Today was the first weekday of the King/Church construction diversions. I watch things evolve via NextBus through the morning peak, and then visited King/Spadina during the PM peak. A caveat: Mondays are light traffic days. There was no Gardiner backlog at all on Spadina. Later in the week will likely be more challenging.
During the AM peak, the service on 504 King and 503 Kingston Road did not load properly, and many vehicles were clumped together. This took quite a while to unscramble, and there were big service gaps. The 504 buses also ran in packs and huddled together at Wolseley Loop, at one point six of them representing about 20 minutes worth of service at the scheduled headway. The peak period did not encounter queueing frequently at points where streetcars turn because of many wide service gaps. When a bunch of cars arrived, they queued one by one awaiting their turn, but then the intersections would open up again even though in theory there should always have been transit service waiting.
In the PM peak at King/Spadina, the major sources of traffic were pedestrians, cyclists and transit in that order. I observed that the traffic signal cycle time was 110 seconds (1’50”). This means that there are 32.7 opportunities (3600/110) per hour for a turn to/from Spadina. The nature of the intersection is that only one streetcar can make the turn per cycle.
The combined scheduled service trying to make the EtoN turn per hour at King & Spadina in the PM peak is 23 streetcars.
| Route | Headway | Cars/Hour |
|---|---|---|
| 503 Kingston Road | 8′ | 7.5 |
| 504 King Car | 10′ | 6.0 |
| 508 Lake Shore | 20′ | 3.0 |
| 511 Bathurst Car | 9′ | 6.5 |
| Total | 23 |
Stir in 12 510 Spadinas straight through northbound on a 5′ headway. When there is a 510 (or any other car) serving the farside NB stop it blocks any car waiting to turn off of King. In a 45 minute visit, I saw this happen four times, and one car missed two turning opportunities because of closely-spaced Spadina cars blocking the stop.
Depending on arrival times and bunching, more vehicles can queue up here than there are cycles to accommodate them. This was under probably the best general traffic conditions we will see.
There were traffic wardens, but they left just before 5pm. The biggest problem was pedestrians blocking turning streetcars which do not have a protected turn phase EB on King. There is a WB advanced green because autos are forced to turn off King here, but there is no advanced green for eastbound streetcars.
The large volume of riders transferring from eastbound streetcars to buses adds to the already substantial pedestrian volumes at this intersection.
The Traffic Wardens did not reliably ensure that streetcars got “first dibs” on turning, and after they left, pedestrian interference became worse.
I boarded a 504 King eastbound at about 5:10. There was congested traffic over the route across to Church especially on Adelaide and it took over 15 minutes to get from York to Church. Some people complain about space “wasted” by bike lanes, but it was the left turn lane that was almost always empty. Some traffic used it to scoot around stopped streetcars!
The severe congestion can be seen in the TransSee maps of service for 504 King and 503 Kingston Road below. The tracking lines for the diversion area are almost horizontal for an extended period. Note that the problem is mainly eastbound (lines reading bottom to top).
I rode a King car east from Spadina and it took a very long time to emerge from the diversion. The car went from 6 minutes early at King on Spadina to 11 minutes late at Queen and Church. Note the length of time spent approaching King and Spadina inching along the street about one carlength at a time. Other locations where the car crept along are also clear in the tracking data.
Among the problems enroute were:
- Congestion on Queen thanks to stopped vehicles and construction in the curb lanes.
- Autos infilling Adelaide Street eastbound leaving no room for a streetcar to merge from York Street onto Adelaide. We were eventually rescued by a Traffic Warden.
- Extremely slow progress across Adelaide thanks to a traffic backlog from Church Street.
- Extremely slow progress on Church Street thanks to a traffic backlog from Queen Street. My car actually fouled the Church/Adelaide intersection as it was unable to complete the EtoN turn in more than one traffic signal cycle.
Ridership on the car was very light and most people got off when the car turned off King onto Spadina. They transferred to the King shuttle buses which were running irregularly and often bunched. These buses were also trapped in the traffic queue eastbound to Spadina of streetcars waiting to turn. (In the chart below, the size of the dot represents the degree of crowding on the vehicle.
For those who want to watch the wandering streetcars and buses on NextBus, here is a link. This will open a combined display of routes 501, 503, 504, 510 and 511. The map can be scaled to zoom in to the area of interest. Displays of operating charts on transsee.ca are free for TTC streetcar routes.
Over coming days I will keep an eye on service performance over the diversion, and once a few weeks’ data have accumulated will delve into the details.
Steve Munro 
As someone who takes the King car regularly for work I noticed how messed up the line has been in the past few days.
There are now regular delays on the line, travel times are longer and overall the service has gone to hell.
There is something to be said for splitting the service at Dufferin Gate and Distillery now that everything is so messed up.
It makes me wonder why they did not opt to turn the 504 at McCaul Loop in the west and Church-Dundas-Parliament in the east.
I get that the on-street loop is not ideal but at least it would keep the service somewhat regular.
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According to the posted data from Transsee, that’s roughly 44 minutes by streetcar to get from King and Portland to Queen and Jarvis; that same distance is 14 minutes by bike and 38 minutes on foot according Google Maps.
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Conditions downtown were downright terrible. Richmond/Adelaide are essentially only one lane. Someone could easily get off a streetcar at Spadina/King or Jarvis/Queen and beat the streetcar to the financial district on foot.
On Queen the construction in the curb lane east of Broadview and the CafeTO installations are not helping matters, even if there isn’t any additional service running in that area. Backed up eastbound traffic (into the intersection) and 504D buses weaving back into the centre lane causes a lot of havoc.
I can’t see how these conditions can be allowed to persist for another 4 or 5 months.
The other poster has the right idea to split the services. Sending man-hours into that quagmire is a waste of resources. Unfortunately board periods will prevent any sort of quick action. I’d also get rid of street parking and CafeTO on main streets in the periphery areas and enforce mercilessly with towing.
Get rid of 504 and 508 streetcars east of Spadina. Run more 504 bus service looping via Jarvis/Wellington/Bay/Front.
End all 501/503 service east of Yonge at Church. End west of Yonge 501 and 504 cars at McCaul and Charlotte respectively.
Yes that means those routes won’t directly connect to the subway but would people really be any worse off? Maybe beef up some of the north to south routes from the Bloor subway.
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This one is interesting as I have seen a great uptick in towing recently, so clearly someone has woken up to the issue of vehicles parked during rush hour causing slow downs with lane merges. However, guess where the tow trucks sit and idle when they are awaiting to be summoned… right in the spots where they would be towing cars from Queen Richmond and Adelaide. They are also causing the problem they are supposed to be solving.
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Why is an “amateur” like Steve Munro presenting his “amateur” observations? Shouldn’t the TTC/Metrolinx do its own “professional” observations? Do they even do so and make their “observations” known at board meetings?
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It’s water under the bridge now, as they’ve moved the diversions, but I went by twice last week and confirmed that there is in fact a green light for eastbound streetcars prior to the white walk sign for pedestrians. I confirmed this on two separate days at two separate times and made a video of one of them. I have a snippet of video from before the diversion where you can just barely see (due to poor camera handling) that this was already happening then.
It is thus a bit surprising to me that the TTC couldn’t make this work, but the Bathurst cars diverting there as well made this a mess of messes.
Steve: The basic problem was that there were more scheduled left turns than intersection capacity, especially considering cycles lost when a streetcar was sitting at the northbound stop and eastbound cars could not turn. Also, I am not sure that all of the operators, let alone the traffic wardens when present, understood how the intersection was supposed to operate.
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