TTC chair Josh Colle, seen on an eastbound Queen streetcar in December, says part of the charter’s value is that it allows the public to hold the transit agency to account.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Toronto's transit agency is pledging to put fully accessible streetcars on three routes and expand Wi-Fi to more of the downtown subway stations, part of a long list of commitments in this year's customer service charter.
There are 38 promises in the 2015 charter unveiled Friday, though a number of them have been announced before.
"It shows our customers that we are listening to them," said Toronto Transit Commission deputy CEO Chris Upfold. "Every year, we pick the things that we think we can deliver, we can think have meaningful impact to our customers and that our customers tell us [are] important."
The 2015 commitments are grouped into themes around accessibility, cleanliness, being informative, modernizing and renewing the system and being responsive. There are also more overarching goals that speak to the safety, reliability and transparency of the service as a whole.
The goals are not ranked by importance, with Mr. Upfold stressing that they intend to complete all of them.
"For different customers and different people who use the system there are different priorities," said TTC chair Josh Colle, who added that he would not want "to suggest that some of them are not as important as others by ranking them."
Among the specific promises is a pledge to have new and accessible streetcars running on the Spadina, Bathurst and Harbourfront routes by the end of this year. This goal relies on Bombardier sorting out production problems that have resulted in only three new streetcars entering service since last summer. The TTC will need to get 28 more streetcars this year to meet the goal.
The TTC is also promising people will be able to see online when the next train is arriving and that new maps will go up in all subway stations, transit shelters and streetcars. There will also be bike-repair stands set up at 10 stations, the locations of which have yet to be determined.
Some of the other commitments had been promised before and have, in some cases, already begun.
The completion of renovations at Union station has long been promised to be done for the Pan Am Games. All-door boarding on streetcars was part of a service expansion promised Monday. And accelerating the rollout of the Presto fare-card system was also revealed this week. All three are listed as charter commitments.
Mr. Colle said that part of the charter's value is that it allows the public to hold the transit agency to account. They had achieved 63 of the 70 goals identified in the previous two charters, he said.
"There will be items that we might not hit our targets on, but if you don't set targets, you're not going to have any drive in the organization, pressure from customers, pressure from council to meet them," the TTC chair said.
"What we've done is we've met the majority of the targets from the previous charter. And I think in fact these things have to evolve. If we … meet all our targets then we're not setting them high enough."
Oliver Moore