Torontonians may have forgotten Mayor Miller’s promise of a one-number-to-call service to facilitate accessing information about municipal services, but the minions at city hall haven’t forgotten to keep spending. John Barber reported yesterday, the 3-1-1 service, modelled after similar city services call centres in the USA, will need another $30.6 million, on top of what has already been spent to become operational. The project has already missed its target implementation date by four years with no certainty when, if ever, the service will launch. And if Baltimore’s success is mirrored in Toronto, the almost 200 employees working on the system will be answering as many questions from their city hall colleagues as from the public.
The story should not be abut the delay and over-expenditure – which is beginning to look like a repeat of the Y2K computer leasing scandal that the Milleristas were going to ensure could never happen again – but about the way the Toronto bureaucracy consistently makes mountains out of mole-hills and life-time careers out of six-month projects. While the Toronto Transit Commission is usually the biggest culprit, this latest boondoggle shows the rest of the administration is equally capable of generating waste and delay along with new jobs. As Barber reports, 3-1-1 service was implemented years ago in a number of American cities, but Toronto would never just buy the system to operate it off-the-shelf. No, Toronto would have to reinvent the service first.
Miller was in Europe last week having his picture taken with lovely streetcars and marvelling about how they are a model for his vision of light rail in Toronto. When Toronto, years ago, determined that it needed to start replacing its fleet of streetcars the TTC immediately concluded no street car already built and tested and in use carry millions of passengers a day in cities around the world would ever work in Toronto. The TTC’s response was to start hiring consultants and engineers to design a new street car from scratch, put it out to tender and, after a few years when world class manufacturers submitted their bids, tell same companies that they failed to understand the TTC’s design specifications, thus giving them cause to throw out all the bids and start over. Like the 3-1-1 service the street car project is years late with no order yet placed or delivery scheduled. All because the TTC insists on re-inventing the wheel, so to speak.
Or the matter of tickets and tokens; the TTC annually claims to have lost millions of dollars to counterfeit transit tickets and tokens while riders long to join almost every the modern city in switching to electronic fare cards that make riding transit easier, increase revenue for the transit operators and are ultimately much more secure. The regional transit co-ordinating authorities have pressured the TTC for years to get with the 20th century, starting long before that century ended. But the TTC said the systems were unproved, wouldn’t work in Toronto, weren’t a priority, etc, and would take 15-20 years to implement. So Toronto uses a fare collection system designed before WWII, loses millions annually and discourages transit use while its staff study the systems that having been working in London, New York, Washington, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris – you name it – for years. Apparently no one ever thinks to ask London and New York who sold them their systems, get a few bids and order a system that would have saved money, increased ridership and paid for itself years ago.
Another example; after years of pressure from riders, the TTC introduced a service to send text message and emails to riders to notify them of delays and interruptions on the subway. The TTC publicity minions proudly declared the service was up-and-running earlier this year. So now I regularly get messages that “subway service has been suspended between x and y stations BUT no one thought that riders would also want to know when service resumes even though such announcements (interruption and resumption) are routine in TTC stations and on the trains. Recently, on a mild winter day with light snow, I received four notices of subway service suspensions on two of three lines over a three hour period. One by one, my options for getting home disappeared. But having experienced this new service before, I went to the nearest station anyway, and – surprise – all lines were operating normally. No doubt the TTC has a team of consultants and IT engineers working on a service to inform riders when service has resumed while wondering why riders are unsubscribing from the current useless service.
But I am reassured that in 2 or 3 or maybe more years, I will be able to dial 3-1-1 and connect to a highly trained call centre operator who will inform me that a project team is taking my concern very seriously. First, please deposit $15 million.
