Staff Report #15
May 9, 2025
To All Commissioners
Re: Financial Update – Specialized Transit Services – Operating Budget – March 31, 2025
Recommendation
That the report be NOTED and FILED.
Background
Set out in the table below is the Statement of Operations for Specialized Transit Services for the three-month period ending March 31, 2025. The statement sets out actual to budget performance for the period.
London Transit Commission Statement of Operations – Specialized Transit Services Three Months Ending March 31, 2025 (000’s omitted)
| Description | Actual | Budget | Amount Better (Worse) | Percent Better (Worse) | |
| Revenue | |||||
| Transportation | $ 207.1 | $ 227.6 | $ (20.8) | (9.1)% | |
| City of London | 3,538.0 | 3,538.0 | – | 0.0 % | |
| Total revenue | 3,745.0 | 3,765.6 | (20.8) | (0.6)% | |
| Expenditure | |||||
| Personnel cost | 347.8 | 360.2 | 12.4 | 3.4 % | |
| Contract service cost | 3,241.9 | 3,351.2 | 109.3 | 3.3 % | |
| All other material expense | 37.7 | 54.4 | 16.7 | 30.7 % | |
| Total expenditure | 3,627.4 | 3,765.8 | 138.4 | 3.7 % | |
| Net favourable/(unfavourable) | $ 117.6 | $ – | $ 117.6 | 3.1 % | |
As indicated in the above table, the service has a net favourable operating budget performance to date of 3.1% or $117,600. An explanation of the variances is set out below.
Net Operating Costs
- unfavourable transportation revenue of $20,800 due to lower ridership than planned;
- favourable personnel costs of $12,400 due to timing of vacancies and less than anticipated overtime; and
- favourable contract service costs of $109,300 due to mainly to penalties applied to the service provider not achieving predetermined daily service levels ($90,100), noting the favourable Q1 service hours have been reapplied to off peak hours during the remainder of the year.
Ridership
The following table sets out actual to budget ridership and other performance related measures as well as a comparison to the same period in the previous year.
Ridership and Other Statistics Actual vs. Budget Three Months Ending March 31, 2025 (000’s omitted)
| Description | Actual | Budget | Variance | % Variance | 2024 Actual | % Variance | |
| Eligible passenger trips | 72,616 | 83,200 | (10,584) | (12.7)% | 68,026 | 6.7 % | |
| Attendant/companion trips | 10,774 | 8,700 | 2,074 | 23.8 % | 6,726 | 60.2 % | |
| Total Trips | 83,390 | 91,900 | (8,510) | (9.3)% | 74,752 | 11.6 % | |
| Average fare | $ 2.483 | $ 2.479 | $ 0.004 | 0.2 % | $ 2.448 | 1.4 % | |
| Service Hours | 45,739 | 46,002 | (263) | (0.6)% | 40,464 | 13.0 % | |
| Total trips per service hour | 1.82 | 2.00 | (0.18) | (8.7)% | 1.85 | (1.3)% | |
As indicated in the ridership results above, overall ridership is less than budget with the trips per service hour being the key driver for this reduction. This is due largely to the impact of implementing the new scheduling software in Q1, and the resulting scheduling difficulties witnessed during the initial period of the upgrade. Many of these concerns have been addressed and the overall system efficiency is expected to continue to improve as system parameters are fine tuned.
Administration will continue to monitor the operating budget performance reporting on same on a monthly basis including providing recommendations as may be appropriate.
Recommended by:
Mike Gregor, Director of Finance
Concurred in by:
Kelly S. Paleczny, General Manager