Day: October 21, 2025

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TTC Seeks Consultant for Streetcar Overhead Engineering

The TTC has an open RFP on the Bonfire site for a Triennial Contract for design services for its streetcar overhead contact system. Much of this document is boilerplate legalese, but the scope of work shows that the TTC plans to address key issues with systems related to streetcar overhead. Five specific tasks are listed in the RFP and more might be added over the term of the contract.

  • Overhead/Traction Power Supply Study
    • This involves a review of the existing system that supplies power to streetcars and the demands placed on it as vehicles move through the network. There is no mention of modelling the effect of increasing service, but this should obviously be part of the study to determine where constraints might exist to service growth. (The recent suspension of streetcar service on Bathurst during the busy CNE period thanks to a power supply failure is an obvious incentive for this work.)
  • Overhead Design for Interections
    • This task would review existing intersections with a view to improvements where appropriate.
  • Overhead Design for New and Existing Lines
    • The title is self-explanatory but it begs the question of why a new design is needed for the existing system, much of which has been rebuilt once for dual-mode trolley pole and pantograph operation, and again for a pantograph-only configuration. The latter work is still in progress, and is responsible for some of the extended bus-streetcar substitutions in recent years. Also notable is the absence of any reference to eBus charging infrastructure.
  • Streetcar Track Switch
    • Although track switches are not part of the power supply to streetcars, historically they were controlled through hardware mounted on the overhead wires. The current system uses antennae in the pavement and on streetcars, and responsibility for the system rests with the Streetcar Overhead section.
  • Streetcar Signal System Alterations
    • The definition of this task is unclear in that there are almost no signals anywhere on the streetcar system. Moreover, there is no reference to the interface between streetcar operations and traffic signals.

In this article I will address only the last two items as they are both related to issues of streetcar operating speeds, a topic raised in a recent UITP review of the streetcar system. (See The UITP Peer Review: What is the TTC Trying to Hide?) Details from this review might become public at the November TTC Board meeting.

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TTC Headway Reliability on Small Routes (Part I)

Many of the service analyses on this site concern larger, major routes like the streetcar lines and bus routes crossing substantial distances in the suburbs. The picture of service quality is not a pretty one. Starting with this article, I will review service on several of the shorter routes, many with infrequent service, to see how the TTC fares. Short routes get frequent stops at terminals where headways can be reset, but irregular service can mean long waits for riders.

Many of these routes show very irregular service and one cannot help asking how this affects ridership. The TTC talks about improving service on major routes with interventions such as reserved lanes, but seems incapable of managing headways on relatively minor routes. There is a parallel here with declining maintenance quality where issues with the “little things that don’t matter” start to bleed into the major services and the system drives away as many riders as new services might attract.

Common problems seen on most of the routes reviewed here are:

  • Headways do not generally stay within a narrow band, but can be badly scattered especially for evening and weekend service.
  • In spite of this scatter, it is quite possible that the routes meet the TTC’s service standards which merge performance over an entire day, and provide a wide margin for data points outside of the target range (40%).
  • Review of the detailed tracking data (not included here in the interest of space) shows that some of the widest gaps occur because of missing buses. There is a metric in the service standards for missed trips with a goal to “minimize” them, albeit with no target. Trips can be missed because no operator or vehicle is available, or because of a short turn before a bus reaches the terminal, or because of such extreme lateness that it might as well not have operated. This statistic has never been reported in the monthly service quality metrics.
  • Bus bunching occurs even on routes with scheduled headways of 20-30 minutes, and this can persist for multiple trips showing little effort to space out service. Where the quality metric is “on time performance”, spacing service to compensate for bunched or missing vehicles can actually work against a “good” score even though what riders see would be more reliable.

Routes included in this article are:

8 Broadview
15 Evans
19 Bay
22 Coxwell
23 Dawes
26 Dupont

31 Greenwood
49 Bloor West
50 Burnhamthorpe
62 Mortimer
64 Main
65 Parliament

An additional 13 routes will be included in Part II of this series.

65 Parliament
70 O’Connor
72 Pape
75 Sherbourne
83 Jones
88 South Leaside

91 Woodbine
92 Woodbine South
111 East Mall
112 West Mall
114 Queens Quay East
154 Curran Hall
168 Symington

After the “more” break, data for one route, 8 Broadview, are shown in detail as an introduction. Further routes are shown only in summary, but with links to PDFs containing all of the charts for readers interested in them.

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