Several people at the TTC must be asleep at the switch these days. Imagine my surprise to see at Broadview Station a brand new poster advertising “seasonal service reductions” for the summer starting September 4. Obviously, someone has changed the banner date on an earlier poster but not bothered to fix the text.
These posters were printed. These posters were installed.
Does anyone at the TTC read them? This may explain, indeed, why so much out of date bilge is left on the walls of our stations.
It is bad enough that the TTC does not take the simple step of printing “remove after xxx” on their posters, but when they put up signs that are just plain wrong, one senses that a remedial reading course is in order.
At times when we have people calling for quick fixes by simply cutting wages and firing staff, gaffes like this give the TTC’s critics the sort of ammunition they need.
Steve Munro 
The same signs are up at the Kipling station, and probably elsewhere. The error is so glaring, it’s hard to believe that no one spotted it.
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In a downtown subway station, there is a map that is so out of date, it still has the 77 Spadina route on it!
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I don’t know if it is still there but there is an old 84 Sheppard West eastbound schedule still at Wilson Station (last I saw it was six months ago). It’s on the east side of the lower bus platform near where the 104, 7A and 160 buses alight their passengers. I wonder if anyone has actually tried to catch an 84 bus from Wilson station.
Maybe this thread should be a “find wrong signage” thread so we can see how many instances of these “issues” we see here.
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No one has to sign off on the copy? There would/should be proofs to approve before printing- you would think.
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With all the kids going back to school it sure feels like service reductions this week. So many routes are jammed packed now.
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How about a bus shelter that has a map so old that it can’t be seen because of fading?
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I agree with Steve… without exception all publicly posted TTC notices should have a “remove after” date. I will up the ante by suggesting the notice also include text, phone, e-mail addresses so riders can advise the TTC of notices with glaring errors such as this one or are long past their expiry date and haven’t been taken down by TTC personnel.
With respect to Karem’s proofing comment, notices are obviously not all proofed thoroughly (due to time pressures, etc. that often arise, especially in emergencies). I’m not excusing it, just stating facts. They should be proofed by someone independent of the designer.
My favourite Infopost proofing blunder occurred one Saturday at Downsview where I was looking for the 84 Sheppard schedule eastbound to Bathurst, only to find that Saturday had been completely omitted from the schedule!
When I enquired why the TTC’s Infopost were not proofed prior to being posted. The reason (excuse?) given was the printing contract didn’t allow printing proofs—to lower its cost. It would therefore cost a lot of extra money for the (proprietary print supplier) to run proofs. I was incredulous… but there you go!
Not all the ≈2,500 or so Infoposts are changed every TTC “Board” period (about 13/year, plus holiday mini-boards) so some Infoposts will stay up an indeterminate time for several months, even years if there are no schedule changes. I’m sure a little ingenuity could ensure these are checked or replaced periodically as well.
There is no excuse though for gross errors or stale construction notices long after completion, as Steve notes, an affliction that also affects the City and keeps Jake Lakey’s Star “Fixer” column in business!
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While we’re at it, how about including effective dates on the schedules posted at stations and elsewhere? The 20 at Main Station (just to example of many I’m sure) has 2 conflicting schedules posted in 2 different places; I have no idea which (if either) is correct and whether it’s the same this week as last with the “service reductions”.
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I was in Chicago in August 1966 and there were posters in the Loop stating the the North Shore Service to Milwaukee would end in February 1963 I believe. I don’t know if the TTC has gotten that bad.
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While we’re on the topic of out-of-date Infoposts, my personal favourite is a 2002 Infopost sheet that was installed as part of the bus route reorganizations surrounding the Sheppard subway opening. It’s an 85 Sheppard infopost, located on westbound Consumers on the far side of Vic Park, so it would have been installed just in time for the 85C Consumers Road branch to be cancelled (it was the first version showing the subway). The best part is that the 85 will never see service changes on Consumers Road, so this Infopost is going to be in limbo indefinitely until someone from TTC stumbles across it.
The 92 Woodbine notice has the opposite problem from the Broadview station notice. The heading is “Summer service reductions and increases end.” In fact, the summer only saw increases to accommodate passengers to the Beach. Presumably the “reductions ending” refers to a minor service increase on weekdays, which is actually a new service increase, not a reinstatement of the previous non-summer service (they must be driving the buses a little faster than they used to).
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I’m not sure if this is still the case, but I remember recently seeing as you walk into Spadina station across from the bus terminal the west side of Spadina, you can see a system map pre-Sheppard subway! (There was a map on Roncesvalles as well, but that got replaced)
At Dundas West Stn., the map of the local area is such that it has the 505 streetcar going north of Bloor.
At St. andrew stn., the map of the local area is SOOOOOOOOO old, (how old is it?) it still has the Church 19 going on Front St.
Sigh….
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My favourite poster screw-up had to be during the Yonge St. Winterfest in February 1999, when the posters said that Yonge Streetcars were diverting during Winterfest. Wow, I had no idea that there was track on Berwick and Duplex, much less that the Yonge streetcar was still operating!
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…and with respect to Dave’s comment – that map with nothing on it is for after all the service cuts are implemented … there won’t be any routes left operating.
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Years ago, all infopost schedules were dated. You had a good idea how up todate it was. Then, for some reason, or maybe no reason at all, all dates were dropped. Now, you have no idea if it is up todate and therefore accurate. Oh well!
Once upon a time, I had a devil of a time trying to convince the TTC that a schedule on the infopost was incomplete since it only showed times and days of service for the branch and not the main route!
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I think they define it with a two letter code, like say IA or IJ. They have some kind of internal coding system to determine the date. This means of course that no one except the TTC knows when the schedule was printed.
I truly think that the TTC’s present method of creating infoposts is flawed like mad. Many years ago, the TTC had the presence of mind to put clockfaces on its schedules to inform its riders which minutes on the clock in which you would expect a bus. Of course, this only worked for 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 minute scheules.
Later schedules had the clockfaces replaced with an ‘ev 10 mins’ or ‘ev 20 mins’ depending on the interval. Anything below 10 minutes was identified with an FS. At this point, the TTC was smart enough to split schedules so that 2 branches of the same route which ran ten minutes or less was given its own schedule identifying times of day with frequent service, or FS. Also, if multiple routes were converging on the same destination (i.e. Eglinton westbound at Bayview), the schedules reflected all routes travelling in that direction (you would see the combined schedule for 34, 51, 54, 56, and 100, this created one small schedule which mostly said FS, but was easier to read)
The infopost schedules we see now is a mishmash of well, a mishmash. I find them personally harder to read compared to the earlier versions. Not only did they mostly condense schedules into one, but branches that are defined as FS were also combined into one schedule, and they covered both branches with “FS”, so you couldn’t tell which branch was which. In some cases, a branch which was not FS was also incorporated, so you couldn’t tell what time it left your stop because the entire block was denoted as FS. They also redefined the FS to mean 10 minutes or less (meaning that buses schedules that previously noted “ev 10 minutes” was also FS). As for boarding a bus westbound on Eglinton at Bayview, they also didn’t combine the schedules of routes with a common destination. So now at that stop is only a schedule for 34 Eglinton East. Some other places with common destinations now have a schedule for each route rather than combining them to one. Finally, all routes, on the return trip of the station now denote the incoming trip of each branch rather than combining them into a simpler layout.
I think a fellow rider pointed out this confusion in the last public meeting for ridership improvements so I’m not the only one who feels that the infopost schedules need to be overhauled.
Steve: This is another example of an interdepartmental problem. The schedules are generated in Planning, but they don’t “own” the program that crunches them into Infopost signs and has various known problems. Fixing this process is not a high priority for anybody, it seems, and so information, a vital part of TTC marketing, is inadequate.
This has implications for the revamped TTC website which presents the same info as is shown on the Infoposts.
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Yesterday, I noticed a bus stop pole at Mt. Pleasant and Belsize indicating that bus service changes are going into effect as of (forget exact date) 1996!
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I have to say that the Infoposts, generally speaking, aren’t too bad considering the number of them out there. I know that doesn’t help anybody waiting at a stop being confounded by one that’s wrong.
The bigger problem with the Infoposts seems to be situations where the card is stolen out of the holder, or the card has faded out beyond legibility, or the window on the holder is damaged to the point where you can’t read the card beneath it. In those situations, the information – right or wrong – can’t be used.
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For an example of what a well designed schedule looks like, check out this example from the Keio Railway in Japan. (http://www.keio.co.jp/english/timetable/pdf/shinjuku_down.pdf)
Not only is every arrival time shown (none of this “10 minutes or less” junk), each branch is not only identified by a letter, but also by a colour which corresponds to the colour of the branch as shown on the map!
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With everyone having cell phones these days, the Timeline system should never have been scrapped. Even if it wasn’t Y2K compliant, they could have worked around it by setting the system to a year in the past where the days would line up with the current year — or, buy a new real-time GPS system.
Steve: Timeline is a great idea if I want to know when a car is coming in the next half hour, but not when I want to plan a trip tomorrow or next week. That requires meaningful, useable schedules and trip planning on the website.
With regard to the other posts on the King car, I’d like to hear Steve’s theory on:
– why he thinks strict schedule adherence on the subway is taken very seriously by the TTC, but not on the surface, and,
– why he never mentions schedule adherence on bus routes (all we hear about here is the Queen and King cars) … do I smell rail fan bias creeping in here again … 😉
Steve: It’s easy to manage a service when you completely control the right-of-way, and the best approach to a delay is to stop service and keep passengers from piling up at one point. It is much harder to do this on a surface route for obvious reasons. The subway was built from day one for centralized management and headway control.
As for the King and Queen cars, they are my guinea-pig routes because they are (a) the subject of a lot of complaints and (b) routes where the TTC chronically requests right-of-way as the only “solution” to their problems. However, I have already done some preliminary work on the Dufferin and Bathurst bus routes, and plan to review Don Mills and Finch East as well. From what I have seen, the quality of service is not magically improved by untethering the vehicles from tracks. Of course, any rider of the Dufferin bus could tell you that.
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As has been noted above, the posted TTC schedules are not only often outdated but are also really quite hard to understand. The schedules in Montreal, which are dated, are FAR clearer, partly because they use the 24-hour clock. See http://www.stcum.qc.ca/English/bus/a-index.htm
The TTC is calling for tenders for the new TTC website at the moment (closing 27 September) and it’s a bit worrying that the schedules on the web (which I assume ARE at least up-to-date) are still going to be generated by an obsolete (or at least problem-filled) program.
The TTC have another tender call out for an Internet Trip Planner (closing 11 September) but if this new service has to rely for its data on the present program I anticipate problems! It might have been better to fix the basic program BEFORE trying to use its data in new and innovative (for the TTC anyway!) ways.
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The Web-site RFP doesn’t talk about that, but the trip-planner RFP does. In essence, the selected technology for trip planning has to be able to generate the existing 2,800 Infoposts and possibly 7,200 more.
Oh, and it does that by outputting to an obsolete unpublished proprietary format, Ventura Publisher.
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Small but irritating: at the express bus stop on Adelaide at Bay, there is no schedule for the Beaches 143 bus. There are TWO schedules for the 144 (Mount Pleasant?). They’re on separate posts, but still. You’d think whoever goes out to change them would notice this eventually.
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Do you remember the destination signs at the St Clair station streetcar platforms that told you where the car at the platform was going? The were 4 lines, Eglinton, Earlscourt, Keele and Northlands (?) (The loop at Weston and Rogers?).
I never saw a car going to the last, but I don’t think the signs were taken down or even modified until the Mount Pleasant branch was discontinued.
I think the signs were manually operated by someone on the platform.
Steve: Northlands was one of those wonderful misnomers. Originally, Northlands Loop was at Weston and Northlands, but was moved north to Avon Loop (at Rogers Road) in 1943. However, the destination sign was never changed on the streetcars which continued to display “Northlands” until the last day of service in February 1966 (the Weston extension was considered superfluous with the extension of the Weston trolleybus south to the new Bloor Subway at Keele Station).
There was a control box at the east end of the loading platform which the platform loader would use to control the signs. By the way, there were FOUR signs given the frequency of service through that loop in those days and three cars on the platform at once was quite common. The combined service westbound from Yonge was one car every 60 seconds.
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Yesterday, I noticed that the TTC ad team cannot afford the cost of a janitor for two minutes. The poster exhorting us not to block the train doors could have done with two minutes of a mop and pail on the yellow rubber platform edging before they took the photograph. A small detail, perhaps, but another indication of a systemic inattention to detail, given all the other comments above.
Trevor: It’s versimilitude! Nobody would believe the picture if the platform was clean. It would be so obviously staged.
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I remember when FS meant 7 minutes or less. 10 minutes or less is almost a 50% increase in wait time for supposedly Frequent Service.
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Looking at Michael Greason’s comment above – the FS was a reason I’m moving to a location close to a subway line.
I’ve waited far too many times for the 506 on Gerrard, the 501 on Queen (even if cars short turn at Kingston Rd) or even sometimes the 22 on Coxwell (when drivers decide to change timings whenever there’s a new rotation).
On Saturday I experienced some fantastic FS service while on Roncesvalles. Granted there was the closure of the Gardiner westbound to put a bunch of extra traffic on King, but I managed to walk from Queen Street all the way to Bloor without even a whiff of a streetcar. If they knew it was going to be a problem (well this is TTC management we’re talking about), they could possibly have split it into an east and west route with turns & transfers happening at Spadina/Charlotte.
As I soon figured out after moving to Toronto (and inform friends/family who visit accordingly), be on the lookout for the FS. It doesn’t stand for “Frequent Service”, rather “Effing Slow”
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The use of FS on 10 minutes or less could be due to the simple desire to save ink (or a bad way of doing so). Consider this: the present infopost system is unable to group consistent intervals of 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 minutes. It displays all times without grouping them together. As for 10 minutes, they decided to qualify that as FS so that so much ink wouldn’t be printed. If they were that serious about saving ink, they simply could have used a better piece of software which would not only group these intervals, but also group return branches and routes heading to a common destination. Nobody cares that a bus arriving at Eglinton and Bayview is from the 100 or the 34, or the 54 for that matter. Nor does anyone heading to Warden Station on the 68 Warden bus care if the bus is coming from York Region. As long as a bus that is going to your destination arrives, thats what’s important.
I did get an interesting counterpoint on this from another rider: accessibility issues. Even if you have 5 routes heading towards a subway station, only two may be wheelchair accessible, so therefore separate schedules may be required so one can pick out when the next accessible route would arrive. Also, if a branch or a route is notorious for its reliability, at least the rider can know if this just happens to be the next bus “scheduled” to arrive at a certain stop.
I don’t necessarily agree with his points although they do make a bit of sense. I just wish the TTC was more serious about the way they produce their schedules to make them more readable.
I look forward to when the TTC junks this useless piece of software for infoposts. When was it introduced anyway, 1998? It’s almost been ten years, it’s certainly time for a change.
Steve: There is a much more fundamental problem with consolidated schedules. Since vehicles always arrive at terminals randomly ahead of or behind schedule, the consolidated schedule arriving at the terminal is meaningless. I see this regularly inbound to Eglinton Station from the east. Outbound is somewhat more reliable, but a consolidated schedule is only meaningful if you are bound for the common portion of the route.
Also, nobody seems to care that five buses may leave the station at the same time and try to set up headways and departure times to provide even service over the common section of the route.
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