Another example is that you do not seem keen on reserved ROWs while European cities use them more often especially (of the cities I have seen) Dresden and Orleans.

Orleans was more aggressive in acquiring a reserved ROW than Toronto.  Orleans took 2 of the 4 lanes of a bridge over the Loire River. It also closed a downtown street to auto traffic and dedicated it to LRT and pedestrians.  This converted street reminded me somewhat of plans for the King Street transit mall.

It appears that the TTC is trying to adopt some of these European practices, but you feel they are inappropriate.  Why would they work in Europe but not in Toronto?  Your arguments sound logical, but then they seem to contradict what I saw in Europe.

Steve replies:  My objections to the TTC’s schemes for MU operation stem from their basic dishonesty.  The claim is that King runs every two minutes, and stretching this to every four with trains will improve traffic operations and service overall.  In fact, the line runs every 4 minutes for most of the AM peak (there is a one-way platoon of 2-minute headway lasting about an hour in an overall round trip of almost two hours).  PM Peak service is every 4 minutes with no extras.

If we run all peak service on King as MU, that means a train every 8 minutes.  People will walk before waiting for that infrequent a service, and this assumes it will be (a) on time and (b) not short-turned.  Waiting time is a significant factor in the perception of service convenience.  When someone has to wait an extended period in poor weather (think February), the TTC becomes a poor alternative to driving.

The TTC has a very long history of blaming external factors for their service quality problems when the root causes are (a) insufficient or poorly scheduled service and (b) ineffective or non-existent route management.  We spend a long time debating things like trains on King without first addressing the internal problems.  Of particular interest is the degree of improvement trains would provide.  I am going to try to get hold of this study to see what it claims will happen and whether the benefits are really worth the offsets.

When service gets down to the 2-minute level, it is close to the traffic light cycle of 80 seconds.  That cycle tends to marshall traffic into waves regardless of the scheduled headway, and the impact is greater the closer the schedule gets to the traffic light cycle.  However, this is now offset to some degree by signal priority on King that adjusts the lights at most locations so the streetcars are not delayed.

Meanwhile on Spadina, the transit priority signals have never been turned on (the line opened in 1997), and streetcars routinely are held behind left turning traffic.  I have commented elsewhere on the inane response from TTC staff to this situation that makes me wonder why they bother with priority signalling at all.  Priority means giving more to transit, but that’s not the way Toronto thinks.

This brings me to the issue of city policy about transit lanes and malls.  Please.  This is Toronto.  When a transit lane was proposed on Queen, the merchants claimed that the world would end because deliveries (and customers) could not park in front of their stores.  Even on Spadina, we had huge fights because the number of parking spaces and the practice of double and triple parking for deliveries would be reduced with the LRT construction.  That was one factor in the original 1970s proposal being deferred, and the topic came up again in the 1990s.  I need not mention the situation on St. Clair.

Transit service in Toronto will overwhelmingly run in mixed traffic for two reasons:  (a) there is no political will to change the balance in favour of transit and (b) the level of service on most routes is such that taking away road space would not fly as a tradeoff.  Meanwhile, the TTC continues to suffer from budget constraints imposed by the very city Council that claims to be so pro-transit, and “transit advocacy” consists of paying for 1/3 of a subway that won’t open for a decade while doing almost nothing for the system as a whole.

We have already seen the impact on ridership and service quality of wider headways on Queen and Bathurst, and we don’t need to do the same to King.  I despair of what will happen when new, larger cars arrive and the TTC implemements a straight 2 for 3 replacement all day long.  Transit service is not just a question of running capacity past a location, it’s also a matter of convenience.

I wish that we had the political environment seen in some European cities (although suburban, car-oriented planning is starting to make inroads there too), but we don’t.  My outlook is strongly coloured by what we have.