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Regular Service Will Resume Shortly

For all of my regular readers who probably wonder why the flow of posts has dribbled to a trickle …

A combination of factors including a comparative dearth of news, the heat, a few short vacations and family issues have kept me from working as hard and regularly on this site as I prefer to.

In the pipeline are:

  • A review of plans for waterfront transit from the Don to the Western Waterfront.
  • A review (yes, finally) of Metrolinx’ Benefits Case Analsis methodology.  With the pending rework of “The Big Move” and the likelihood that many will seek justification for building or ignoring various transit proposals, any so-called methodology needs to be rigourous, defensible and well-understood.  The BCAs fail on at least two of these counts.
  • A review of the Customer Service Panel’s recommendations.
  • A recap of the TTC meeting scheduled for August 24.
  • A review of streetcar operations on Spadina for February, and for the full-length St. Clair route for July.  Both of these routes use reserved lanes, and the GPS-based data make detailed analysis much easier and revealing.
  • Later this fall, I will turn to the Carlton and Dundas routes, the only two for which I have not published operational reviews.

There is also, of course, the small matter of the coming election.

3 thoughts on “Regular Service Will Resume Shortly”

  1. Are you still having to special-request monthly data?

    It seems to me that someone with good skills at internet data pickup should be able to produce daily and monthly reports on streetcar routes based on Next Vehicle data. (Maybe someone is already doing this?)

    Steve: Yes, I get the data by special request, although the Commission recently directed staff to make archival data generally available as part of the open data policy. However, the due date for this is December 2010. As for the NextBus data, I prefer the original material. NextBus is a live feed, not an accumulation, and moreover it is the digested version of the current system status as processed by NextBus. I want the source data to avoid whatever manipulations NextBus has made. I have noticed from time to time that NextBus “loses” vehicles, and not just when they go off route.

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  2. I recently moved to Carlton Street after living on King West. I knew I was spoiled by the uber-frequent King car, but I wasn’t prepared for the chaos that exists on the Carlton route. Several operators have described Carlton as the worst managed route. There are lots of local trips along Carlton and the scheduled service frequency is inadequate. When a car comes along there’s simply too much work for it to do and bunching results. At Carlton/Jarvis TXTTTC often returns predictions like: 1 mins, 2 mins, 5 mins, 22 mins.

    I’m looking forward to seeing your route analysis, Steve.

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  3. @Dick Hmm, sounds like the 501 Queen route as well – but even longer, not enough streetcars scheduled, & truly terrible line management. You’d think that having more streetcars on these long streetcar lines would give the TTC more streetcars available to deal with bunching and large gaps in service.

    But no, TTC management, including Admiral Adam Giambrone, state there’s no use to add additional streetcars cuz they just get swallowed up by traffic.

    Hello?!

    Tell that to the dozens of waiting passengers bypassed at stops cuz streetcars have people almost spilling out of the windows they’re so full.

    Meanwhile TTC shining stars want to build a TTC museum as a monument to themselves. Something’s very wrong with this organization. Where’s the broom when you need it?

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