Finance

by

TTC Service Changes: August 1, 2021

Updated July 20, 2021 at 11:00 am: An explanation from the TTC for the routing choice for the 504C King West shuttle has been added at the end of this article.

The schedule changes for August 2021 primarily bring adjustments to running times and headways on several route. Continuing a recent pattern, the TTC has started to trim back extra travel time that buses do not require. This results in a combination of effects including:

  • Identical service is provided by fewer vehicles
  • Better service is provided by the same or fewer vehicles
  • On only a few occasions are headways widened

The affected routes are:

  • 28 Bayview South
  • 30 High Park
  • 37 Islington
  • 50 Burnhamthorpe
  • 52 Lawrence West
  • 55 Warren Park
  • 60 Steeles West
  • 64 Main
  • 65 Parliament
  • 95 York Mills
  • 120 Calvington
  • 952 Lawrence West Express
  • 953 Steeles East Express

For details, refer to the spreadsheet linked at the end of this article.

Royal York Station Construction

Remedial work is needed at Royal York Station left over from the Easier Access Program. For the period of the August schedules, bus routes will not loop through the station, and service south and north of Bloor Street will be interlined. The hookups are the same as during the previous construction work: 15/48 Evans/Rathburn and 73/76 Royal York North/South.

One Person Train Operation Trial on Line 1

On a trial basis, trains on Line 1 will operate between Vaughan Metropolitan Centre and St. George Station with one person crews on Sundays.

Track and Watermain Construction on Queen

As previously announced, the track on Queen will be rebuilt between Bay and Fennings (near Dovercourt). Work will be done in stages with complete shutdowns of the street including auto access and curb lane CafeTO installations. For ongoing details, please refer to the City of Toronto’s page for this project, and pop open the “Construction Phases and Details” tab.

The TTC has been upgrading the overhead wiring on Queen for pantograph operation from Parliament Street westward, and it is reasonable to hope that once the track project passes McCaul Street, the 501 streetcars can return to Queen from their current diversion via Parliament and King. There is no announced date for this.

Watermain Construction on Broadview Avenue

For those who might have been wondering about the lack of activity on Broadview, the problem was a widespread shortage of materials and this deferred the start of the watermain replacement. Work began recently working north from Hogarth toward Danforth. The southern part of this project, to Gerrard, will follow.

The TTC plans to replace the track on Broadview between Gerrard and Danforth in 2022. In the previous round, a little over two decades ago, the street was rebuilt to modern standards with a full concrete base and steel ties. Only the top layer of concrete will have to be removed, and the rails will be installed onto the existing ties and foundation. The same type of work is now underway on Queen.

The cycle time for track replacement is measured in decades, and we have now reached the point where most of the tangent (straight) rails are laid on a modern foundation. Intersections started later, and so there is still some special work where more extensive reconstruction is needed. Renewal projects on modern track are simpler because the street does not have to be excavated to the depth of a new foundation.

King-Queen-Queensway-Roncesvalles Project

The changeover to the Phase 2 configuration was originally anticipated for Wednesday, July 21, but the project is running late and this has been deferred.

When the area is ready, the replacement bus services on King and Queen will be reconfigured as shown in the map below, and track work will shift to the King Street leg of the intersection.

Service on the 501/301 Queen bus will run through east-west on Queen on the normal route rather than diverting via Dufferin and King.

The 504C King shuttle will amalgamate the existing Roncesvalles and King West shuttles into one route between Dundas West Station and Princes’ Gates Loop. 504C buses will run westbound via Queen, eastbound via Triller and King.

Updated July 20, 2021 at 11:00 am: A reader asked in the comments why a street further west was not used for the westbound trips to shift north from King to Queen so that bidirectional service could be provided on more of King Street. The TTC replied:

Wilson Park and Beatty were not acceptable for use by buses for the following reasons:

• Both Wilson Park and Beatty are narrow one-way roads. There is on-street parking on the west side of both roads which severely limits clearances for buses on these roads and leaves little room for error which is a safety concern.

• TTC’s Policy On Traffic Calming And Speed Humps opposes transit service on roads with speed bumps. Similar to many side streets west of Dufferin that were considered for potential use, Wilson Park and Beatty were eliminated as options since both roads have speed bumps.

In addition to Wilson Park and Beatty, TTC evaluated every road west of Dufferin as a potential turnaround option. Unfortunately, it was determined that none of the roads were suitable for a safe bus operations as similar clearance issues were present on each of these roads. As a result, we determined the only suitable option for northbound bus operations was Dufferin Street.

Email from Stuart Green, TTC Media Relations, July 20, 2021

The Details

Service Changes 2021.08.01

by

Red Lanes, Express Buses and Service Reliability in Scarborough

Four routes in Scarborough benefit from the introduction of reserved lanes on Eglinton Avenue East, Kingston Road and Morningside Avenue.

  • 86 Scarborough
  • 186 Scarborough Express
  • 116 Morningside
  • 905 Eglinton East Express

In previous articles, I looked at the change in travel times with the onset of covid-era drops in traffic levels beginning in Spring 2020, and the effect of the “red lane” implementation in mid-October 2020. This is an update to bring the review to the end of June 2021.

On five other corridors (Jane, Dufferin, Finch East, Steeles West, Lawrence East), there are plans for reserved lanes, although the proposals have not met with universal acclaim. In future articles I will bring the review of their routes’ behaviour up to date. The map below shows the affected routes as proposed in the Service Plan. Lawrence Avenue East was added to this list by the TTC Board.

My underlying premise is that pre-pandemic conditions are a reference point for travel times. Across the entire transit network, traffic congestion and boarding delays fell with the onset of covid. This has been building back gradually, but the effect varies from route to route. There are also external events such as the LRT construction on Finch Avenue West that affect intersecting streets. Finally, the transit red lanes were introduced concurrently with two other changes: the removal of some local stops and the restoration of express service.

This makes identification of the actual cause of shorter travel times more difficult to isolate, and the answer is probably “all of the above”. Each street and route is different, and the benefits, such as they are, of the red lanes should not be assumed to apply on every route segment in the city.

A concurrent issue for transit riders is the dependability of service. It may well be that five minutes is shaved off of their journey with a reserved lane, but if the service is erratic and the wait time for a bus is unpredictable, this benefit can be sabotaged. The situation is further complicated by a mix of local and express buses. If an express can serve a rider’s planned trip, it might save time thanks both to the red lanes and to the fewer stops enroute. However, if the likely wait for an express bus exceeds the time saving (and desire for certainty), a local bus could prove “faster” if it shows up first.

The TTC forever talks about optimization of service and schedule adjustments to make things work better. Problems should be “solved” with schemes like reserved lanes and express buses, so they say. However, headways (the time between buses) continue to be irregular leading to rider frustration and complaints, some of which are due to overcrowding caused by irregular service.

The TTC is good at getting the City to make changes to roads to “improve” service, but not so good at managing the service it has.

The short version of this article is that the red lanes on Eglinton/Kingston/Morningside improved travel times somewhat although we have not yet seen the real test of whether they prevent a return to pre-pandemic, pre-red lane conditions. The benefit varies from route to route, time of day, and day of the week. In spite of the claims that transit priority would lead to more reliable service, gapping and bunching remains a problem on most of the route using the red lane corridor.

This is a key issue for expanding the program: transit priority on its own does not guarantee regularly spaced and, by extension, evenly loaded vehicles.

A Note About Data

Since the idea of the red lanes first appeared, I began to collect data on the proposed routes. This was complicated by a few factors:

  • The red lanes, aka RapidTO, were proposed in the Service Plan issued in December 2019, before the pandemic. In anticipation of studying their benefit, I began collecting vehicle tracking data for the affected routes in 2020.
  • In some cases, because I was already tracking major routes, I had data from April 2018, but there is a big gap until late 2019 because this was the conversion period from the old CIS tracking system to the new Vision system. Data extracts were not available from Vision until late 2019. Therefore, I have very little pre-2020 data that is recent enough to be used for comparison.
  • With the effects of the pandemic on traffic and riding levels in 2020, the travel times are no longer representative of worst case conditions. A silver lining is that for the period when traffic was very light, this gives a best case situation for transit travel, in effect setting a bound on the improvement we could expect if we could just make the traffic disappear.
  • Almost all 900-series Express routes were dropped in Spring 2020, and they have only slowly been returning (more are planned later in 2021 or early 2022 including a few new routes). Therefore an express-vs-local comparison is not available on all corridors.
  • Before the Express network existed, express trips (typically the “E” branch of a route) ran with the same route number and their data are mixed together with the local trips. It was not practical to attempt to fish the express trips out of the tracking data in part because local and express runs did not always make their trips as scheduled, and this varied from day to day. Some buses alternated between making express and local trips. Therefore, data from 2018 represent a mix of times for local and express trips. This understates the time needed for local trips and overstates the value for express trips.

I will not burden the reader with a discussion of the methodology for converting CIS and Vision data to the format used in my analyses. There are two articles on this:

Continue reading →
by

TTC 2022 Service Plan Consultation

Updated June 28, 2021 at 6:10 pm:

The TTC has filled in some of the details on 51 Leslie, 88 South Leaside and 354 Lawrence East Night. See the individual sections of this article for details.

The TTC has launched public consultations for its 2022 Service Plan. This will be a difficult year in which ridership is expected, at best, to climb back to 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. Budgets will be tight because the transit system plans to be operating close to 100 per cent of is former service (building up gradually on the buses for January 2022, then streetcars and finally the subway) even though fare revenue will be at a lower level. The TTC recognizes that it needs to provide good service to attract riders back to the system.

For the week of June 4-11, boardings on each of the TTC’s networks by vehicle type are still below 50 per cent of January 2020 values:

  • Bus: 40%
  • Streetcar: 27%
  • Subway: 23%
  • Overall: 31%

Trip occupancy for buses is generally below the target level.

  • 4% of trips are over 50% full
  • 0.6% of trips are over 70% full
  • 0.3% of trips are over 80% full

An important distinction about crowding measurements is that as ridership recovers, a the definition of a “full” bus will rise from 25 riders today, to 35 and then to the “standard” full load of 51. Service levels and crowding in 2022 will be measured and allocated against this shifting target. In the short term, service will be provided at a crowding level below pre-pandemic times.

Crowding levels reported now are all day, all route, all week values, and they hide problem areas in the system. The TTC still does not break out reports on crowding or service quality by route, location or time of day. Their “On Time Departure Report” has not been updated in several years, and although there is still a link to it from the Customer Service page, the link is dead.

The 2018 Customer Charter is still linked and it includes a commitment, carried forward from the 2013 Charter:

Posting the performance of all surface routes on our website so you know how your route is performing.

One might ask why Rick Leary, the man Andy Byford hired to improve service, is incapable of producing reports of service quality beyond the extremely superficial level found in his monthly CEO’s Report. The TTC have detailed crowding data and use them internally, but do not publish them. As for on time performance or headway reliability, I have written extensively about problems with service quality and these metrics. Even though service is the top of riders’ desires, it is not reported by the TTC probably because the numbers would be too embarrassing.

This is a gaping hole in TTC Service – the absence of meaningful reporting and measurement of service quality as experienced by riders.

Although the TTC plans to return to 100 per cent service, this does not mean that the service patterns will match those of early 2020. Demand patterns have changed both in daily patterns (peaks or their absence) and location (heavier demand to suburban jobs in sectors where work from home is impossible). To the extent that peaks are smaller or non-existent, this works in the TTC’s favour by allowing a higher ratio of service hours to driving hours (buses spend less time, proportionately, going to and from garages). This also, of course, spreads out demand and can reduce crowding.

A new phenomenon is the early morning peak caused by commutes to jobs outside the core. This produces crowding even on some Blue Night Routes, and the TTC is looking at how this can be resolved.

There is a page on the TTC’s site including a link to a survey about planned changes including some new and revised routes, as well as the plan for route restructuring to accompany the opening of Line 5 Eglinton Crosstown. Tentatively, that line is expected to begin running on July 31, 2022 according to the TTC, but that is simply a planning target, not a hard date.

In this article, I have grouped the planned changes geographically to pull together information on related routes rather than numerically as they appear on the TTC’s site. I have also included information on some changes planned for later in 2021 to put the proposed 2022 route structure in context.

There is a separate consultation process launching soon regarding the future service design for the period between the shutdown of Line 3 Scarborough RT in mid 2023 and the opening of the Line 2 Scarborough extension in fall 2030.

There are three major components in the 2022 plan:

  • Optimize the network to match capacity with demand.
  • Restructure the network for the opening of 5 Eglinton Crosstown.
  • Modify the network to respond to customer requests, evolving demand patterns and new developments.

All maps in this article are from the TTC’s website.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Board Meeting June 16, 2021

The primary issue on the agenda for the June 16 meeting was the “near miss” in the subway in June 2020 and management’s failure to report this issue to the Board. Please see The “Near Miss” At Osgoode Station for further details on that item.

CEO’s Report

The CEO’s Report contained little new and included the usual statistics about which I have written before. These are supposed to be the “new improved” version, but they still hide more than they tell.

  • Service reliability:
    • “On time” performance is still measured only at terminals, and is reported on an all day basis.
      • For the subway, the target is that headways be no more than 1.5 times the scheduled value.
      • For surface routes, the target is that departures be within a window of +1/-5 minutes to schedule.
  • Subway capacity:
    • These values are reported as averages from several locations over the peak periods.
    • The index is the percentage of scheduled service operated, not the number of trains. This measures what proportion of planned service was provided, not the absolute amount of service or demand.
  • Vehicle reliability:
    • In many cases, the reported kilometres-between-defect numbers appear to be capped and do not reflect the actual maxima achieved nor the month-to-month variations.
    • Subway reliability changes are, in cases, reported to be affected by line closure that reduce the amount of mileage the fleet accumulates. This should only affect distance-based metrics if the failures are a function of something other than distance and if cars are prone to break down even if they are used less.
    • eBus reliability shows consolidated results for all three vendors with average MDBF values generally above the target of 24,000 km. This does not align with comments in the Financial update (see below).

A major concern for the TTC is the growing number of assaults on employees. This is a trend seen across the transit industry, according to TTC management, and it is related to the pandemic, stress levels and arguments over fares and masking. This index is measured per 100 employees and reported quarterly. In 1Q21, the value grew above 6 offenses per 100 employees per quarter.

Offenses against riders are also up compared to the pre-pandemic era, although the number is falling. This index is measured per-million-boardings, not as an absolute value. If riding falls, but offenses do not fall at the same rate, then the index goes up. Conversely, growing ridership could cause the index to fall even if the number of events does not. A common problem, according to management, is fights on the subway.

Although the Board sought more details, management did not have the detailed stats to hand and could only report limited anecdotal information.

Customer mask use continues to be reported at over 96 per cent, with only a few percent above that wearing masks improperly. Very few riders were observed unmasked.

Ridership has not changed much in the past month, and the stay-at-home order, only recently expired, has reduced demand.

Average weekday boardings were 502,000 on bus routes (36% of pre-COVID), 286,000 on subway lines (19% of pre-COVID) and 81,000 on streetcar routes (23% of pre-COVID) for the week ending April 24, 2021. There was a small increase in boardings for all modes the last week of April.

CEO’s Report, p. 11

Bus occupancy continues to be reported as well below the level seen in September 2020. Like many TTC stats, this chart shows all route, all day values and does not break out hot spots and times. There is no reporting of where “Run As Directed” buses are used or of their efficacy in reducing crowding.

This chart will bear watching as demand grows with relaxed pandemic rules and later in the year with a resumption of in person activities in schools, some work locations and entertainment venues.

Financial Update

The quarterly financial update tracks the ongoing status of the Operating Budget and major Capital Budget projects.

On the Operating side, the TTC projects a shortfall in revenue because ridership has not recovered at the expected rate in the first months of the year. This will be almost completely offset by reduced expenses over the year. In the short term, the TTC is running ahead of budget because cost reductions have exceeded revenue losses, but this is not expected to last as service ramps up to handle demand growth through the second half of the year.

The key indicators for operations are shown in the table below:

Note that the TTC projects it will schedule about 3 per cent less service hours over the year than originally planned, and for the year-to-date has actually scheduled about 5 per cent fewer hours than budgeted due to lower than expected demand. This falls more heavily on the subway which is operating at 87 percent of normal service levels, while bus and streetcar services are at 97 and 95 percent respectively.

The actual versus budgeted ridership is illustrated in the chart below.

Service levels are planned to begin rising in September with a return to 100 per cent of service budgeted for January 2022 when ridership is expected to hit 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

With ridership at only 50 percent at the start of 2022, the City and TTC will continue to be challenged to operate 100 per percent service levels. Provincial and federal support programs are based on their fiscal years which end on March 31. Funding for Covid support for much of 2022 is an unknown. This will be a major budget issue.

On the Capital side, there are only a few projects with significant news.

The major overhaul of streetcars now in progress to repair manufacturing defects on the first of the fleet will not complete in 2021.

The projected underspending on the 204 LRV procurement is due to project closure activities not being completed until 2022. The Major Repair Program, also included in this project, is tracking behind schedule due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced Alstom’s production facilities to temporarily shut down in late March 2020. Currently, Alstom is working on accelerating the program to be completed by the end of 2022.

Financial Update, p. 18

This will affect the level of service that can be provided on the streetcar network, and the expected return of buses to bus routes will be delayed.

On the Line 1 ATC project, revenue service is planned to extend from Rosedale to Eglinton in 4Q21. Completion to Finch would be in 3Q22. There is an issue at Eglinton Station due to the Crosstown project and the timing of the shift in platform stopping location further north as planned for the new links to the Crosstown concourse below the subway station.

On the eBus project, vehicle reliability is cited as a key issue:

Vehicle Reliability and Fleet Availability: Only one (New Flyer Industries) of three vendors for e-Buses are meeting availability and reliability targets. Action Plan: The TTC is working with all vendors on a daily basis to improve both vehicle availability and reliability to address these issues through root cause analysis, vehicle modifications and improvements for the supply chain.

Financial Update, p. 33

This raises questions about the planned split tender for eBuses and how the TTC will deal with a vendor that has not met reliability targets. A further update on the head-to-head competition between vendors is due in 1Q22 but the RFP for buses will be issued in 4Q21 for deliveries in 2023.

by

TTC Service Changes Effective June 20, 2021

Many routes will see service changes with the June-July schedules coming into effect on June 20, 2021.

The changes lie mostly two areas:

  • Improvements to or cutbacks in service in response to pandemic-era demand.
  • Reliability improvements with increased or decreased travel times.

The majority of the updates are on weekend schedules.

A few notable changes are described here, but readers should refer to the full spreadsheet of changes linked below to see what is happening on individual routes.

2021.06.20 Service Changes

New Route Numbers

In preparation for the opening of the 5 Eglinton Crosstown and 6 Finch West LRT lines, routes now bearing these numbers have been changed.

  • 5 Avenue Road is now 13 Avenue Road
  • 6 Bay is now 19 Bay

Queen Street West Water Main and Track Construction Projects

The replacement of track and some water mains on Queen from Bay to Fennings (between Ossington and Dovercourt) is an ongoing project that will run until December 2021. The City’s construction plan is to occupy single blocks of Queen Street at a time during which all planned work will be completed. Temporary CafeTO patios will be removed as each block is rebuilt.

Work will begin westward from Bay to Spadina from June to August, and will then shift to work east from Fennings to Spadina from August to December. For the staging plan, please see the City’s project web page. 501 Buses will divert around construction areas as needed.

The 501P Park Lawn service has been shortened to loop at Humber Loop using an old TTC loop at The Queensway and High Street to turn around and access the bus loop at Humber from the west. This change is already in place, and will formally be part of the schedule on June 20.

King West 504Q Bus Shuttle

The 504Q shuttle from King/Queen/Triller has been extended from Sudbury Street to the loop at Princes Gates. This change is already operating and will be formally in the June 20 schedule.

A Note About “Reliability” Improvements

Since pre-pandemic times, the TTC has been adjusting schedules by adding running time, often at the expense of wider headways, to ensure that very little service has to be short turned. This has the unwanted effect of causing vehicles to bunch at terminals where there may not be room for them, and for operators to regard departure times as somewhat elastic because they know they will soon be ahead of schedule thanks to the padding.

Several of the changes in the June schedules reduce scheduled running time to claw back provisions that are not required under current traffic conditions. At the same time, the scheduled headways might go up or down depending on current demand on the route. Each route and time period is different in this respect, and readers should look at the spreadsheet for the details.

Recovery Time

In the spreadsheet, running times are shown in the format “A+B” where “A” is travel time from one terminus to another, and “B” is the “recovery time” if any at the terminal.

There is no formula or policy rationale behind the length of recovery times, and in some cases none is provided in the schedule. In other cases, very long recovery times are side effects of scheduling branching services.

For the schedule to “work”, the round trip time (RTT), including recovery, must be a multiple of the headway. When a service has branches, each branch’s RTT must be a multiple of the headway. In cases where buses switch between branches, the RTTs for both branches will be a multiple of the common headway plus half a headway, and there will be “half buses” assigned to each branch. This works because the RTTs for the two branches add up to a multiple of the common headway.

For example, the midday service on 79 Scarlett Road operates every 24 minutes on each branch with a 60 minute RTT. Buses alternate between two branches, and so one complete cycle takes 120 minutes which is a multiple of 24. The vehicle assignment for each branch is 2.5 buses.

In order to make this sort of scheme work, particularly for infrequent services, “recovery” times are adjusted up and down in schedules as needed. They have little to do with actual operating conditions or the need for flexibility in handling traffic effects.

In particular, there is no contractual requirement for the TTC to provide any recovery time, and operators on routes with tight schedules make do as best they can. This creates problems for “on time” metrics.

600 Run as Directed Buses

The spreadsheet includes a list by division of the “600” buses commonly known as RADs. The number of RAD crews varies by day of the week, but for June-July there will be 127 of them on weekdays.

It is common for the TTC to talk about these buses being deployed around the system as if they are all in service at the same time. In fact, the crews are broken into time periods, and roughly speaking one third of the RADs exist at any one time. This means that the number of buses available to handle surge loads or the occasional subway service replacement is not as large as TTC claims might imply.

Service Planned vs Budgeted

The regular service planned for June-July is about 3.8 per cent below the budgeted level due in part to ridership not returning system-wide at the expected rate.

Construction service is up by about 19 per cent over budget, although this is a charge on the capital projects rather than operations.

The peak bus fleet in service, including RADs and construction buses is 1463 in the AM peak, 1499 in the PM peak. This is 211 and 175 buses, respectively, lower than the available fleet of 1674, which in turn is well below the total fleet of over 2000 allowing for maintenance spares at about 20 per cent.

A footnote in the table below shows that the peak fleet utilization is actually 1536 buses, slightly higher than the “total in service” of 1499. The reason for this is that there is an overlap between buses running out of service at the end of the peak and those that come newly out of garages at the same time.

There is ample room in the existing fleet to operate more bus service, but this would require additional subsidy.

The streetcar fleet is underutilized because of major construction projects, pandemic service cutbacks and a major overhaul project.

by

Headway Quality Measurement: Update

This article should be read in conjunction with Headway Quality Management: A Proposal for which this is a response to some questions and suggestions in the comments, and adjustments of my own in the interim. Specific routes discussed here are:

  • 52 and 952 Lawrence West local and express services
  • 504 King streetcar service (December 2020 before the diversions now in place for construction work)

Changes in format include:

  • Better spacing of the columns in the headway distribution charts for clarity,
  • Separation of the AM and PM peak periods for an express service that only operates for a few hours of each period, and
  • Changes in the layout and colour scheme of the headway distribution charts to emphasize the portion of service that lies within the target band of headways.

Both routes reviewed here show the problems of branching services and wide differences in scheduled service. A service may look “good” where all of it branches overlap, but be much less reliable on the unique segments. Vehicles may or may not be “on time”, but service riders experience does not accord with the TTC’s claims of high reliability. Indeed, there are cases where schedules contain built-in gaps that exist as part of blending services and managing transitions between service periods. They “work” for the schedule, but not for the rider.

One can argue that my proposed methodology should be adjusted with narrower or wider target bands. That’s easy to do, but the important issue here is to measure service as riders actually experience it, looking at various points on routes and all times of the day. The TTC’s scheme of looking only at terminals and averaging results over all time periods buries variations in service quality that riders know all too well.

Continue reading →
by

Headway Quality Measurement: A Proposal

For regular readers of this site, it will be no surprise that my opinion of the TTC’s reporting on service quality is that it is deeply flawed and bears little relationship to rider experiences. It is impossible to measure service quality, let alone to track management’s delivery of good service, with only rudimentary metrics.

Specifically:

  • The TTC reports “on time performance” measured only at terminals. This is calculated as departing no more than one minute early and up to five minutes late.
  • Data are averaged on an all-day, all-month basis by mode. We know, for example, that in February 2020, about 85 per cent of all bus trips left their terminals within that six minute target. That is all trips on all routes at all times of the day.
  • No information is published on mid-route points where most riders actually board the service.

Management’s attitude is that if service is on time at terminals, the rest of the line will look after itself. This is utter nonsense, but it provides a simplistic metric that is easy to understand, if meaningless.

Source: March 2021 CEO’s Report

There are basic problems with this approach including:

  • The six minute window is wide enough that all vehicles on many routes can run as pairs with wide gaps and still be “on time” because the allowed variation is comparable to or greater than the scheduled frequency.
  • Vehicles operate at different speeds due to operator skill, moment-to-moment demand and traffic conditions. Inevitably, some vehicles which drop behind or pull ahead making stats based on terminal departures meaningless.
  • Some drivers wish to reach the end of their trips early to ensure a long break, and will drive as fast as possible to achieve this.
  • Over recent years, schedules have been padded with extra time to ensure that short turns are rarely required. This creates a problem that if a vehicle were to stay strictly on its scheduled time it would have to dawdle along a route to burn up the excess. Alternately, vehicles accumulate at terminals because they arrive early.

Management might “look good” because the service is performing to “standard” overall, but the statistics mask wide variations in service quality. It is little wonder that rider complaints to not align with management claims.

In the pandemic era, concerns about crowding compound the long-standing issue of having service arrive reliably rather than in packs separated by wide gaps. The TTC rather arrogantly suggests that riders just wait for the next bus, a tactic that will make their wait even longer, rather than addressing problems with uneven service.

What alternative might be used to measure service quality? Tactics on other transit systems vary, and it is not unusual to find “on time performance” including an accepted deviation elsewhere. However, this is accompanied by a sense that “on time” matters at more than the terminal, and that data should be split up to reveal effects by route, by location and time of day.

Some systems, particularly those with frequent service, recognize that riders do not care about the timetable. After all, “frequent service” should mean that the timetable does not matter, only that the next bus or streetcar will be reliably along in a few minutes.

Given that much of the TTC system, certainly its major routes, operate as “frequent service” and most are part of the “10 minute network”, the scheme proposed here is based on headways (the intervals between vehicles), not on scheduled times.

In this article, I propose a scheme for reporting on headway reliability, and try it out on the 29 Dufferin, 35 Jane and 501 Queen routes to see how the results behave. The two bus routes use data from March 2021, while the Queen car uses data from December 2020 before the upheaval of the construction at King-Queen-Roncesvalles began.

This is presented as a “first cut” for comment by interested readers, and is open to suggestions for improvement. As time goes on, it would be useful for the TTC itself to adopt a more fine-grained method of reporting, but even without that, I hope to create a framework for consistent reporting on service quality in my analyses that is meaningful to riders.

Continue reading →
by

TTC Board Meeting: May 12, 2021

The TTC Board will meet at 10:00 am on Wednesday, May 12. The agenda is short, but contains a few major items.

After the Board meets, I will update this article based on their discussions and staff presentations.

Continue reading →
by

The TTC CEO’s Report: Old Wine in New Bottles?

The April 2021 TTC CEO’s Report came in a new format, and with that a hope that the long-promised improved content had arrived, not just better graphics. The new report looks good, but it continues to over-simplify key details and omits measures of major system components.

Back in January, I reviewed the then-current version in Measuring and Reporting on TTC Operations: Part I and planned a Part II that would look at how metrics used in other cities might be applied in Toronto, and what they would reveal. That article has been sitting in rough draft for a while. Building alternate views of the TTC requires some data crunching I just have not brought myself to do yet.

I recommend that earlier article to readers if only to avoid reiterating the shortcomings of past reports here.

A key point is that the report tells us what the TTC did, not what it might do if its assets were fully utilized. For years the combined tropes of “we have no buses” and “we have no garage space” were used to rebuff calls for more service when the real problem was underfunding on both the capital and operating side. More service means not just more buses, but hiring enough drivers to take as many buses as possible out of garages and onto the streets.

The CEO’s report tells us how successful the TTC was at fielding scheduled service, but is silent on the constraints that prevent the operation of more.

In the pandemic era, it is not enough to say that the TTC provides “98% service hours for 32% ridership” when social distancing fundamentally changes how we think about system capacity. As ridership returns, there will be a balancing act between providing more space (i.e. more service, more seats) and changing crowding standards. We are likely to see a period when the social comfort riders hope to see will exceed the space the TTC can provide due to both financial and fleet limitations. Already service is being shuffled between lower and higher demand routes to address crowding without extra costs.

The eagle-eyed readers will note that the cover photo on King looking east from Yonge includes a 514 Cherry car (a route that was replace by the 504A King to Distillery service in October 2018) and a CLRV (a vehicle retired at the end of 2019).

An important improvement is the presence of a “Hot Topics” section to focus attention on key items of note. That said, a few potential problems come to mind:

  • How does a topic get on this list?
  • What happens when a topic remains “hot” for an extended period?
  • Is there an upper bound to the hot topic count?

Most of the “hot topics” in this report belong in the permanent lists as they represent standing issues, not monthly flashes. If the “hot topics” really are “hot”, they should appear sooner than three-quarters of the way through the report.

The report has no tracking of infrastructure reliability even though, for example, track, power and signals are responsible for interruptions of subway and streetcar service.

Averages vs Details

A common problem throughout the TTC’s presentation of various metrics is the degree of averaging, of consolidating data and thereby missing its variability in time, space and effect on riders. If something “works” 90 per cent of the time, that may sound good, but that other 10 per cent can have a disproportionate negative effect. Moreover, as discussed here many times, it is not enough for “n” vehicles to show up every hour. They must be reasonably spaced to give predictable wait times and crowding levels.

By reporting on average values, the TTC ignores the day-to-day, trip-to-trip experience of riders.

Corporate Views vs Rider Views

Corporate plans look at the world from a corporate view, but the TTC’s job is first to serve riders and move people around the city.

The “core metrics” are now aligned with the corporate plan’s strategic objectives and, in theory, demonstrate how the TTC is advancing that plan’s goals. This approach consolidates metrics that are most important to riders in one category, and shuffles some key ones into an appendix.

There is a particular problem that accessibility issues do not get their own grouping because this is not one of the TTC’s five corporate objectives. Given the TTC’s long history of underserving these needs, metrics of accessibility should be reported as a group and tracked together rather than being scattered through each section of a corporate view.

This does not mean hiving Wheel-Trans off into its own section, but recognizing that there are many aspects to accessibility that affect users of both WT and the “conventional” system, especially now that riders are encouraged to use the “family of services” as much as possible.

Metrics should include items from the capital budget, not just strictly “operating” statistics. Ongoing plans and progress on key projects that will affect system capacity, safety and accessibility should be included even though they may be in the capital budget. It does not matter (and riders do not care) how various parts of the system are funded, only that system improvements are tracked in one place.

This would not preclude the quarterly Financial Report from going into more detail, but the absence of “one stop shopping” in the CEO’s Report weakens its value.

There are five strategic areas plus a group called “Hot Topics”:

  • Ridership
    • Revenue rides (linked trips)
    • Customer boardings (unlinked trips)
    • Wheel-Trans passenger trips
  • Financial
    • Fare revenue
  • People and Diversity
    • (Metrics to be announced)
  • Safety and Security
    • Lost time injury rate
    • Customer injury incidents rate
    • Offenses against customers
  • Customer Experience
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Customer service communications
    • On-time performance (subway)
    • On-time performance (streetcar and bus)
    • On-time performance (Wheel-Trans)
    • Accessibility: Escalator and elevator availability
  • Hot Topics
    • Wheel-Trans contact centre wait time
    • Customer mask use
    • Bus occupancy

Of the three Hot Topics, only customer mask use might be considered as a “topic of the moment” although it will be with us as long as the pandemic and infection are a concern to riders.

Problems with Wheel-Trans booking systems have existed for years. Measures of availability and response time deserve a permanent spot within an Accessibility group.

As for bus occupancy, this is fundamental to the perceived quality of transit service. This has been a pressing issue for years, but is a particularly hot topic in the pandemic era . We often hear about “run as directed” buses, but never see stats to support the benefit they might provide at key locations rather than as a system average. With Automatic Passenger Counters across the bus fleet, the TTC should report regularly on crowding at a granular level including problem routes, locations and times of the day.

Continue reading →