In the previous installment, I reviewed the headway patterns for the 501 Queen route outbound to terminals at Neville, Humber and Long Branch.  Now I will turn to the operation of the west end of the route between Long Branch and Parkside Drive.  I used Parkside (the east side of High Park, and the continuation of Keele Street south of Bloor) as the eastern end of the measurement because it is at the end of the private right-of-way and because this avoids problems with variations caused by operations at Roncesvalles.

The charts presented here show headways (the frequency and regularity of service) as well as link times (the time needed to traverse part of the route).  Headways are important to riders because they show how predictable service will be, and they also bear on riding comfort because crowding is directly affected by regularity of service.  Link times are important for service planning because they show where and when congestion occurs, and how predictable (or not) the running time between locations will be. Continue reading →