Monday afternoon, I took advantage of the balmy Thanksgiving weather to look at the state of Fleet Street, an oxymoron if ever there were one in its current state. The construction is working its way east from Exhibition Loop, and is currently at the Strachan intersection where the coming realignment of the tracks is already visible. From here east, the street is a mess, pedestrians are walking along the roadway because the sidewalks are torn up, and the former brewery site is now a vast and empty lot awaiting more condos.
All of this doesn’t warrant a post, but two observations do.
First, despite the fact that the 509 Shuttle only has to run back and forth from Spadina to the Princes’ Gates, there are three buses on this service, and two of them were running almost as a pair. I was one of a handful of people on the trip east from the CNE, and I didn’t see many on the other two buses either. Isn’t it amazing how the TTC can run such frequent, if erratic, service for construction replacement, but when it comes to basic everyday service, well, you know the rest.
Second, I saw the best example of a transit priority signal in Toronto. Eastbound at Strachan and Fleet, there is a signal to let the streetcars out of Exhibition Loop. Despite the physical impossibility of any streetcar actually appearing here for several months, the light dutifully cycles through its “transit” phase. Clearly, the presence or absence of a streetcar has nothing to do with this “pro transit signal”, and it is simply one phase in a multi-phase progression. That’s what I see elsewhere and indeed it’s the sort of thing that is actually “anti-transit” because streetcars must wait for their own phase rather than using the regular green time that had been available to them for decades.
The TTC and the Works Department need to start being honest about which signals are true “transit priority” and which are rather expensive decorations whose main effect is to keep streetcars out of the way of other traffic. There is supposed to be a report on this subject coming to the TTC, maybe even at its October meeting. Stay tuned.
Steve Munro 
Well, you know what they say Steve: “If a transit-priority light flashes where there are no vehicles, does anybody see it?”
So, the solution, then, to better service is to declare every route a construction zone and detour around it. I can see that working….
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The best example of an unfriendly transit priority light is at Fairview Mall, as the buses exiting Don Mills Station to go east on Sheppard sit there forever. I’ve heard that Fairview Mall itself has a lot to do with this, but it’s definitely anti-transit, even if it isn’t on the surface.
Steve: Yes, I have sat at that light on the “Town Centre Rocket” many, many times. A sterling example of how we make surface transit so non-productive.
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I recently rode the entire length of the new Paris T3 tramway and it appears to be a paragon of transit priority. The tram I rode stopped only at stations and never for traffic lights despite the many streets it had to cross at grade. It seems that parallel and cross auto traffic comes to a stop as a tram goes through an intersection. The only time it stopped for auto traffic was when a driver erroneously stopped his car on the tracks. He backed up after a few blasts from the tram horn.
The T3 tramway is similar to the St. Clair ROW in that it is mostly in the centre of a street with 2 lanes of traffic on each side. The T3 trams are protected from auto traffic by traffic lights – not railway crossing gates or signals.
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I rode the Paris T3 in late September with similar results. There’s not a hope of the St Clair line and streetscape ever resembling the T3. In Paris the street is far wider, the station stops are fewer (and properly constructed and sized with level loading for the low floor cars, proper shelters with seating and route information and schedules for each stop (as well as real time electronic signage for next car data), there are no center poles and the great majority of the line is laid with grooved rail and “paved” with grass. Operation is virtually silent. If the local merchants and the SOS people could have been guaranteed a similar streetscape and facilities, and they had actually seen the T3, I doubt there would have been any objections at all.
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I remember the first year the Strachan transit signal was in use during the EX. After a single streetcar entered the intersection the transit signal was immediately cancelled and took quite a time to return. This operation was thoroughly incompetent to handle the streetcar traffic and when I saw it the loop was choked with streetcars and an inspector was in the intersection waving the streetcars through the intersection 4 and 5 at a time, ignoring the transit signal.
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With reference to Richard and John, I agree that the St. Clair line is a disappointment to anyone who has seen LRT work well in any other city, including American cities.
Steve, given your own criticism of the design problems with the TTC’s existing streetcar and right-of-way lines, is there any hope that the Transit City LRT lines will be designed “properly”, using internationally recognized best practices? Although I love the idea of LRT, I am skeptical about Transit City due to my fear that it won’t end up looking much different than St. Clair.
Steve: I share your fears. Probably the most important part of the process will be to involve affected communities early in the process rather than presenting a design as a fait accompli. That’s what happened on St. Clair, and a lot of fine tuning of the sort done in the Waterfront projects simply could not happen on St. Clair.
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Yesterday at a pub, I was with a few friends, one of them brought an acquaintance who works for or works with the Roads department. So I had a useful chat with him that brought up some interesting points:
According to him, the TTC is perhaps the biggest thorn on the side of the Roads department. How the Roads department works is that they have diagrams that identify the various streets and they have data on traffic patterns, how many cars are in this stretch, how many cars are on that stretch, how long traffic signals are green at this particular intersection, etc. etc. etc.
The way they determine signal priority is based on calculations on the amount of traffic that goes through each stretch. It is also determined by signal priority at prior intersections, when does the traffic light at intersection A go green and how much traffic goes into the stretch before intersection B before the light at B goes green.
The problem they have with transit priority is that this screws everything up, according to them. The flow of traffic is disrupted and as a result traffic jams occur because the light in one direction which would normally turn green to empty a glut of cars at one stretch cannot do so because a bus travelling in the cross direction needs to pass through first. The problems according to them are evident, most notably on Eglinton at Bathurst and Dufferin. While Bathurst and Dufferin have transit priority signals, Eglinton does not. And because timings on Eglinton are never met because a bus travelling on Bathurst and Dufferin needs priority, the result is constant traffic jams on Eglinton. According to them, traffic flow was a lot smoother before transit priority was introduced. Also mentioned was the Eglinton West bus which suffers as a result of these jams.
Also according to him, Transit priority is not in place at Spadina for one reason: it would jam up cross streets in the same manner as Eglinton. Also they have installed transit priority on College, Queen (!) and King (!) (not Dundas for some reason) in order to keep traffic on those streets moving. If transit priority was to be turned on at Spadina, it would cause massive chaos as traffic on those cross streets wouldn’t be able to move (ok so they will but at a rate of a green light every 4 minutes). The rationale is that because Spadina now has an ROW, it can afford to wait a few minutes while they empty traffic from these cross streets.
The biggest complaint according to him about Transit Priority is that in order for this to work properly, they need to sit down with the Transit Commission in order to come up with a framework on how priority should properly be determined. So far, according to him, the TTC has not been cooperative about this, saying only that they want to have the light turn green when one of the vehicles approaches a lighted intersection.
The point he makes is that yes they know, but they have to make sure that these adjustments do not bring the road network to a standstill. You cannot have priority all the time, he says. Some consideration must be made for the drivers out there, and by extension, intersecting TTC routes, especially those with similar priority. Otherwise they would be inundated by calls from irate drivers and to some extent, other TTC commuters negatively affected by Transit Priority.
Every street, and every intersection needs to be re-examined to see how transit priority would figure in the equation. For intersections of two transit-priority streets, the street with the greater risk of gumming up would get the priority, not the street with the most traffic or most transit vehicles passing through.
He also mentioned St. Clair and Dufferin as he has a particular interest in this intersection, especially the east to north left turn lane. Their studies indicated that not including such a left turn lane would have problems for road traffic in the area. Either one of three things would happen:
1) traffic would get funnelled down Via Italia and east on Mackay Avenue and drivers would have to turn left at Dufferin. This may not be an option because residents, concerned about the impact of east-to-north drivers in the area have petitioned the Roads department for a no left turn sign at Mackay and Dufferin.
2) traffic would get funnelled south on Westmount, and west on Rosemount. The roads department has been inundated with residents in this area concerned about the impact about the loss of an east-to-north left turn at St. Clair and Dufferin and the resulting traffic that would go down their streets.
3) they would use the Northcliffe U-Turn signal. This according to the Roads Department would be a disaster. Westbound traffic would probably gum up on St. Clair at around this point, and on this point “local merchants” are especially concerned about that impact on their business.
There are no real alternatives to turning left on St. Clair to go north on Dufferin. The only thing that drivers could do is to turn left on Caledonia, a long distance west and east on Rogers road, considerably north of St. Clair. It is a far distance for a detour for anyone going to or coming from this area. This according to them is why the left turn lane was finally approved.
Don Mills Station at Fairview: Sheppard Avenue routinely gets gummed up going westbound between the 404 and Don Mills. The problem according to him is Don Mills Avenue, which apparently gets more priority than Sheppard. So they need to move cars along that stretch efficiently, which is why the buses need to wait a bit while the lights do their thing. Also, that particular intersection where the TTC offramp is has been a problem according to him. It is a 4-phase intersection which runs on a particular cycle: Sheppard first, outgoing Fairview Traffic second, Parkway Forest third, and TTC buses last. Previously they had transit priority at this particular intersection, but noticed a large spate of accidents here as overzealous drivers tend to “predict” a traffic light (move on a red while expecting a green) and smash headon into a TTC bus. To reduce instances of this, they reverted to a fixed phase operation except that if a TTC bus is not present, they do not cycle the light for TTC buses. Safety trumps priority according to him.
As for Strachan and Fleet, he doesn’t know why this is the case. According to him, Strachan is supposed to get more priority than Fleet, and by extension the streetcars. He supposes that this intersection, like Fairview Mall has similar issues with “overzealous drivers” and thus it is now a fixed phase signal which runs through the TTC phase even though no TTC vehicles are present.
So as you can see, the Roads Department is in a very tenuous Catch 22, favour signal priority one way and you have an influx of angry car drivers, favour signal priority the other way, and you have the TTC commissioners breathing down your backs.
Don’t get me wrong, I would like to see increased TTC priority at lighted intersections at all times but these arguments by the Road Works employee shed some light as to why it is so difficult to do so.
Steve: Thank you for this fascinating collection of information. I have known about the issue of cross-street interference due to transit priority signals and there are definitely cases where there just isn’t enough green time to go around. In these situations, a fixed cycle is obviously needed.
Dufferin and St. Clair is an interesting issue because the original plan shown for this intersection had a much more severe curb cut on the southwest corner than the final design. What happened was that the tracks were shifted north a bit, but it took the big fight about whether there would be a left turn lane to force this to happen. The new design didn’t show up until the special Community Council meeting.
It is worth noting that the discussion about traffic diversions and the unworkability of the Northcliffe U-turn was NOT raised by the representative of the transportation department at the public meeting where the question was put: do you want a left turn or not. I suspect that the outcome would have been very different if (a) the impacts were fully explained and (b) a less-unpalatable design had been brought forward. When I originally wrote about this issue, I did so in the context of the information presented at the public meeting.
(Of course I have also written at length about the unnecessary impacts of centre poles and the extra space they require, but that’s an issue at areas between stops. Again, it’s a case of the neighbourhood not being given a full presentation of the alternatives, a pervasive problem with that project.)
With respect to Spadina and Harbourfront, there are specific cases where cross-street traffic is not an issue, or where transit priority needs to be re-examined. For example, streetcars can encounter excruciatingly long delays at Lake Shore because a very long green is used to unload traffic from the Gardiner eastbound. Ironically, some of this tends to get backed up northbound on Spadina thanks partly to other lights that didn’t used to be there.
On Queen’s Quay, several of the intersections have transit cycles that do not allow for the presence of multiple cars, and this can trap vehicles that should get priority. If we can detect that a left turn queue is or isn’t occupied and adjust the length of a left turn phase accordingly (they do this at my own home intersection at Broadview and Danforth) surely they can detect that there is more than one streetcar present. Similar problems arise when two cars arrrive in opposite directions at nearly the same time, and only the first one gets the transit phase. The second one has to wait for the next cycle.
There is a special case eastbound at the York Street stop where the traffic light controlling access to the parking lot stops every eastbound car shortly after it leaves the stop. The TTC needs a way to tell the signal that a car is about to leave the stop and initiate the transit phase. This is not rocket science and requires only a car-based transmitter and a wayside receiver. The same type of antenna and transmitter that are now used to run the electric switches could provide this without years of technology development if only there were the will do implement it.
At Fleet and Strachan, if the motorists were confused by the transit signals, why not simply go back to a standard signal with the streetcar crossing on the east-west green as it did for decades? That’s a mode that everyone understands, and the streetcar gets a lot more green time. Left turns can get their own phase as and when needed, although with the new traffic patterns there, such turns will be rare. In any event, I have a hard time agreeing that we should coddle the poor motorists who can’t tell the colour of a traffic light. People get caught from time to time at Broadview/Danforth because the advance greens do not operate at all times, and they are expected to watch what is going on, not just assume “their” green is next up.
The problem with a short transit green also affects the Don Mills Station exit. Make it a fixed cycle if you must, but make sure it stays green long enough for the buses in the queue to get out onto Sheppard. Today they regularly run the tail end of the green into the red, and I have been on buses doing this several times.
I cannot help feeling that while there is much to sympathize with the poor traffic engineers who will always have less capacity than they need, some of their arguments don’t look at things from a point of view that maximizes transit benefits wherever possible. Note that their complaint is how the TTC services screw up their priority system.
Oh yes – Dundas Street. For some reason, the new loop detectors have not yet been installed, but I know TTC planning expects that this will be a priority street once the construction is done. I will follow up on this. Note that this work is funded by the TTC, not by the City. Why they can’t install the loops when the build the track is utterly beyond me.
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Very interesting. I have wondered if it would be possible to move the left turn signal on Sapdina to the end of the green cycle if streetcars were waiting to go through or if that change would be considered too confusing to drivers. Apparently it would be, which is too bad as changing the sequence of lights would be a way to improve transit speed slightly without messing with the cross street timing.
But just how far do you go catering to over-zealous drivers and reinforcing their habits? Safety is important but it occurs to me the problem is not with the lights, but with drivers not watching them. Therefore might we not be safer in the long run if we broke drivers of this habit?
Another problem not mentioned there is clearly Queen’s Quay. Steve pointed out one problem with it, I’d like to point out another. That is the current system of making east-west pedestrian traffic stop for the streetcars. It serves no purpose but to slow both pedestrians and streetcars down. It is as if whoever is responsible for the sequence of lights there decided that if cars had to wait so would everyone else. More likely just a result of a lack of innovation coupled with an unusual situation, but I don’t see that as much of an excuse.
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I’ve never liked the priority that exists on Queen’s Quay. Streetcars regularly have to stop at every single lighted intersection for a green light that will come minutes later. I have no clue as to why they do not make the transit priority similar than it is on Spadina.
Fortunately, I have kept in contact with the Roads worker and he has viewed this post and provided some comments that he wants me to write on his behalf:
1) Overzealous drivers: He has this “Some Driving Idiot” rule that says there will always be a jerk who will always do something stupid to disrupt the flow of traffic. This is what did the Transit Priority in at Don Mills station, and probably at Fleet and Strachan as well. Sure, he doesn’t like to “coddle” these idiot drivers but you can’t get rid of them (for every idiot driver who changes his habits for the better, there is always another driver who does the reverse), you can only try to take their actions into account.
2) Eglinton at Dufferin and Bathurst: The Roads department had requested a fixed-phase signal at these two intersections as to maintain the traffic flow on Eglinton, to which the TTC had refused, they wanted priority on Dufferin and Bathurst. Now the TTC is complaining of their buses being slowed down due to traffic jams on Eglinton and wants the Roads department to deal with it. Eglinton in particular has been a big headache for them.
3) Fleet and Strachan: the way the intersection is designed prevents the use of streetcars crossing the east-west green. Because streetcar traffic goes in a different direction than normal car traffic, streetcar traffic must go in a separate phase to avoid accidents.
4) Spadina at Gardiner: the problem is the flow of traffic coming off of the eastbound offramp, which is substantial. They have seen traffic backed up for miles as cars wait to use this offramp. This flow of traffic has created a problem for traffic on Spadina at Front and Blue Jays Way, the signal priority needs to be revised as they do not free up enough cars on that stretch of Spadina to accomodate the traffic coming from the Gardiner, so what happens is that traffic coming from the eastbound offramp gets hung up on the streetcar tracks. They are aware it is a problem (not just for streetcars but for car traffic as well), so now they are trying to fix it.
5) Don Mills Station: Right now, the transit offramp signal goes on green for about 30 seconds before Sheppard Avenue itself gets its green. 30 seconds is not a lot of time, but the only amount of time that the Roads department will allow. Any more than that, and westbound traffic starts to really jam up all the way up to the 404. Invoking the “some driving idiot” rule, westbound drivers tend to block the intersection of Sheppard with southbound 404, thus also creating a problem not only for southbound 404 traffic, but for eastbound Sheppard traffic trying to turn into the southbound 404 onramp. Originally, the traffic software at the Sheppard Fairview intersection was set up so that transit would get priority whenever a bus was in the offramp. This is what the roads department would have preferred, if not for the driving idiots. They also considered leaving the transit priority as it was in the hopes that drivers would eventually “get used to it” but due to the unusual number of accidents here, the priority needed to be changed. He also wonders why the line wasn’t built to Victoria Park instead so that the TTC can avoid all the congestion issues at this part of Sheppard Avenue and that Victoria Park and Sheppard Avenue would be more receptive to Transit priority. (Of course I know this is expensive, but according to him, it would have saved a lot of headaches here).
6) Dundas: He’s not 100% sure about these loop detectors but surmises that the TTC had not properly consulted with the Roads department with regards to adding these devices to the road. The Roads department apparently does have a say when it comes to Streetcar reconstruction projects so he’s saying that the Roads department likely did not sign off on installing thoses devices on the basis of insufficient consultation.
7) Roads department in general: The viewpoint among most employees of the roads department is that Transit is not the biggest priority for them, their objective is maintaining an optimal flow of traffic, and that according to him, would also benefit TTC riders as well. Thus the TTC should not get a free pass to everything. The signal priority system in place is quite delicate, and if they need to revise it to give TTC vehicles higher priority, they need to do it right. This means extensive consultations with the TTC, now if only they would come to the table. He’s also not in favour of the piecemeal approach to signal priority now being taken as it means a lot of work trying to revise traffic signals as best they can in order to maintain the flow of traffic.
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It seems that a basic problem is that works fails to think of a bus or a few buses as hundreds of people rather than, at best, just another car. Their approach to transit priority seems to be a hope that what’s good for traffic in general will likely benefit transit in some way. Although he doesn’t seem to want to do it, he feels forced to cater to the idiot driver who will hit the bus or block the roads.
What’s missing is any realization that in order to convince drivers (smart and idiot alike) to use transit, we have got to make it fast, perhaps even faster than driving. While he says he fears that drivers will complain if transit priority is enacted, it has been done in cities across North America and elsewhere and has not caused heads to roll. At some point one needs to take personal responsibility for one’s decisions.
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I have been following the construction on Fleet St with interest. Always glad to see a PRW going in to keep the streetcar system going with more dependability and less delays. Some of us can remember the packed westbound streetcars lined up, one after the other, waiting for automobile traffic on the tracks to get the green light to cross from Fleet to Lakeshore, just east of Fleet Loop. Then, of course, there would have been the usual delays with traffic congestion as the streetcars got near Fleet and Strachan. There certainly appeared to be no real effort in getting streetcars through and sometimes I think today is the same thinking.
When the “Ex” was on this year, I stood at the corner of Fleet and Strachan for a while watching the auto and transit traffic trying to co-exist. There were police there, but in my opinion they were absolutely useless. If one can picture the way that the westbound auto traffic enters the CNE, they cross the streetcar tracks on the west side of Strachan and then they are in the fairgrounds. This day (and probably every day the ex was on?) the CNE people set up a checkpoint just west of the tracks in the CNE grounds. There they were telling the would-be fair goers that their pass was no good there, the parking was full or whatever and they had to turn around, which of course, caused chaos with the traffic that was trying to exit the grounds. As this is going on, vehicles are turning left and right from Strachan, plus some traffic on Fleet St wanted to go west into the Ex. The car tracks were blocked by all this and the streetcars, both directions, would miss their signal, some of them several times. Has this situation simply moved the problems from east of Fleet Loop to Strachan?
I think a simple solution to the problem could have been, when the road was all torn up for the new track work across Strachan, the EB and WB rail from the PRW on the east side of Strachan could have jogged in NW direction toward the NW corner (maybe taking a bit of the property to the north) and then aligning the rail up to the existing PRW in the EX. New passenger loading/unloading platforms could have been built that could actually be used during the time the CNE is in operation. All motor traffic going into the Exhibition grounds from Strachan and Fleet St would then have entered the grounds to the south of the car tracks and at no time be blocking the streetcars.
Hopefully, the readers can understand what I’m attempting or trying to say here.
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What’s bigger or more obvious than a transit vehicle? If drivers are clever enough to anticipate light timings, they ought to be capable of not driving headlong into buses and streetcars.
Maybe if giant Tesla coils were installed at intersections to zap vehicles that aren’t obeying the lights…
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Seems to me the basic problem is that the streets are free to all comers and thus get overloaded with vehicles that might not be there if they had to pay $10 to drive on a busy street at rush hour. You can play around with signals all you want but if your basic problem is chronic under capacity, then the only real fix is to start charging to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads.
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Roger: it has to be noted that the Roads department wants to consult with the TTC on a framework for Transit priority. The issue here is that the TTC is not complying and insists on a patchwork system which appears to have deleterious affects on traffic at priority signals. The successes experienced by other transit jurisdictions are certainly through proper planning and consultation.
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