Many discussions here lately have included comments about building networks of “bus rapid transit (BRT) as the truly low-cost solution to our transit woes.

Meanwhile, the TTC regularly trots out a chart showing the relative capacities of various modes.  This appears most recently in the Environmental Assessment materials for the eastern waterfront projects.  One of the many appearances can be found in the presentation materials for the West Donlands public meeting held last week.  (Warning:  this file is over 11 mb if you are on a slow link.)

The TTC claims that buses can handle demands of 6,000 per hour or more.  Let’s do the math. Continue reading →

Effective April 1, several changes will occur on TTC routes.  I’m not going to detail them all here (they will show up on the TTC’s website soon enough), but here are the major points.  They are all on the streetcar system. Continue reading →

This week’s TTC agenda includes a report called Improvements to the 504 King Streetcar Service.  You can read the details on the TTC’s site, but here are the high points and my comments on them.

Installation of a temporary reserved right-of-way on a four-to-five block section of King Street as a demonstration project in July and August 2008.

This proposal is modelled on the successful scheme down on Queen’s Quay, although I doubt we will be so lucky as to see bike lanes and geraniums up on King.  It is unclear which section of King would have the trial, although there is a suggestion in the report that it go west of John to pick up the restaurant district.  If so, a 4-to-5 block stretch won’t make it to Yonge Street.

While this will be interesting to see, it will benefit offpeak operations as much as the peak if most of the reserved lane is in the theatre/club district.  However, it’s much harder to justify a reserved lane for the offpeak headway on King  given other interests who will want all four traffic lanes.  The TTC is using peak period demands and headways to argue for reserved lanes, but there are problems in the offpeak as well.

A much more reasonable proposal would have been to ban parking (see below).

Rescind the existing “transit lane” on King from Dufferin to John, and from Jarvis to Parliament, because it isn’t enforced anyhow.  Expand the peak no-parking period from 7:00 to 10:00 am and from 3:00 to 7:00 pm.  Designate King from Dufferin to Parliament as a “transit priority zone” where fines for traffic and parking violations would be doubled.  Expand the use of red-light cameras to include King Street intersections.

I think that the hours of “no parking” need to be expanded.  If we count up the number of spaces on King in the theatre district versus the number of seats in various theatres, it is clear that parking on King itself does not contribute much to the overall capacity for people coming to these venues.  The same argument holds for the restaurant strip west of John.  If we are going to talk about taking space for transit, the easiest source of that space is the parking strip.

Staff to report back on the feasibility and cost of constructing taxi lay-bys on King from Bay to York.

Again, we can use streets to store traffic, or to move it.  If the taxis in the financial district are considered essential, then make room for them so that there are two working lanes each way.  Otherwise, start towing.

Elsewhere in the report, staff note that they have added cars to provide extra capacity above what the Service Standards would otherwise dictate.  Well yes, but that was at least four years ago and riding is still climbing.  This extra service, taking the line down to a 2-minute headway, only operates in the AM peak and is timed to hit the inbound peak through Parkdale and the Bathurst/Niagara neighbourhoods.  The PM peak service remains every 4 minutes.

Congestion on King is not a serious problem in the AM peak.  Indeed, although there is congestion through the core in the midday and afternoon, there is also congestion in Parkdale (any problem on the Gardiner or special event at the CNE), in the Theatre/Club district (evenings from roughly Wednesday through Saturday), and on Roncesvalles Avenue (some weekends).  None of the TTC’s proposals addresses this.

The report claims that a previous scheme for dedicated reserved lanes and closing of King to much traffic was opposed by business owners and some Councillors.  This is understandable considering that a permanent installation is an all-day affair and the level of off-peak service on King is not all that frequent.  As I said above, it also gets tied up in areas other than the core.

There is a fascinating table showing riding on the King car from Dufferin to Parliament, and the PM peak from 5:00 to 6:00 (3040 riders)  is nearly as high as the AM from 8:00 to 9:00 (3450) even though there is less service.  Note that on a 2-minute headway, there are only 30 cars per hour, and obviously we are getting good turnover of passengers and bidirectional traffic to get that many riders per car, especially in the PM.

The transit market share on King is at or above 60% from Strachan to Yonge hitting a peak around 70% at Spadina.  I wonder how much higher it would be if we could fit more people on the service?

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 →

The new 29 Dufferin service described below was approved without debate at the TTC meeting on January 31.  Like some who have commented on this post, I look forward to the creative writing in the six-month review of the trial service.  It’s good to know that influential members of Council can get service to a location with zero demand while people are freezing in the cold from inadequate service.  Maybe the Councillor will champion significant additional funding for TTC operations in this year’s budget.  We shall see.

Here’s the original post: 

Last September, at the urging of Deputy Mayor Pantalone, the TTC approved the extension of the 29 Dufferin bus through the CNE to serve the new BMO Field soccer stadium.  This will not just be a special event service, but an all-day operation.  Every second bus will run south from Dufferin Loop, across the top of the CNE grounds via Saskatchewan Road and Manitoba Drive (past the existing streetcar loop) to a loop just north of Princes’ Gate. 

It should be noted that the Dufferin bus will not pass much closer to the new stadium than the existing streetcar service, and Ontario Place will still be a healthy hike from any transit service.

This wouldn’t be news to anyone except for one thing:  the estimated annual cost will be $350K, but this will be offset by reallocating service from the existing Dufferin route or from other parts of the system.  One or two additional buses will be required at all times of the day, and as we well know, there’s nothing to spare elsewhere in the system.

Try telling this to the residents of northeastern Scarborough who, after a deputation at the TTC last year, were told that the earliest they could get more service, or in some cases any service, would be September 2007 when Mayor Miller’s 100 new buses will start rolling into town.

I suppose that if we built the soccer stadium in Scarborough, we would already be extending the RT to serve it day and night whether anyone was actually there or not.

I have no problem with serving special events at the CNE grounds, regardless of where they are located or what market they serve.  When we start taking service away from the existing system during peak periods for a new full-time service, a line has been crossed.

The list of routes where service is inadequate but where improvement is thwarted by a combination of fleet size, available operators, and the pig-headedness of the City Budget process, is very, very long.  When one Councillor gets service reallocated to serve his pet project, that’s an abuse of the transit system.

This proposal should be scrapped.

Over the past year, oft we heard the TTC argue that adding service is of no use because vehicles just get stuck in traffic.  More service does not lead to more ridership.  This is hogwash, but they’ve been getting away with it.

Let’s look at just what sort of additional service the King car has enjoyed.

Back in the dark ages of 1990 before a recession and service cuts took their tolll, the King car provided the following service:

• AM Peak: 2’20” combined service west of Church, 3’30” to Broadview Station
• Midday: 6’00”
• PM Peak: 2’43” over the entire route
• Early Evening: 7’17”
• Late Evening: 9’20”

The route operated 4,600 vehicle miles or about 7,360 km of service and carried 58,800 passengers per day, and the Lake Shore route did not yet exist.

By 2000, the service looked like this:

• AM Peak:  A 4’00” headway from Dundas West to Broadview overlaid by a 4’00” headway east from Roncesvalles for 12 trips corresponding to the peak eastbound demand to provide a 2’00” headway for 48 minutes.
• Midday:  6’20”
• PM Peak:  4’00”
• Early Evening:  7’30”
• Late Evening: 10’00”

The route operated 4,300 vehicle miles or about 6,880 km of service and carried just under 52,000 passengers per day, and the Lake Shore route did not yet exist.

By 2003, the service looked like this:

• AM Peak:  A 4’00” headway from Dundas West to Broadview overlaid by a 4’00” headway east from Roncesvalles for 16 trips corresponding to the peak eastbound demand to provide a 2’00” headway for 64 minutes.  Three trips on Lake Shore fit into this but they are widely enough spaced that they do not make a big impact on the headway seen by riders waiting in Parkdale or King/Bathurst.
• Midday:  5’40”
• PM Peak:  4’12”
• Early Evening:  7’15”
• Late Evening: 10’30”

The route operated 4,200 vehicle miles or about 6,720 km of service and carried just under 48,000 passengers per day.

Today, the service is:

• AM Peak:  Same as 2003
• Midday 4’45”
• PM peak 3’45”
• Early evening 7’00”
• Late evening 9’00”

The King and Lake Shore routes operate a total of 7,100 km per day and, according to the TTC stats for 2005, carried 47,900 passengers.

[Updated Feb 5] When the TTC says that it added nine cars to the route, this is simply not true in the context of recent service changes.  Relative to 2000, extra eastbound trips have been added to the AM peak, and midday service has been increased.  However, there has not been the magnitude of change one would imply from “nine more cars” because overall the amount of extra service is small.

[Updated Feb 5]  The number of cars in service in the AM peak on King and Lake Shore was 44 in 1990, 38 in 2000, 50 in 2003, and 48 today.  Note that in 2003, the route was under major reconstruction.

The combined 2’00” AM peak service has been in place since 2000, with a few trips added by 2003.  Meanwhile, the wider headway of the afternoon peak remains.  One might reasonably ask whether the prospect of a tedious wait for a trip home is a disincentive to people who might ride the marvellously improved AM peak service.

The improved midday service, implemented in September 2005 as a first step in the Ridership Growth Strategy was worthwhile, but this probably happened after the 2005 riding count was taken, or was in place for only a short time before.

The TTC must stop misrepresenting the issues of service, demand and traffic congestion.  We are deadlocked with a bogus claim that more service doesn’t generate more riding and a demand that exclusive lanes are the only solution to our problems.  The logical conclusion is that we shouldn’t spend more on TTC service because it won’t make any difference.  What, then, is the purpose of the Ridership Growth Strategy?