Service changes to be implemented on June 22 include a large number of seasonal cutbacks in service on a par with what was done in 2013. There is an unusually large amount of construction underway around the city and this is reflected both in adjusted schedules and in a much higher than budgeted number of hours for construction-related service. This activity is one of the constraints on service growth for 2014.
Updated June 18, 2014: With the reopening of Cherry Street south of Mill Street, the 172 Cherry bus will resume its normal routing through the Distillery District (via Parliament, Mill and Cherry) on Saturday, June 21.
29 Dufferin will be formally scheduled as an articulated bus route on weekdays. Although there will be fewer vehicles than at present, the reduction is smaller than the relative size of the vehicles giving an increase in route capacity. This may be offset by service reliability as happened already on 7 Bathurst.
The Queen and King streetcar routes will divert around track construction at Broadview & Queen from June 30 to July 25.
501 Queen cars which are now diverting both ways via Broadview, Gerrard and Coxwell will alter their route to divert via Parliament, Gerrard and Coxwell.
504 King cars now diverting both ways around the Don Bridge constuction via Parliament and Queen will alter their route to divert via Parliament and Dundas.
501/502 bus replacement service on Queen will divert both ways via Pape, Dundas and River. As with the diversion service already in operation for the Queen & Leslie track work, these buses will loop downtown via Church, Richmond and Victoria. There will be no 503 Kingston Road Tripper service to York & Wellington.
2014.06.22_Service_Changes (Updated June 13, 2014)
Steve Munro 
Minor typo sir – for some time now the 95A has been discontinued and extended to Ellesmere RT STation as the 95C. “Kingston Rd” buses will now be 95A (your table still lists 95A Victoria Park)
Steve: Oops! That’s what I get for using last year’s summer changes as a template. I will fix this later tonight. Thanks for flagging it.
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Steve, there are a couple of omissions in your table of service changes:
1. Additional running time will be added on 129 McCowan North in the AM peak, midday and PM peak due to road construction between McNicoll and Steeles. In the AM peak, the conbined headway will widen from 4’30 to 5’00’ with no change in the number of buses allocated. During midday, two buses will be added, and the combined headway will remain at 6’00”. In the PM peak, two buses will be added, and the combined headway will widen from 4’15” to 4’30”.
2. Additional running time will be added on 59 Maple Leaf will change during midday on weekdays due to Metrolinx construction on Weston Rd north of St. Phillps. One bus will be added and service will change from every 30′ to every 23′.
3. Five CLRV trippers will be removed in the AM peak from 504 King, as part of seasonal service reductions.
4. The service reductions on 190 Scarborough Centre Rocket are intended to be reversed in September, so they should appear under seasonal changes in your table.
Steve: This was a particularly messy update to deal with because of multiple concurrent changes: new route lettering, summer cuts and construction, plus a few real service changes. Some routes’ changes are listed in more than one place in the TTC memo with only partial info, and I didn’t catch all of them. In preparing my table, it was a judgement call what to do when there was both a construction change and a summer headway change. 129 McCowan North was in the simpler “seasonal” list because I missed the more detailed construction info elsewhere in the memo where info on that route spans a page break.
Similarly, I missed the 59 Maple Leaf mid-day service improvement.
The 190 Scarborough Centre Rocket has many service changes of which only those in the peak period are flagged as “seasonal”.
As for the 504 King car, the information in the service memo is confusing. Under the section describing the Broadview/Queen diversions, there are reallocations of vehicles between King and Queen, but these changes are already reflected in the May schedule summary:
Dundas West to Broadview Station 3 ALRV trips + 15 CLRV trips
Dundas West to Parliament 3 CLRV trips
Roncesvalles to Broadview Station 3 CLRV trips
The June memo shows the existing 18 trips from Dundas West to Broadview Stn as if they were a new arrangement, and it also says that there are 6 CLRV trips from Dundas West to Parliament, and says that there is “no change”. If that is correct, then there are no “5 CLRV trippers” to be cut from the schedule even though this is shown under the seasonal changes.
Now that the Service Summary for June has been posted, it is clear that there will only be 10 CLRV trippers between Dundas West and Broadview Stations, and this resolves the contradiction in the memo.
Thanks for catching these. I am contemplating a different arrangement of the information so that I can maintain the more compact format than the service memo, but avoid problems where changes are spread among two or more categories at the same time.
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Can’t wait to see Rob Ford re-elected to his second mayoral term tonight. I wonder how many people will move out of Toronto and/or commit suicide once Ford is re-crowned mayor tonight. I hope that Rob will name Doug Ford as his Deputy Mayor in his victory speech tonight. I can’t wait to hear Robby’s victory speech and will be heading home early tonight so that I don’t miss any of it.
Steve: Well, assuming that this is not a joke, there is a tiny problem: Rob Ford is not running tonight. It’s the provincial election, not the municipal one. RoFo is still in rehab, and the person running for re-election is Kathleen Wynne, although Ford’s buddy Tim Hudak would like to take the prize.
This fall, I look forward to RoFo’s concession speech wherein he talks about how the new mayor has “a mandate”. But that’s asking a lot of someone who thinks all his problems are the fault of the media.
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Let’s be fair. He doesn’t think all his problems are caused by the media.
Some of them are caused by the downtown elite, and by streetcars.
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Just a minor typo, the chart still says 106A York University Rocket.
Steve: Fixed. Thanks.
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Steve, while the 7 Bathurst (or should that be the 7A Bathurst?) seeing some reduction in service level (thanks to the reduction in the number of buses because of the changeover to articulated buses, this again is a pet peeve of mine. I have always thought that articulated vehicles (i.e. longer vehicles) should be placed on routes that need more capacity but already have frequent service or at times when there is more demand. But to change the route over like this basically reduces service and is a way of the TTC of trying to cut costs (less buses mean less operating costs) and not making things better for the riders.
Steve: What is interesting on 29 Dufferin is that although headways are wider, there is also an increase in capacity. The real challenge for the TTC is to run these buses on a reliable spacing which could actually make the “after” service noticeably better. However, on 7 Bathurst, as I already reported, the service with artics was even more disorganized than with the regular sized buses.
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Though Metrolinx are still working on the rail bridge (similar to Lower Sherbourne and, soon, Parliament) Cherry Street has just re-opened from Mill to Lake Shore. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the TTC to return the 72/172 bus to its normal routing along Mill and Cherry.
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You missed a lot of routes like 129, etc. You never miss streetcar routes or routes in and around downtown. You post a lot of data and analysis for routes closer to your heart. Have you ever analysed data for a Scarborough bus route? Correct me if I am wrong but I doubt it and by Scarborough bus route I mean one whose entire route is in Scarborough. You seem to focus on areas in and around downtown and streetcar routes/areas as those are areas closer to your heart and for some reason you also seem to like the Yonge St area through Thornhill to Richmond Hill and hence your support for the completely unnecessary Richmond Hill subway project. Your cherry picking is inconsistent with providing riders information about Toronto Transit (service updates, construction, etc).
Steve: Once again, a voice from Scarborough proves itself utterly incompetent to even read what I have written. First off, I have published an analysis of Lawrence East which, while not entirely in Scarborough, is certainly a major route there and subject to a lot of uneven headways because its branched services are not properly meshed. I have also looked at Finch East, although didn’t publish the results.
Where you are totally off base is in saying that I support the Richmond Hill Subway. I don’t and never have. Frequent GO service would have cut off demand for that subway years ago, or at least deferred it for several decades. Instead the subway jocks at the TTC connived to push the project forward while downplaying the importance of a DRL or Don Mills line. The TTC likes to play all professional and innocent on matters of subway expansion, but their hands have not been clean going back through decades of bad decisions.
As for streetcar routes downtown, if you were paying attention, I did miss some updates for them this time out, but in general they are less complex and have less to miss in the service memo. They also carry a potload more riders and have been starved for improved service far longer than any route in Scarborough with the possible exception of the RT itself. My focus on them and on trunk bus routes has been to show that the poor service is at least as much the fault of bad line management by TTC and game-playing by some operators as it is an inherent problem with streetcars. When you look at the stats for major routes like Dufferin, Bathurst, Finch West or Lawrence East, they are not all that different from what we see with streetcars. The TTC gets away with claiming that they can’t fix service problems, but that is, quite bluntly, BS and flows from a long history of blaming external forces, never looking in the mirror, to address systemic problems. Thanks to Karen Stintz, they have been so concerned with looking good, with cleaning up the system, that they have lost track of what the buses, streetcars and subway trains are really there for — to provide service. This is changing a bit, at least in intent, but I have yet to see the benefits on the street where it counts.
When you learn to stop casting every single argument from the point of view of the downtrodden, ignored Scarberian, I might be prepared to engage you further, but don’t be surprised to see future comments deleted.
This is my blog, and I am not the Star or the Globe — I publish what I want to publish on my own time and with nobody paying me for the effort. You are welcome to start your own competing site. Now piss off.
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Regarding the discussion above about articulated vehicles providing increased capacity: yes, there is more capacity, but not to the extent advertised. According to sign-up board at Wilson, on 7 Bathurst and 29 Dufferin, in the peak periods, there will be a total of 42 and 47 artic buses in the AM and PM peak, respectively, starting June 22. It is a mystery how this could be achieved with a total fleet of 45 artics available for service at the division.
The same problem is now seen on Saturdays, where dispatching 40 artics for service on Dufferin out of the total fleet of 45 is next to impossible. So, seeing quite a few standard buses running on artic headways should come as no surprise. I am looking forward to seeing a serious shake-up in Service Planning, but I am not holding my breath.
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I would note Steve it also seems to be in general both a better place for real information, and generally (though not always) informed debate.
Question for you Steve? Have you done any more for/on Rexdale, or East York or Mimico, than you have for Guildwood, or Malvern? In some of previous discussions here with you, you have pressed the case for the worst served areas, and have been quick to point out the specific need for Malvern. I would also note that you have pushed much more strongly in the debate with regards to Scarborough than you are given credit for. I wish that Waterfront West was being championed as strongly. Also I credit you with being extremely clear in past post with comments with regards to the notion that the TTC had not even considered LRT for Vaughan in a creditable manner. You seem to have been happy to allow many comments (including mine) and even made the point that “subway extension has to end” when I amongst others have railed specifically against a Richmond Hill subway extension.
I wonder if the poor me advocates for Scarborough realize that at some point this passive aggressive approach, will cause a reaction not just from you but from other Toronto and Ontario voters and taxpayers. At some point, people will say, you know they are never going to be happy so why bother trying.
I am of the mind that Transit City would have offered the best possible service to Scarborough and especially Scarborough, and yet somehow this is not good enough. As someone said in a previous thread, seems like “Green Eggs and Ham”. Rather than looking to see how it would work, and what could be done, this notion has been torpedoed by those who will not even look reasonably at the proposal. Nor have they been ready to look at how it mirrors service elsewhere that is both very high quality and effective.
I was going to react to “Cardiologist” comments, when I realized he is only hoping to see Mr. Ford as a patient. He (Mr. Ford) is likely causing himself significant arterial congestion, much as he has the city. His deliberate misinformation has likely damaged the city and Scarborough in particular, even more than his diet has damaged his own health.
Steve: I don’t pick my topics based on geography — the improvement of transit in general has always been my goal. That said, advocating better GO service on any available corridor at reasonable fares is advocacy for the outer suburbs in general. Many times have I written about problems with the through-routed Queen service to Long Branch which even the TTC acknowledges is responsible for poor service on the route overall. East York includes Thorncliffe Park, a location I have always supported for a station on a Don Mills line. Yes, I spend a lot of time talking about the downtown routes and the streetcar system, especially its reconstruction. This is important both because of the numbers of riders these lines carry (and could carry many more), and because the evolution of construction techniques shows both a commitment to quality and longevity in the new infrastructure. After all, I am a streetcar advocate, but unlike Rob Ford, do not have a transit monomania.
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Why is the 11B Bayview short turn (formerly 28) not being extended to Sunnybrook Hospital? Bus route 11 seems to have quite a severe overcrowding problem between Sunnybrook and Davisville Station (is much emptier north of Sunnybrook) so it seems like this short turn service should be extended to Sunnybrook. It seems pretty weird that we would have a branch of the Bayview bus that doesn’t run along Bayview. Though I am rather surprised by how busy the former 28 is despite going a short distance that is practically walking distance.
Steve: The Bayview short turn (whatever it is called) covers about 2km, not exactly “walking distance” for some people. That said, yes, it is odd that service between Davisville and Sunnybrook is actually better evenings and weekends, when the short turn service goes to the hospital, than during weekday peak periods.
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With a 10-minute gap in both 501 and 504 westbound services at 8 AM this morning, I had a chance to walk down Parliament.
The detour is fully in place. What’s interesting though is at both Gerrard and Parliament (west to south) and Dundas and Parliament (north to east) there is a switchperson on duty AND A POLICE OFFICER to stop traffic for them. That’s 4 people!
It does make you scratch your head on why they simply didn’t detour 501 down Broadview/Dundas where all the switches are working instead of Gerrard/Parliament. (it may even be faster westbound, given how much the Gerrard/Parliament intersection backs up in rush hour).
Even this very quiet morning at 8 AM it took 3 light cycles for the 506 I was on to get to the stop at Parliament. (Broadview looked empty, even with cones on the road south of Dundas. Parliament itself was also traffic-free, and Dundas also was quiet.)
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