Author: Steve

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Where Are The Queen Car Riders Going? (Updated)

The coming TTC meeting includes a long report on the status of the Queen car and various strategies to improve its operation.  I will comment on that separately when I have a chance to digest the material.

The report contains a fascinating table in Appendix A, at physical page 7, showing origin-destintation data for the route broken into five segments:

  • Long Branch to Humber
  • Humber to Bathurst
  • Bathurst to Church
  • Church to Kingston Road
  • Kingston Road to Neville

We learn here that riders originating in the Beach travel overwhelmingly to the Church/Bathurst segment, and I suspect even they are concentrated toward the eastern end of that segment.

Riders from east of Yonge overwhelmingly are destined for stops east of Bathurst, and only a tiny number travels to Long Branch.

Conversely, of riders originating on Lake Shore, well over half (52% peak, 63% all day) are bound for another stop on Lake Shore, not for stops on the Queen line itself.  Those who do continue downtown don’t want to go past Yonge Street.

What is fascinating about the report is that it completely ignores these data although they have profound implications for route structure and service.

People do not want to ride from Neville to Long Branch, but to the central area.  Claims that split routes would foul up travel patterns don’t quite line up with the O-D information in this table, provided that an appropriate overlap of east and west end service exists for the busy central section.

The TTC has consistently ignored the fact that the “Long Branch” service has a strong local demand that is abused by the through operation with the Queen service to Neville.  It is worth noting that the all day boardings west of Humber are 5,500.

Just after the 501 and 507 were merged, the count stood at 7,700.  In previous years when Long Branch had its own service, daily boardings ranged from 11,000-14,000.  This is a textbook example of destroying a service and its demand, and refusing for almost two decades to acknowledge the mistake.

Even in its weakened state, the demand remains over half local for the rather obvious reason that anyone going downtown has much faster ways to get there.  Part of this lies with congestion problems, but a lot has to do with the unreliable service.

Much work has focussed on fixing service to the Beach where, intriguingly, the all day boardings are less than on Lake Shore even though it gets twice as much service (on paper anyhow).  To be fair, the Long Branch segment is roughly twice the length of the Beach segment and the density of demand on the west end is lower than the east, but the optics are poor.  Assuming that every boarding has a matching return trip (not exactly valid, but close enough for a rough estimate), we are moving mountains for the 7,500 trips to and from the Beach segment every day, but the 11,000 on Long Branch are another matter.

Updated February 15:

Some of the discussion in the comments thread took me back to the original data, and a desire to see numbers of riders, not just percentages.  This information is now available in a consolidated table.

The first part of this table is the data reproduced from the TTC report.  The second part converts the percentages back to passenger counts.  As a double-check, I summed these values, and you can see that some of these do not exactly match the boarding counts no doubt due to rounding errors.  However, this is good enough for discussion.

The third part gives percentages expressed by origin rather than by destination.  For example, 69% of the riders going to the Long Branch section of the route originate there, 14% originate from Bathurst to Humber, 15% originate from Church to Bathurst.

The vagaries of demand surveys show up in the fact that the number of people originating in each segment is not the same as the number of people arriving there.  For example, 5,500 people board on the Long Branch segment, but only 5,034 make it their destination.  Similarly, more people board the Humber-Bathurst segment, 8,750, than travel there, 8,291.  Although it is possible that the 501 is gradually depopulating southern Etobicoke and Parkdale, the more likely answers lie in variations in trip patterns (out one way, back another) and the inevitable inaccuracies of sampling.

Of the folks bound for the Beach, 3,889, only 88 originate west of Bathurst Street.  Conversely, only 101 of the 5,034 travellers west of Humber originate east of Church.  Those among us with long memories might observe that this could be partly due to the long decline in service quality that would drive anyone trying to make a long trip across Queen give up and find another route.  In any event, the O-D pattern is concentrated in the central part of the route from Kingston Road to Humber (and more likely Roncesvalles if the data were more finely divided).

Lost in the mists of time are O-D figures for the era when the Queen car had well over 60,000 boardings per day.  Where did those lost riders come from and where were they going?

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Transit City Status Update

This month’s TTC agenda includes a long update on the status of the Transit City plans.  I will not attempt to précis this report, but will touch on points of particular interest.

Funding is in place to allow continued work on Environmental Assessments [sic] and other engineering work, but the real challenge comes later this year when construction is slated to begin on Sheppard.  The fog may clear a bit once the provincial budget is announced and we know just how much money will flow to Metrolinx and to transit in general.

A related problem, of course, is the question of new LRVs for the existing and future streetcar/LRT networks.  By the time the budget is out, the TTC should know what the bids for new cars look like, and Queen’s Park will have to decide whether they are serious about paying for them. Continue reading →

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Putting Green Power in Perspective (Updated)

[See the end for the update which discusses the bus fleet.]

Green Power comes up from time to time in the transit wars, especially when anti-LRT and anti-trolley bus factions trot out observations about “dirty” peak power.  Strangely, we never hear this sort of remark about subways, but some of those projects have enough hot air in them that Calgary’s “Ride The Wind” slogan has a whole new meaning.

Calgary is proud that its LRT network is entirely powered by wind energy, and I thought it would be worthwhile to compare the TTC’s power requirements with the capacity of the wind farm that Calgary uses.

TransAlta Wind supplies the power, and their current installed farm of 252 turbines generates 731,000 MWh (MegaWatt hours) per year.  They are planning to expand with higher-output turbines.

For comparison, the generator at the CNE, a comparatively small installation, produces 1,815 MWh per year.  Its generator is one quarter the capacity of the newest TransAlta installations.

The TTC’s annual power requirement is cited as 436,000 MWh in a December 2007 report on their environmental plan (at page 9).

Supplying the TTC would require a wind farm on the order of 50 of the new generators planned by TransAlta, presuming that we could obtain comparable all-year wind in Ontario matching Alberta’s climate.

This would not, strictly speaking, power the TTC but would feed into the grid to offset demand elsewhere.  The TTC’s demand has strong peaks, and wind just doesn’t work that way.  Some peak power will inevitably come from peak generation capacity, whatever technology that may be.

As the TTC moves to increase its use of electricity for propulsion, there will be a lot of debates about the power source.  In all of this it’s worthwhile to know the scale of what we are discussing.

Update:  In another thread, the enternal question of trolley buses and possible alternatives is churning again.  Supposing that the automotive industry actually manages to create an electric bus (remember that this is the same industry that is in danger of going bankrupt for lack of meaningful R&D).  What would an electric bus fleet’s power requirement be in Toronto?

As a starting point, I will use the trolley bus because it is a well-known, well-documented form of electric bus using modern propulsion equipment.  It is highly unlikely that any new vehicle will improve substantially on its power consumption.  The power consumption for trolley buses reported by APTA (American Public Transit Association) is .18 mile/kWh.  This is equivalent to 5.56 kWh/mile or 3.45 kWh/km.

In 2007, the TTC bus fleet operated 107,609,000 km, and if this had entirely been at the average consumption of the trolley bus fleets included in APTA’s numbers, this would require 371,251 MWh of power.  Note that this is not far below the existing electrical power requirements of the TTC.  If we add the numbers together, we get more than all of the wind power now generated by TransAlta Wind.

Alas, if we insist on using battery or fuel cell buses, we will suffer very considerable conversion losses within those systems, and the total power requirements will be even higher.

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The Bingham to Long Branch Car

In response to comments in another post about service from Bingham to Long Branch Loop, John F. Bromley left the following:

One car per week from Bingham to Long Branch actually operated for a very short time in 1966 (Feb 26 to May 21), when QUEEN was split at the east end to operate evening and weekend cars alternately to Neville and Bingham. The last QUEEN of the day from Bingham, before the 22A COXWELL night bus took over on Kingston Rd) made that trek. 4745 made the last Bingham-Long Branch run at 1.02 AM on May 15. The car was 1 minute late arriving at Bingham and my planned 8 second exposure was cut to just over a second as the doors slammed open and shut and he took off.

4745-bingham-loop-660515

 

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Toronto’s Operating Budget and the TTC

This morning, the City of Toronto unveiled its operating budget for 2009.  Included in this material are budget briefing papers for all city departments including the TTC.

This gives a view of planned TTC operations with more information than we have seen at the TTC meetings, and includes the following items (these are selected quotations from a much longer paper):

  • Ridership is expected to grow by 6 million in 2009 to 473 million, and then remain flat for 2010 and 2011 due to the recession.
  • Specifically with respect to the Queen car:
    • Implement additional bus service and service reliability measures on the 501 Queen Street route to compensate for the shortage of streetcars required to meet ridership growth.
      The TTC will hire a total of 20 new Route Supervisors. Of these, six Route Supervisors will manage the 501 Queen route to ensure the optimum flow of streetcars. In 2009, the TTC will split the Queen Street route. In 2009, the TTC will also add buses to the 501 Queen Street route in order to deal with growth in the number of riders in anticipation of the new LRVs with increased capacity which will be delivered in 2011.
    • The 2009 Recommended Operating Budget includes funding of $0.880 million for reliability improvements to the 501 Queen Street route and $0.280 million to address the streetcar shortage on Queen St. As well, there is $1.735 million to fund 20 additional Route Supervisors to deal with congestion and improve the flow of buses and streetcars on heavily traveled routes.
  • Continuation of the Ridership Growth Strategy service improvements is funded for 2009.
  • The 2010 Outlook reflects a net increase of $188 million. For 2010, it is expected that ridership will stay flat at the 2009 level of 473 million riders due to the economic downturn. Collective bargaining agreements, other employee costs, service requirements, energy needs, inflationary increases and the operating impact of capital projects will continue to exert pressure in 2010. In 2010, there will also be an on-going impact of over $11 million from increased growth in service. Given the volatility of fuel prices in 2008, it is difficult to predict future diesel rates. No funding for new service initiatives is included in the 2010 Outlook at this time. No fare increase is included in the 2010 Outlook.
  • The 2011 Outlook represents a net increase of $75 million. As in 2010, other employee costs, service requirements, energy needs, inflationary increases and the operating impact of capital projects will continue to exert pressure in 2011. The impact of cost of living increases is not included in the 2011 Outlook after the end of the first quarter as the latest collective agreement expires on March 31, 2011. No funding for new service initiatives is included in the 2011 Outlook at this time. No fare increase is included in the 2011 Outlook.
  • It is recommended that the Chief General Manager of the Toronto Transit Commission report back to the Budget Committee in Spring 2009, with a five-year plan, driven by ridership and TTC service delivery plans that would include various options for a multi-year fare strategy.

We now learn, through the budget papers, exactly what is planned for Queen Street including a route split and partial use of buses to deal with the shortage of streetcars.  This appears to contradict statements about the Queen car made at TTC meetings and in reports suggesting that the single-route operation would be maintained while various route supervision options were pursued.

Where the TTC will find the extra buses to supplement service on Queen is unknown considering that they don’t have enough to serve their bus network today.

It also appears that any further expansion of RGS beyond its current extent is shelved for the near future at least partly due to budgetary constraints.

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Yonge Subway Tunnel Repairs Phase 2 Begins (Updated)

Effective Sunday, February 15, repairs on the subway tunnel liners between Eglinton and Finch will shift further south and the late-night turnback operation will move from Lawrence to Eglinton.

The 97 Yonge route will operate from Eglinton to Finch station stopping in Lawrence, York Mills and Sheppard stations enroute to make connections with east-west routes.  The late night extension of routes south to Lawrence Station will end, as will the 97F service via Yonge Boulevard.

Bus service will run every 3 minutes Monday to Friday, and every 4’30” on Sundays.  As in Phase 1 of this project, subway service will run through to Finch on Saturdays.

Updated:  An early plan to use the “special events” bay (the old surface terminal at the Duplex Avenue end of the station) has been changed.  Shuttle buses will use the regular terminal.

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Bus and Operator Shortage Hits Service

On Sunday, February 15, new schedules will be implemented on many routes.  Across the system, many of the peak period improvements from last November are rolled back to reduce the demand for buses and operators.

The bus shortage is easy to understand thanks to the battery problems with the hybrid fleet, but the shortage of operators is more troubling.  Does this represent a problem with recruiting, a higher turnover of staff, a jump in retirements, or some combination of these?  The TTC owes us an explanation if only to temper expectations of service improvements that are practical later in 2009 and beyond.

The cuts will be in place from February through, probably, June 2009 when we would normally see summer service reductions.  The real challenge will come in September when “full” service should return to the system.

February 2009 Service Changes

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GO Georgetown South Open House Reviewed

Robert Wightman reports:

I was at the GO South Georgetown open house in Mt Dennis (Eglinton and Weston Rd.) today.  Some interesting things that I learned are:

  1. There will be a seven or eight track corridor from the TTR yards up the Weston Sub to the North Toronto sub where two tracks will head west on the Galt Sub. GO owns the Galt Sub south of the Diamond at the North Toronto Sub. If there are eight tracks one will probably disappear at Lansdowne where the Newmarket sub branches off.
  2. Bloor station will be two island platforms serving four tracks. It will be possible to have the Milton trains stop here. There would be four ARL (Air Rail Link formerly known as Blue 22) trains, four Mt. Pleasant locals, one or two Kitchener express trains, plus one or two Milton trains each way each hour in base service. God knows what it would be like in rush hour. There would be a direct connection to Dundas West Station, finally.
  3. There will be a four track depressed line in a 650 m long tunnel through Weston north of Lawrence. The station for Weston would be moved south to a level area so that the north end of the station, four tracks, would be just north of the bridge at Lawrence with most of the station to the south. There would be two CP tracks and one or two CN tracks go through at grade as they do not want to run them down and up the grade. Clearance would be 22 feet, 6.8 m in the tunnel, enough for electrification at 25 KV AC.
  4. Future stations are planned for Eglinton, to connect with the LRT to form a major transit hub and one at Woodbine. These would not happen until the line is electrified. The electrification would probably be at 25 KV AC but this has not been finalized though everything is being built with adequate clearances. Apparently when the Deux Montagnes line in Montreal was re-equipped it was converted to 25 KV AC according to the consulting engineer I talked to.
  5. The ARL line will be run with two car trains of self propelled Budd RDC’s on a 15 minute headway. There would be four trains providing the service with a two car hot spare train. (It would be plugged in with warm engine oil and be either heated or cooled to the proper temperature to be quick a change off.) There would also be one spare car for running maintenance. I do not think that this is an adequate spare ratio but we shall see.
  6. SNC Lavalin wants high platforms to provide easier loading and unloading but the GO guy and the consulting engineer doubt that this will happen as it make for under utilized station platforms at Union Station and will require gauntlet tracks at the line stations to allow freight and express trains to pass the high platforms. The artist’s rendering shows low level bi folding doors at each end, sort of like skinny doors on the single level GO trains.
  7. The line from the GO line to the airport is extremely interesting. The consulting engineer said that it was “straight from Canada’s Wonderland.” It consists of a light and airy, perhaps even flimsy, elevated single track line down the middle of the Goreway to get to the Airport and then grades up to 5% to get through the airport to a two track 80 m long island platform. This will allow for expansion to three car trains. He also said he saw a drawing of a two car train with a high platform sliding double door in the middle of the car. This would allow for faster loading and unloading.
  8. Every level crossing from Strachan Avenue to the airport will be closed or grade separated for passenger trains. It will be interesting to see what happens to the two remaining level crossings in Brampton but this study did not go that far. They figure that there will be 240 + trains a day through Weston with the freights still making level crossings at two streets.
  9. There was no one there who knew much about the rush hour only service to Bolton. One map had a line labelled enhanced GO service to Orangeville and one person thought that they were going to run GO trains through the Forks of The Credit but I think that it means better bus service to meet the more frequent GO trains.

I will try to get out to the meeting in Kitchener tomorrow night for the extended GO service but as I have to be at the airport for 6:00 a.m. Friday I may not make it. Apparently the storage area at Baden is the third choice. There is not room at the Kitchener station to store trains and they do not want to do a reversing move on the mainline so the yard must be to the west. The storage areas at Milton and Richmond Hill are accessed by yard trackage and are considered a reversing move so they do not have to change ends and perform a brake test. 

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Scarborough RT/LRT Benefits Case Analysis (Updated)

Updated February 3:  In a previous version of this post, I was using 4-car trains for the Base Case and therefore claimed that the fleet was undersized.  This has been corrected.

On January 16, the Metrolinx Board approved release of the Benefits Case Analysis (BCA) for the replacement and extension of the Scarborough RT.  This document is now available online.

The original TTC proposal, was simply to replace the current technology with Mark II RT cars on the existing alignment. This is now referred to as the “Base Case”.  Four alternatives, all considered superior to the base case, were evaluated in the BCA.

  • 1: Extend the RT 5.4 km to Malvern Town Centre using the current technology.
  • 2: Extend the RT to Markham & Sheppard where it would connect with the Sheppard East LRT including an LRT branch north to Malvern.
  • 3: Replace the RT over its entire length with LRT and extend to Malvern on approximately the same alignment as the first RT option, completely in an exclusive right-of-way.
  • 4: Replace the RT with LRT and extend to Malvern with a partially exclusive right-of-way east of McCowan.

Major Flaws in the BCA

To save readers from combing through the rest of the text, here are major points where the analysis does not hold up.

  • The peak demand for which the line is designed, 10K/hour, is substantially above the modelled peak demand of 6.4K/hour in The Big Move.  The Metrolinx regional plan includes frequent commuter rail services through the extended RT’s catchment area, and this likely attracts some riders away from the RT.  Designing for higher capacity than required inflates fleet, carhouse and operating costs.  It may also affect train lengths and the cost of retrofitting existing stations.
  • LRT options presume the construction of a dedicated carhouse for the Scarborough line even though, by the time an LRT would operate, the Sheppard line’s new carhouse would be operating and could act as the base for Scarborough trains.  This inflates the capital cost of LRT options.
  • The alleged cost-benefit ratios are highly sensitive to the presumed value of travellers’ time.  This value is orders of magnitude greater than the value of environmental effects (reduced car use) and dominates the calculations.  The model overall favours proposals that serve long trips at comparatively high speeds (e.g. with widely spaced stations) that may not be conducive to the type of neighbourhood preferred in the Official Plan.
  • The values assigned to savings from reduced automobile use are based on a much higher factor than in the VIVA Benefits Case report, 95 vs 23 cents per km (2031).  The effect is to grossly overstate the savings from reduced auto usage for all options.
  • Economic benefits include the money spent on labour during construction.  This value for all options is a disconcertingly low percentage of the total project cost (well under 20%).  This shows that a substantial portion of any scheme is consumed by planning and design, materials, vehicles and system component costs.  Moreover, the idea that spending more on one project is “good” because it generates more work is valid only if one ignores other projects that could be built with the same money and labour.  This will be an important factor when projects are weighed against each other.
  • Estimates for the length of time the RT would be closed for upgrade or restructuring are “at least 8 months” for RT and “up to 36 months” for LRT.  These figures need to be reviewed in detail to determine where the differences lie.  The numbers are taken from the original TTC study (which did not include the qualifiers) when the physical changes needed to handle Mark II RT cars were considered to be trivial.  This may no longer be true.
  • Overall the analysis looks at the RT in isolation from the surrounding network and ignores alternative ways that the demand might be served on the network, not just on the RT corridor.  Although the report shows LRT as the less expensive option, the difference versus RT options may actually be understated.

Continue reading →

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Where’s My Streetcar?

Tess Kalinowski, writing in today’s Star, tells us of the job that TTC Route Supervisors have in managing service.  We learn of great hopes for vehicle location technology so that supervisors will actually know where cars might be up and down their lines, but the telling comment comes here:

Frequent mechanical problems mean supervisors have to scramble to find another car. These days, the 30-year-old Rockets are failing so fast the TTC expects to be running buses on some routes by the end of the year to keep service levels up.

“There are days when you’re constantly scrambling to find a piece of equipment,” says [route supervisor Doug] Smith.

This is the reality of TTC operations at a time when the St. Clair line is partly shut down for reconstruction.  A report on fleet plans is due later in 2009 for all modes including streetcars.

Toronto needs to know how its service will be provided, and the streetcar system needs an infusion of confidence.  The last thing we need is the feeling that “streetcars mean bad service” just as we are trying to expand LRT into the Transit City network.