Month: September 2021

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A Small Gap on the Bathurst Bus

From time to time, someone will tweet a complaint to @TTCHelps about a very long wait for a bus and copy me into the thread. This can set off an exchange which, to be diplomatic, can involve varying claims about what is actually happening.

For as long as anyone can remember, the TTC has a standard response to such complaints: that traffic congestion or some other transient event beyond their control is responsible. More recently a few new lines have been added to their repertoire including:

  • Due to inadequacies in the schedule, buses cannot stay on time, but this will all be fixed in a coming revision.
  • There are “run as directed” buses which are used to fill gaps in service and respond to problems of overcrowding. These buses are far less numerous than some at the TTC have claimed, and they are completely invisible to service tracking apps.
  • Riders concerned about crowding can refer to transit monitoring apps to see if an uncrowded bus is coming down the route. Of course if you’re on a streetcar, they don’t have passenger counters and there is no online crowding info for them, in spite of ads for this service up and down Spadina Avenue.

On top of this, the TTC produces monthly on time performance stats that purport to show that, overall, things are not too bad. They have “service standards” about what constitutes an appropriate quality of service, and they hit them to some degree some of the time, on average.

This is a long-standing response of “not our problem”, backed up by “we will fix the schedule eventually”, “we are meeting our standards most of the time”, and “riders can find uncrowded buses, so what’s the problem anyhow”.

This is cold comfort to riders waiting for service.

Problems of irregular service and crowding on the TTC predate the pandemic, and were starting to attract attention by the politicians who claim to set policy and could not square complaints from riders and constituents with management reports. Then the world changed.

But the world is trying to change back, and with it the desire for transit service to actually attract riders. The time is overdue for attention to quality of service as a basic marketing tool. A shop window does not attract customers with a photos of products that might arrive soon, maybe.

Bathurst Bus Scheduled Service

In January 2021, weekday service on 7 Bathurst changed from regular-sized to articulated buses (12m to 18m), and the January 2019 schedule was restored. As we will see later, there are still several 12m buses running on Bathurst, but on schedules that assume 18m capacity.

In May 2021, peak period service was trimmed in response to actual demand, and the service in effect until Friday, September 3, was to operate every 10 minutes throughout the day (see table below). Note that the schedule includes an allowance for construction of Forest Hill Station on Line 5, but actual operating data charted later in this article shows that this is no longer a source of delay.

The January schedule with slightly more frequent service will return on Tuesday, September 7 as part of the TTC’s overall restoration of service.

On Friday afternoon, September 3, 2021, a tweet popped up asking the perennial question “where’s my bus” from a rider waiting at Glencairn and Bathurst. The 7 Bathurst is a notoriously unreliable service even though, irony of ironies, it serves the TTC’s Hillcrest complex.

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Ontario Line Consultation: September 2021 Round

Metrolinx has announced the dates of its next round of consultations on the Ontario Line. The presentation decks for these are not yet published, but when they are, I will comment on them here.

The links from the dates below will take you to the registration page for each session.

  • September 9: West Segment (Exhibition to Queen/Spadina Station)
  • September 16: North Segment (Pape to Science Centre Station, plus the Maintenance and Storage Facility)
  • September 23: East Segment (East Harbour to Gerrard Station)
  • October 7: Downtown Segment (Osgoode to Corktown Station) [The original meeting date was September 30, but this has been changed by Metrolinx.]

These pages have provision for submitting questions in advance, but nothing specific yet to which participants might react.

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Service Reliability of 54/954 Lawrence East

This article completes my analysis of corridors where RapidTO “red lanes” have been installed or proposed to speed bus operations. Previous articles in the series are:

This article reviews travel times and headway reliability (the intervals between buses) primarily through the pandemic era to July 2021 with April 2018 data as a pre-pandemic reference.

The High Points

The reduction in travel times on Lawrence East from mid-March onward was smaller than on some other routes, and this was confined to certain areas and directions. This implies that red lanes would not offer much change during many periods over the route from Don Mills to Starspray as proposed.

A further problem lies in the infrequent service particularly east of the 54B Orton Park scheduled turnback beyond which only half of the scheduled service (plus peak-only express buses) operates. A fully reserved lane is hard to justify if it will not substantially affect travel times and if only a few buses per hour actually use it.

The segment west of Victoria Park includes the DVP interchange where integration of red lanes would be difficult. The time saving from March 2020 onward is small or nil for most of the day.

By far the worst problem on the 54/954 Lawrence East service is headway reliability, and unpredictable gaps in service can contribute far more to journey times than any saving that might arise from reserved lanes. Service leaving Lawrence East Station both ways is very erratic even though this would be a logical place to space service.

The route is subject to congestion and construction delays along Eglinton from Leslie to Yonge, although the schedule is supposed to include extra time to compensate.

Headways inbound from eastern Scarborough are disorganized both at the very outer end, and west of the point where the 54B service merges in. The express service operates on wide-ranging headways to the extent that waiting for the next one to show up could add more to a trip than the time saved by “express” operation.

Average headways on a daily and weekly basis generally follow scheduled values indicating that most or all service is present, and the wide gaps cannot be explained by missing or untracked vehicles.

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TTC’s 100th Birthday

Today, September 1, 2021, marks the anniversary of the day 100 years ago when the Toronto Transportation Commission, as it was then known, began the consolidation of the mostly privately owned street railways that served Toronto into the system we know today.

I will not attempt a mini-history in this article as there is good reading elsewhere in the TTC and Toronto Archives sites, as well as many detailed articles on various aspects of the system’s history on the Transit Toronto site.

At Roncesvalles Carhouse, which is conveniently half-empty thanks to a combination of the never-ending King-Queen-Queensway-Roncesvalles reconstruction (held up by Toronto Hydro) and the reduced level of streetcar service, the yard could be dedicated to a collection of vehicles over the past century. There was plenty of room for a socially distanced gathering of media, a few politicians, TTC management and staff.

The assembled fleet included:

  • Peter Witt 2766, PCC 4549, CLRV 4081, ALRV 4207, Flexity 4601
  • Proterra 3725, BYD 3754, New Flyer 3722, Nova Bus 8850, GM New Look 2252 and Wheel Trans ProMaster W700.

The TTC has produced a commemorative book that will be available at some subway kiosks and through the TTC online shop. There is also a painting which will be issued as a poster, and used as the cover art for the January 2022 Ride Guide. The artist is Robert Croxford.

[Full disclosure: I reviewed an early version of the text for this book on a pro bono basis.]

In his remarks, Mayor Tory emphasized the importance of the TTC to the City of Toronto and to the movement of people particularly during the covid pandemic. He gave thanks for the dedication of TTC staff and the substantial funding from other governments. Although there are many large capital projects now underway, Tory also noted the importance of better funding for day-to-day operations.

Although the reference was veiled, Tory also was happy that the proposed “uploading” of the TTC to Ontario did not occur, and that the TTC was celebrating its centenary as a municipally owned and operated system.

Although Premier Bill Davis brought Queen’s Park’s participation in transit funding, he was also responsible for the failed technology dreams of the Ontario Transportation Development Corporation’s maglev train “GO Urban”. Had Toronto’s suburban network actually developed in the financially balmy days of the 1970s as an LRT network (planned by the TTC in the 1960s), the city might be a very different place.

The TTC began in the post-war excitement of the 1920s, survived the Great Depression and provided key service to Toronto in World War Two. Then came the Metro amalgamation of the 50s, the start of the subway network, and the booming economy that fueled growth of Toronto and the surrounding region. Transit barely kept up and the density of transit service once seen in the old City never came to the suburbs.

Cutbacks began in the 1980s, but hit hard with the mid 1990s recession when the TTC lost 20 per cent of its riders, a loss that was not recovered until the mid 2000s. There has been much emphasis on subway building, but the new lines did not contribute new riders at the same rate as the earlier rapid transit additions on established, well-used corridors.

With the covid pandemic, ridership dropped again and now stands at about 40 percent of the pre-pandemic level growing slowly as more activities resume. The TTC faces a challenge over the coming decade not just to regain its riders but to sustain and improve service as external subsidies fall.

As I have discussed in many articles, there is a crying need to deal with line management and headway reliability. It is not enough to advertise a service, but a transit system must actually operate credibly to be an alternative to other solutions including that classic alternate for the TTC acronym, “take the car”. There are limitations to what can be achieved with red paint and a handful of reserved bus lanes.

As I was leaving the event, I could not help looking at that yard and contemplating what it might have become if not for we merry band of “streetcar enthusiasts” (and that’s the polite term) who convinced the City of Toronto and the TTC back in 1972 to keep the streetcar system. The years have not been kind, and service levels on some routes are a shadow of what operated decades ago.

When cuts settle in as a management response, when “tailoring service to meet demand” means stuffing as many people as possible onto a declining number of streetcars and buses, the result is a “new normal”. Every time there is an economic downturn, and there have been a few since the early 70s, transit falls back and rarely recovers lost ground.

Back in 2019, the TTC had an all time record day with 2.7 million, but that was for a special event – Raptors Victory Day. But in years before, the rate of ridership growth had leveled off, in spite of continued population growth in the City. The political focus was on where new rapid transit lines might be planned (never mind actually built and opened), while daily operations were strangled by a Mayor and Council bent on limiting taxes. The TTC squeezed some savings out of its own organization, but that sort of exercise is limited to short-term austerity, not for long-term growth.

Today’s presentation had brave words about the TTC’s future, its importance in greening our city. Very true, but not possible without acknowledging that owning and running a good transit system costs money, and short term “efficiencies” can work contrary to our goals.

The TTC’s bus network might be electrifying over the coming decade, a noble goal albeit an expensive one that could constrain vehicle purchases more generally. But if all we do is to replace existing buses and offer no more service, the real saving of moving more people by transit will not be achieved.

This might have been a great site for condo towers overlooking the lake at Sunnyside, but it is still a car barn as it has been since 1895 and the early days of the Toronto Railway Company. I look forward to the day when this yard will be full of streetcars again, and there will be good, frequent service across the entire streetcar network including long-awaited extensions in the waterfront.