Service Cost and Quality

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Buses vs LRT: “And”, Not “Or” (Updated)

Updated September 6, 2010 at 4:50 pm:

Anna Mehler Paperny of the Globe and Mail writes about the difficulties of getting around on a bus network where service leaves much to be desired.

The better way? Don’t get Janet Fitzimmons started.

The East Scarborough resident lives less than five kilometres from her work in the Kingston Road-Galloway Road area. But the bus ride takes a good 40 minutes – once the Lawrence Avenue bus comes, if it isn’t full. If the weather’s nice, her commute is faster by foot.

“But I’m lucky: I’m able-bodied and healthy.” And, she adds, “my commute isn’t bad for Scarborough.” A colleague of hers takes three buses to traverse what’s barely a seven-kilometre direct trek.

Meanwhile, Tyler Hamilton of The Star tells of the travails of attempting to use service on Kingston Road in The Beach.

Last Tuesday I needed to head downtown – Bay St. and King St. – for an event. […] It was rush hour. I seemed to have plenty of time, so I decided to take the 503 Kingston Rd. streetcar route. Checked the schedule. Walked to my stop and arrived what I thought was 10 minutes early.

No streetcar. Twenty minutes later, no streetcar.

This is rush hour, remember. Finally a bus that would take me along Queen St. arrived and the driver encouraged me to get on. “The 503 won’t be coming. Take Queen St.,” he says. “It will get you close. Hop on.”

I hop on. A man sitting across from me leans over and says, “TTC, eh… it means take the car.” I offer a forced chuckle. The bus drives along Kingston Rd. for five minutes and then reaches Queen St. “Time to get off,” the driver says. Huh? I join a herd of passengers exiting the bus. Apparently I should have known about transferring onto a Queen St. streetcar.

Confused, I wait. I wait. I don’t see a streetcar. I see a cab. Hail it. It will be worth the $20 at this point – enough money, mind you, to drive half a month in my Honda Civic.

I share my frustration with the cab driver. “The TTC is good for the cab business,” he replies with a smile.

Of course, a regular rider would know that there is no such thing as a 503 car, at least not until September 7 when streetcar service returns to Kingston Road.  The scheduled bus service is every 12 minutes on the 502 and 503 providing a supposedly blended 6 minute headway.  Take the first thing that comes along if you’re going downtown.  If it’s a 502, change to the King car at Broadview if you want King rather than Queen Street.  This is the sort of survival tip a regular will know, but a novice won’t.

By the way, the streetcar services will run every 15 minutes, with an allegedly combined service of 7’30”.  Don’t hold your breath.  A big problem with both of these routes is that they are short-turned and wind up missing the very customers they are intended to serve.

Add to this the appalling off-peak service and you have a recipe for driving away customers.  The 502 bus or streetcar is scheduled every 20 minutes, but only a few days ago I waited 36 minutes for one to show up.  I had not just missed one, and so the gap was easily over 40 minutes.  By the time we reached Queen Street westbound, we had a light standing load even on that wide headway, and we had also passed two eastbound 502s.  That’s right:  3 of the 4 buses on the route were east of Coxwell.  This is called “line management”.

The real irony is that the 12 Kingston Road bus comes and goes at Bingham Loop every 10 minutes.  There is better service east of Victoria Park than west of it on weekdays.  Evening and weekend service on the 22A Coxwell is better than on the 502.  This is one of the few places in the TTC where weekday service is worse than at any other time, and that’s assuming the weekday service is vaguely on schedule.

An important part of improving bus services generally is that the TTC must stop thinking of the outer parts of lines as places where short turns and unpredictable, infrequent service are acceptable.

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Catch The Spadina Bus While You Can

Some time ago, I wrote about the haphazard way in which station vicinity maps were replaced (never mind their content).  There are a few spots in the system that time forgot, and, while it lasts, I thought to bring you a map from before July 1997 when the 510 Spadina car began operation.

This is one of the older style of maps, back when the TTC actually put connecting surface routes on them.  If you look closely, you will see that Spadina south of Bloor is served by route 77.  The date on the map is “03/96”.

The “You Are Here” pointer gives away the location — the Walmer Road exit from Spadina Station.  This was built as part of the reconfiguration of Spadina Station to accommodate the LRT line.  Oddly enough, the route map right beside it is recent enough to include the Spadina car.

Another version of this legacy map at the bottom of the stairs from the west side of Spadina has been replaced with the new version.

Elsewhere in Spadina Station, a poster still advertises the August subway diversions for construction at St. George.

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Service, Courtesy, Safety (Part I)

Since 1954, the coat of arms of the Toronto Transit Commission has proclaimed the slogan “Service Courtesy Safety”.  After the Russell Hill subway crash in 1995, safety and maintenance quality zoomed to the front of the pack.  Years of neglect, of saying “we can get by” on inadequate budgets, finally took their toll.

Much work has been done to restore a safety culture at the TTC, to the point where other important aspects of the operation were eclipsed.

The TTC hasn’t had the best of times.  Although last year’s civic workers strike was not a TTC affair, any municipal strike reminds voters of past job actions by transit workers.  By late 2009. the media were in a feeding frenzy looking for any stories to discredit the Miller/Giambrone administration.  The “sleeping collector” fell right into their laps, and became the lighting rod for a host of complaints about the TTC, its employees and its service.

In March 2010, the TTC created an independent “Customer Service Advisory Panel” to examine a range of issues, and that panel reported yesterday, August 23.  The full report is available here.

Reading through it, I was struck by many quite reasonable items, but also by a sense that parts of the document were an attempt at face saving.  Too many recommendations place the responsibility for change at the front line employee or even at the customer without acknowledging that the best employee cannot do a good job without proper support from the organization.  Management must not regard good service (in many senses of that word) as something they can’t afford.  Departments must not assume that “it’s someone else’s job” to deal with problems, or defend their turf against others while failing to provide good service.

To give TTC management credit, statements by Chief General Manager Gary Webster at the press conference, the Commission meeting and on an interview with CBC Radio were open in accepting the need for organizational change.  Yes, there are some proposals with significant costs attached, but many structural and procedural problems require only the will to change how the TTC does business.

Early in the report, the panel tells us:

[W]e were pleasantly surprised to learn that all of the TTC stakeholders are passionate about their transit system. Everyone, from employees to management to customers, truly wants a TTC of which they can be proud.  [p 2]

This should not be a surprise.  The TTC was once (as they so often told us) the envy of transit systems world-wide, a system of which the city could justifiably be proud.  But that was a long time ago.  Years of mutual back-patting among the TTC brotherhood coupled with declining financial support from governments of all parties were a poisonous combination.

If you’re perfect, it’s hard to admit that some of the lights are burned out, that the stations are getting dirty, that the trains are not maintained to quite the standards of “the old days”.  If you’re perfect, then your customer service must be ideal, a sterling example for others to follow.  Pride in the system was replaced with self-congratulation, with a view bounded by the mirror on the wall.

That desire for pride is worth remembering through the entire process.  We want to believe in the TTC, we want to show our friends (even those who think that the only way to get around is in a car) how good transit can be, we want people to say “have you heard what Toronto is doing”.  We don’t want excuses.

Another surprise for the panel was the rider expectations for TTC frontline staff:

Operators are expected to act as a tour guide, policy enforcer, fare collector, and custodian, while providing information, directions, and special assistance. All of this and much more is expected while, at the same time, they are to operate the vehicle in a safe manner – Paying attention to the road at all times, adhere to the speed limit despite a tight schedule, and practice defensive driving. And, above all, they must ensure that passengers arrive at their final destination safe, and on time. [pp 2-3]

This is a surprise? The next paragraph gives a troubling clue about the underlying thoughts:

[I]t is apparent that customers do not often consider the complexity of the huge system that operates in the background, day in and day out, to keep the TTC running. [p 3]

Yes, the TTC is large and complex, but it is by no means the largest system on the planet.  Many of them recognize the importance of good customer service despite their huge size.  They don’t depend on customers cutting them slack because the transit system is so large.  If anything, a big system should have a benefit of scale, of experience with complexity and change, that a small system might not encounter often.

Unfortunately, all the customers see is that the bus is late, or the operator did not effectively answer their questions. [p 3]

Exactly.  It is the view from the customer that’s important.  A guest in a hotel does not want to hear about the problems of repairing centuries-old plumbing, or of cooking huge dinner banquets, or of co-ordinating the unseen army of staff who keep the place running.  They want a clean, well-maintained room, elevators that work and service that is almost magically there without being asked for.

The report’s 78 recommendations are divided into eight groups.  A review of each of the 78 is not required to establish patterns, to see the underlying philosophy.

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Thoughts From Down Under

Jarrett Walker has a few good articles on his website, humantransit.org, that should be required reading for our friends at Metrolinx, among other places.

In What Does Transit Do About Traffic Congestion, he argues that the last claim that should be made for transit is that it will reduce congestion.  Instead, the benefits of a transit-oriented city show up in economic activity, mobility and other benefits.

There is, however, a caveat lurking here.  Dense cities with good transit (or even cities with a good potential for better transit) don’t appear out of thin air.  Once we build sprawl, then the benefits and effects of transit seen in the older, denser cities will not appear overnight even if we run the most intensive BRT, LRT or subway network through auto-oriented suburbs.  Transit can make things better, but it will not reverse the damage and inevitable congestion of decades of bad planning.

By the way, be sure to read the comments.  If you think the threads on this site get out of hand, just try Walker’s blog.  You will see some very intelligent point-counterpoint discussion in some threads.

In If On-Time Performance is 96%, Why Am I Always Late?, Walker discusses the conundrum that transit agencies talk a great line for being on time, but the actual experience of users is much, much, much worse.  Both GO Transit and TTC have a love for patting themselves on the back (although rarely each other’s), and talking about their improvements in on-time performance.

So much of this is relative to the metrics used (how late can a train or streetcar be and still be “on time”) and the lack of weighting of the results to reflect the number of passengers affected by on time (or not) service.  Even in the off-peak, gaps of two scheduled headways or more are common on downtown routes and this drives riders away.  At least with NextBus, it is now possible to know with certainty that there is no car just around the bend out of sight, and if there is, it’s going in the opposite direction.

GO Transit now has schedules that reflect the real world in which they operate, but persists in reporting all-day on-time figures rather than breaking these out to show service quality when most people ride the system.

Finally, in Strasbourg:  You Can’t Take It Home With You, we get a loving overview of both the city and its tram system, part of the renaissance of LRT in France.  The real issues come at the end where we learn about the major changes in street space usage and restrictions on cars that accompanied the installation of tram lines in this very old city.  The moral, applicable to anyone comparing transit systems, is to look beyond just the technology and the scenery, and understand how and why the city streets work (or don’t) as they do.

Any moves to improve “congestion” in Toronto must start with a fundamental debate about what the streets are for, and which existing uses must be reduced (and how) in order to make room for what’s left over.  Ironically, we focus these debates on the heart of downtown, a comparatively small area, when the real problems of transit’s competitiveness and congestion lie out in the suburbs.

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Where’s My Car?

Today, the TTC unveiled the next step in its customer information services with the ability to obtain next vehicle information via an SMS text message from any cell phone.

The cell phone “short code” for this service is 898882 (txtttc), and all stops for which this service is available now have stickers showing their individual codes prominently.  The reponse that will come back looks like this:

505 E 3min / 505 E 3min / 504 E 4min / 505 E 4min / 504 E 6min / 504 E 7min. Predictions generated as of 14:54.

This happens to be for the northbound stop on Broadview at Withrow for my return home after today’s press announcement across the street in Riverdale Park.  The message does not include location info because you would already know this from making the request in the first place.

The list shows the next predicted vehicles at the stop.  For stops served by multiple routes where you are only interested in a specific route, you can append the route number to the stop number as in:

12345 504

where “12345” is the stop number and “504” is the route number.  This can be further qualified with a direction (N, S, E or W) although few stops have cars for the same route travelling in more than one direction.

An as-yet unadvertised service is the ability to retrieve information for any stop using a route, direction and stop name lookup from NextBus.  Once you reach a display you want, you can bookmark it for direct access.  Even if you want to look up a different location, it is faster to pick any bookmarked lookup you already have, and then select an alternate location.  These displays auto-update.  (The link given here takes you directly to the TTC route selection page.)

At some point, the TTC will create a page on their own site where you can look up stop-based info using the stop number, or navigate to NextBus for the more general selection menu.

Finally, I hope that the TTC will agree to expose the NextBus maps to public view again soon.  There have been internal debates about the way these maps show how, at times, the service is not well-organized, but this information is very useful in cases where someone wants to get a general idea of the state of a route for use in the near future without having to look up service “now” at a specific stop.

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Bylaw Enforcement is Anti-Transit

I wish that I could put this story down to the silly-season, the pre-election follies that afflict City Hall.

I wish, but I can’t.

Today, we learn in the Star that TTC buses will be forced to comply with the anti-idling bylaw, although there are good reasons for not doing so, as the article describes.

Meanwhile, we learned only two days ago of the many exemptions available to those who flout traffic control bylaws.  These are the “legal” exemptions, not to mention the many other road users who operate as if traffic bylaws don’t apply to them.

Enforcement can be spotty, even when paid duty constables are hired as the TTC did a few years ago to patrol King Street, because everyone knows the tickets will either be cancelled, or will be treated as a business expense.  Meanwhile, the City and the TTC gripe about traffic congestion and its effect on transit service.

Maybe they should both start with a “war on cars” where it matters, on all those cars that block lanes intended for moving traffic.  A fleet of tow trucks will drive the message home that roads do not exist to store cars, they exist to move them.

Once that challenge is in hand, the City can turn to a long-suggested but still not implemented proposal to extend the times designated for rush hour restrictions.

If Toronto has nothing better to do than ticket idling buses, then the City has lost sight of the real problem on our streets.

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Service Changes Effective June 20, 2010

Many service changes take effect on June 20, 2010.  Most of these are seasonal route changes and, in some cases, improvements.  Many routes lose peak service, particularly in the AM peak, during the summer because school traffic falls off.

2010.06.20 Service Changes

The 512 St. Clair route is scheduled to return to Gunn’s Loop on June 20, but the actual implementation date has not yet been finalized.  Cars will operate to Lansdowne with geneous layovers pending the opening of the line.

The TTC has published a comparison of running times and headways for the route before and after the implementation of the right-of-way on St. Clair.  Particularly striking is the improvement in running times on Saturdays when St. Clair was the most congested before the reconstruction.  Advocates for transit priority often forget that there are many more hours, and much more traffic, outside of the peak period on some routes.

An operational change effective on June 20 is that AM peak cars running out of service will now operate east to Yonge, then return westbound and go out of service at St. Clair West Station.  This will avoid having cars bound for Roncesvalles Carhouse drop inbound passengers eastbound at Vaughan Road rather than taking them to the subway.

2005-2010 St. Clair Schedule Comparison

For details on individual route branches, please refer to the TTC’s Scheduled Service Summary.