement of passenger volumes, the UPRL figures (page 3 of the linked document) are sobering.

• NOX for airport trips is 77.54g by train, but only 6.61g by auto. Adjusting for Tier 4 only reduces the train value to about 15.5g, over twice the auto value.
• PM values are 1.41g and 0.56g respectively. Correcting for Tier 4 (roughly 20% of Tier 3) brings the PM value for trains down to .28g.
• CO2 numbers are 6.93kg versus 6.08kg.

For NOX and CO2, the airport service, even at Tier 4, will generate more pollution than the auto trips it replaces. This directly contradicts claims that the airport route will reduce pollution.

Metrolinx assumes that every trip to and from the airport will carry 56 passengers. This doesn’t sound like much, but is in fact a seated load for the cars that will be used in their new configuration. Any decrease in the average load per trip raises the emissions per trip accordingly.

Diverting Auto Trips to Reduce Pollution

Now we must turn to the auto side of the balance sheet. I will take the calculated emissions per trip as given by Metrolinx, but of course the number of trips diverted to trains will be much lower than claimed. Therefore, the emission reduction due to this diversion (assuming you accept the premise of such diversion) will be much lower than claimed by a factor somewhere from 4 to 7.5.

As an example, total GO CO2 emissions (which are not affected by Tier 4 standards) are given as 46 kilotonnes per year for rail and 553 kt for auto, a difference of 507 kt. Once the demand correction is applied, this falls to a range between 68 and 127 kt. There is a saving, but not as much as claimed. This will be offset by the higher pollution from train operations on the airport service.

It’s important to remember that this “reduction” is in the airshed of the Barrie/Georgetown/Milton corridor while the new pollution due to the trains is concentrated along the rail lines themselves.

Conclusion

The calculations underlying the Minister’s approval of the Metrolinx proposal are deeply flawed to the point of invaliding claims made about environmental impacts. The Minister and the Government have committed to a major policy decision that is not supported by materials filed by the proponent.

Whether this is an error of oversight (nobody recognized the flaw in ridership estimates) or an error of misrepresentation (someone hoped that this flaw would go unnoticed) is not for me to say. Either way, this shows extraordinarily poor analytical skills in Metrolinx and in the Ministry that this was not caught.

To reiterate (for those who scrolled all the way down to skip the details), correcting the Metrolinx data for Tier 4 emission standards and for their overstatement of riding in the corridor:

• For GO services:
  • NOX emissions per passenger trip will lie in a range straddling the projected emissions for cars.
  • PM emissions per passenger trip will be much lower for trains than for autos.
  • CO2 emissions are lower for trains than autos, but the difference is much less than claimed.
• For Airport services (with no adjustment for possible overstatement of demand):
  • NOX for train passengers will be over twice that for auto users.
  • PM per passenger trip will be half that of autos.
  • CO2 per passenger trip will be greater for trains than for autos.

Because the demand in the corridor is overstated by a factor of at least 4, claims of pollution reduction due to diversion of auto trips to rail are similarly inflated.

Metrolinx and the Ministry of the Environment owe everyone an explanation for this situation. Community groups have worked tirelessly in support of electrified transit and endured much criticism rooted in the belief that any trains, no matter what their technology, were vastly superior to auto travel. Electrification was something for tomorrow, something that needs a two-year study, something about which oddly little was known beyond its being “too expensive”.

Do the study, but structure it so that important information — basics like a validation of capital costs and operating savings — are available to guide policy decisions as soon as possible. If past studies (some as recent as Metrolinx own evaluation of the Lake Shore proposal in 2008) are wrong, explain why we should believe a new set of consultants more than the old ones.

We have already had one ministerial resignation this week in Ontario, and the Minister of the Environment would do well to encourage Metrolinx’ participation in reviewing the validity of their environmental claims.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under A Grand Plan, GO Transit, Transit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

14 Responses to “Fun With Figures at Metrolinx”

1.Clean Diesel Test Cases says:

October 7, 2009 at 11:15 am

My principal concern is that the lungs of 300,000 people along the corridor, including children and seniors, will be used as test cases for the adverse health affects of a technology and fuel that has not been scientifically analyzed yet, ‘clean diesel’.

While Metrolinx and the Minister of the Environment explore air mitigation measures and monitor our air from these ‘clean emissions’ generated from a high capacity corridor, our health costs will rise as respiratory illnesses increase in our neighbourhoods.

The residents of the rail corridor will be guinea pigs for a new, unproven, highly toxic technology, when one technology, which is proven and internationally implemented, electric trains, is not implemented at the outset. Electric trains are a proven mitigation standard to protect health.

What a waste of time and money.

2.Tom West says:

October 7, 2009 at 11:26 am

Metrolinx seemed slightly obsessed with what *could* happen (full trains all day long), rather than what *will* happen (full trains in peak only). They are also put far too much emphasis on “per passenger” emissions, rather than total emissions (which is what really matters). The way to get really low emissions is for people travel less often/less distance, but I’ve yet to see anything on reducing overall transport demand. (I would love to work close to where I live. I expect my town would love for my employer to have its office close to where I live as well, and my employer would like the lower rent/tax where I live too… it’s just a downtown Toronto address somehow seems to be required).

Could you do some similar calculations looking at fuel costs vs. electricity costs? Given that’s per train, we can sidestep the passenger count issue.

Steve: I will have to mine that info out of various studies. In this post I wanted to concentrate on the errors in Metrolinx methodology and, by extension, their conclusions. There is another saving beyond fuel, by the way. With electric, you don’t need as many trains to provide the same service because of their superior acceleration. This reduces fleet (capital and maintenance) and crew costs.

3. Mark Dowling says:

October 7, 2009 at 11:32 am

Steve – the first thing I notice from that spreadsheet is that GO trains are assumed to have 5000bhp and UPRL trains to have 2000hp. Does GO have ambitions to pull 16 car sets to Bolton and has anyone told the GTAA for noise planning at their platform that all UPRL trains will be four powered cars and not 2 + 2 unpowered trailers? I seem to remember these numbers being linked from a previous post of yours, at least the Blue22 ones anyway.

4. zb says:

October 7, 2009 at 11:36 am

The entire population of Brampton will be using the GO train every day. What’s so hard to believe about that?

5. Andrew MacKinnon says:

October 7, 2009 at 1:16 pm

More fun with figures:

“Our current estimate of the cost of electrifying the Georgetown line only is $1.5-billion. We estimate the cost of electrifying the GO system, including Lakeshore East and Lakeshore West and the other lines, to be somewhere between $7 and $10-billion”. From the http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/an-interview-with-rob-prichard/article1314661/” rel=”nofollow”>Globe and Mail.

That’s $30 million/km for the Georgetown line. This seems absurdly high to me.

Steve: Compare to the figures quoted in the Metrolinx Benefits Case Analysis for Lake Shore electrification. The table on page 2 of the report (page 9 of the PDF), give a cost of $1.89-billion with service at 10 trains/hour for the electric option. This is roughly a $1-billion premium over the diesel option. Note that this will include some costs that would be shared with other routes if the whole network were priced such as the complex wiring of Union Station and its approaches, as well as a new maintenance facility for electric trains. Even so, this gives a cost somewhere around $14-million per route/km, much lower than the cost quoted for the GSSE.

However, the incremental operating costs for diesel are $215-million, while for electric they are $141-million.

The same study also states quite clearly that achieving the desired level of passenger capacity in the Lake Shore corridor is impossible with the constraints of corridor width and other train operations if diesel trains are used. The reason for this is that such trains accelerate and decelerate more slowly than electric trains, and therefore occupy more space for safe operation. This translates to a limitation on train spacing and, hence, train headways. Much higher capital costs are shown for the full build-out of electrical operations, but this is a configuration that could not be operated with diesels.

6. Kevin Milburn says:

October 7, 2009 at 2:25 pm

Very well written piece Steve. Too bad Metrolinx don’t listen to us when we can see the trees for the forest and they can’t.

The ARL will never pollute less than the cars they are to replace. The business model is flawed from the outset.

Now we have various companies chiming in with the estimated cost of Tier 4 locomotives being an additional $5 million per vehicle. So to convert an MP40 at $5 mill will cost a further $5 mill. All of a sudden the electric alternatives doesn’t look that expensive does it?

Will we ever get the truth out of Metrolinx?

7. Michael B says:

October 7, 2009 at 2:56 pm

I understand the issue about not using electric trains. However I think the debate over pollution is being blown way over the top. The people in this corridor bought homes knowing that a train line is there, and further more a train line that already uses diesel trains.

There is no room to complain knowing that a rail line does not stay static and it could see more or less trains as time goes on.

So the residents of the corridor should have thought about that before buying homes on a rail line.

Same issue happens with people who buy near the nuclear plant in Pickering, or the airport in Mississauga, etc. They all knew these places were there. Yet they choose to complain.

Steve: Your analogy is inappropriate. The Weston Subdivision, starting from Strachan Avenue at the south, has seen a long, slow decline in use to the point that there is little non-passenger traffic at the bottom end. CPR gave up space on its site of the right-of-way that became the Railpath, and huge areas that once held freight operations are now empty. Only because this space exists can Metrolinx propose to restore the corridor to 8-track operation with frequent service.

The design of the Airport link requires that it have two dedicated tracks for its own use rather than sharing trackage with GO.

From a pollution, noise and vibration point of view, the number of trains in the lower end of the corridor will rise immensely. Saying that “people should have known” begs the question of why developments were allowed to occur along these rail corridors. This happened for hte simple reason that nobody, including the politicians or planners, expected such a huge increase in rail traffic.

And Tom West, this is a big city. The idea that people are going to stick to their own neighbourhood and that is going to reduce the need for good all day transit service, I think is a sad sad idea. We should have had all day transit service on these lines 30 years ago instead of waiting till now.

If you want to live closer to work, then move into Toronto. Business should not be moving out of the core, because that only leads to more pollution, sprawl, and lower transit use. If we want to reduce how much people travel, than people should be buying closer into the city.

But that being said, we should still be providing all day frequent service on all train lines. If we did, we would probably see GO carrying close to a million riders a day, considering Sydney, which is not much smaller than Toronto carries almost 900,000 riders a day on their suburban rail network. Only difference is they run all day service on all lines.

Steve: And that entire network is operated with electric equipment.

8. Morgan C. says:

October 7, 2009 at 5:48 pm

MIchael B, If you bought a house near Pearson knowing full well that there’s an airport there, and then our government decided to increase flights by a factor of 7-9 time are you saying that’s just too bad, you should have expected that? Really?

9. Karl Junkin says:

October 7, 2009 at 6:22 pm

MRC’s time-distance charts’ scenarios in the GSSE EPR (Appendix A), while poor quality compared to the Hatch Mott Macdonald time-distance charts prepared for October last year on the Lakeshore Corridor (Appendix E-1, beautiful), do show Georgetown peak period headways of, on average, around 7.5 minutes or better, when local and express are combined, 15 minutes each or better (counter peak for local service is at 30′ though, curiously, even though express rail counter peak frequency is the same as its peak frequency, suggesting that Metrolinx is underestimating the importance of local service).

Those same charts also show UPRL sharing the tracks hosting the express rail portion of the service. I overlaid the same-direction tracks for GO/VIA, and found that they do need 3 tracks, but not 4, that 4th track is the UPRL’s doing. GO/VIA, based on Metrolinx volumes excluding UPRL, will not fit on 2 tracks.

Steve: What is quite clear is that in all of these studies there are different assumptions about service levels and design every time someone addresses the question. Getting consistent answers about implementation cost and operational effects is challenging. A big challenge for the electrification study will be to explain why all of the previous studies, including the one for the Lakeshore corridor, are wrong, and if so why the government paid for them.

10. Nick J Boragina says:

October 7, 2009 at 6:43 pm

“My principal concern is that the lungs of 300,000 people along the corridor, including children and seniors, will be used as test cases for the adverse health affects of a technology and fuel that has not been scientifically analyzed yet, ‘clean diesel’.”

What a load of bull.

If adding one more train is going to result in the death of 300,000 people, then would not removing one more train be very helpful? In fact, lets remove all the trains and see how well that works! So long as they are not in your backyard, thats fine and dandy! Have them drive along the 401 and be in those people’s back yards!

Steve: Your comment is a load of bull. Metrolinx is not going to add one train, but almost 400 to what now operates in the corridor south of West Toronto. The Minister’s order allows Metrolinx to go ahead with their new service provided they use Tier 4, provided that it is actually commercially available. Electric trains are available today.

To add to the confusion, the Metrolinx numbers, once corrected, lead one to suspect that pollution tradeoffs between the corridor and “diverted” trips elsewhere are anywhere near as rosy as claimed.

11. M. Briganti says:

October 7, 2009 at 8:01 pm

I lived behind a low-volume rail line for years and I can honestly tell you that if I lived anywhere along the Georgetown rail corridor now, rather than fight this, I would simply get out now while the getting’s good.

Electric or diesel, their property values will tank and the noise/vibration will be far worse than the health effects of all the added pollution. Who the heck would want to live there with electric trains plowing through every 5 minutes? The noise will be constant.

12. Jason Bomers says:

October 7, 2009 at 8:55 pm

A while back I was trying to calculate how much in health care costs the diesel expansion would cost the city and the province. With this analysis on pollution levels it would be much easier. It costs 2 billion a year in respiratory illness related to traffic congestion in Toronto. That is A LOT of money. If there is actually an increase in pollution or a similar amount than for cars taken off the road with diesel, the province will have to pay, especially for those people who live along the corridor. With electrification, if the pollution levels are non-existent, how much will the province save? It would be interesting to try and put a dollar amount on this savings and see how long it would take for electrification to pay for itself.

13. Jonathon Markowski says:

October 7, 2009 at 10:33 pm

When Pearson gets busy, they build a new airport… when bus routes get busy we build subways, why is it that commuter rail operations are constricted to the small array of existing surface corridors?

Steve: For the same reason that we don’t build subway lines by tearing new rights-of-way through neighbourhoods. Also, when bus routes get busy, we build LRT (or should). The moment you want a new railway corridor, it will be almost impossible to find one that is completely on the surface. Underground operation precludes diesel trains and greatly increases construction costs.

14. James Bow says:

October 7, 2009 at 10:49 pm

Tangentally related to this, given that Kitchener GO trains would use the Weston corridor, is a new report coming out talking about the feasibility of extending Milton GO service to Cambridge, and it looks like Waterloo Region has some interesting things to consider.

Reports on GO Kitchener and GO Cambridge claim that both services could be up and running by 2011, assuming the province came forward with funds. GO Kitchener, however, is a lot more expensive. Initial costs would run to around $180 million, and would give us a number of additional trains, but taking two hours to get from Kitchener to Toronto. To slash 30 minutes off the run would require the spending of at least another $300 million or so.

GO Cambridge could be done for around $110 million, and there’s no extra money required. The bottleneck that used to exist at Milton is now gone, and all that would be required is completing a second track between Milton and Cambridge, and paying for the construction of four stops (Galt Collegiate, Franklin Avenue Park ‘n’ Ride, Highway 6 and Campbellville). Now the Region, the province and GO have to choose.

Even though I live in Kitchener, and would see substantial benefit if we could fully upgrade Kitchener’s GO service (which would mean a similar increase in speed for VIA’s service), I’m thinking it might be better if Cambridge gets GO service first, because while GO Kitchener increases service, it doesn’t increase service choices. Cambridge residents still have to trek to Kitchener to take the new trains. GO Cambridge, on the other hand, adds a completely new service for region residents to access. This improves the accessibility of inter-city transit in the region. Your thoughts?