Service Cost and Quality

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Service Changes Effective Sunday, May 11, 2008 (Updated)

Many service changes will take effect this Sunday.  Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories:

  • Improvements to handle overcrowding
  • Season changes (mainly services to university and college campuses, and to parks)
  • Construction changes

I have listed only one of the construction changes.  Weekend service on 512 St. Clair will be reduced slightly because cars will now be stored at Hillcrest Yard and it is not necessary to have all cars in service all of the time.

A number of the “seasonal” changes involving longer hours of service will likely stay in place in September.  In November 2008, if the planned implementation of 30-minute minimum frequencies on all routes while the subway is operating goes ahead, these services would become permanent.  There is no point in removing them for a few months between the end of the summer and the implementation of the Ridership Growth Strategy policy for hours of service.

Service Changes for May 2008

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TTC Riding Counts — Are There More Passengers? (Updated)

The 2008 Service Plan report is out although only the cover document is posted online as I write this.  The detailed report is not yet up with the other Service Reports.

Updated April 20, 2008:  The report is now available online.

Once I get a chance to digest the updated route statistics, I will post them here.  However, it is worth noting that, as usual, several streetcar routes have riding counts that are years out of date.  We know that more recent data must exist because some service improvements are starting to work their way into the system, but it’s always troubling when the overall system reports don’t have current data.

Routes With Updated Riding Figures

  • 502/503 Downtowner & Kingston Road – 7,800 (up from 6,100 first reported in 2002)
  • 504/508 King & Lake Shore – 53,100 (up from 47,900 in 2005)
  • 501 Queen – 43,500 (up from 41,200 first reported in 2002)
  • 510/509 Spadina & Harbourfront – 48,000 (up from 43,400 first reported in 2003)

Routes With Unchanged Riding Figures

  • 511 Bathurst – 13,600 (unchanged since 2005)
  • 506 Carlton – 41,200 (unchanged since 2001)
  • 505 Dundas – 35,200 (unchanged since 2005)
  • 512 St. Clair – 31,000 (unchanged since 2002)

It’s good to see riding going up, but the infrequency of updated counts means that the so-called financial performance (a piece of creative accounting of the highest order) of major routes is misreported to their detriment. 

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Service Changes for March 30, 2008

Updated March 30, 2008: The attached spreadsheet has been updated to include information on the projected changes in vehicle loads and the list of outstanding changes that are awaiting sufficient resources to be implemented.

One of my readers, Brent, sent in a long note with a summary of service changes that will take place in one week. His introductory comments were:

I see the service summary is out early like usual this time (as opposed to the top secrecy back before the February improvements) and it shows most of the main service changes. (Searching the PDF for “Mar-08″ and “Apr-08″ highlights all the adjustments.) I have compiled them below (I have no life!!), except for cases where there is no noticeable change and it may relate to minor trip adjustments.

Note that the Bathurst streetcar has service reductions on Saturday what with the replacement of CLRVs with ALRVs…

The St. Clair service sounds interesting. With tracks to the carhouses cut off, they’ll just run the same 7 streetcars at 3-minute intervals all day until the late evening, when presumably they’ll just park them somewhere on the ROW and run buses instead (since of course we can’t run the buses on the ROW anyway…)

One service change that doesn’t show up as a change in the schedule is the decoupling of the Evans bus from the Prince Edward bus on weekends, which means that the Evans bus will end up with a 15-minute layover (plus 45 minutes round trip traveling) to maintain a 30-minute headway.

Special arrangements for St. Clair are required because track from Bathurst Station Loop north to St. Clair will be replaced, and a captive set of cars will remain on St. Clair for the duration. These will run a three-minute headway between the two subway stations until mid-evening when the full route will switch over to bus operation.

The TTC has not posted a service advisory for this project on their site yet, but I suspect that this arrangement will carry through until June given the speed of track construction jobs of this size. Even then, until the reconstruction from Vaughan to Dufferin is completed, streetcars will be limited to serving the east end of the line.

One notable problem that the TTC has not addressed is overcrowding in the AM peak period on 509 Harbourfront. With the construction diversions, this seems to have fallen off of the radar, but there was a deputation at the TTC last year from people complaining that cars were full eastbound before they reached Bathurst Street. The new service is actually slightly worse than what was there a year ago in the AM peak, although some off-peak headways have been shortened.

As we know both from riding experience on the 509 and the analysis of CIS data for this line I published earlier this year, the schedule for service on Harbourfront is often more creative writing than reliable fact. In an analysis of the 511 Bathurst route now in preparation will confirm, layovers at Exhibition Loop are quite generous and eastbound service on Fleet is quite erratic. The TTC really needs to start treating the new residential neighbourhoods on Queen’s Quay and Fleet to good, reliable service, not as a seasonal tag end of a route serving an amusement park.

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A Day on the TTC

Robert Wightman sent in the following comment about problems maintaining service on, mainly, the streetcar system on Tuesday, March 25.

I spent yesterday afternoon rush hour working at home and listening to the scanner for TTC surface operations and this is what I heard.

Russell could not send out all scheduled service because they did not have enough equipment available. A car on Carlton and one on Queen went disabled and had to be pushed to Russell. This took 4 cars out of service and screwed up the lines for awhile. The line inspectors must know that a Commissioner lives in the Beach because they turned two WB cars at Russell and sent them back to Neville.

A fight broke out on a WB Queen car in front of the City Hall so the WB service went along Richmond to York thus bypassing the delay and the subway.

A Spadina car went disabled in the Station and had to be pushed out. They decided to push it out to the street before locking out the brakes, bad move as it lost air on the curve and they had to crank the brakes off. They could not use the spare track as there was a car using it to “dry out”. It was waiting for the emergency truck as it had no fans and the windows were too steamed up to see out. This screwed up Spadina for a while.

Another car broke a bar under the front truck and had to be escorted back to Russell by the emergency truck. Again there was no vehicle available to replace it.

The emergency trucks were running all over the system making minor repairs to cars that were still in service but had no heat, one wiper missing, doors that wouldn’t open, lights that didn’t work.

The subway had a train with a pair of cars that went disabled so they drove it onto the tail track at Finch until they could fix it.

The system is broke and it isn’t getting fixed. The Inspectors managed to find enough cars that were to run in to replace the missing cars after the rush hour. How much of the service problems are caused by equipment failures each day? Yesterday was not good weather but this still seemd like a lot of problems for one rush hour.

Both equipment and operator shortages remain a big problem especially for the streetcar system. We need some honest answers from the TTC about just how many cars are really available for service and why so many are sitting in the shop. I don’t think the situation has been presented with as much urgency as it deserves, and we still face the impact of having the St. Clair line fully back in operation sometime this fall or winter. New cars won’t be here for years, assuming we somehow find a way to find them this fall when it’s time to place the order.

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Waiting for the 501 — An Operator’s View

[Updated March 17, 2008: I have received various comments with schemes for alternate ways to operate the 501/502/507 in various combinations. None of these will be posted here as this debate could go on forever. The next round in the discussion will come with the TTC’s own proposals expected in May.]

On March 6, Ed Drass wrote about the Queen car’s problems and the various options that might improve service, some day. The article is not yet up on the Metro News website, but the link here will take you to an index of Ed’s columns.

Recently, I received a long note from an operator about the problems of the new way the line is being managed. These are grouped in blocks by general subject with my own comments interspersed. Continue reading →

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Service Improvements, Someday

Peter Kuitenbrouwer in the National Post has a series of articles talking about crowding on the TTC.

One more person, and this subway’s gonna explode

If you ignore the smell, the bus is still the better way

A seat on the Queen streetcar? Don’t make me laugh

The February 17 service improvements are a start, but it’s no secret that there’s a long way to go. A few changes are in the wind as described in a TTC report from their February 27 meeting.

We learn that more service will come with the March 30 and May 11 schedule periods to address the backlog of overcrowding, at least on the bus routes.

In the fall, further improvements will change the peak hour loading standard for bus routes. Across the board, the standard will be improved by 10% so that the acceptable average loads, now in the mid-50s depending on vehicle type, will be reduced by 5 or 6. This won’t mean 10% more service on every route because some lines are running below the new standard already and won’t be eligible for more service. (These tend to be short routes where cuts today would have a severe impact raising the average load above the line or making the headway unacceptably wide.)

Also planned for the fall is a return to full hours of service on most routes so that if the subway is open, the routes are operating at least a 30-minute service. 2009 may bring a 20-minute maximum, but that’s a budget issue for next year.

Meanwhile, we see little discussion of streetcar or rapid transit service because both suffer from constraints in fleet size. That may be the situation, though I am skeptical, but what is missing is a projection of what we would need if we made the same changes in loading standards for the rail modes. Continue reading →

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Major Service Improvements Start February 17, 2008 (Update 2)

On Sunday, February 17, the TTC will introduce new schedules with improved services on many, many routes throughout the city. I have boiled a long TTC document describing them in detail down to a mere 8 pages for easy reference.

Please note that I have not proof read every single line, and for definitive information, you should go to the TTC’s site.

Update: For the detailed TTC service summary, go to the February service summary.

Update 2: My consolidated table of service changes has been corrected to include the list of routes that still await added service. This was placed temporarily in a reply to a comment, but has now been moved where it belongs.

These changes are long overdue, but many of them bring routes only just within loading standards. We must hope that this trend will continue into 2009 as the bus fleet builds up with new deliveries, as riding continues to grow, and as the city’s revenues are strong enough to support more transit improvements.

A few notes about reading my chart:

  • The column “vehicles added” gives the number of new vehicles on the route at the time shown. You will notice that the effect of “n” new buses varies with time of day because the relative changes are different.
  • The old and new headways are shown. In some cases these are for blended services, and if you are interested in one branch, please refer to the TTC’s details.
  • The load factors shown are for recent riding counts “old” and projected loads after the change. The values are for the peak hour within the period, and loads on individual vehicles will vary.
  • The loading standards are shown for peak and offpeak services. Due to the variations between capacities on different types of vehicles, the standards are not identical for all routes. The off-peak standard is based on a seated load.

The last page of my summary shows those service improvements which have still not been implemented due to budget constraints. In effect, we’ve got what we’re getting for now, and for the rest, come back later. This shows that the TTC is still constrained in its ability to handle growing riding by the money it is given from Council to subsidize operations.

I fervently hope that this list will drop to and stay at “Nil” over 2008, and that we won’t be back worrying about service shortfalls in two years’ time.

Some points are particularly worth noting.

Bloor 300 and Yonge 320 Night Buses

Service improvements on these routes will reduce overcrowding especially on the popular 320 where the recorded average load is 82 passengers per bus! The headway on Yonge south of York Mills will be more than halved from 7’30” to 3’30” on the weekday schedule (which operates Tuesday through Saturday mornings). Sunday morning service is also improved, although not as dramatically.

At this rate, we may need to put streetcars back on Yonge to handle the demand on the night service!

Finch East 39

Service on this busy route will improve during most operating periods. The AM Peak headway will drop from 90 seconds to 79, with half of this service running express, and half local. Finch Station has severe bus congestion problems, and it will be interesting to see how the TTC fares with even more service on the 39.

Midday, early evening and Saturday services will now include express operation on half of the trips. The arrangement of express stops will change considerably. Fourteen little-used stops between Brimley and Warden will be dropped from express service, and they will be replaced by twelve busy stops from Warden to Bayview

Longer term, obviously, something will have to be done to increase capacity without flooding the street with buses. Artics might be nice in the short term, but an easterly extension of the Finch LRT is really what this street needs. (I’m getting carried away with myself, and will stop these fantasies immediately!)

Other Miscellaneous Changes

54 Lawrence East is now officially an accessible route.

139 Finch East is renamed Finch — Don Mills to clarify where it goes.

53 Steeles East will include mixed express and local operation on weekday evenings.

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TTC’s Revisionist History — Where Have The Queen Car Riders Gone

Today’s Star contains a pair of articles by Tess Kalinowski and Christopher Hume on the joys of the Queen car.  Recently, National Geographic listed the 501 as one of the world’s ten top streetcar rides in Journeys of a Lifetime.  Some riders may feel that’s an apt description of their typical journey.

A few nuggets from the TTC in the article show that this organization still refuses to understand and accept its own role in the destruction of riding on this line.  Marilyn Bolton, speaking for the TTC, is quoted:

Much of the 501’s ridership decline coincided with the expansion of the Bloor-Danforth subway and the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, according to the TTC.

“Riders moved up (north) to take advantage of the new subway lines and moved away from the Queen streetcar,” said Bolton.

A look at the statistics [discussed here on December 11] shows that ridership on the Queen Street corridor fell during a period long after the Bloor Subway opened in 1966 (extended to Islington and Warden in 1968, then to Kipling and Kennedy in 1980).

That old chestnut about congestion shows up again:

The sheer length of the route is also a problem. When a car blocks a streetcar by making an illegal left turn or someone parks on the tracks or some other delay occurs on the line, the reverberations travel a long way.

As my analyses of operations on streetcar routes have shown quite clearly, major blockages of service are rare and the disarray in operations can be traced substantially to poor line management and dubious on-time performance even when there is no external source of delays.  Without question, the length of the route magnifies any event, but minor delays are a fact of life for transit operations.

The article also includes a claim that it takes up to five hours to make a trip on Queen.  That’s for a round trip, not a one-way, and even then, this is a rare situation belonging to major storms and regional traffic snarls.

If riders migrated north to the BD subway, they were driven away by poor, unreliable service on Queen.  After the Fix the 501 Forum, the TTC claims it will change its operations and address reliability issues.  Inventing new excuses for driving away riding at a rate unmatched elsewhere on the system is no way to tackle the problem.

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Where Have All The Riders Gone? (Update 2)

[Updated December 14:  A chart of the top 30 bus routes has been added in response to requests from readers.  Comments on this chart are at the end of the post.] 

[Updated December 12:  Charts of ridership and vehicle mileage for most of the system from 1976 to 2005 have been added.  Comments on these appear at the end of this post.] 

My title may seem an odd choice, but my evening spent foraging in TTC statistics was quite sobering.

Some have commented here that I spend an undue amount of time on the streetcar system, and so for a moment, I will turn to the buses.  The TTC likes to believe that its system is growing, and in some very limited places, yes, that is true.  However, the service cuts of the 1990s decimated service and ridership on the entire system, not just downtown.

The count of boardings (one person on one bus regardless of whether they pay a fare or transfer) hit a peak of about 1.42-million in 1989.  This went into  long decline and by 2005, the number was 1.17-million.

Service, measured in vehicle miles, took a hit, although not as deep, through the 1990s, and by 2005 was growing back to almost the same level.  However, this masks what was really happening.  Routes in the handful of growing areas were getting more service, but the TTC was not recapturing riders it had lost.  Major routes now carry only a fraction of what they handled in 1989. Continue reading →