Author: Steve

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My TTC Is …

[This item was updated at 10:30 pm on August 28.  The additional material starts midway through the post.] 

Today, the TTC launched a campaign to inform and survey Torontonians about the potential impact of budget cuts in 2008.

More information is available at the TTC’s website.

Until mid-July, when City Council voted to defer consideration of new taxes until after the Provincial election in October, everything we heard about the TTC was upbeat:  service was to improve by leaps and bound, and a network of LRT lines criss-crossing Toronto would be built within 15 years.  Even Queen’s Park sounded positive about transit with the Move Ontario 2020 plan providing 2/3 funding for every transit scheme on the GTA.

Everything changed with that deferral, and it wasn’t long until all of that positive news about transit was only a memory.  The TTC is trying to turn this around with the “My TTC” campaign in the very brief time between the end of summer holidays (when both the voters and the media start taking issues seriously again) and a special TTC meeting to discuss possible cuts on September 12.

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Analysis of 504 King: Part VII – Friday, December 22, 2006

This day was quite a disaster for service on the King route.  The service operated on the special Christmas-week schedule with the assumption that traffic would be lighter and have a different distribution.  Congestion played havoc with the schedule with a one-way trip from Broadview to Dundas West peaking at about 90 minutes, over half an hour longer than the usual pm peak schedule time.  Eastbound trips peaked well over an hour. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part V – Saturday, December 9, 2006

Weather:  Windy and cold in the morning

Service on this date shows quite a number of short turns whose primary purpose seems to be to re-space cars that could probably have reached the end of the line.  Particularly notable is the long terminal times by cars that do make their full trips indicating that much recovery time is available and some short-turns may be premature. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part III – Friday, December 1, 2006

In the previous post, I used Christmas Day as a fairly straightforward example of the data analysis from the King route.  Now, I will turn to an example of a very bad day for service, December 1.  The weather was “rain, heavy at times” according to Environment Canada.

This is probably the worst day in the month both for weather and for disorganized service with the possible exception of Friday, December 22 which I will present in a later post. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part II – Christmas Day 2006 (Updated)

Updated August 25 at 10:30 pm:

For some time, I have been working on a different version of the program that produces the headway and link time charts, and this work is now complete.  This will simplify future work on other routes, but also it cleans up the existing charts.

I have made the following changes to the charts that are linked from this post:

  1. The data points are shown on the charts so that readers can see exactly where they are.  Each point represents a car on a specific headway at a specific time, or a car’s travel time between two points.
  2. I have added a moving average trendline based on 7 consecutive data points to show the reliability (or lack of it) of the detail as opposed to the longer term average which approximates the scheduled headway (provided there are no delays or short turns).

Otherwise, this post is unchanged.  Information about other days will appear soon.

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