Month: August 2023

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Yet Another Change to East End Streetcar Services

Further to my recent post about planned service changes effective September 3, the TTC has issued a revised set of route arrangements thanks to a change in the schedule for Metrolinx work at Queen & Degrassi.

There will be four stages to the service modifications:

  • Sunday, September 3 to Friday, September 22 at 10 pm
  • Friday, September 22 at 10 pm to Friday, September 29 at 10 pm
  • Friday, September 29 at 10pm to Monday, October 2 at 4 am
  • Monday, October 2 at 4am to Sunday, October 8

October 8 falls on Thanksgiving weekend which is the October TTC schedule change date. Service arrangements beyond that point have not been announced.

The information here is adapted, with corrections, from the TTC’s website Streetcar Service Changes page. As I write this (4:50 pm, August 29), there are several inconsistencies or errors on the TTC’s site. This article is an attempt to consolidate the available information.

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TTC Announces Fall 2023 Service Increases

On August 28, 2023, Mayor Olivia Chow and TTC Chair Jamaal Myers held a press conference at Scarborough Centre Station, hosted by TTC CEO Rick Leary, to announce planned service improvements for coming months. The map below shows routes affected by plans for October and November 2023.

The routes in blue, the former SRT colour, are part of the restructuring for the Line 3 replacement service. Note that they are shown as running west from STC via Progress, Brimley and Ellesmere. This is the final routing, although the 903 express bus is now using Progress all the way to Kennedy. The reason for this is that a queue jump lane is planned for Brimey and Ellesmere, but it is not yet ready. When it is completed, the buses will shift to the originally announced route via Ellesmere.

Other routes will see improvements to service and/or to reliability. No details were announced.

Service hours are planned to increase through the fall:

  • In September to 93% of prepandemic levels
  • By November to 95% of prepandemic levels with bus service rising to 99%.

Note that this does not mean that late 2023 service will be identical to early 2020, but that similar numbers of service hours will be provided. The bus network is especially important because it has the strongest ridership recovery rate.

The improvements planned include restoration of school trippers (a normal fall event), increasing service based on demand, reducing wait times by improving the Ten Minute Network, and adding unscheduled, Run-As-Directed service to supplement capacity.

Funding for the improvements comes from the unspent budget headroom created by the delay in opening the two Provincial LRT projects on Eglinton/Crosstown and on Finch.

I expect to receive the details of September service changes soon and will publish them when they are available.

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512 St. Clair Converts to Bus Operation Until Summer 2024

From September 3, 2023 until summer 2024 (the exact date is not specified), the TTC will operate buses on route 512 St. Clair during several overlapping construction projects.

Updated August 28 at 5:00 pm: A response from the TTC about the scope of work for this project has been added.

A major part of this work is the reconstruction of St. Clair West Station Loop.

All transfers between surface routes and the subway will occur on street, and the following route changes will occur:

  • 512 St. Clair buses will operate between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop.
  • 47A Lansdowne buses will return to their normal terminal at Earlscourt Loop.
  • 90 Vaughan will be extended south to Bathurst Station.
  • 33 Forest Hill and 126 Christie will interline as a single route rather than looping at St. Clair West.

The chart below shows the many projects affecting St. Clair in the coming year.

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TTC Service Changes Effective Sunday, September 3, 2023 (Preliminary)

This is a preliminary version based on GTFS data (the standard format for transit schedules used by online services) and some Service Advisories on the TTC site. I expect to receive the full list of September service changes early in the week of August 28 and will update this article accordingly including the usual detailed comparison of service levels.

Updated August 26 at 9:15 pm: 512 St. Clair updated to reflect complete bus replacement for work at various locations on the line.

Updated August 27 at 4:30 pm: At 10:30 am on August 28, the Mayor, TTC Chair and CEO will hold a press conference at STC Station to “outline how the TTC will increase service beginning September and into the fall.”

Updated August 29 at 5:30 pm: Due to changes in the Metrolinx schedule for work on the Lake Shore East Queen Street bridge, there has been a further revision of planned service. Please see this post for details.

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TTC Confirms SRT Will Not Reopen, Plans Bus Improvements

The TTC has announced that the SRT will not reopen and that the focus will now be on the replacement bus service.

The review of the July 24 derailment is still underway and is unlikely to complete with much time left for remediating the condition of the SRT and restarting service for a short period before the planned November 18 shutdown.

The initial operation with reserved bus lanes is under construction with painted lane markings southbound on Midland and northbound on Kennedy between Eglinton and Ellesmere. Other work including red painted lanes, queue jump lanes and signal priority will be implemented in the next three months.

One problem caused by the unexpected early SRT shutdown is that the temporary bus terminal facilities at Kennedy Station are not yet completed. A interim terminal north of Kennedy Station will be used. Once the station reconfiguration is done, eight routes that now terminate at STC will be extended through to Kennedy Station to eliminate transfers.

This was part of the original plan for the SRT replacement service. The list of candidate routes for transfer elimination is 38 Highland Creek, 129 McCowan North, 131 Nugget, 133 Neilson, 134C Progress, 939 A/B Finch East Express, 954 Lawrence East Express, 985A Sheppard East Express [source: FAQ within Future of TTC’s Line 3 Scarborough].

According to the press release, the TTC is working to remove the existing SRT infrastructure and build the replacement bus roadway sooner than the original plan that stretched out two years. An updated target date has not been announced, buy the TTC’s recognition that this roadway is urgently required is a welcome change.

A larger issue critical to review of TTC’s maintenance plans is whether the derailment is a “one of” event, or if there has been a general decline in TTC maintenance across the system. This is directly tied to capital and operating budget planning for 2024 and beyond.

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TTC Board Report Archive Vanishes

Updated August 24, 2023: Access to the pre-2022 agendas has been restored through a page containing a search function by meeting type and date. However the path to the agendas has changed so that links from old articles to the agendas will now bring a “not found” response because they have moved from a directory “public-meetings” to “All-public-meetings”. This is another example of the TTC’s web management insensitivity to the importance of consistent navigation.

Fortunately, the links to reports have not changed unlike the situation in mid-2021 when all links to reports on the TTC website changed.

Thanks to an unexpected side-effect of work on the TTC’s website, Board agendas and reports prior to January 2022 have vanished.

The agenda page used to be created dynamically, but it has returned to a static format with links to meetings listed in a table. However, this table only goes back to January 2022.

The TTC advises that this is a temporary problem. All of the reports and agendas are still on the site, they just are not visible.

Without going into the details, it was possible to reconstruct the index information from a publicly available index file (sitemap.xml) which is used by web indexing services. The page linked below is a directory, pro tem, to Board agendas from 2005 to 2022.

TTC Board Meeting Agenda Index Archive

Although the TTC will, in due course, restore their directory page, I plan to update this archive with a subject matter index so that readers can find, for example, all annual budget articles without knowing the dates of meetings when they were presented. Stay tuned. This is very much a “spare time” project.

For future reference, this page is linked under the “Reference” tab in the main navigation bar.

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TTC 2024-2028 Service Plan Consultation Round Three

The TTC continues its consultation on a five-year plan for service combined with a “customer experience action plan” with a series of pop-ups in mid-August, meetings with various stakeholder groups, and an online survey available until August 27.

With the election of a new Mayor and a shifted political balance of the TTC Board, the context for these plans has changed quite substantially. After years where “less is more” might have been a fitting logo, the TTC now faces key questions about its future. What should transit be? How deep are it shortfalls? How high should we aim for improvement?

For information about previous rounds, see:

Current plans are to take the Annual Service Plan for 2024 to the TTC Board in Fall 2023. There will be a final, fourth round on the Five-Year Plans in November 2023 and they will go to the Board in early 2024. It is not clear how the Five-Year Plan will interact with the 2024 budget process which will already be substantially complete. This timing is a remnant of the Tory era at City Hall when the budget was a “done deal” at the Mayor’s bidding and debate on future options simply was not tolerated.

An important part of the Five-Year Plan is the TTC’s claimed “vision” for its future:

Focus on improvements that enhance TTC’s core-competency: mass transit – moving large volumes of customers safely, reliably, and swiftly across Toronto

In all of the talk about transit and various improvement schemes, staying focused on moving people must be a top priority. The attractiveness of transit for that function – getting from “A” to “B” and back again – must not be lost in flirtations with marginal technologies, ancillary services or “improvements” that will not touch most riders’ daily experience.

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TTC’s New Board

Today, Toronto Council appointed a new slate of members to the six Council positions on the TTC’s Board of Commissioners. They are:

  • Jamaal Myers, Chair
  • Josh Matlow
  • Paul Ainslie (*)
  • Dianne Saxe
  • Chris Moise (*)
  • Stephen Holyday (*)

(*) Members who were reappointed.

The new chair, Jamaal Myers, will be interesting to watch. He has a background in transit advocacy and was once part of the Scarborough Transit Action group. He has also been appointed as Chair of the Toronto Accessibility Advisory Committee.

Having a regular transit rider from an activist background will be a big change for the TTC as it plans for pandemic recovery and improvement.

Josh Matlow has been a thorn in the side of the Scarborough Subway advocates, but he is is not a one-issue candidate. He will bring another important voice to the TTC Board for improvement across the network.

Dianne Saxe comes from an environmentalist background and was the last Environmental Commissioner of Ontario until the position was consolidated with the Auditor General by the Ford government.

The three new members, joining Commissioners Ainslie and Moise, strongly swing the balance on the TTC Board to a concern with transit as a service and with addressing rider needs. As I have written in detailed past articles, all of them must now wrap their heads around how the TTC works (or doesn’t work) and determine priorities for the TTC’s future.

As for TTC management, I have a word of advice: these people actually ride the system and know what day-to-day transit experience looks and feels like. Don’t try to con them with meaningless stats skewed to show the system in the best possible light. Where there are problems, shortfalls between expectation and delivery, tell people so that they can be addressed, and so that riders sense that management is living on the same planet.

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TTC Hillcrest Changes for New Streetcars

The first of the 60 additional streetcars for Toronto’s fleet arrived at the Hillcrest Shops on August 9, 2023. Based on the budgeted cash flow over coming years, delivery of these cars is expected to complete in 2025.

  • 2023: $58.434 million
  • 2024: $193.248
  • 2025: $82.644
  • 2026: $5.759
  • Total: $340.265 million
Car 4604 at Harvey Shops on August 9, 2023 [Photo from a reader]

The currently active streetcar yards at Leslie, Russell and Roncesvalles can absorb 35 of these cars, but the remaining 25 will need additional storage and servicing facilities elsewhere. The TTC plans to adapt part of their Hillcrest site as a small carhouse that will serve the 512 St. Clair and possibly 511 Bathurst lines. Aside from providing space, this will also reduce dead-head costs for cars that now come to St. Clair from Leslie Barns.

The presentation erroneously states that “New streetcars will begin arriving at TTC facilities by 2025” [p. 2] when quite obviously this will be late in the overall delivery scheme. However, as the first 35 can be accommodated elsewhere, it would make sense that Hillcrest changes do not have to be ready until the latter half of the order arrives.

Some of the project schedule, however, extends into 2027 and this begs the question of why the work will take so long.

Aerial view of Hillcrest from the northeast. [TTC photo]

The TTC plans consultation sessions in the neighbourhood in August, although they have not yet announced dates or locations. Links:

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A Revived, Activist TTC Board?

Following Olivia Chow’s election as Mayor of Toronto, the process is now underway to repopulate committee and board appointments that will reflect the Mayor’s and Council’s priorities .

The Striking Committee – Councillors Malik (Chair), Bravo (Vice-Chair), Carroll, McKelvie and Perks – is very different from the crew who managed this process under Mayor Tory. Only Deputy Mayor McKelvie was carried over from previous era.

The City Clerk polled Councillors to determine each member’s interest in a wide variety of positions, and their requests will be considered by the Committee at its meeting on August 10, 2023. Their recommendations will be forwarded to Council for approval at a special meeting on the afternoon the same day.

Up for grabs are six positions on the TTC Board including the Chair and five other seats. The Councillor members’ terms will run to the end of 2024 when the process of juggling appointments will be repeated (standard practice at Council’s mid-term), although the sitting TTC Board members are likely to be reappointed for a further two years.

The remaining four members of the board, non-Council “public” members, will not be up for reappointment until early 2025 or 2027 unless Council rescinds them sooner. Any selections will be affected by the revised membership in the Civic Appointments Committee.

Today there are only five Councillors on the Board and there is one vacancy.

Councillors who have asked to be considered for the TTC Board are: Ainslie, Burnside, Holyday, Mantas, Matlow, Moise and Myers. Of these, all but Matlow and Myers are already on the Board, and Burnside is Chair. (The Vice-Chair is chosen from among the citizen members.)

The Striking Committee and Council should aim to create a TTC Board that actively pursues policies to improve transit. This includes public debates about just what we, as a city, expect of the system. Wringing their hands and saying “we can’t afford anything, so we won’t bother trying” should not be an option.

There are huge challenges financial (the City’s budget deficit), political (the Ford government at Queen’s Park) and organizational (the less-than-steller performance of and reputed poisonous environment under CEO Rick Leary). Any would-be Commissioner who views their job as simply showing up for meetings now and then to hear good news stories should seek work elsewhere.

The TTC has just embarked on consultation for its 5-Year Service Plan and a Customer Experience Action Plan. This might have been a business-as-usual plan under Mayor Tory entrenching a “Board approved” set of targets driven by a conservative agenda.

Toronto needs much more, an aspiration not just for “better” transit, but for a greater relevance of transit to riders across the city. Even if our goal is out of reach in the short term, we should aim high.

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