This is a follow-up to my first article on this subject: The King Street Diversion Debacle.

From October 19 until early November, there was a major disruption of transit service downtown due to concurrent construction activities and the complete absence of transit priority or traffic management.

• A sinkhole of King east of Jarvis blocked all streetcar service from the afternoon of Wednesday, October 18 to Tuesday, October 24. From October 25 onward, streetcars diverted only weekdays until 7pm.
• Construction on Adelaide Street for the Ontario Line 501 Queen eastbound diversion track continued including the relocation of several underground chambers. This work closed York Street northbound at Adelaide.
• Construction on Queen Street at Yonge for the Ontario Line closed that street from James to Victoria.

This event showed what can happen when a transit service and the streets it runs on are nearing the point of gridlock, and are pushed over the edge by loss of capacity. It also showed, quite starkly, how Toronto’s talk of managing congestion is much more talk than action.

This is a vital lesson in planning for future diversions and special events.

An important issue here is that some of the congestion problems pre-dated the sinkhole. Moreover, congestion did not occur in the same time at all locations, and some of it did not correspond to traditional ideas of peak periods.

The volume of turning movements overloaded the capacity of the intersections to handle transit, road and pedestrian traffic. A detailed list appears later in the article.

Streetcars and buses stop to serve passengers at many intersections, a fact of life for transit vehicles which behave differently from other traffic. Often two traffic signal phases would be consumed per vehicle: one for it to pull up to the stop, and one for it to make the turn. This limited the throughput of some intersections to fewer cars/hour than the combined scheduled service of the routes.

The electric switch southbound at King and Church was unreliable, and operators had to manually throw it so 501 Queen cars could go straight south to Wellington while other cars turned west on King. On its own, this would be an annoyance, but it compounded other delays.

Only 501 Queen ran on its scheduled route looping south on Church to Wellington, then west to York, north to King and east to Church. During some periods, the congestion was so great that the 501 Queen service was redirected from the Don Bridge westward via King to Distillery Loop. Off-route operation plays havoc with trip prediction apps adding to riders’ woes in finding when and where the service they needed would be.

In this article, I review the vehicle tracking data and travel times over the route from Queen and Parliament, west to Church, south to King and west to Peter (east of Spadina) using the 503 Kingston Road car as the primary subject. This was the only route that travelled the full length of the area during the diversion. Some cars did short turn, but most operated west to Charlotte Loop (King, Spadina, Adelaide, Charlotte) and they give a good representation of travel times experienced by all routes.

In the third and final part of this series, I will review the effect the delays downtown had on service of the three streetcar routes. This type of event has effects far from where it occurs, and these are not always acknowledged. A related problem is the inherent irregularity of TTC service even without a major diversion and congestion added to the mix.

After the break, there are a lot of charts for people who like that sort of thing, but there is also a summary for those who want the highlights.

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