I received a comment from Karem Allen in Durham that belongs in its own thread: 

A friend asked me if I knew why there would be an empty bus following closely to a full bus and my anwer was — so the empty one would be able to jump ahead and pick up riders.

He told me at one time they could leapfrog and be able to help the other drive but are now strangled in policy.
He told me that if a Driver gets 2 early’s in a month he is suspended.  So instead of jumping ahead and taking the riders and let the full one continue the empty one will hang back so as to not be early and of course the stop is empty of people.

Is this still in force?

I did not think buses were on a schedule to be early anyways.

There are a few things going on here worth talking about.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with buses playing leap-frog to handle passengers when they are bunched.  This can even out the load and the buses actually make better time going down the street.  Sometimes, however, the following driver will let the poor sod in the first bus take all the load.  Not fair, but it happens.

Having said that, the TTC does have a fetish for on time performance that can have bizarre results from the customers’ point of view.  This is driven by a measure, reported monthly to the Commission, that was introduced by former CGM David Gunn:  what proportion of all trips operated within 3 minutes of their scheduled times.  This sounds laudable, but like many corporate targets, it skews the very process it is intended to measure. Continue reading →

I received the following comment from Karem Allen who runs the transit_nightmares page on Durham Transit at:

http://www.durhamregion.typepad.com/transit_nightmares

Here is something that never can be studied and is never accounted for:

GAS extreme situations.

My friend and fellow coalition member just called me with the following story.

• More people were on the GO train then normal- line ups to buy tickets were long as these were brand new riders with no passes or long term tickets. They chose to use transit because perhaps they had not gas or wanted to conserve it. 
• Upon arrival at Union station they were greeted with broken TTC token machines and out of service lights.

Question– were they down on purpose to force them to pay the cash fare?

Neither systems seem to be prepared to greet the number of people that actually are getting out of the cars.

We will be bringing this incident at the transit forum tonight. People were really mad that they could not buy tokens once they arrived at Union Station.

This is the time to woo the discretionary transit user not drive them away with broken stuff.

Solution could be – more ticket people on hand to cover the increased customer load at both GO and TTC.

Steve:  One thing I have learned in years of looking at large organizations like the TTC is that you should never look for a conspiracy when indifference, bad planning or bad luck can explain a problem.  The real question here is how long the token machines have been down and why.  Can any regular user of Union Station let us know?

I agree that GO and the TTC really need to make an extra effort at times like this, but both organizations have a mindset that they have no spare staff or budget to do anything.  This is dangerous because it can become a strongly entrenched excuse for never even trying.  If the TTC ever reached a point where it had enough funding, enough operators, enough vehicles and no traffic congestion, I am sure they would invent some new reason to explain why the service on Queen Street was still so undependable.

Please see the end of this post for additional text. 

Over the past few years, careful readers of the annual TTC Service Plans will notice that more and more requests for new service are denied because they don’t meet the financial criteria.  Today at the TTC we had yet another example, and it’s worth examining to see, in miniature, the problems brought on by blind, formulaic decision-making. Continue reading →

A notorious aspect of TTC budgeting is that ridership projections are stated relative to last year’s budget, not relative to last year’s actual riding.

With a system bursting at the seams, everyone is waiting for the new service coming in the fall when the Ridership Growth Strategy finally starts to kick in.  But, wait a minute, the TTC’s plans are not all they seem to be. Continue reading →