This post is a compendium of galleries of construction projects in various locations on the streetcar system around the city including:
These photos continue from my September 4, 2023 post.
Continue readingAt today’s special meeting of the TTC Board, the expectation was that Rick Leary would be dismissed as CEO. This was not to be, for reasons yet, if ever, to be revealed.
Problems with Leary’s performance go back some years, and he is Andy Byford’s worst legacy. His original hiring was intended to bring a focus to operations as Byford’s deputy based on a supposed reputation from his stint at York Region improving operations there. Needless to say, there is a huge difference between a sprawling bus network with mostly infrequent service (YRT has fewer than 600 buses) and the TTC’s bus, streetcar and subway operations.
Leary came to YRT following his retirement under a cloud from Boston’s transit agency, the MBTA, quite a step down in the scale of systems. In Boston, a serious collision on the Green Line (the streetcar subway which has been a major part of the City’s transit system for over a century) led to a Nation Transportation Safety Board condemnation of the safety culture at the transit agency (then the MBTA). Leary was supposed to address the report at an MBTA Board meeting, but never showed up, and retired shortly afterward.
When Byford left TTC to become President of the New York City Transit Authority (one component of the larger Metropolitan Transportation Authority), Leary succeeded to the CEO’s role. There were warning signs of problems from early days with the abrupt departure of many of Byford’s TTC management team, and stories of a hostile work environment. Some were pushed out, some waited until their pension numbers were favourable.
Leary was known to have a quick temper, and stories of a poisonous work environment were common. TTC Board meetings became tightly scripted sessions with rehearsed presentations and responses to likely questions. Leary fit in well with the Tory era which, we now know, had a strong desire for news that “everything is all right” and the minimization of problems, especially fiscal ones.
Labour-management relations left a lot to be desired, although Leary’s moves to outsource some aspects of system maintenance responded both to the hawkish stance of some Board members, and carried over a program started under Byford.
Previous articles here have flagged the shortcomings of the CEO’s Report with metrics that hide more than they tell. Service quality is reduced to “on time performance” with the naive sense that vehicles leaving on time from terminals will magically provide even service across their routes. That, in turn, led to a scheduling regime that favoured padded travel times, and a “no short turns” operating policy that did as much harm as the problem it was intended to fix. More subtly, what was lost was the need to actively manage service, including the necessary skilled staffing, to deal with constantly changing conditions.
Another troubling problem is the size of the transit fleet unmatched by service. This problem existed before the covid-era service cuts, but worsened as service was reduced. Many elderly and/or less reliable vehicles could be sidelined without affecting service. However, as new buses are delivered, the excuse of an old fleet will not hold up, and the fleet should be out on the street, not sitting in garages and carhouses.
This has staffing and budget implications that have not been part of TTC’s planning. The question is not just can we run more service, but how much and how soon. Leary’s history on that point is dubious. After John Tory’s election as Mayor in 2014, he acknowledged that the system had been starved for resources under the Ford administration, a position for which then-candidate Olivia Chow was ridiculed during the campaign. Tory bought the TTC an extra 100 buses, but almost all of them went into the spare pool, not into regular service.
The degree of collusion between TTC management and John Tory’s office was on full show during the 2023 budget debates when the TTC, that is to say Leary, refused to release details of service changes even when they were requested by Councillors and Board members. Keeping secrets won’t hide the information, only delay the public’s seeing what happens with service on the street.
At the end of Byford’s era at TTC, there was a plan for Line 2 renewal including a replacement fleet, new carhouse and yard, automatic train control, power and station upgrades. This plan never saw the light of day, and Leary instead pushed a scheme to rebuild the existing Line 2 fleet. This would avoid a capital spending crunch, but would also limit service growth, including on the Scarborough extension, and expose the TTC to a potentially unreliable aging fleet of subway cars. In time Leary reversed his position, but key years and momentum were lost.
Most troubling has been the matter of safety. In June 2020, there was a “near miss” at Osgoode Station where a train leaving the pocket track nearly collided with a northbound train on the main line. The issue here is not the signal design, training and operational procedures that made this possible, but that Leary withheld any report of the incident from the TTC Board almost a year after the incident. This should have been a firing offense, but Leary remained in his position with an explicit Board directive that major incidents of this nature be reported immediately.
The SRT derailment that abruptly ended service on that route in July 2023 was very public. The full investigative report into its causes has still not been released although an overview was presented at September’s Board meeting. At this point it is not clear whether deferred maintenance was the culprit, but there are unhappy echoes here of another period of TTC financial constraint and maintenance cuts that led to the crash at Russell Hill.
Again the issue is whether a growing problem was not reported, or worse not even detected. This scenario has been seen on other transit systems where operations degrade through make-shift arrangements like slow orders over poor track while the repair backlog grows. We simply do not know the current state of the TTC, and the political focus has been entirely on maintaining service.
Those who follow TTC announcements of delays will recognize the frequently-used term “operational problems”. This can embrace a wide variety of issues ranging from operators who do not show up for their shift to disabled vehicles, derailments or power system failures. Over Leary’s tenure, the amount of information giving specific explanations for problems has declined sharply, and Leary himself is rarely seen as a spokesman and explainer for the TTC. This is much unlike Andy Byford who could articulate problems and more importantly a desire to fix whatever underlying problems might exist.
If Leary had been removed, the challenge faced by a new CEO would lie in rebuilding the management structure, gaining the trust and dedication of 15,000 employees, presenting a credible and thorough recovery plan and budget for Toronto’s transit system, all while keeping the lights on and the wheels turning. Leary is not the man for that job.
No, gentle reader, I am not going to write yet another article about what the TTC should be doing. We’ve been around that bush a few times recently. The context yet to be set is the amount of money the TTC will have both for day-to-day service and maintenance, as well as capital funding for key projects.
Toronto’s political preoccupation, with good reason, is on the housing and affordability crisis. Transit will not be front of the line for funding, although it is a key service. Into this uncertain future should come a new CEO and revived management.
This is a significant failure for Mayor Chow. A too-timid TTC Board has missed the chance for renewal of its senior management.
Starting on October 19 mid-afternoon, streetcar service on King Street east of Church was blocked by a sinkhole caused by a broken watermain. Streetcar service was diverted from King to Queen, and the 501B Queen bus was shifted south to King.
The sinkhole repairs completed a few days ago, and effective October 25, the diversions are only in effect until 7pm while water main repairs continue. While this arrangement does improve evening service, it perpetuates the operational problems caused by the total lack of transit signal priority and traffic management at key intersections.
Updated Oct 27 at 11:15pm: The modified routes will not be in operation over the weekend, but will resume on Monday morning, October 30 according to the @ttchelps X account.
A separate problem occurs at the transition back to “normal” service in the evening. The buses revert to normal or run back to the garage, but it takes some time for the congestion to abate and normal streetcar service to resume. This puts a large gap between the two services.
Diversion Announcement This diversion announcement linked below has disappeared from the TTC site. As the TTC updates their info, I will amend this article.
In summary, here are the normal (now evening only) and modified (daytime) routes through the affected area:
This arrangement has extremely severe effects on transit and traffic in general notably at locations where streetcars must turn. There is no Transit Signal Priority (TSP), no Traffic Warden (aka “Agent”), and no attempt to manage the conflicts between turning streetcars, other traffic and high pedestrian volumes at affected intersections. Concurrent work on Adelaide Street diverts traffic to Yonge Street and adds to congestion on streets used for the bus diversion.
Travel times of half an hour and more between Spadina and Church are common.
The situation makes total mockery of the City’s recent Congestion Management Plan by showing how they are utterly unprepared and unwilling to respond to an event that requires major reallocation of road space and time among various types of users, and active management in place of passive acceptance of chaos.
A fundamental part of traffic planning is to determine intersection capacity. This is not rocket science. If there are “N” green phases per hour, and in practice it is only possible for at best one streetcar to turn per cycle, this sets an upper bound on capacity. In fact, one per cycle is amazingly optimistic and could only likely be achieved with both TSP signalling (a “white bar” transit only phase) and a Traffic Agent to ensure the TSP was respected.
Service frequencies on the streetcar routes, and the equivalent cars/hour are:
This translates to the following demands by turning cars/hour:
A typical traffic signal cycle time is 80 seconds, or 45 times per hour. It is self-evident that attempting to turn 35 cars/hour would be a challenge. This is compounded by the fact that many cars will stop to serve passengers before turning and will almost certainly lose one cycle for that purpose.
Another source of delay is that the electric switches for turns do not always work requiring operators to manually set their route where some cars turn and others go straight through. This can also affect TSP signals where they do exist because the switch electronics “tell” the signals that a transit phase is needed.
This is a crisis-level example of why TSP should be installed everywhere that streetcars might need it, not just for standard scheduled movements (e.g. eastbound at Queen and Broadview, turns at King & Sumach). It is precisely during events where operations go off kilter that the best possible priority is needed. If the facilities were sitting there, they would benefit occasional diversions and short turns, as well as major service interruptions like this one.
The City’s plan is utterly silent on this need, and that must change. For its part, the TTC must insist on improved TSP for streetcar and bus routes. This is not a panacea, but an important contribution to transit reliability and credibility.
The TTC has announced that streetcar service west of Sunnyside Loop (where 501A service now ends) will be extended to Humber Loop on Sunday, October 29. Service to Long Branch will be provided by the 501L shuttle bus operating between Humber and Long Branch as shown below.
A 501M Marine Parade bus will operate from Humber Loop.
The 508 Lake Shore streetcar service will resume to Long Branch Loop on Monday, October 30. Cars will leave Long Branch roughly every 20 minutes from 6:40 to 8:10am. Westbound trips will leave King Station from about 4:25 to 5:45pm.
The eastern terminus of the 501A cars will continue to be at McCaul Loop.
The extension is possible between regular schedule changes because running time is already provided in the October schedules for 501 operation to Humber, and for 508 operation to Long Branch.
Full 507 Long Branch streetcar service will be restored at the next schedule change on Sunday, November 19.
Night service will continue with the 301 Queen Night Bus because of the need to divert around Ontario Line construction.
At its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report titled Congestion Management Plan 2023-2026. With a familiar refrain, the report begins:
The City is facing an unprecedented amount of construction road closures creating congestion issues for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians and surface street transit. There has also been a significant demand for special events in the City post-pandemic with the needs for road closures and more comprehensive traffic management strategies to minimize the impacts. This situation emphasizes the demand for better coordination of access to the right-of-way and the need for improved traffic management overall to help mitigate the impacts of congestion while maintaining safety for all road users.
[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at p. 1]
It goes on to talk about “refocusing” on four key areas:
[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at pp 1-2]
- Leveraging Technology to Better Coordinate Construction on City Streets and expanding the Construction Hub program
- Establishing a dedicated traffic management team that will work with stakeholders such as Toronto Police Services, Toronto Parking Authority, TTC, Metrolinx GO, the Office of Emergency Management and City Councillors to improve traffic management planning efforts around major events while also coordinating with ongoing construction
- Providing increased traffic management support for surface street transit for both TTC and Metrolinx GO to help mitigate the impacts of construction related route diversions
- Investigating Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to better optimize traffic signal operations to help all modes move more efficiently and safely with less delay around the City.
This appears modestly promising but for the fact we have heard many proposals before and, if anything, congestion becomes worse. If this is a “refocus”, one might ask what the City has been doing for the decade since the first Congestion Management Plan was adopted in 2013. In turn, that goes back to an October 2011 motion by Councillor Josh Matlow asking for “a report on the cost and feasibility of implementing a Synchronized Traffic Signal System”.
Looking back at years of reports, there is a common theme that changes are possible at the small scale with improvements of up to 10% in traffic flow at specific times and locations. However, these are one time effects in the sense that the improvement, once achieved, cannot repeated to cope with traffic growth.
Moreover, there is a finite capacity in the road system, and the major political challenge is to apportion this capacity among competing demands. Motor traffic, as the dominant use, inevitably must give up part of its share to give better service and space to others. This was a fundamental choice needed in the King Street Transit Priority Pilot scheme, and even there, the assumption was that some traffic could shift from King to parallel corridors.
[Full disclosure: I was a paid consultant on a project in 2014-15 to review the major east-west streetcar lines with a view to modifying traffic and parking rules to improve transit operations in the peak and shoulder-peak periods.]
Although Transit Priority is one topic in the report, there is no mention of the RapidTO program which appears to be stalled after the initial implementation in Scarborough on Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside. I am not counting the red lanes for the 903 Scarborough Express bus replacing the SRT as they came from a force majeure situation and would not otherwise have been implemented. Any of the RapidTO proposals will involve substantial change in allocation of road capacity, and they have not been well received in some quarters.
A related question is whether dedicated lanes can be justified in areas where TTC service is not as frequent as it once was on King Street, especially on a fully dedicated 7×24 basis.
In March 2020, the Covid lockdowns made a lot of traffic vanish, although as reported both here and elsewhere, traffic is now above pre-pandemic levels. This is particularly true in the suburbs where there are proportionately more jobs that are not suited to work-from-home arrangements, and where transit’s share of the travel market is hampered by service levels, route structure and trip distances.
The pandemic also triggered a move to accelerate construction projects both as a job creation program and to take advantage of the lower effect on traffic possible at the time. However, construction does not appear to have diminished, but the normal traffic level is back.
The basic problem of finite road capacity is made much more complex by the removal of significant chunks of that capacity for rapid transit construction, utility repairs, streetcar track maintenance (downtown), road and bridge maintenance, and curb lane occupancy permits for building construction. All of this might be “co-ordinated”, but the sheer number of affected locations and the duration of temporary capacity removal means that the road system is rarely at an optimal condition.
This also hampers schemes to reallocate capacity permanently for transit, cycling and pedestrians.
The current report includes only two recommendations:
Any other effects would come from continuation of work already approved or in progress, notably from the “Smart Signals” project which is already underway, but which is not yet fully funded.
Notable by its complete absence in this report is the recognition that some congestion cannot be easily “fixed”, and that active intervention in allocating road capacity will be necessary in the worst cases. That is dangerous political territory, especially in a City that has lived through both the Ford and Tory eras where transit did not rank first.
Moreover, there is a danger that a focus on “congestion” will reinforce the TTC’s typical behaviour of assigning all blame for poor service on external factors when their own scheduling and line management practices make a substantial contribution.
In the remainder of this article, I will review various aspects of the City’s plan and actions to date. This is mostly in the same order as sections of the report, with some consolidation to group related items.
Continue readingAt its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report about the City’s Congestion Management Plan. I will review that in a separate article, but to set the scene, it is worth looking back at the success and failure of the King Street transit priority pilot.
The original idea was to establish King Street, by far the busiest streetcar corridor downtown with consistently high demand, as a mostly-transit street to speed trips through the core area. A combination of forced right turns, enlarged boarding areas at stops, together with other road changes would make travel by car between Jarvis and Bathurst Streets difficult, if not impossible.
The scheme was quickly watered down thanks to protests from the taxi industry, including carriers like Uber whose vehicles were not branded, and this presented an immediate problem for enforcement. That problem was compounded by the lackluster efforts of Toronto Police who had more important things to do with their time. Occasional blitzes were separated by long periods of laissez-faire non-enforcement.
Despite these limitations, the changes actually did improve travel times, and in particular, the reliability of travel times, over the affected section. Then came the pandemic, and traffic downtown evaporated along with any vestigial efforts to enforce traffic laws. Motorists became used to driving as they pleased, and that has survived into the post-pandemic period along with the unsurprising result that many benefits of the transit priority scheme have been lost.
This article looks back at the actual data for 504 King cars operating through the core to show how travel times have evolved. I have included data going back well beyond the implementation of the King Street transit priority pilot in November 2017. Some of these charts appeared in earlier reviews of King Street, but they are included here for “one stop shopping”.
All data for the analysis here were supplied by the TTC from their CIS and Vision vehicle tracking systems, for which much thanks. The presentation and conclusions are my own.
Continue readingThis article continues my reviews of bus operations on 512 St. Clair in September 2023 and of streetcar operations in the preceding months.
One aspect of any route’s operation is the degree to which vehicles have time for a layover at terminals. If this time is too small (or worse, none at all), service can be disrupted by the simple need for drivers to answer calls of nature and just decompress for a few minutes.
There is no formal break built into schedules in Toronto as can be found in some other transit systems, but a quick look at the TTC’s schedule summaries will show that most routes have built in “recover time”. This is intended to compensate for random events during a trip, although sometimes it is simply a mechanism to make the round trip time come out to a multiple of the scheduled headway.
Some of the “service reliability adjustments” the TTC advertises with schedule change are nothing more than shifting time from “recovery” to “driving” time without actually changing the round trip time. In other cases, time is added or removed without changing the total number of vehicles causing the service headway to get longer or shorter.
When schedules have excessive travel and/or recovery time, vehicles queue up at terminals causing congestion on the approach if there is no place to park off-street.
In the case of 512 St. Clair, the time spent at St. Clair Station (the eastern terminus) was fairly consistent up to the end of June 2023, but things got really messy. This corresponded to the point where service on the line as a whole became considerably worse as we saw in earlier articles.
This was caused by two competing factors in route operations.
This is the second part of my review of service quality before and after the substitution of buses for streetcars on 512 St. Clair in September 2023. Part I deals mainly with bus operations in September.
Until May 8, streetcars operated between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop over the full route. Work on the GO bridge west of Caledonia was expected to start in May, and so on May 8 the streetcars were cut back to Earlscourt Loop and the 47A Lansdowne to St. Clair bus service was extended west to Gunn’s Loop.
The work did not occur as expected, and in response to problems with and complaints about service provided by the 47A, the streetcars resumed operation to Gunn’s Loop, but with no added running time, effective on July 4. That condition remained in effect until September 3 when buses took over the full 512 St. Clair route, and the 47A Lansdowne returned to its normal terminus at Earlscourt Loop.
The TTC has a lot to answer for here with the combined effect of service cuts and erratic operation of the service that remained while the line operated with streetcars. Buses look better by comparison because the streetcars, even with their dedicated lane, were so unreliable.
This was compounded by the effect of the long-running bus substitution on travel times discussed in Part I of this series, and by the inadequate preparation for transit priority as of day one of the bus replacement.
Continue readingEffective September 3 and until July 2024, the TTC has replaced streetcar service with buses on oute 512 St. Clair for various construction projects. The length and scope of this work evolved between May 2023 and the point where the full closure was announced at the end of August. See The Changing Scope of St. Clair Construction.
Replacement buses are scheduled far more frequently than the streetcars they replaced, but they are running in the mixed traffic lanes beside a now-empty streetcar right-of-way. Depending on traffic conditions, travel times can be substantially longer with buses.
In the months before the conversion, the streetcar service was already in upheaval for planned work at the GO overpass west of Caledonia, and the St. Clair car was cut back from Gunn’s Loop (Keele) to Lansdowne. It was subsequently restored when the timing of work at the overpass changed, but the schedules were not changed to reflect the longer route.
This article reviews, mainly, the bus service from September 3-30, 2023. In a following article, I will turn to the streetcar service it replaced and the less than ideal quality provided during the on-again, off-again service through to Keele over summer 2023.
Responding to complaints about the bus service, the TTC has stated that they are working with the City on traffic signalling changes, as well as modifications to road lane allocations to remove bottlenecks in the bus operation. For the length and potential effect of this streetcar service suspension, one must ask why these changes are studied and, maybe, to be announced, implemented after the fact rather than as an integral part of the switch to bus service using the regular traffic lanes.
This is not the first time in 2023 (or earlier) that the TTC plays catch-up with getting priority measures for its service during extended diversions and construction projects. The attitude seems to be that problems will be addressed as and when they occur, rather than being anticipated and planned for, with transit service and riders getting a raw deal.
Continue readingThe TTC has announced the details of its service changes for October 2023.
Continue reading
Steve Munro 