Day: May 16, 2008

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Route 501 Queen in December/January 2007/08 (Part 1: Short Turns)

In anticipation of a TTC report on measures to improve service on the Queen car, there will be a series of posts here over the Victoria Day weekend.  These will review data for December 2007 and January 2008 on 501 Queen and related routes.

I am going to take a different approach in the sequence of articles from earlier rounds.  In those analyses, I began with the graphic timetables of route operations showing first Christmas Day 2006 and then moving on to other days of interest.  Later came Headway and Link Time analyses for individual days, and later for the month as a whole.  Finally came charts showing the short-turning and service reliability as seen outbound from Yonge Street.

In practice, now that this entire process is fairly well understood (at least by me), I am going to turn things around and work “backwards” from the monthly charts to specific days.  The monthly summaries reveal days and locations where interesting events or practices might be found, and of course they also show the overall pattern of transit service.

I have made some changes in the charts both to make the headings “friendlier”, and I plan to standardize on the filenames I used for the linked PDFs.  (Really!  I promise!)  Some of the changes that readers have asked for will not be found in this version such as expanding the daily graphs to have more per day (and hence fewer hours per page).  This is a tradeoff between having charts that are too busy and spreading peaks over multiple pages.  Also, I have deliberately kept the pages in letter size format so that people can print them without having legal sized paper.

For this first set of comments, here are the charts of vehicle destinations outbound from Yonge Street.

December 2007 Westbound to Humber and Long Branch

December 2007 Eastbound to Neville

January 2008 Westbound to Humber and Long Branch

January 2008 Eastbound to Neville

These take some explaining, but they provide a lot of information. Continue reading →

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Station Redesign for Pape and Islington

The TTC agenda for May 21 includes full PDF versions of the reports on the planned redesign of Pape and Islington stations.

The file for Pape Station is about 5.5MB, while the one for Islington Station is about 2.8MB.  A notable change at Islington is the disappearance of the proposed SNC-Lavalin building on the former bus loop site, although this remains available for development.

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Subway Entrance Identification (Update 2)

In an unusual move, the full version of a report (almost a 70MB PDF) of a design charrette on entrance identification is available on the TTC’s report website.  If you want it, grab it while it’s still there as this situation may not be permanent.

I will add comments here after I have a chance to digest it.

Update 1:  I got all the way down to the last page after the file downloaded, and there was a pair of photos of the existing sign at Osgoode Station and a proposed replacement.  The “new” one looked terribly familiar.

A quick visit to the City Archives confirmed my worst fears:

You can see a sign that looks remarkably similar at the opening of the Yonge Subway in 1954, or at the opening of the University line in 1963.

Here is the original entrance on the south side of Bloor east of Yonge.

The old signs used the shape of the TTC flying keystone (the wings were added for the “Rapid Transit” image to the original 1921 design), and this was simplified to make the signs cheaper to build and maintain by the time the Bloor line opened in 1966. The main differences between the 1954 and the 2008 versions are the use of the “modern” TTC colours in 2008, and the absence of the word “SUBWAY” across the wings of the sign.

Update 2: As a public service, I have put a condensed version (1.3MB) of the TTC’s file on my site.