For September 2006 we will see many service improvements although these fall largely in the off-peak period as the fleet size constrains the TTC’s ability to run more peak service.  Looking through the long list, I noticed that the Service Planning folks have been squeezing every drop they can out of the available budget by, in some cases, only adding a few extra trips here and there rather than a service change for an entire operating period.  Typically, this extends the shoulder of the rush hour rather than, say, improving service all day long.

Some service improvements originally planned for early 2006 but deferred due to budget deliberations are finally in the schedules, while others remain on hold for future implementation.  Next year’s budget brings with it the big jump in the bus fleet and a concurrent need for additional operating subsidy.  We will see whether the Budget Advisory Committee, Council and the Mayor are willing to put their money where most of their mouths are on transit improvements.

In the long section that follows, I do not give the details of the changes (for that, you can look at the TTC’s own site when they are posted), but only a general idea of what is happening.  I have omitted the minutiae such as garage reassignments and operational changes that do not affect headways. Continue reading →

[After I posted this article, I received an email pointing out that the change in off-peak loading standards I had described as only applying to low-floor bus routes had, in fact, been applied to all surface modes.  After checking the schedules for January 2005 against those for March 2006, I found that some service improvements were, in fact, made in off-peak frequencies on some streetcar routes.  The article below has been revised accordingly.] 

The July 19th TTC agenda contains an update on the Ridership Growth Strategy, and it contains many items worth talking about here.

Broadly speaking, there are four classes of changes covered by the RGS update:

• Service Quality
• Transit Priority
• Commuter Parking
• Fare Incentives

Service Quality improvements have two broad subgroups:  better loading standards and better minimum service standards. Continue reading →

This post is in the best journalistic tradition.  On those slow days and holiday weekends, all the material you’ve been saving up for months finally sees the light of day.  To readers who submitted comments and wondered where they went, take heart.  Today is for you!  This post collects comments loosely related to service quality and operations.

Back in March, I was writing about how transit services are analyzed.  We’re still waiting for the 2007 Service Plan to give us updated stats, but it’s time to rekindle the discussion here. Continue reading →

Looking at the June schedules for the TTC, I was struck by something quite odd:  on some streetcar routes there is either no additional rush hour service, or only a marginal change in service levels.  Have riders abandoned the TTC?  Are “downtown” riders travelling at times other than the conventional peak period?  Or is the TTC just pinching pennies by cutting service?  Here are some examples: Continue reading →

I’ve been rather busy this week with various cultural events including the hotdocs festival (more reviews to come), a Jane Jacobs memorial get together (repeated on CP24’s Hour Town on Sunday at 6:00 am and 1:05 am), the launch of spacing magazine’s latest all-transit issue, a spectacular performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass by Tafelmusik, and it’s still not over.

Having a few moments here, I’ll catch up on some of the comments that have accumulated for the week. Continue reading →

Yesterday’s TTC meeting definitely strayed into the realm of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of …

Although few of the Transit Commissioners could be called “young men”, we know that spring and the silly-season following the traumas of budget debates are upon us.

The plans for CLRV rebuilding and purchase of new streetcars were on the table with a status update on both projects.  (I will post a detailed piece on that issue tomorrow after I have finished work on the details.)  Among the topics of discussion was the question of couplers for the CLRVs.  This achieved much hilarity, albeit with some loss of decorum and a sense that the old-boy’s club is still too prevelant at TTC, and masked the fact that they really didn’t address the question.  Here are the important bits: Continue reading →

Following up from my long post about the King car, I dug into my archives for the 1984 report by Streetcars for Toronto about streetcar operations.  You can read all the details in the report here.

In a few days, I will post information about the responses between SFTC and TTC that followed.  The upshot of this exercise was that we proved the TTC was doing a lousy job of scheduling and running service, and the TTC did an excellent job of showing how unwilling it was to accept criticism.  The single largest effect from all of our effort was that they made the vehicle numbers on the streetcars (PCCs then) bigger so that the Inspectors (now called Route Supervisors) could see them easily.  I am not making this up.

The situation in the Beach raised the locals’ ire enough that the following cartoon appeared in the Ward 9 Community News [apologies if there are any copyright issues here 22 years after the fact].

[Ah the simpler days when grannies with guns could be used as a joke.]

Among the significant features of our report was the use of graphs to show the operation of a route.  The full set is not reproduced here because the salient details are discussed in the text.  However, I have scanned and assembled one graph for the King car’s operation on the afternoon of May 24, 1984.  The graph is linked here.

This image is explained in detail in the text, and it provides as easy way to analyze the operation of an entire route.  The technique is not new, possibly only to the TTC who do not use it.

We had over a dozen people standing on street corners recording car movements to get this data, but the TTC could get it today from the computerized vehicle monitoring system.  Alas, they don’t and it’s a great shame.  That part of the computer system was never developed as a budget saving.

Here’s a challenge for the TTC:  Digest all the data you already have, and provide a website where anyone can look at a graph of any route’s operation for, say, the past month.  This is not rocket science, but it would put to rest claims and counterclaims about what quality of service actually exists on the street.  Will the TTC do this?  Don’t hold your breath.

They will go on telling us that any claims of poor service are figments of our imagination or, alternately, the service really is bad, but only with a reserved lane will your bus show up on time.

I will return to the question of service management and what causes delays in a future post.