Month: May 2024

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505 Dundas Headways: April 2024

In the previous article, I reviewed travel times on 505 Dundas for the month of April 2024. Now, here are charts of the headway data.

Service on this route comes nowhere near meeting the TTC’s own rather lax standards for service quality. The TTC measures On Time Performance (“OTP”) with the assumption that if cars are on time, then regular service will take care of itself. However, there is considerable leeway in the words “on time”.

OTP is measured only at terminals and compares the scheduled trip time to the actual one. If a car leaves no more than 1 minute early or 5 minutes late, it is “on time” for the stats. There is no measurement of OTP along the route, and the spacing from terminals is rarely maintained.

The six minute window this provides allows service to be quite erratic, but still counted as “on time”. For example, on a route like Dundas with a 10 minute headway, cars could alternately be 5 minutes late and 1 minute early. This would produce the following departure pattern:

Scheduled12:0012:1012:2012:3012:4012:501:00
Actual12:0512:0912:2512:2912:4512:491:05
Headway4′16′4′16′4′16′

The cars on short headways would inevitably catch up with the cars on wide headways, and pairs 20′ apart would travel across the route. There is nothing in TTC standards to measure this. and reports will blissfully say that service is “on time”. In fact, the TTC does not even achieve its own lax standard.

There is also no metric for missed trips caused by absent cars. Conversely, a trip at a terminal can legitimately be missing if a car was short-turned to restore regular service. The TTC’s focus on OTP stats to the exclusion of any other metric is one reason for the no short-turn policy. This can do much damage by blocking legitimate service management techniques. In the article on travel times, there are many examples of short turns to preserve service on the central part of the route rather than letting vehicles pile up at terminals.

This article shows how service leaving the terminals of 505 Dundas is disorganized from the outset, and how this evolves along the route. For an organization that hopes to win back riders, this is not an ideal example of what service should look like.

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505 Dundas Travel Times: April 2024

On the Toronto Council agenda for May 22, 2024, there was a motion asking for Transportation Services to investigate changes in traffic regulations on Dundas Street in anticipation of coming work on Spadina Avenue and at Spadina Station. This will replace streetcars with buses for a period from late June to mid-December, 2024, and the buses will not operate on the streetcar right-of-way.

Community Council Decision Advice and Other Information

The Toronto and East York Community Council requested the General Manager, Transportation Services to report directly to the May 22, 2024 meeting of City Council on recommended temporary parking, loading and traffic amendments on Dundas Street West that would support timely and reliable streetcar service on Dundas Street West between Spadina Avenue and McCaul Street during construction at Spadina Station.

Summary

During the June to December 2024 closure of the 510 Spadina streetcar for construction at Spadina Station, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) wishes to enhance alternate routes for customer movement to and through the Chinatown neighbourhood. One key alternate route is the 505 Dundas streetcar. Unfortunately, this streetcar is frequently delayed by acute traffic congestion between Spadina Avenue and McCaul Street. To improve timeliness and reliability of 505 Dundas streetcar service through Chinatown during the Spadina closure, TTC is requesting that Council temporarily modify left-turn prohibitions, reduce on-street general-use parking, and add no stopping restrictions in strategic locations and timeframes along Dundas Street West between Spadina Avenue and McCaul Street. Designated loading zones may also help to reduce conflicts with streetcar service while supporting local businesses.

Transportation Services has replied to this request with a recommendation for changes in parking, stopping and turning restrictions on Dundas between McCaul and Spadina. Current curb lane restrictions are for no parking or stopping only in peak periods, with a mixture of paid and unpaid parking allowed at other times. There are also various turning restrictions (see the reply for details). The proposed changes are:

  • Between McCaul and Spadina, Dundas would be a No Stopping zone in both directions at all times.
  • Between University and McCaul, the peak direction (eastbound AM, westbound PM) would be a No Stopping zone.
  • Left turns eastbound and westbound at Dundas and Spadina would be banned between 7 am and 10 pm on all days.

A coach loading zone will be preserved in front of the Art Gallery (south side of Dundas, west of McCaul), and “consultation will be undertaken with the Chinatown BIA to identify areas where loading zone could be designated”.

Council amended the staff recommendation to asked for a “report back to the Toronto and East York Community Council by the fourth quarter of 2024 on the effectiveness of these changes for streetcar operations and a recommended long-term plan for parking, loading and traffic regulations on Dundas Street West between Spadina Avenue and McCaul Street.”

How much these changes will contribute to the Dundas car’s operation remains to be seen. There are already peak period restrictions on Dundas, and so there would be no change at those times. As always, the question of enforcement in practice vs regulation in theory is a problem. Moreover, 505 Dundas service is much less frequent than the combined services on King, and transit’s presence on Dundas is nowhere near as dominant. At most times, the scheduled service is every 10 minutes, and the most frequent service, 7 minutes, is on Saturday afternoons.

There is much more to the 505 Dundas route than the short section east of Spadina, and any review of the route should look at it over all. The travel time between University and Spadina, even on “bad” days, is under 10 minutes and the likely saving of any restrictions will be at best 4 minutes, likely less. Focus on a single segment will not address wider problems along the route.

The remainder of this article looks at travel times for 505 Dundas cars in April 2024 as a “before” point of reference, and to high light other areas where cars are (and are not) delayed.

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506/306 Carlton East End Track Work & Bus Replacement

Route 506/306 Carlton will operate as a bus route east of Parliament Street for two weeks beginning late on May 25. Worn curves at Gerrard & Bowmore (between Coxwell and Woodbine) and at Coxwell & Upper Gerrard will be replaced.

Updated June 6, 2024: The diversion that was expected to last until June 6 finished a day early, and normal service was restored to Main Station on June 6, not June 7 as originally planned.

Updated May 31, 2024 at 4:30pm: On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 28, the TTC announced that the 506 Carlton route would be extended east to Woodbine Loop via Queen Street. This would soak up the very substantial unused scheduled time for trips through to Main Station. Although some cars did operate over this routing on May 28, many turned back at Broadview. From May 29 onward, all service ran east to Woodbine Loop via Broadview and Queen, returning westbound via Queen and Parliament. None of the cars operating off route, nor any of the replacement shuttle buses appear on the tracking apps.

There service diversion varies as work progresses:

From 11pm Saturday May 25 to 4am Monday May 27:

The first stage of the work will be at Gerrard & Bowmore.

From 4am Monday May 27 to 4am Friday June 7:

The second stage of the work will be at Upper Gerrard & Coxwell.

TTC Construction Notice

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The State of Disrepair (II)

The extended shutdown of Line 2 on May 13 brought the TTC’s work car fleet into the spotlight thanks to multiple equipment failures leading to hydraulic fluid leaks.

In the management presentation, the average age of that fleet was cited as 17 years, but these cars vary greatly in age. Here are the affected cars.

VehicleBuiltFunctionLeak Incident Dates
RT-411993Tie TamperApr. 2/24 & May 16/24
RT-171996Tunnel WasherJan. 17/24
RT-71998LocomotiveFeb. 10/24
RT-562006Vacuum & Drain CleaningJan. 14/24 & May 13/24
RT-842011Vacuum CarMay 15/24

Replacement of RT-41 with a new car was proposed in the 2018 Capital Budget along with several other new and replacement cars. The intent was to refresh the fleet and increase capacity to perform more work on the expanding subway network. Most of this program was deferred under CEO Rick Leary, although a second Tie Tamper, RT-21, does now appear in the illustrated list of work cars. RT-41 is well overdue for replacement.

Inspection of all work cars began a few days after the May 13 incident. Sources indicate that fewer than one third of the three dozen cars reviewed in the first two days passed inspection.

Planned work on Line 1 on the May 18-19 weekend was deferred, and it is unclear how the sidelining of RT-41 and other cars might affect planned track repairs.

Questions for the TTC

On May 22, I wrote a series of questions to TTC Media Relations attempting to get an official version of what I had heard from sources. Here are the questions.

  1. Can you confirm the failure rate for inspections (over 2/3)?
  2. Has all of the fleet been inspected now and what are the results?
  3. Will further adjustments be required in maintenance plans?
  4. A key vehicle that was not available last weekend was RT-41 the tamper car. According to the fleet diagram included in the board presentation there is another tamper car RT-21. What is its status?
  5. In 2018 the capital budget included a multi-year program to replace elderly work cars and expand the fleet including [replacement of] RT-41, but this program was repeatedly pushed into future years. What is its status?
  6. Since the pandemic the budget blue books have not been available, although there was talk of an e-version of them. What is the current status?

The TTC’s response on the afternoon of May 22 was not very revealing:

As you know from the Board meeting, we’ve already started the deep dive with external consultants AND our own staff have enhanced our proactive inspections on the workcar fleet.

The results, outcomes and findings will first be shared with our Board when they are known.

I can say that your source has misinformed you in as much as we have not yet inspected the entire fleet as this is a time-consuming process that sometimes requires workcars being shunted from one location to another.

As deficiencies are identified, they are corrected before being the work cars are put into service.

The TTC’s response was less than helpful for all questions:

  1. The TTC did not address the failure rate for cars that had been inspected.
  2. The TTC claimed my source was incorrect, but misrepresented the question. In fact I asked whether the inspections had been completed, and indirectly they confirmed that the answer is “no”.
  3. Not answered.
  4. Not answered. Tamper RT-21 is a comparatively new vehicle (it does not appear in 2018 fleet lists). It is not clear why it was unavailable when tamper RT-41 was sidelined.
  5. Not answered. The repeated deferral of this project is a matter of record within the budget papers from 2017-2024.
  6. Not answered. The significance of the “blue books” (so named because of the colour of the binders that held them) is that they included detailed descriptions of all capital projects and their status well beyond information in budgets or quarterly financial reports. Before the pandemic, these were routinely provided on request, but I have not been able to obtain them since 2019.

Most of the questions have nothing to do with the “deep dive” into fleet condition, but the TTC has used a simplistic response to dismiss all questions whether they relate to the deep dive or not. The one “answer” attempted to discredit a statement I did not make, and by extension the entire sequence.

Maybe, somewhere, there is a Board member who will demand answers.

Reduced Speed Zones

The tables below track the Reduced Speed Zones where track is awaiting repair. This is an updated version since the previous article. Depending on how your browser presents the tables, you may have to scroll to the right to see the most recent entries.

Although many of the entries from early 2024 have cleared off, others appear suggesting that inspections are uncovering new problem areas and adding them to the list. Little has changed through the month of May.

Source: TTC Reduced Speed Zones Page

Line 1Jan 18Feb 2Feb 12Mar 7Mar 12Mar 14Mar 21Apr 29May 8May 17May 22
Hwy 407 to VaughanNB
Sheppard W to WilsonNBNBNB
Wilson to YorkdaleSBSBSBSB
Yorkdale to Lawrence WSBSBSBSB
Eglinton W to St. Clair WNBNBNB
St. Clair W to DupontNBSBSBSBSB
Spadina to St. GeorgeBWBWBW
St. George to MuseumNBNBNB
St. Andrew to UnionBWBWSBSBSBSBSB
Union to KingNBBWNBNBNBNBSBSBSBSB
College to WellesleyBWBWBW
Bloor to RosedaleNBNBNBNBNBNBNBNB
Summerhill to St. ClairBWBWNB
St. Clair to DavisvilleBWBWBWBWBWSB
Davisville to EglintonBWSB
Lawrence to York MillsNBNBNBNBNB
York Mills to SheppardNBNBNBNBNBNBNB
North York Centre to FinchNBNB
NB = Northbound SB = Southbound BW = Both Ways
Line 2Jan 18Feb 2Feb 12Mar 7Mar 12Mar 14Mar 21Apr 29May 8May 17May 22
Royal York to JaneBWBW
Runnymede to High ParkWB
Keele to Dundas WestBWBWEBEBEB
Sherbourne to Castle FrankEBEB
Castle Frank to ChesterEBEBEBEBEBEBEB
Chester to BroadviewWB
Greenwood to CoxwellEB
Coxwell to WoodbineEBEBEB
Woodbine to Main StreetEB
Victoria Park to WardenEBBW
Warden to KennedyWB
EB = Eastbound WB = Westbound BW = Both Ways

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TTC Doubles Down on Service Change Misinformation

In a recent “Stakeholder Update” email, the TTC reiterates misleading claims about the service changes implemented on May 12.

Significant Service Increases as of May 12

As of May 12, TTC has TTC increased scheduled service on major routes, delivering more frequent and reliable trips, shorter wait times, and more room for customers on board. The latest round of service increases will bring service to 96% of pre-pandemic levels, the highest since 2019. 24 bus routes now have improved service, mostly in off-peak periods, providing more room on board and improving more than 140,000 daily customer trips.

I reviewed the changes in a previous article showing that in many cases service is actually less frequent than it was before. See:

TTC quotes service as being at 96% of pre-pandemic levels. This is measured in vehicle or train hours, not by the actual frequency of service. Some of the changes use additional vehicle hours to address traffic congestion stretching existing service further apart to give longer scheduled trip times. With less frequent buses, these changes do not provide “more room on board”.

The TTC claims that by improving schedule reliability, they simply reflect actual operating conditions and that the former service did not match schedules. This might be true, but still does not reflect the provision of more service measured as buses/hour past your stop.

The tiresome point about this is that one expects spin from what is a “communications” piece telling the official story and putting the TTC in the best possible light. For years the TTC Board under former Mayors has been content to lap up this and other management tales, but an organization hoping to win back riders cannot start by overselling its wares.

The TTC has severe budget problems, but these are not helped by overly rosy claims about improvements that, if anything, undercut calls for better funding. It’s easy and popular to slag the Feds when they don’t belly up to the bar on capital funding, but this applies equally to the City and Province on the operating side.

Riders may see the ads touting better service, but like shoppers lured into a store with a glitzy window display, they soon find what is really on offer.

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How Many Buses Does The TTC Use? (2024 Update)

A year ago, I reviewed the usage of the bus fleet to compare the total size with actual usage. See:

In this round, the data are from January 1 to February 15, 2024. As before, the raw information has been provide by Darwin O’Connor from his TransSee website, for which much thanks.

The amount of service the TTC operates is limited mostly by budget, which in turn dictates how many operators the system can afford, but there is also the question of bus availability and reliability.

Updated May 20, 2024 at 3:10pm: Link to UITP report on in-motion trolleybus charging added at the end of the article.

Reliability

Buses that break down interrupt service and incur greater maintenance. Buses that never leave the garage might show up on the roster, but they are not really available.

For many years, the ratio of spare buses to scheduled service on the TTC has been quite high by industry standards, and this grew during the pandemic thanks to service cuts. Restoring full pre-pandemic service, let alone expanding beyond that level, does not depend on fleet size in the short term. Moreover, many of the elderly vehicles on the system will be replaced with new diesel-hybrids now on delivery, and this should increase the number of buses actually available for service. Opening of Lines 5 and 6 Crosstown and Finch West should also release buses for use elsewhere.

The May 2024 CEO’s Report shows the current official fleet size.

The reliability of buses is reported in an odd way by the CEO. The charts below have capped the reported mean distance to failure at a target value rather than reporting actual values for several years. We know that hybrid buses achieve at least 30K kilometres between failures, and diesel buses achieve 20K, but the actual numbers could be both higher and more variable than the charts show. Meanwhile, some values for battery eBuses are capped and others wander quite a bit. Note that both the target level and y-axis maxima vary from one chart to another.

An important factor here is that buses that never, or rarely, operate in service do not contribute to failure statistics, and this can hide the true reliability of a fleet, or subgroup within the fleet. Unused buses represent capital sitting idle and service that cannot be provided. If budget cuts prevent full usage of the fleet, this is hidden, but there could be an unseen cap on what is possible if budget priorities change.

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Hydraulic Oil Spills on the Subway

Subway service on the central portion of Line 2 Bloor-Danforth was suspended for over 12 hours on Monday, May 13 due to a spill of hydraulic fluid on the tracks. The replacement bus service was swamped by the combination of subway demand and congestion on Danforth Avenue and Bloor Street. The situation was compounded by changing and incomplete information about the extent and potential duration of the problem.

This was initially described as a spill somewhere between Sherbourne and Castle Frank Stations with the impression that the directly affected area was small. In fact, the volume was large, 200L of hydraulic fluid, and the area ran from Spadina to Greenwood Yard (east of Donlands Station). Trains could not operate safely until the rails were cleaned and operators could brake with confidence that trains would actually stop correctly.

This was not the first such incident. At a TTC Board Meeting earlier in 2024, ATU Local 113 had raised the issue of operational safety after a similar, albeit smaller problem in January at Eglinton West Station. Following the May 13 spill, the ATU wrote to the TTC Board raising basic questions about the incident, and by implication how well-informed the Board actually was about ongoing issues with subway safety.

At the May 16 Board meeting, management gave an extensive presentation about hydraulic fluid leaks and the recent increase in the frequency of these events. It is not clear whether such a detailed presentation would have occurred without the ATU going directly to Board members. Management’s credibility and transparency have been open to question following a near-miss incident at Osgoode Station that went unreported to the Board for almost a year, as well as track and infrastructure problems including the SRT derailment, and the need for ongoing slow orders due to problems with subway track.

CEO Rick Leary has retained external consultants, Hatch LTK, to review these incidents, and there will be a peer review by APTA (American Public Transit Association).

A much broader concern is subway delays of various types and how they are handled. Some have external causes (passengers wandering at track level, for example), but some are “own goals” in the sense that they arise from operational or infrastructure issues that could have been prevented. Whatever the reason, all of them strain the subway’s ability to provide reliable service. This works directly against the drive to restore transit’s credibility and attract new and returning riders.

Far more is needed than free Wi-Fi here and a new kiosk there. Creature comforts are nice, but the service must be trustworthy. The TTC’s fundamental job is to move people. The lion’s share of delays might be due to external factors beyond the TTC’s control, but how they react to delays is key.

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Three Views of TTC Growth

Growth of transit ridership is a subject often discussed in the abstract, but rarely with specifics and particularly with no thought to the financial implications for Toronto and supporting “partners” in other governments. Transit is one of those “good things” we will support at least with fantasy maps of future networks and even billions here and there for construction. Actual transit service is quite another matter.

This issue surfaces again with two 5-year plans at the TTC Board meeting of May 16, 2024:

Both plans talk about many things other than ridership, and I will leave a wider review for another day. The Corporate Plan includes one of those great time-wasters of management navel-gazing, new vision and mission statements.

The new vision statement: Moving Toronto towards a more equitable, sustainable and prosperous future.

The new mission statement: To serve the needs of transit riders by providing a safe, reliable, efficient, and accessible mass public transit service through a seamless integrated network to create access to opportunity for everyone.

    The concept of actual growth is buried in five “strategic directions” rather than being the one overarching goal.

    1. Build a Future-Ready Workforce.
    2. Attract New Riders, Retain Customer Loyalty.
    3. Place Transit at the Centre of Toronto’s Future Mobility.
    4. Transform and Modernize for a Changing Environment.
    5. Address the Structural Fiscal Imbalance.

    In simpler days, this was expressed by the motto still found on the TTC coat of arms:

    “Service Courtesy Safety”

    The Service and Customer Experience Plan, true to its name, actually focuses on service although one might hope it would aim higher if only to inform debate on possible futures for Toronto. It does include a number of options including costs projected out five years. This is a welcome reminder of the 2003 Ridership Growth Strategy that started from the premise “here is what we could achieve” rather than “we cannot afford to even talk about improvements”.

    Not mentioned in either of these is the TransformTO scheme for massive increase in transit service and ridership. TTC staff included this in a December 2023 update on their Electric Bus Plan. There has been some confusion about whether this is actually an approved Council policy, and I understand that it is not. In any event, it is another vision of the future, and it would incur very high costs for additional fleet, infrastructure and service.

    A vital point about service plans is that rapid transit construction alone will not achieve high growth both because trains must run in those tunnels to carry riders, but also because those riders do not all live and work at stations. The service to and between the rapid transit lines is as important as the shiny new stations and tunnels.

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    Service Improvements That Aren’t

    Today, May 12, the TTC implemented many changes to its services as detailed in my previous article.

    Earlier in the week, on May 7, the Mayor Chow and TTC Chair Myers, among others, held a press conference to announce widespread service improvements, and the illustration below has appear in the Mayor’s social media feeds.

    There is only one problem: several of the routes on this map will see service cuts, not increases. In some cases, there is a service increase, but on only part of a route or at a limited time through the week. The chart below illustrates where and when the changes actually happen.

    In parliamentary language, one might say that “the Mayor was badly advised”. However, it is her name and face on an announcement that simply is not true.

    TTC management has a long history of spinning service changes to emphasize the gains, such as they might be, while downplaying the cuts. The May 2024 changes were particularly challenging to anyone who wanted the details because the memo containing this information was not released until the afternoon of May 10. Normally it is available one to two weeks in advance. It may have suited the stage management of the press conference to keep it under wraps.

    995 York Mills Express was singled out in the press announcement because of the doubling of weekday midday service from 20′ to 10′, but that is a rare example of a significant improvement. It is not typical of the actual changes to the bus network as a whole.

    I have already written about the so-called service recovery based on vehicle hours, not on actual service frequency. The TTC itself has noted a decline in traffic and transit speeds in recent years. That, combined with more generous provisions for delay recovery time has pushed up the number of hours even while some routes see less frequent service.

    This chart and the following text have been corrected to show changes to 939 Finch East Express which were missed in the first version.

    A detailed route-by-route review follows the “more” break.

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    TTC Service Changes Effective May 12, 2024

    The TTC has announced many service changes on Sunday, May 12. As I write this, they have issued a press release and have a page listing the changes on their website that, I must say, conveys more detailed information than usually appears in their notices.

    There are more improvements than cuts in this round, but they lie mainly outside of the peak period.

    They have not yet issued the detailed list of changes from which I normally build a spreadsheet comparing old and new headways, travel times and vehicle allocations. When this is available, I will update this article with the usual spreadsheet. I hope to get the details tomorrow (May 8).

    Updated May 10, 2024 at 10:00 am: The TTC has still not released the detailed memo describing the changes. This is not merely an inconvenience to that pesky blogger SwanBoatSteve, but it affects internal processes for customer information online and at stops. Customer info is always cited as an important part of plans to improve service, but actual delivery can be hamstrung by delays in key parts of the process.

    Updated May 10, 2024 at 5:00 pm: The detailed memo of changes was issued mid-afternoon today. This article will be updated first with the addition of maps, and a correction to the 104/184 service information. Over the weekend, I will build the usual spreadsheet showing the details of all changes. Stay tuned.

    Updated May 10, 2024 at 5:15 pm: Construction project list added. Tables of service hours and fleet allocations added.

    Updated May 11, 2024 at 7:40 am: 39 Finch East change revised from “Weekday” to “Saturday”.

    Updated May 11, 2024 at 11:55 pm: Spreadsheet with details of all service changes added.

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