CBC Radio 1 will be looking at the issue of TTC customer service starting on Monday, January 11, and I will be on Metro Morning dark and early sometime before 6 am.
Updated January 11: The Metro Morning interview is now available online.
The chats with story producers got me thinking about the TTC’s eAlert system as well as other sources of information. Knowing we won’t possibly cover all the details in a short interview, and that other aspects of the discussion will certainly come from readers here, I have started this thread.
A long-standing complaint about TTC service is that nobody knows what is going on. At the best of times, one might peer into the mists on Queen Street and hope that somewhere there is a streetcar, or listen down the subway tunnels for the familiar rumble of a train. Far too often, the TTC is not at its best, and the lack of information can drive people into a fury, one that may be visited on hapless TTC staff who are no better off than the rest of us.
The TTC’s website can be hit-or-miss depending on whether it is being updated regularly. For example, the 501 Queen car’s route description was not changed back from the Shaw/Parliament split until quite recently (thanks to feedback from a reader on this site). However, the 512 St. Clair route description gives no hint of the split streetcar/bus operation.
Diversions pose a special challenge because some are implemented thanks to emergencies such as fires or major collisions, but the most annoying are those implemented locally by the route management team, and not reflected on the website or on notices at bus and car stops. The 41 Keele (local) service is diverting around construction at St. Clair southbound, but it took a few weeks for this to show up online, but only in the route description. The schedule page and map still show the route running via St. Clair, and you can look up times for a stop that in fact has no service. The info is on the “Diversions” page, but there is no alert on the route’s own page to indicate that readers should also consult the diversion information.
The subway, the main target of this article, has additional information sources for would-be riders, although all of these can be quite frustrating.
If you are at platform level, and your station has a working video screen (dead screens are becoming common), and you’re standing close enough to read it, and Transit Control considers a delay to be serious enough to put up a notice, then you have a fighting chance of discovering that something is amiss. There may even be PA announcements, but they tend to occur only for very long-running delays. (As I write this, there is no subway service east of Victoria Park, and info about this comes over the speaker systems regularly. It also appears on the “Service Advisories” on the TTC website.)
If you are anywhere else, and you have cell/internet signal, you may get information from various sources:
- The TTC’s eAlert service (via email)
- The TTC’s Facebook page (via SMS)
- Twitter feeds, some from TTC sources, available via the TTCUpdates community page (not a TTC site)
I get both the eAlerts and the Facebook updates, and compiled a log of information from both sources. My apologies to those who don’t like “busy” displays as there is a lot of info consolidated in one place.
The first few columns show the date, location (the affected part of the system) and the nature of the event. Some of these are rather vague, although specific information may appear in followup alerts on in the “all clear”.
Next come two pairs of times. The first two give the timestamp on the emails for the alert and the all clear for an event. Where these are blank, there was no email. I have used the email timestamp because it indicates when the message was actually sent by the TTC, and this is rarely identical to the “last update” time included in the body of the message. The next two give comparable information for the Facebook page updates. Generally speaking, these are a bit earlier than the corresponding email times. If either the email or Facebook messages mention shuttle buses, “Yes” appears in that column.
One of the problems of emails and SMS texts familiar to anyone who uses a PDA is the lag time between a message being sent and its appearance on your PDA. This is complicated by different strategies for retrieving messages used by various carriers and by different devices. I have a Blackberry and that’s my frame of reference as it is for many other TTC riders. I would be interested to hear from, for example, iPhone users to know if they see a different pattern.
The eAlerts are emails, and as such can be subject to many delays both in the originating system and at various points along the way. (I am not going to give a tutorial about email here.) The important point is that, in addition to the various places where delivery can be delayed enroute from the TTC to you, there is the “polling interval” of your own PDA. In order to conserve transmission bandwidth and network load, your PDA (like the email client on a computer) checks for new mail from time to time. This can introduce a delay up to almost the length of the polling interval before you actually receive the message even if it is already sitting in your inbox on your service provider’s system.
By contrast, SMS texts are pushed out to your PDA when they are available, and they don’t sit around waiting for your PDA to ask for them. It is possible for these messages to get queued up at the sender’s end, but that is Facebook’s problem, not the TTC’s, and Facebook appears to have a fairly robust subsystem for shipping texts out quickly.
The remaining columns show the times when an email alert or all clear, and an SMS alert or all clear showed up on my Blackberry. Not all messages show up here either because the Blackberry was turned off, or I had no signal (and therefore the times are meaningless), or my desktop email client picked up the incoming mail before the Blackberry did.
What is quite consistent is that the delay for email delivery is consistently longer than for SMS, and this is likely due to the nature of the media. SMS is a “send now” message while email is “send when convenient”. This has important implications for the TTC’s ability to update its riders with system information on a timely basis — there is a basic limit to the speed with which the message will reach people. There are also technical implications of capacity requirements, not to mention the question of what Facebook will do if tens or hundreds of thousands of people all subscribe to the TTC’s page via SMS.
Leaving aside the technical stuff, something else is clear in the log. There are incidents that appear in only one of the two logs. Some of this is easy to understand because the TTC is not yet officially reporting delays to surface routes via eAlerts, while the Facebook page often has this info. However, there was a period from December 9-11 (Wed-Fri) when there were no eAlerts. Indeed, December 9 was an extremely bad day for the TTC with many delays through the morning peak period, including both signal problems and passenger illness. None of these showed up in an eAlert.
Facebook activity more or less vanishes evenings, weekends, and periods when the proprietor may be on vacation (easy to check via his own Facebook posts). This sort of inconsistency implies that both sources each depend on few or possibly one person, and if they’re not around or too busy, then the job doesn’t get done.
Also missing from this log, needless to say, are delays that nobody gets around to reporting one way or another. It is very hard to believe that the system was so reliable over the Christmas break.
In the next article in this series, I will turn to the way that outages are managed including information for TTC staff and the handling of substitute bus services.
Steve Munro 
I cannot wait to see your thoughts on this whole signal debacle at Warden, why they just do not set up a block in the area, run the crossover manually and run the signals in the area remotely from Transit Control is beyond me.
Steve: If there is a problem with the signal plant, and they need the track clear to do testing, running trains through on a manual basis is little help. The big question is whether they will sort things out by Monday morning. According to the Star (as of 3:30 pm), they didn’t know what the problem is.
On a more general basis, several of the reported signal failures in recent weeks are on sections of the line that are much younger than the original Eglinton to Union stretch where a replacement program is in progress. The TTC can’t trot out the “it’s old and worn out” story for the entire system.
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You might want to get a scanner and listen to control and the line supervisors talking. There was a problem with this section of the subway yesterday and the had the line shut down from Victoria Park to Kennedy. The problem was a signal at the interlocking going into Warden yesterday. I don’t think from listening to them yesterday that they fixed the problem but rather worked around it. Unless they actually need to have power down access to the line why can they not manually dispatch trains between Victoria Park and Warden?
Yonge was closed north of York Mills one day last week because a passenger collapsed and fell onto the tracks. This was on the scanner but I never read about it anywhere. I don’t subscribe but checked the web site.
It would be interesting to follow 512 on the NextBus programme as they are short turning them all the time.
Steve: If only the TTC and Nextbus would get their act together and expose the rest of the system, which they claim to have working at CIS control, to the rest of the world. I am planning to request the 512 data for January 2010, by the way, but still await the Queen data for October/November.
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There is also the issue of bus delays, which are often more important the subway delays, because the frequency of operation can be much lower.
For example you take a bus that is supposed to appear at 10:07, 10:27, 10:47 in order to get to work for 11:30 you catch the 10:27 bus. Due to the hybrid problem, there is no 10:27 bus, would be nice to know so that you can take the next earlier bus instead. Even if it isn’t time critical, you’re not going to go out at a time where the next bus is not running. For a bus that is every 20 or 30 minutes, one can freeze waiting for the bus.
Steve: I agree, and that’s another issue in this whole thread. The TTC has been resting on its laurels, rather tarnished ones at that, of the subway alerts, but the surface system is vital to how people actually use the system.
If you wait long enough, the Next Bus system will tell you this sort of info, but I am not holding my breath. Supposedly it will begin to appear this year. The Queen car is slightly more frequent.
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The last alert I got:
Now, is this VP and west or VP and east…………? hmm they missed something.
Steve: They did say “problems continue”, and so it is the same issue as before, but, yes, they did hit “send” just a tad too soon. This is not the first such truncated message.
I told you, Ed Drass, Brad Ross, Adam Giambrone, Joe Mihevc, the Tooth Fairy and everyone in between about sending a notification when things are over and service is back to normal … they improved on that but not the best.
Steve: As you will see from my log, “all clear” messages generally are sent out for all delays. This signal problem has been going on all day.
Also the PA system on the subway IS REALLY HORRIBLE, if we are riding the train and you cough I won’t hear the announcement, forget about it during rush hour.
Aren’t there any volume controls on these things?
Steve: I continue to be amazed that we can have crystal clear stop announcements, but cannot have clear reception for messages from Transit Control. This must have something to do with the receiver system on the trains as the PA itself obviously works ok.
I am looking at my messages from ttc e-alerts and I got a message at 5:57am … technically that’s Saturday service (signal problems at Warden, shuttles between VP and Kennedy), could this be the same problem as 3:18pm problem or a separate one? If separate one then they didn’t tell that the 5:57am was over.
Steve: The 3:18 message is the fourth one today. It is the same problem.
So no one is at transit control past 5 or 6pm? There should be someone there at all times, not the same person 24/7.
Steve: There are some messages posted in the evening via email (see my log).
Isn’t Brad Ross the Director of Communications (NOT TRYING TO TRASH HIM, HE IS GOD) but shouldn’t he start COMMUNICATING? Somebody could take over communications overnight when Brad goes home.
Steve: I am not sure Brad is ready for a guest appearance in the famous play by Samuel Beckett. In any event, something less subtle than the overnight apperance of a leaf on a bare tree is needed for TTC patrons.
Between you, TTC updates, and Transit Toronto … I am more informed of delays than from the TTC itself. That’s a shame.
Hell, give me a metropass each month and I’ll sit at TTC HQ (or whereever Transit Control is) and I’ll send e-mails/sms between 10pm and 8am. I am sure other Transit geeks/advocates would do it. Somehow I think they will hire someone at a higher cost than $121.
Not that I am doing much between 10pm and 8am anyways.
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In reference to Miroslav’s comment about the truncated message I do remember an E-ALERT being issued for A DISABLED STREETCAR AT PAPE STATION! That was something else.. I think the TTC actually made an apology and informed people off the error on that one.
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Actually today’s messages on the subway are quite good. They’re clear, and repeated frequently. Normally in an outage you get a hurried message at half the volume, and where you can’t quite clearly hear which station is having the problem. You stand there waiting to hear it repeated, and all you hear is the usual smoking message and perhaps an advert to buy a day pass for a holiday that’s already passed.
I don’t know if the problem is bad microphones, or bad training, but they should probably have prerecorded messages for outages at every station, which they can loop when there is an outage.
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I can understand why the TTC cannot update their website for temporary short-term diversions caused by accidents but when a diversion is in effect (and planned to be in effect) for weeks or months there REALLY is no excuse. Last summer/fall the Queen cars were not running between Victoria and Parliament while work was going on at Church. Though the diversions were noted on the “Construction Project” pages there was NOTHING on the schedule / 501 route page. If you went to the schedule page and looked up Queen and Jarvis you would be told the times of the next three streetcars at Jarvis, but not that they were not going to appear for 6 weeks! (Of course you are actually told when they are SCHEDULED to arrive, as we are still waiting for the real arrival times to get onto the web, or actually to customers at all.)
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I think the problem with TTC on board announcements and those from transit control are that most of the TTC staff have no clue how to properly speak on a radio. Anyone with a radio scanner, who monitors the TTC frequencies will know this.
The best way to do notices is to have a small program on the computers at transit control, so the controller for the area can select the route number, select an issue, possibly a run number and type in a short note. The website would then show the delay. When the problem is over, select the route number and “all clear” and it then updates the website.
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Hi,
I asked Adam about releasing CIS data on a nightly basis for route analysis, his reply was:
We are moving to GPS by end of year 2010 and it will begin to be posted at that point. CIS has limited capacity.
—
So, hopefully that means we will be able to get all of it in some form at that point…
The two issues I see at this point are the following:
1) No screens in the entrance ways of stations (nothing is more annoying than paying only to find the system is shut down, or the next train will be 10 minutes, and you only want to go a stop) – this should be fixed.
2) No distance or speed information is displayed on signs, so it is hard to tell if the next train is “2 minutes away” but actually is stuck at a signal that won’t change for another 4 minutes….
TTC seems to do a particularly good job of notifiying people of delays and having a solution relatively quickly…unlike GO Transit…often GO’s ticket window and bus staff are clueless as to what people should do in the case of line closures, and it is particularly bad for those travelling counter-peak flows (try getting home at night from burlington when the jam is in oakville, expect a 3 hour wait at the least)
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If the TTC could get the word out as quickly as Adam denied those NOW gay rumors, there’d be no problem!
Steve: Adam seems to have stopped tweeting transit updates.
PA system? — the old bull horn speakers from the 60s were the best … not only were they eerie looking but the fact that you couldn’t understand a single word that came out of them made it even scarier.
Interlocking at Warden? … my understading is that the TTC doesn’t mess around with interlockings anymore — not after that near miss at the wye years ago.
Steve: I agree about signal safety, especially in a situation where it took much of the day to figure out what was wrong. Stuff like that needs to be fixed properly, and they were lucky to have the weekend to do it.
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Some great comments here. The one thing that bugs me is that when they first rolled out the e-mail alerts they said SMS was “coming soon” — it’s now been quite a long time and “soon” is becoming a pretty relative term.
The problem with relying on third parties like facebook and Twitter for SMS updates is a) the one you mentioned above about potential delays on their own systems b) you have to be a member to get them, which not everyone likes to do (especially if it involves giving out a cell phone # to a company whose ultimate goal is to make money selling your personal information) and c) if something goes wrong or doesn’t work, the facebook and Twitter gods don’t care, and TTC can do nothing about it. The last problem annoys me the most — I’ve been signed up to receive Twitter updates via SMS from @TTCnotices for a couple months now and have yet to receive my first message.
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Why does the TTC not hire somneone to do weekends and evenings? I can do it, and other people here seem to want to as well. I only get $12 an hour as-is, I’m sure that hiring three people to cover all the “off hours” cant be back breaking 😛
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As I watch NextBus this morning all but one Spadina Car entered service by heading west on Queen to Church and South on Church to King. The other one turned on to King at the Don and has been sitting in front of Little Trinity Church for quite a while. There is no mention of any problem on King though.
It is now ten minutes later and the Spadina Car at Trinity St. just disappeared. I guess that they took him off the computer or the system lost him. It does seem to loose and then find vehicles all the time.
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Communication boils down to respect and courtesy. You wouldn’t just not show up for work without telling your boss, or just not show up at dinner time without calling the spouse.
Here’s a simple example of what drives me nuts. You get on a bus that is on time at your stop, and at some point it pulls up and sits by the side of the road. The driver doesn’t hop out for a coffee, but just sits there.
Would it kill him to get on the speaker and say “hey folks, transit control asked me to hold off for a bit. We’ll get rolling in just a few minutes”?
But they don’t do that. They sit, and just assume it’s ok with the riders that we have no idea what the stop is for or how long before we resume travel.
And there we are. Individuals of dignity and worth, sitting their like cattle on a train. The lack of communication is disrespectful and discourteous.
They have no problem yelling “move back please”, or other such blather when it suits their purposes. They have no problem sharing a few laughs with their fellow drivers off shift who jump on for free. It’s as though the paying riders work for the privileged operators.
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I guess you will get to experience the night bus tomorrow morning. There seems to be a serious problem with reliability on the 300 Bloor-Danforth night bus – it is scheduled to come every 15 minutes (except Sunday morning), but there is always bunching so effective headways can be up to 30 minutes, and the buses are often overcrowded. Is it time to split the route in two to increase reliability? Also, I often notice out of service buses running along the night bus route – is there any chance of scheduling some buses going in/out service on downtown bus routes to make 1 run along the night bus route to the garage – away from downtown around 2am and towards downtown around 5am (8am on Sunday), when the night buses are the most crowded?
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My concern is the poor service when calling the Customer Service number. I had one incident a while back when taking the Dufferin bus north from the end of the Spadina line when the bus didn’t show – and there was no answer at the Customer Service number – and the passengers just waited in the cold for 1/2 hour not knowing what was going on.
If I were to treat my customers that way, I would be instantly fired. But the culture of “no accountability” at the TTC allows them to get away with it.
Steve: The Customer Service line is only staffed weekdays during business hours.
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I just logged back on to NextBus and there appears to be no service on 509 or 510. Has the TTC gone on strike or is there a major disruption or is the system screwed again? You will all be glad to know that Muni in San Francisco is working well.
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DavidC says:
January 9, 2010 at 7:40 pm
“I can understand why the TTC cannot update their website for temporary short-term diversions caused by accidents but when a diversion is in effect (and planned to be in effect) for weeks or months there REALLY is no excuse. Last summer/fall the Queen cars were not running between Victoria and Parliament while work was going on at Church. Though the diversions were noted on the “Construction Project” pages there was NOTHING on the schedule / 501 route page. If you went to the schedule page and looked up Queen and Jarvis you would be told the times of the next three streetcars at Jarvis, but not that they were not going to appear for 6 weeks! (Of course you are actually told when they are SCHEDULED to arrive, as we are still waiting for the real arrival times to get onto the web, or actually to customers at all.)”
GO Transit seems to have no problem keeping their web site up to date with all delays, disruptions, and detours with minimal time lag. Perhaps the TTC should see how the upstart does it. GO is spread out over a much larger area and probably need to get some of their information from drivers who phone in rather than checking the CIS or whatever system replaces it. GO also seems to give its bus drivers some lee way in the route they follow because I have ridden the same express route into Union and sometimes it takes the Gardiner and other times it bails out and takes the Lake Shore.
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One thing I’d love to see happen is changing policy to make emergency transfers worth a full fare that can be used later – in essence, a refund.
The TTC’s apparent dislike of commuters who make the mistake of using the system during an outage generates a lot of ill will, and such a gesture would go a long way towards abating that.
Another idea: relax transfer rules and make it clear that the rules are relaxed for a period during and shortly after the outage. Make it clear people can walk to alternate routes or around a subway disruption and won’t lose their fare by doing so. Oh, and next time a contractor cuts through a tunnel roof then TELL people that it’ll be faster to walk than to wait for the bus.
Steve: Giving a grace period after an outage assumes that all staff know they are supposed to treat transfers this way, including fare inspectors who may be roving the system checking up on any new smart card implementation. With smart cards, it would be possible to retroactively refund for situations like that, but this implies a fairly sophisticated ability to determine which trips are entitled to the refund.
The Enbridge mess was complicated by the fact that the police did not simply close Yonge Street and use it as a bus roadway, leaving Mt. Pleasant and Avenue Road to handle the cars. This sort of thing needs to be part of a standard response to a major subway emergency.
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A few thoughts about how the eAlert system should be set up for Wireless devices
-I should be able to specify start and stop points on commonly used trips (i.e daily commute). If there are multiple reasonable routes between these points, the system should be able to identify these routes. I’m only concerned with certain times of day, so I should receive notice of any problems on any of the possible routes between these times.
Example: Lets say I live on Finch between Bayview & Yonge, and work at Bayview & Davisville. I have two reasonable ways to get to the office:
39 bus WB-Yonge Subway-11 or 28 bus
39 bus EB-11 bus
I need to know if there are any problems on any of these routes when I leave the house in morning and when I leave the office, so that I know which of the two routes I should take. If I get to Finch station only to find out the subway isn’t running, I’ve lost time on my commute that i didn’t have to. Also I should also be updated if something happens during my commute, so that I can try to get around it. If I get on the 11 bus NB after work and 2 minutes later I get a message that there’s a big accident at Bayview & Lawrence, I can get off at Eglinton and head for the subway. But I don’t need to know about problems that happen at 10:30 am, or on a Saturday on these routes.
-In addition to the above regularly scheduled routes, I should be able to query the system for trouble between Pt A & Pt B whenever I want to, and get an update enroute. If I’m going to the Ex, and trouble happens while I’m on the Yonge Subway north of Bloor, I’d need to change my route from the 509 to the 511 or 29 Bus.
-For all of this to work, the TTC needs their own service, with a few staff members to at least monitor radio chatter, write & post updates, and stay on top of things to announce the all clear.
Steve: Realistically, the TTC is only going to give you the ability to subscribe to a group of routes, not to a geographic area. I think you can figure out for yourself which routes you want to monitor based on regular usage. Ad hoc queries are supposed to be coming, soon, well maybe later this year.
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Someone above mentioned the unreliability of hybrids. Thought you should know that the first workday back from the Christmas holidays, over 50 of the 90 hybrid buses that OC Transpo owns (so far) wouldn’t start, resulting in as many as 100 runs being cancelled. The excuse was it was too cold. Firstly, it was only -10. Secondly, this is Canada! What sort of excuse is THAT?!
Steve: It ranks with “traffic congestion” and the fact that the SRT and snow don’t get along well. A combination of bad design, and a refusal to address obvious, common conditions.
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Communications is really an ongoing problem at the TTC in many areas.
Drivers have no idea of problems outside their vehicle, and passengers can’t find anyone to ask, even at stations.
I went to buy tickets on 01 Jan, and thought I would have to pay the new rate, as there was special signage about the old rate which gave the end date as 30 Dec. If the date changed, why not change the signage?
Steve: The effective date of the change was always going to be the 3rd. Any signs claiming it was January 1 were wrong.
(And why would a 512 streetcar going west only to Lansdowne have Keele displayed on its sign?)
Steve: There is a sort-of convention that routes which have bus shuttles at the end for long construction projects sign the cars as if they were going all the way. This avoids having people wait forever for a “Keele” car that will never appear. A similar arrangement is in place on the 504 King car which cannot physically reach Dundas West because there is no track on Roncesvalles right now.
In practice, this can be a bit hit-or-miss depending on whether the operators know what they are supposed to do.
On the website (dare I mention it), there is nothing in the route description for the St. Clair or King services about the split operation, and the schedule page for King even claims that there is service available at Howard Park and Roncesvalles southbound. In fact, the buses are on Dundas Street at that point.
If you know enough to go to the construction page, available only from the main page, not from the individual route pages, you will find a link to St. Clair Transit Today, and might figure out what is happening although you have to select the right subsection. Only the route diversions page tells you that both the 504 and 512 don’t run on their normal routings, but the general description of the 504 makes no mention of southbound service diverting via Dundas, Lansdowne and Queen. You have to go to the detailed diversion page for the 504 to get that info.
Needless to say, it’s not very likely that a general user of the site will know about this “navigation”. However, I am sure that the TTC has a long, complicated excuse for this state of affairs, and plans to rectify the situation sometime in the next millenium, subject to budgetary considerations. Indeed, if they wait long enough, the 512 and 504 services will be back to normal and they won’t have to do anything!
Thanks for all of your efforts over the years, but if there is no major sea change from management down, I don’t think the corporate mindset will change to actually share info with its passengers.
Steve: A pervasive corporate behaviour is that the TTC will acknowledge that is has a problem and may even launch a remedial program, but they can be terrible on follow-through. The website is a perfect example. New, spiffy, allegedly accessible (although I defer to others on that score), but horrible to use and often inaccurate.
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The system update banners on the screens at Eglinton Station have said “The next train is delayed” full-time for months now.
Steve: I beg to differ, at least for southbound trains, as I have been at Eglinton fairly recently. I will check this out.
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I was standing on the Union station subway platform a couple of days ago, and during an announcement a train started to pull in. I swear the announcement actually increased in volume so that it remained audible over the train noise. I know many car audio systems have speed-compensated volume, but is it possible the TTC has something that adjusts for background noise? Or was it just a bored collector keeping his or her hand on the volume dial?
It is/would be a good idea, as announcements are easily drowned out otherwise. (Though repeating them often does help, as by the second or third time you’ve usually heard it all clearly.)
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This thread, along with fares, are favourite TTC hobby-horses of mine… reflecting the incredible importance of not only service, but fares & “customer information” especially “real-time” customer information as ridership catalysts to not only generate incremental rides, but revenue as well.
TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, is very tech-savvy (TTC website redesign, Real Time Transfer Stop/Station Next vehicle Info) the first TTC Chair to grow up using technology and also a daily TTC user and intuitive about what TTC riders want. Despite this the TTC IT is expanding customer information in baby steps, rather than in giant leaps forward for dramatic ride impact.
To limit customer service to just being the best way to deliver advanced e-alert delay notices misses the big strategic picture: TTC service will always be disrupted, whether surface (congestion, accidents, fires, breakdowns, weather, etc.) or subway (mechanical, signal, PAA’s, “injury at track level”, etc.). As they say… s*** happens and it’s naïve to think that any system can alert people to last minute service disruptions, in advance of their trip, especially with 1.6M daily rides each weekday.
It’s a no-win for the TTC, if they announce every apparent disruption, riders would tune out due to the sheer volume of e-alerts, the TTC would be blamed for “crying wolf”; and if they take the time to determine the reasons for a delay, and conclude that it’s serious—a lengthy disruption—they’re accused of not being on-the-ball with advance notice, or the delay is resolved. A double-whammy no-win/no-win.
What the TTC really needs is real-time customer information in-hand that let’s people dynamically plan their trip, en route, in response to the disruptions as they are occurring, just as drivers do when faced with congestion, accidents on city streets or the Gardiner, QEW, or 401 highways.
Without it, passengers are blind-folded not knowing the reason for the delays, or what alternative routes they should choose, much like today’s advanced GPS units with FM traffic alerts for accidents and congestion that the GPS unit will try to avoid by dynamically recalculating alternate routes that will avoid the congestion and save trip time.
Service, the core product of the TTC is fundamental to rides and ride growth. Without buses, subways and streetcars there are no rides, let alone ride growth. It’s clear, however, from recent performance the last two years after RGS service additions in 2008 that the TTC can’t just throw service onto the streets and expect a ridership increase, as happened in the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s.
The TTC’s battles to add service back up to 1988’s peak levels has tended to overshadow the fact that fares are also important; just look at the slower TTC ride growth in 2008 and 2009 after Nov 2007’s 15¢/$9 adult increases, despite 2008’s RGS off-peak (Feb 08) and peak (Nov 08) service additions… with 2010’s Jan 4th 25¢/$12 adult increases likely an even worse ride impact.
Fare increases and the operating cost of adding service steal the headlines and Council’s/TTC’s Budget debates while real time customer information is literally off-the-radar as a ride/revenue-stimulus; despite being one of the most cost-effective ways of making transit, cheaper and more convenient than the car.
A little history as to why…
In late 1997 the TTC fielded its first modern era “Competitive Research” study to systematically examine the TTC’s strengths and weaknesses vs. the car. As then TTC CMO, I felt my M&PA Staff demoralized after not only the recent August 1995 Russell Hill accident shocked them by killing three women riders, the first ever TTC subway rider fatalities; compounded by coming on the heels of 6 straight ridership/revenue declines through 1996, despite their best marketing efforts.
The M&PA Staff were so gloomily pessimistic about TTC ridership growth prospects, they didn’t believe me that the TTC would grow again, as they reasoned once 13-24 year-old heavy users graduated, started working and got their first car they would abandon the TTC forever!
I commissioned the competitive research in part, to break this pessimism and give them a ray of hope that TTC rides would grow again and surpass 1988’s ride highs once employment returned to pre-90’s-recession levels, as indeed it did, as we know now 12 years later.
At PepsiCo, then Chairman Wayne Calloway emphasized the importance of competitive intelligence, learning from the competition (e.g. CCE—Coca-Cola enterprises) to gain advantage over them, and personally urged me and my Pizza Hut/Taco Bell Canada colleagues to know our competition inside out and backwards!
While second nature at private sector PepsiCo, one of the world’s best marketers, in the public sector TTC they were so traumatized 12 years ago by the never ending 90’s recessionary gloom: the funding/fares/service/fatal accident ride impact, that they stopped believing they had any competitive advantages vs. the car!
They didn’t understand real customer service, as I painfully learned in the private sector, trying to deliver pizzas in under 30 minutes or it’s free against 3 competitors in Windsor! Imagine if the TTC customer service standard was at your destination in 30 minutes or your trip is free!
The TTC never realized the key to ride growth was knowing their customers/riders better—and giving them what they wanted—when the car couldn’t! A little like Dorothy being told by the Wizard of Oz she had the power to return home to Aunt Em in Kansas all along with a little knowledge that all she had to do was clicking her ruby slippers.
The 1997 Competitive research revealed that people take transit when “it is cheaper, faster and more convenient than the car” and the TTC beat the car for three types of trips—downtown: 1. To travel downtown to work; 2. to travel downtown to for entertainment; and 3. to shop with the kids. The TTC equivalent of Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
This is particularly relevant to 2010 ride growth given the TTC’s 13-24 year old core riders are not only transit’s heaviest users (David Foote U of T, in “Boom Bust & Echo” wrote “they’re heavy users of transit as they have lots of time on their hands and no money!”), but also the most savvy/wired/dependent heavy-users of technology with their iPhones/Smartphones/Wi-fF/3G-dongled laptops/iPod Touches giving them anywhere, anytime 24/7 information access.
It’s a marriage made in heaven… those of you who are Spacing fans… think back to the Feb 2007 Gladstone Transit Camp on the TTC website redesign challenge and all the Mac laptops wi-fi enabled with live blog updates; or similarly at the later Metrolinx Metronauts transit summit.
One way for the TTC to make transit more convenient is to make real time TTC information, real-time vehicle information, and fares more accessible (smart phones, live updates/streaming, debit machines at all Collector booths) just as I set out to do in June 1997, when I recommended the TTC’s create its first website, that went online Jan 1, 1998.
It proved to be a huge success with hits growing to over 11M/month in 3 years and helped fuel 50M ride growth in 5 years. Today, however, the website is a given, taken for granted as our 13-24 year old heavy users, indeed virtually all riders of the TTC now expect more, much, much more and in real time, just as they live their lives when not on the TTC: connected to their world, family, workmates, classmates 24/7 in real time via smart phone and laptops—unthinkable in 1997 age of dial-up access that required a wired phone landline.
The TTC looks at public access to real time customer service vehicle information with mixed emotion: at worst it exposes them to ridicule by anti-transit politicians and opponents for their apparent operational ineptness in running the system without frequent daily delays… so why throw gasoline on the fire and stoke the histrionics when it will just lead to less support and budget for the TTC?
At best, and the reason why it’s a risk worth taking is it will signal a paradigm shift in real customer service that shows the TTC really gets it, really understands their customers, and knows it will help the Ridership Growth Strategy and Transit City deliver on their potential and promise… to create a true transit city, with transit as a way of life in Toronto, the preferred way to travel, not just for those who can’t afford a car.
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Today’s Star has an update on the Broadview closed stairway, saying that “isn’t likely to be fixed before mid-April.”.
This contradicts the sign that they’ve posed on the stairway itself, which says it will be reopening on the 15th.
This is typical of TTC communication, two different sources giving contradictory evidence, so that you don’t know which to believe, and end up believing neither of them.
Steve: Broadview is my home station, and I will let everyone know what happens on “opening day” later this week.
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Even when things go wrong, we must remember to not alaways blame the bus driver. They put up with enough crap like this.
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This problem isn’t unique to TTC. On New Year’s Eve, GO Transit’s main status page was reporting two late trains and everything else “normal”. However, the online Union Station “next train” board showed about ten cancelled trains.
That said, GO seem to be planning to improve things: (Provision of a Station Service Status System).
Steve: The TTC has several ideas for new and expanded information channels, but the big issue is providing the staffing and having the corporate desire to provide this info. These should not just be technology/construction projects, but fundamental changes in the corporate attitude. It’s easy to spend millions on video screens and internet goodies, but if you don’t use them, if you don’t feed them with accurate, up-to-date info, it’s a waste money and a big disappointment to customers.
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Steve: “The big issue is providing the staffing and having the corporate desire to provide this info. These should not just be technology/construction projects, but fundamental changes in the corporate attitude”
I agree completely. So, the question is: how do you change that corporate attitude?
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Improving the audio quality of spoken announcements is all well and good, but until there’s a written equivalent deaf people can read you’re only solving half the problem. (Cf. Museum station detour.)
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Tom West says:
January 11, 2010 at 9:31 am
“This problem isn’t unique to TTC. On New Year’s Eve, GO Transit’s main status page was reporting two late trains and everything else “normal”. However, the online Union Station “next train” board showed about ten cancelled trains.
That said, GO seem to be planning to improve things: (Provision of a Station Service Status System).”
Weren’t a lot of New Year’s Eve trains cancelled weeks ahead of time and a special schedule run? New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve (or the Friday before if they are on a weekend) are a special schedule and have been for years. This fact was published in GO’s newsletter, on the web and on posters at the stations. GO should not have to advise that a train that is not on that day’s schedule is not running. If GO cancelled 10 trains from what was left of the schedule then nothing would have run.
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I took the GO train into and out of Toronto today for a course I take. Since the course was only two hours long I decided to ride the TTC and check out the 512 and the construction on Roncesvalles. I walked up to St. Andrew Station to get a day pass as the pedestrian traffic from GO Union to TTC Union was so large that I could not get into the subway without a wait. I figured that I could walk to King and buy my pass just as fast, then I got on a 510 running into service. There had just been a gap on King westbound as there were two 504’s, one signed Roncesvalles as he was probably running in, a 508 then the 510. There were a number of people who waited for the 510 and all of them either got off before Spadina or rode up Spadina. Torontonians are learning to read.
I went over to Yonge and up to St. Clair to catch the 512. There had also been a gap on St. Clair and I got the third car in the convoy. The operator said that some of the drivers did not know how to run this line. He certainly did and the only red we had to wait for was Avenue Road and that was because the cars in front of us blocked the intersection. When we got to St. Clair West we were the eighth car in the station and none were on the spare track. The supervisor asked if any one wanted the station, no one did, so he sent the car straight through. A car to clear the passengers waiting on the street while the other cars cleared the station platform. He will probably be fired for doing something useful instead of keeping all the cars in order.
Steve: With all the short turning, they are never in order. This was a good move, but the remark about operators knowing (or not) how to run the line is telling.
The ride over to Lansdowne was quick and uneventful. There is an alighting stop for the 512 on Lansdowne just before the entrance to the loop. The CLRV was swung over to the curb and just barely cleared the pedestrian walkway for St. Clair. The new low floors will be a mess here. Some urban landscaper has narrowed the lane way in the loop by putting in trees and planters so a street car has trouble passing a bus and any sucker coming up the lane way is stuck until the streetcar leaves. When it is a low floor his tail end will be going west while his nose is going north. The lane will really be blocked. Did any one know that the TTC was going for 28 m cars when they re-designed this loop or was that done back in Witt days? The street cars had no problem making the illegal left hand turn or exiting the loop. The autos seemed to have re-learned the danger of messing with 25 tonnes of steel, or rust.
Steve: When the loop was designed, the new cars were going to be something like what Bombardier displayed at Dundas Square. The biggest problem with this loop is that all of the Lansdowne buses should loop via Davenport, Caledonia and St. Clair and avoid the loop completely. I suggested this ages ago to the TTC, but the idea probably got lost along with so many others.
Every CLRV I was on except one was frigid. On most cars the drivers wore a vest or sweater plus coat and hat to keep warm. One car actually had some heat and the driver only had a sweater and vest on, no coat. How hard is it to get a resistor grid to work; they have no moving parts.
Steve: Cold cars continue to be a problem. I was on one recently where the operator called for a change-off just after taking it over. It was 4037, the car that has been used for Adam Giambrone’s TV show.
Spadina south bound at 10:00 a.m. had a packed standing load all the way to south of Dundas and we were not in a gap. The service appeared to be normal as the two cars in front were never more than two lights ahead. Are the ground men at King, Queen, Dundas and College north bound for rear door loading?
Steve: Yes, although I don’t know why you would need them anywhere but Dundas at that hour of the day.
St. George station, especially the east end of the lower level is a disgrace. The walls an ceiling are so filthy that the mice were running down the tunnel to get away. Didn’t the TTC used to have a wall washing car? I realize that it is a little cold right now to use it but this is not new dirt. The older the stations the better looking they appeared to be. There is no longer a horrible stench from the washrooms at Eglinton; there are no longer any washrooms at Eglinton. They are supposer to be re-furbishing them.
Steve: The TTC is no longer allowed to flush dirt into the sewers as the stuff coming out of the subway tunnel is considered an environmental hazard. Nice that they’re leaving it for the passengers.
I rode a King car over to Roncesvalles and the replacement bus up to Dundas West. The city has a least put down temporary pavement were they have ripped up the street car tracks and the road was remarkably smooth. The person responsible for this oversight will probably be fired. The bus had to go on the sidewalk on the west side of the street to get around some construction. Considering the amount of hole digging and concrete pouring going on the traffic moved remarkably well.
Contrary to some reports that I have read here, every operator went out of his or her way to help passengers and keep the riders informed.
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More on my observation from my trip into Toronto yesterday, this time on the GO train service. I took the last train in from Brampton and it had a standing load when we left Malton. From Weston in almost as many people got off as got on so the line is getting local ridership. Because of construction we could only use the single platform at the south end of the station and platform clearing was very slow, especially as most people wanted to get to the east end of Union and into the subway or PATH system.
The stairs and inside areas that lead to the exits on York street are very bright and airy, a nice change from the old dark labyrinth. York Street’s sidewalks are not wide enough to handle the surge of pedestrian traffic and they need to put some inside walk ways to get up to the moat and Front Street. I hope that when they get all the cars and trucks out of the basement this is going in.
Steve: Yes, this is part of the overall plan. The York east side teamway will be rebuilt like the one on Bay Street. The basement of Union Station will be lowered and rebuilt into a GO area (upper) and shopping concourse (lower) as discussed in other posts. The rental car business will be kicked out fairly soon as construction will start on the west side of the station. The trucks serving businesses at the station will all use a new loading dock in the southwest corner of the building.
The line up to get tickets at the subway was very long so as I said I walked up to St. Andrew Station. On the way home we had a standing load to Bramalea Station. Almost as many people got on the trains as got off at Weston, Etobicoke North and Malton. Some people actually got off at Bloor northbound and walked through the hole in the fence to the Rail Trail. I have never had a ticket checked between Union and Bloor so maybe they can ride for free because it seems to be an expensive way to go to Bloor and Dundas. At Brampton half of the passengers walked away from the station instead of driving. With all the new construction in the Brampton Downtown I expect walk ins to become an even larger portion of the ridership. With the number of standees it would seem that the Georgetown line will either need longer trains or more frequent trains soon. Only problem is that all the new platforms are only 10 cars long.
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Steve:
Do TTC really think people never want to call in about service issues outside of working hours? (Unless this is an Ontario thing? My health insuarnce company doesn’t believe in letting me talk to them outside of office hours… good thing I’m allowed to do non-work calls at work).
Steve: It’s the TTC saving money and hoping you will use another technology like the Internet.
Robert Wightman says:
I *think* GO just ran extra trains compared with normal weekday service, and didn’t remove any. I agree with you that trains not scheduled shouldn’t appear at all.
Reading through most of the above comments, the impression I get is that there are plenty of channels for TTC to get information to customers, both for pre-planned and unplanned events. However, too many staff seem incapable of using the channels correctly, or not at all.
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Tom West says:
NO, GO did not run any extras! They cancelled a lot of trains, actually they were not on the schedule, and started the Rush Hour Service much earlier. Here are the changes made to the Brampton service, where I live. From the Transit Toronto web site though this information is incomplete:
GO has four train sets that lay over at Georgetown after the p.m. rush hour. They ran these four trains. The first left Union at 1:00 p.m., the second left at 2:45 p.m. The other two, I believe, left Toronto at 4:15 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. On normal weekdays the 1:00 p.m. train runs to Bramalea and then returns in service to Union; the 2:45 p.m. runs to Brampton then runs out of service back to Union. The four regular trains to Georgetown leave Union at 4:15 p.m., 4:45 p.m., 5:15 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. It also cancelled the 6:45 p.m. train for Bramalea. All this information was in newsletters to riders and on their website a couple of weeks before Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
None of the cancellations were unplanned for. This has been GO’s normal procedure since the late 60’s. Given the FACT that GO has a different schedule on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, none of the scheduled service was cancelled. I went by the Brampton and Mt. Pleasant GO stations on those days and the parking lots were less than half full Given the fact that ridership on these days was about 50% of normal GO ran enough service and they ran it on the published Special Schedule. They did not run extra trains as there was no one to ride them.
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One of the biggest problems with announcements on the subway is that there is no consideration given to the accoustical properties involved. Subway stations have a king sized echo along with ambient noise. That means announcements have to be made slowly, perhaps like the VIA Rail announcements in Union Station. I found myself in an emergency situation last Sunday morning in Islington Station. The doors to the main section of the mezzanine were locked. The voice on the P.A. was fast and totally incomprehensible. What if we had been in a dangerous situation?
The Sunday before I was in the front seat of a St. Clair streetcar when it broadsided an automobile attempting an illegal left turn. Why aren’t the transit signals made to look entirely different from a left turn signal? Perhaps instead of green, a white signal could be used or something like the white verticle line as used at Spadina and Queen’s Quay? And while they’re at it they should re-design the fixtures so they look more like a ralway signal than a traffic signal. Of course if the car driver is thinking there should be no confusion but as I understand it, the driver of the car that was broadsided said, “It was my fault. I wasn’t thinking,”
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Agreed. And they have certainly no problem about pushing aside riders for their union-mandated smoke breaks.
You want proof? This was witnessed by myself at Royal York Station as I went to obtain a day pass a couple of Sundays back. The operator was simply standing there having a smoke. So when I asked him if I could buy said day pass, he said, in quite a terse tone: “WAIT UNTIL I FINISH HERE FIRST AND THEN I WILL SERVE YOU.” When I pointed to the growing line of people waiting to buy tokens he said: “LOOK I WORK HARD FOR YOU GUYS AND OUR CONTRACT ALLOWS ME TO TAKE MY SMOKE BREAK AND I WILL. YOU WILL WAIT.” He then proceeded to light another cigarette.
Frankly, I didn’t ride the TTC after that. And I don’t think I will again after this. This all boils down to one simple thing: most TTC operators don’t give a rat’s ass about the people they service, they only care about themselves and their “fellow union man”. I could digress and say that this could be applicable in a non-union environment. Remember the Day Pass incident I had during the Taste of the Danforth? That was reported to the TTC customer service and a case file was opened, but when I went to call them again for a follow up, it was closed as a “non-issue”. What the heck does that mean? Does it mean that my concern as a rider does not count? Is the TTC customer service (non-unionized) standing up behind the union?
All TTC operators, unionized or not, need to take a civics class. Almost every ride on the TTC as of late has been met with some rudeness from a TTC operator one way or another. Contrast this with my experience in Lisbon where every operator I encountered was helpful, friendly and courteous. The TTC should take some lessons from them.
Steve: I have to say that every TTC operator I have dealt with in the past two weeks has been at worst, professional, and at best friendly. That said, when I look at service on St. Clair, I am seeing a holdover of the old shuttle-era style of operation where some ops take long breaks at the terminal even though the line is a fraction of the length of the Queen route. This problem is compounded by attempts to run the route to schedule rather than simply managing a headway. Riders get cheezed off with good reason.
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Stephen Cheung quoted a TTC employee saying, “OUR CONTRACT ALLOWS ME TO TAKE MY SMOKE BREAK AND I WILL.”
That is the same attitude as saying, “I have the right to swing a stick at a beehive, and I will.” The difference is, there do not appear to be repercussions for the former as there are for the latter.
This isn’t restricted to the TTC specifically, or even to Unionized environments semi-specifically, but observations of it appear to be more common when it comes to the TTC.
Setting aside the issue of wondering if non-smokers get the same contract-guaranteed breaks, why do contracts (or those who interpret them) seem to prohibit common sense? Why on earth take a break when it gets busy? I would have no problem with giving someone an extra break or two, at non-busy times, to make up for having to delay a break due to a busy period. Heck, if the TTC signs a contract to guarantee breaks, they should have a mechanism to provide relief staff to ensure the breaks are possible during long periods of constant flow of people.
Steve: It may be that there are fewer people available to provide breaks, or that smokers need more of them than mere mortals and take them more often. At Broadview Station, it is not uncommon to see the booth with a sign saying “please pay and enter” while the collector smokes out on the street.
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How hard is it really to work as a Collector? It’s like a cashier but simpler, and at three-times the pay. Very few of these guys could handle a real customer service job. I find it especially annoying when they know they can say or do anything to intentionally rile-up someone because they are protected by the booth. I’ve witnessed a number of such incidents.
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Steve you make a great point about how the TTC operates “to schedule” and not “to headway”. How many times does anyone have to wait for a vehicle to arrive only to have it dawdle along the route at a snails pace before you switch to another mode of transport?
I know you’ve said it before but it makes far more sense to operate ‘rapid transit’ on a ever ‘n’ minutes a vehicle passes any stop on the route than the TTC schedule terminal arrival – departure style.
And when it’s a surface vehicle the other users of the road get frustrated too!
Steve: Yes, this is a big problem, and responsible for a lot of the mess on St. Clair right now. The running times need to be adjusted, but if the TTC simply said “let’s run a headway of x minutes” and spaced the cars accordingly, they would have a decent service. Instead there are many short turns and a lot of bunching.
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