This is the first in a series of posts about service on the Queen car following on from my article about evaluating the quality of transit service.  Queen is a major TTC route that includes many problems including its length, traffic congestion in certain parts of the route, and a general dissatisfaction among riders.

Just how bad is the service?  A common observation from riders is that they can walk to their destination without being passed by a streetcar.  On the outer ends of the route, service can be unpredictable especially west of Humber Loop where only half of the service is even scheduled to travel and some of that is short-turned.

The TTC’s goal is to operate 70% of streetcar service within 3 minutes of the advertised headway.  On Queen, scheduled headways at most times lie in the range from 5 to 7 minutes, and this translates to an acceptable band of service that treats gaps of up to 10 minutes as “punctual”.  In practice, the route rarely attains that 70% score.

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