I have written before about the need to reorganize the way service is operated on the Queen line, and the TTC never quite gets around to doing a detailed review. I’m not sure what it will take to light a fire under them, but the time is long overdue for them to admit the through-routing of 501-Queen and 507-Long Branch was a disaster.
Other related issues include the problem of Humber Loop (not the most ideal location for a transfer given its isolated location) and the mix of services running downtown from Parkdale.
I received a comment from “Ed” recently that shows finally, someone has realized there are problems on Lake Shore, although the “fix” is a temporary one.
As you may know, a pseudo-507 service has returned to Lake Shore Blvd.
501 Queen is the only route I can think of where a single destination sign (501 HUMBER) can mean either an eastbound or a westbound car. I know that this experiment is recent (started Sept. 30th?) but so far, I don’t find it particularly helpful. The following is an e-mail I posted to the Toronto-Traction mailing list.
The rails in the Long Branch Loop at the Humber are getting shiny again as streetcars are travelling through this turn-around frequently these days. Apparently cars and drivers who would normally be working on St. Clair and have been displaced by constuction, are running on various lines as extras. Some of these cars are servicing Long Branch between Humber and Long Branch Loops as pseudo ‘507’ runs.
Let’s hope that the extra 507 runs (just Long Branch to Humber?) become permanent, as service out there has been too infrequent to maintain ridership, though perhaps those extras should be extended to Roncesvalles for connections to the King car?
I come from Brown’s Line and Lakeshore, and have ridden the line regularly since early 2006. The results of these extra cars so far are not encouraging.
Sunday afternoon I caught an eastbound “501 HUMBER” car and got to hang around at Humber Loop where my pseudo-507 joined one (or was it two?) compatriots in the old 507 turnaround. A westbound 501 HUMBER car finally pulled in and we boarded it.
I passed through Monday on a 501 NEVILLE PARK at about 2:30 PM and saw THREE cars laying over in the loop. This morning, I just missed a 501 NEVILLE PARK ALRV, followed less than a minute later by a 501 HUMBER car. After a considerable wait, another 501 HUMBER car showed up and delivered me to Humber Loop. I joined people already waiting for an eastbound car. Another eastbound 501 HUMBER shortly thereafter delivered yet more people (there were now about 30 waiting to travel east from Humber). Finally an eastbound 501 NEVILLE PARK CLRV showed up. This car was crush-loaded by Dufferin….
The problem with 501 service is poor line management and erratic headways. My observation is that the pseudo-507 branch of 501 has the same gaps followed by a pair or three cars running close together.
Instead of having a random wait for a 501 car that will take me downtown, now I have a random wait for a 501 car that may or may not take me downtown, with possibly another wait at Humber for a car that will actually take me downtown.
The one possible saving grace is that I can now catch westbound 501 HUMBER cars with some hope of a good connection further westbound at the loop. Although seeing packs of cars laying over, I’m not sure how well that will work either.
Oddly, the transfer I got this morning is a green “SPECIAL EVENT TRANSFER”. Why not use the same ol’ 501 QUEEN transfer?
I do think that Humber Loop, late at night, would nicely recreate the atmosphere of Casablanca–everyone standing around, hoping to get their special transfer to be able to escape to Long Branch. (Can we remake “Casablanca” as “Humber Loop”?)
I am amazed that the TTC cannot even properly manage extras running on a route with zero traffic congestion. Lake Shore used to have quite good local demand. It was no King Street, but the Long Branch cars carried a respectable amount of traffic back and forth on the line. Unfortunately, the way the TTC plans things, local traffic tends not to count because all of those ons-and-offs don’t build up a huge load in the same way a crowd of downtown-bound travelers would. Service cuts over the years drove away riding, and improving north-south bus services made the BD subway more accessible for travel to the core.
With the redevelopments now in progress on Lake Shore, and the designation of this route as part of Transit City, it’s time for the TTC to look at making the service reliable and frequent.
Ed speaks of bunches of cars laying over. On 501 Queen, this is caused by hugely padded running times that allow for possible traffic congestion and the need for a long break after driving for nearly 90 minutes across the city. When they get that far, it is not unusual to see two 501 cars in Long Branch Loop even though the scheduled headway is 15 minutes or more. There is no excuse for bunches of 507 extras which should be shuttling back and forth on a reliable, properly-spaced headway. The extras are a nice idea, but can someone at the TTC please try to manage the service?
As for Humber Loop’s cinematic role, at least the denizens of “Casablanca” got to drown their sorrows in a bar.
Steve Munro 
I have also noticed the change in service along Lakeshore in the past couple of weeks with the addition of the Humber cars.
The wait for a streetcar out in the Long Branch/New Toronto neighbourhood where I live seems far less now whenever I take it , however, the additional cars are being mismanaged in the same way the regular line was mismanaged, as the previous post observed.
I’ve seen them bunched up twos and threes at the Humber Loop and furthermore, since there was ZERO communication from the TTC to area residents about this being introduced, I have seen many people not getting on the Humber car to the loop when it passed them and still waiting for the Queen car for a no-transfer trip. They didn’t know that it would be faster to transfer at the Humber Loop to a Queen car coming WB to turnaround and go back downtown in the morning.
This just proves the case where giving more money to a person who is financially irresponsible doesn’t solve their problem, unless they learn to fundamentally manage money responsibly.
On the subject of the location of the Humber Loop…one of my main problems with it is that it is being targeted as a main transfer hub that is not even a destination people want to go to, and there are few other connections to the rest of the transit system (only the Park Lawn bus?).
Also, I think relocating the loop it to Park Lawn is a ridiculous idea and a total waste of money. I’ve been taking notes every time I ride the route, timing stops between major stops, and the biggest bottleneck in the western portion of the route (from Roncessvalles to Long Branch) is that single intersection of Park Lawn and Lakeshore.
More often than not, Gardiner overflow (or an accident) funnels traffic through this intersection and completely holds up the streetcar service. It doesn’t matter how many additional cars area added.
To be honest, an exclusive streetcar ROW could be added just at the intersection and it would dramatically improve service. It doesn’t need to go all the way to Long Branch (yet) because there is little traffic further west. The TTC is waiting because further west they say they don’t have the property to do exclusive ROW yet (again debatable, since the scheme they’re thinking of would probably include keeping 4 lanes for traffic and on-street parking).
I would think that a better segmentation of the whole route would be to have service from Long Branch to Rocesvalles be its own route.
There are turnarounds (and a car yard) at Roncesvalles and there are actually connections to other routes AND it’s actually a destination people want to go to from the west. It’s a hub for 3 other streetcar routes AND you can get up to the Dundas West subway station AND the Dundas West GO Station.
Imagine that…a CONNECTED network.
The additional time for a streetcar to travel from Roncesvalles to Humber is very short because it’s already in the Queensway exclusive ROW. It would add neglible impact for EB cars to speed along and turn around at Roncesvalles instead of the Humber Loop. It would also be better service for the new condos/townhouses along The Queensway near Windermere, too.
Combine this with Roncesvalles track getting reconstructed in 2009 (they just pushed the date back from 2008) to provide better service north-south. The natural hub for the western part of the route should be at Roncesvalles/King/Queen, and the Humber Loop/Park Lawn loop shuld be eliminated entirely as a key transfer point.
And finally, if the Waterfront West LRT ever gets going (although it’s debatable whether it is actually a good idea), using Roncesvalles/King/Queen as the main hub for the whole western portion of the line makes complete sense.
The cost of relocating the Humber Loop was pegged at $7 million, which is crazy to spend to move a loop 500 m west to the very bottleneck intersection.
My solution costs nothing to implement, except to perhaps instead spend the $7M on adding a very short segment of exclusive ROW at the Park Lawn/Lakeshore intersection so streetcars can actually get through the intersection.
But I work for the City, so what do I know. 🙂
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I agree that the Humber loop is in a strange place and moving it a few hundred yards at vast cost seems stupid. Why not leave it where it is for “emergency short turns” and if there is to be a division or partial division of the Queen/Lakeshore (or WW West) line into two segments – as often suggested here – it would be far better to have it at King/Queen/Roncesvalles for all the reasons given by Dave.
The Humber Loop is particularly poorly planned as the 80 (Queensway) bus passes so close it it – with no stop and no transfer possibility.
Steve: Humber Loop is, of course, a remnant of the old City of Toronto (and hence fare zone 1) boundary with Etobicoke. I have always thought that the scheme for Park Lawn was intended (a) to allow the redevelopment of Humber for condos and (b) to allow conversion of the Long Branch service to bus operation.
Park Lawn itself was a replacement for an original plan to have the Queen car loop up Legion Road (a bit further west) to connect with a relocated GO Transit Mimico station. The idea that anyone would get off of the GO train to transfer to the Queen car is laughable, but that’s what passes for planning in these parts — connections on a map whether they make sense or not.
Now that Transit City has embraced the entire line, the Park Lawn proposal is a non-starter. The problem is, of course, that once studies are launched, they are almost impossible to stop.
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I’m under the impression that the Park Lawn Loop is being built so that the looping facilities that are currently at Humber can be extended to Park Lawn. Three reasons:
1) The area around humber loop is simply…. well to say the least, quite barren. Besides the transfer to 66 Prince Edward, not much of interest is in the area.
2) For residents of condos just south of the Humber loop, if they don’t want to wait for a Long Branch car, they need to walk up through the Humber streetcar tunnel to reach streetcars at the loop. The intention of the extension is to provide convenient service to those condos as well as the park nearby Park Lawn (though I’m not sure why they didn’t create the loop further west as originally planned)
3) The tracks on Humber loop are due for replacement I am told. Why replace the rail at humber when you can create a new loop at Park Lawn as the logic goes……
I should mention that the original plans for Queen were to end the service at Park Lawn, at the same time, the 66 route would be extended via Park Lawn to Lakeshore, and run west on Lakeshore to Long Branch. Service on Berry east of Park Lawn and Stephen Road would be terminated. There are actually residents who prefer that option as it would connect to the Bloor Danforth line and at the same time, would not subject Lakeshore to the same chaos that exists on St. Clair. Apparently there is a group forming in the same vein as SOS.
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I would hate to see a venerable streetcar line pass away because of this debate over a loop. If it’s a connection to the subway you want, then run the 507 up Roncesvalles to Dundas West station.
Steve: I proposed this a few years ago, but the suggestion, like so many, disappeared into a black hole at the TTC.
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With the WW plan, something drastic would happen to the 501 anyway, would it not? The current Long Branch – Roncesvalles portion of the 501 is going to land into the future WW’s route, wouldn’t that mean that the future 501 is going to terminate at Ronces or Dundas West/Bloor GO in the future anyway?… which would make it genuinely “The Queen Car” (instead of the “Queen-Queensway-Lakeshore West Car”). I think that makes the debate of the future of Humber Loop’s demise or relocation obsolete as I can’t see a ROW WWLRT requiring a short-turn at the Humber Loop.
That said, another example of bad management at the TTC, one wonders where all these hiring troubles are coming from, they obviously don’t have very high standards for the management division if these kinds of botches are occuring in the network. I know an american guy here in Tokyo who used to work for the Boston Subway’s operations dept., he’d be able to handle this a lot better considering the problems he resolved for Boston’s network (among other things, his changes delivered better service with less trains).
The Mimico GO Station situation is thoroughly obsolete from a connectivity perspective of this route if you look at it in the long-term: The current 501 line already joins at Long Branch, and the future WW line will join at both Long Branch GO and Exhibition GO, who cares about Mimico? (They’re actually a very short walk apart anyway).
Steve: The problems with line management go back years and are deeply rooted in an attitude that “nothing can be done” because of traffic congestion coupled with the disaster of moving this function from on-street supervision to central monitoring via CIS. The idea that service can actually be managed properly seems to have been lost from the corporate culture.
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I too believe that turning cars at Humber is a dumb idea. The reason that they are doing it is that “It has always been done here so it must be the best place.” They should run the cars to Roncesvalles and then do the scenic tour of the car house. With the cars missing from the west end of 505 and 506, unless the bridge is done there could be an argument for sending them up to Dundas West to augment the service on Roncesvalles “during the construction.” This would be useful to see if there was a demand for it or not. Having ridden the Dundas car diversions people do adapt and make use of new weird routes.
Since the loop is there I would leave it until it need a major rebuild then probably scrap it. I agree with the others who think that the 507 should run at least as far as Roncesvalles. This makes for an ugly looping manoeuvre for the 507 but the Queen cars could turn at Sunnyside or go to Humber if you really felt that Swansea needed a direct connection to downtown. I think that I would run some, if not all the Long Branch cars along King during the rush hour to increase service through Parkdale. This would give 507 Dundas West Station and 508 Church or maybe 508 Parliament. My $0.02 worth.
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My 1st thought is, why in heck isn’t the TTC adding service to the sardine-like 504 King line or main 501 Queen lines?
I live on the Lakeshore and’ve noticed the extra CLRVs, usually bunched up. But I’d rather see the Dundas & St. Clair spare crews & cars used where they’re really needed.
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I never liked the Queen car because of the poor line management in resulting in the all too familar service gaps in the beaches and the Lakeshore. It also makes me wonder if the Queen car in the east was extended north to Victoria Park station would these issues continue? I believe the Queen car should also go to Dundas West station and the reborn 507 also going to Dundas West station (I don’t know if it’s possible, the only time I ever used Dundas West station was during the mess involving the garbage train that burned to nothing at Old Mill, a long time ago. But it was cool to take a Mississauga Transit bus into the city like that.) This setup would be good for the short term until Waterfront West is built and direct service downtown would make people leave the cars at home, I know this because the number one complaint is the time it takes to use the 501 downtown.
Steve: At the risk of sounding a bit chippy, it’s important to make proposals based on things you know about. You risk being tagged as a politician otherwise.
You have obviously never seen Victoria Park between Queen and the Danforth. There is no room for a double-track streetcar line there, especially south of Gerrard. More to the point, extending the line is no way to guarantee that it will be better managed.
Sending the 501 up to Dundas West is not a good idea due to problems with station capacity. The 504 and 505 services use up the platform space, and at most we can add a 507 service as I have proposed elsewhere.
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I’m appreciative of all the comments as I don’t know that area particularly well and I tend to bike most places. My interest in this post and comments comes from detesting the $255M Front St. Extension for ignoring any transit options and then thinking that the $540M WWLRT is going to so dramatically improve service that it will make things all better. We have a serious problem with a poor planning and EA process that doesn’t contrast such transit options as adding four GO trains instead of these two projects and perhaps saving $600M, nor exploring a raft of other transit proposals some of which will be less feasible, some of which may cost more money, but may give better value.
For instance, if we had a $600M budget could we build both a Front St. transitway AND an extension of the Harbourfront line through the Ex to the south side of the Lakeshore (or on it) giving two more direct lines to the under-served Etobicoke area?
We truly need a corridor study – converting the FSE to a transit project would free up the $50M already, and even the interest on that sum would go a fair distance to a comprehensive evaluation of options.
Politricks and officialdumb – sigh!
Steve: And, Hamish, you must be aware that all designs for the WWLRT protect for the possibility of the FSE’s construction.
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Steve wrote, “At the risk of sounding a bit chippy, it’s important to make proposals based on things you know about. You risk being tagged as a politician otherwise.”
Or you risk being tagged as a TTC supervisor!
True story: a TTC driver I know was telling me about a problem on a run he was doing and an emergency short turn was ordered. Without exposing the specific location, basically he was ordered to take couple of side streets to turn around, but the routing had him turning onto a street where a traffic light was, going around to another street to return to the main street making a left turn without the benefit of a traffic light. When he responded that the routing should be the other way around, the supervisor initially got all upity about being corrected, until he go the chance to explain the traffic light situation for the left turn.
As I understand it, senior TTC employees generally don’t want a desk job, so when supervisor positions open up, those with seniority usually pass it over. This means that younger (translation: those with a meek awareness of what is actually out there) take the supervisor jobs and try to manage things from a desk with CIS terminals and Mapquest (or something similar).
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Steve said:
“As for Humber Loop’s cinematic role, at least the denizens of “Casablanca” got to drown their sorrows in a bar.”
Maybe the TTC could reopen the old waiting room and get a liquor licence for it!
On a more serious note:
At one time the Long Branch car looped in the vicinity of the car house. (My father used to take it as far as Kipling to get to work.) This was before Metro Toronto and before the Queensway routing. Presumably there would have been some overlap with the Queen car.
Steve: Transit Toronto has a detailed route history including the various configurations of services on Queen and Lake Shore.
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Hi Steve;
You say “time is long overdue for them to admit the through-routing of 501-Queen and 507-Long Branch was a disaster.” I don’t see the reason for being that negative.
In principle, it’s better to through-route than force people to transfer (this can be done well or poorly, of course).
I did ride the old LONG BRANCH route occasionally (maybe once a week on average) back in the summers of ’78-’82 and I remember that service could be erratic then as well.
The fact that *all* streetcar service went south in the ’90s, about the time of the 501 through-routing, means that we can’t say what the situation would have been on a continuing 507 route through the ’90s; maybe it would have been cut back to two lonely streetcars, or cut altogether.
Local trip generators along Lake Shore Blvd. have changed: Goodyear tire plant closed in the ’80s; Lake Shore is changing from a street with industries to a street with apartments/townhouses and the ugly strip of car dealers towards Brown’s Line; this will continue with the announced closing of the Arvin-Meritor plant, the last industry of any size directly on Lake Shore. Also something like half of the working-class bars along Lake Shore are closed; the Long Branch car is no longer the “fight car” that one operator described it in I think Larry Partridge’s book. The demographics are changing, and these people are mostly not working locally. The biggest local trip generator on Lake Shore that I have seen is the high school on Kipling, and Humber College.
In summary, although I have frequently complained about 501 service to Long Branch, both to the on-line community and often enough to the TTC, I would like the 501 through-routing *fixed*; and I am not convinced that the situation is unfixable.
Steve: I am going to jump in here to clarify my proposal. Most definitely I do not want to reinstitute the transfer at Humber. However, very, very few people bound to or from Lake Shore are going to or coming from anywhere east of Yonge. Having one line all the way from almost Victoria Park to Brown’s Line is a guarantee of poor service everywhere. We need two separate lines, one for west end traffic and one for the east end. The exact configuration is a matter of some debate and also involved redesign of the King service.
I am considerably less sanguine than you when you say “finally, someone has realized there are problems on Lake Shore, although the “fix” is a temporary one”. The “fix”, as it is currently implemented, really isn’t worthwhile.
The cars run on no schedule that I can determine, and I have never seen fewer than two cars laying over at the Humber end (and often enough three), and recently I saw that they’d discovered the layover track at Long Branch loop as well. The pseudo-507 cars then take off either just before or just after a through 501, and the two just get in each other’s way.
This Tuesday night, I was on a pseudo-507 out of Humber Loop: he only got moving when a through 501 started pulling forward from the stop. Monday night, I was on the third car of a four-car parade that ambled westbound on Lake Shore at 10 PM: a through 501 ALRV, a pseudo-507 CLRV, a through 501 CLRV, and a pseudo-507 CLRV. The first pseudo-507 CLRV stopped and went into Tim Hortons at 27th which held up the car I was on and let the fourth pseudo-507 CLRV catch up. So this is four cars in about 10 minutes (“always a car in sight”) followed by the usual gaps (“unless there’s a gap, when you might as well walk”).
It seems to me that the pseudo-507, the way it is currently operated, is close to useless as they don’t maintain any properly-spaced headways and they’re not integrated with either 501 LONG BRANCH or 501 HUMBER service. I can see some transit planner looking at the bottom-line results and saying “See? The Long Branch service doesn’t need any more cars. We gave them some and they were all underutilized.”
Steve: This is a perfect example of the problem I have raised in many other posts: nobody is actually managing the service. On top of this, it is clear (despite the altruistic statements that might come from Local 113) that operators will do as little work as possible given half a chance. The TTC for its part does nothing to publicize the service or to make sure that it actually operates in a way that is useful to riders.
As for the way that the results might be analyzed, the biggest problem is the empty-headed bean-counters, some in management, some on the Commission, who would look at the numbers and come to your conclusion without looking at (or even being aware of) the total lack of an attempt to run good service. The entire system is beset with this. These are the same people, of course, who made the $10-million mistake in estimating the “cost saving” of closing the Sheppard line.
I am becoming very, very disheartened with the TTC’s inability to manage the service it has properly. Its standard fallback arguments about congestion being the root of all evil don’t wash any more.
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As south Etobicoke resident, I would like to make a few comments (I hope someone from the TTC is reading this): There is absolutely no signage and no indication on the TTC website about these Eastbound 501 Humber cars. I came across this post/website after Googling for information on these cars. (Careless drivers or in fact an eastbound 501?) I have seen lots of people forgo getting on these in lieu of a 501 Neville Park.
My second beef is with the regularity of 501 cars in Etobicoke. The service out here is embarrassing. I had a 11 AM GO train to catch at Long Branch last Sunday, after heading out 45 minutes early to catch the street car (I live at Islington, literally a 5 minute drive away) I was flabbergasted to see 4 street cars pass by (on my walk to the stop) and then I missed my train since no car arrived for 45 more minutes!
I moved to Toronto with high hopes that the TTC would enable me to leave my car at home. Ha…no chance.
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I’ve had to travel to various destinations along Lakeshore over the past fifteen years. I live a five-minute walk from both Keele and Dundas West subway stations. My starting point provides a number of routing possibilities. I have tried all of them and concluded that not a single one provides the frequency or the reliability to make transit worth my time to reach the South Etobicoke area.
Most of my trips are to a computer store on Lakeshore just west of Kipling. By car I can routinely complete the round-trip in an average of one hour at any time of day, any day of the week. On a very lucky day making timely transfers and with no line hold-ups the transit trip takes two to three times that. More than once that transit trip has taken nearly FOUR HOURS! (I could drive to London and back in that time!)
Now the only reason I’ve bothered to try all the routing options and keep trying occasionally over the years is because I’m a transit supporter and don’t want to misjudge a service based on just a few bad experiences. (Whenever I drive I can still clearly observe the service problems which I am fortunately bypassing with my car.) However, I’ve been forced to conclude time and again that transit service throughout South Etobicoke is disgustingly poor and unstable. When the TTC says that service expansion in this area is unjustified due to low ridership figures and projections, that has to feel like an enormous slap in the face to that community. First-hand experience tells me that the low ridership figures are the direct result of horribly inadequate service, especially off peak. Why would anyone bother to use transit there given the situation?
Ironically, one of the worst links in the chain for my trips there is the Roncesvalles portion of the 504. So even when the 501 is stable and I actually manage to catch a car that isn’t short-turning at Humber Loop, the regular screw-ups on the 504 can add an hour or more to the trip just over that short section! I’ve routinely been able to walk all the way up from Queen to Bloor on weekday evenings just after rush hour and not see a single car in either direction in that entire time!
The TTC digs their own grave in a number of locations in Toronto. With less and less free time available to residents these days, the time saved by taking the car becomes a necessity rather than an ideological choice. Even if it only cost a quarter to “Ride the Rocket” it would still be too expensive for most of my trips in terms of quality of life and actually meeting all my obligations.
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I, for one, would like to see the 507 car reinstated. I live in the Long Branch area, and if I have to go downtown, will normally go by GO train (or take the 123 or 110 to the subway should I require something in the northern part of downtown Toronto.) As such, my 501 trips tend to be in the Long Branch-Humber Loop (ex 507 route) portion of the 501 route. As I have stated on the forum for Transit Toronto, I have seen delays for over an hour on the 501 route west of Humber Loop because of problems east of Humber Loop.
My suggestion is not to eliminate the 501 completely west of Humber Loop, but rather to operate the 507 in addition to the service already provided (perhaps running to Roncesvalles rather than Humber Loop and perhaps even downtown during the rush hours on either Queen or King.)
I have experienced the pseudo 507 car. I had to go downtown the other week, and decided to take the 501 line because of the chance to go “old style.” I took a pseudo 507 car to Humber and caught a short turn car east from there. On the trip back, I was lucky enough to get a Roncevalles car, then a Humber car, and then a pseudo 507 car. The pseudo 507 car for the home trip arrived at Humber and waited until after a run through from Neville Park came through, even though people were waiting for the connection (the driver sat in the car for awhile – I assume it was his break.) He was surprised that someone would wait for the pseudo 501 car, but I said it was historical/personal reasons, which he accepted.
Proper mangement of the 501 route (plus any reinstated 507 cars) is certainly required!
As for the current operation of the pseudo 507 car, here are some pictures of the cars at Humber Loop (I hope to get some of it on the Lakeshore soon):
http://tinyurl.com/2hzg2z
http://tinyurl.com/2yzfp4
http://tinyurl.com/27onub
http://tinyurl.com/2zhbxh
http://tinyurl.com/yvm6bq
(Steve, if you desire any of these pictures or other TTC related pictures, for you website, etc. please feel free to contact me.)
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Steve,
Thought I would let you know, for at least the last week, the TTC powers that be have added a NEW short-turn bus in the PM rush running from Neville to Kingston Rd.(looping via New Eastern and Old Eastern to get back EB to Queen.) 15-00hdwy. This bus runs from about 330-630pm weekdays.
According to the driver, this added PM bus is in direct response to complaints from us Beach people about crappy 501 service in the PM rush.
BTW, while certainly helpful, the driver says he is reporting to his bosses that the bus is not worth it as he states he hardly picks up anybody….. I boarded at KR & Queen along with about 15 people so I think it’s a good start. Stay tuned I guess………….
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