The weekend of Sept 23-24 saw another shuffle in the streetcar diversion list on which I last reported a few weeks ago. This round of changes is triggered by two events:
Metrolinx work on the Lakeshore East corridor at Queen & Degrassi streets prevents streetcar operation through the underpass, and at times the road will be closed to all traffic.
Toronto Hydro work on Queen West has completed to the point that streetcars are no longer diverting via King Street through Parkdale.
Services now operating on Queen Street include:
501L (aka 507) Queen bus from Long Branch to Dufferin. These buses do not appear on transit apps.
501B Queen bus from Bathurst to Broadview & Gerrard, with downtown diversion around Ontario Line construction.
501 Queen streetcar from Sunnyside Loop to McCaul Loop.
501D (aka 513) Queen bus from Victoria Street (looping via Church, Richmond and Victoria) to Neville Loop. These buses appear on transit apps as 513 Queen East.
503 Kingston Road bus between the Don River and Kingston Road.
During certain periods, the underpass at Degrassi will be closed to all traffic and the 501/503/513 services will divert via Broadview, Dundas and Carlaw.
Complete closures are planned for Sunday, September 24 all day, and from Friday, September 29 at 10pm to Monday, October 2 at 4am.
The 504 King car operates only west of Distillery Loop pending completion of road and track construction on Broadview from Gerrard to Broadview Station Loop. Heavy construction at the loop will begin on Monday, September 25. Paving in the curb lanes on Broadview south of Danforth has begun following completion of track work.
The 72A Pape bus serving King Street East will use the same diversion around Queen & Degrassi as the Queen services, and will not serve stops south of Dundas nor on Queen east of Broadview during periods when the underpass is closed.
The 505 Dundas car no longer serves Queen Street East except between Coxwell and Woodbine Loop. It now operates via Broadview, Gerrard, Coxwell and Queen to Kingston Road.
There is no map of the current route arrangement in the east end on the TTC’s Streetcar Service Changes page, and some maps for 505 Dundas reflect its route before the shift north to Gerrard Street. The 505 Dundas section also still includes a reference to the 506C bus from Castle Frank Station which no longer operates.
The 506 Carlton car is unchanged with normal service except at the west end where cars divert to Dundas West Station due to water main construction on Howard Park Avenue.
Routes 509 Harbourfront, 510 Spadina and 511 Bathurst are operating normally.
Further to my recent post about planned service changes effective September 3, the TTC has issued a revised set of route arrangements thanks to a change in the schedule for Metrolinx work at Queen & Degrassi.
There will be four stages to the service modifications:
Sunday, September 3 to Friday, September 22 at 10 pm
Friday, September 22 at 10 pm to Friday, September 29 at 10 pm
Friday, September 29 at 10pm to Monday, October 2 at 4 am
Monday, October 2 at 4am to Sunday, October 8
October 8 falls on Thanksgiving weekend which is the October TTC schedule change date. Service arrangements beyond that point have not been announced.
The information here is adapted, with corrections, from the TTC’s website Streetcar Service Changes page. As I write this (4:50 pm, August 29), there are several inconsistencies or errors on the TTC’s site. This article is an attempt to consolidate the available information.
This is a preliminary version based on GTFS data (the standard format for transit schedules used by online services) and some Service Advisories on the TTC site. I expect to receive the full list of September service changes early in the week of August 28 and will update this article accordingly including the usual detailed comparison of service levels.
Updated August 26 at 9:15 pm: 512 St. Clair updated to reflect complete bus replacement for work at various locations on the line.
Updated August 27 at 4:30 pm: At 10:30 am on August 28, the Mayor, TTC Chair and CEO will hold a press conference at STC Station to “outline how the TTC will increase service beginning September and into the fall.”
Updated August 29 at 5:30 pm: Due to changes in the Metrolinx schedule for work on the Lake Shore East Queen Street bridge, there has been a further revision of planned service. Please see this post for details.
At the TTC Board meeting on July 12, 2023, there was a brief discussion of the problem of short turns on streetcar lines. The information provided by management was, shall we say, less than a full accounting of what is actually going on.
This issue flared up many years ago particularly with short turns of service in The Beach among other areas, and in general a problem with erratic, gap-filled service on the outer ends of routes. TTC management committed to reducing or eliminating this problem, and to that end there was a “no short turns” policy that everybody seemed to know about at the operational level, but which was officially denied.
The stats did go down, but looking under the covers showed that not all was well:
Short turns are a bona fide service management tactic for dealing with delays to restore even spacing of service. There is nothing wrong with a short turn of some cars in a parade because this will restore service sooner than if every car trundles to the terminal and they return in a pack.
The official count of short turns fell to almost zero. However, this was due in part to selective reporting that was clear to (a) anyone actually riding the system and (b) anyone looking at vehicle tracking data.
Rick Leary got the equivalent of a gold star from the Board who frankly did not know any better, but occasionally wondered why claims of improved service did not align with complaints from constituents. The standard excuses for occasional upsets due to congestion and construction were regularly trotted out even though service could be erratic at times and locations when these were clearly impossible.
The charts below from the July 2023 CEO’s Report show the official count of short turns on the streetcar and bus network. An important factor in comparing the two is that the buses overall have many routes where congestion and construction do not affect most, if any, trips. The figures are not broken out by route to flag the “bad actors”. Moreover, the values are presented as a percentage of all trips so that time-of-day effects are hidden.
The “no short turns” policy implementation is quite clear in the data from Fall 2018 through Spring 2019. In reviewing actual short turn counts from tracking data, I have found that the values are consistently under-reported, and they do not represent actual conditions. For example, the proportion of service outbound on 501 Queen from downtown (as counted at Woodbine vs Greenwood) reaching Neville Park ranges from 100% to below 50% in January to June 2023.
Updated July 15, 2023: In June 2023, the TTC changed its reporting of short turns from an absolute number to a percentage. The scale of these charts does not make sense because the streetcar chart claims it is per 1000 departures, but cites a percentage (per 100). For comparison, the May 2023 charts are below.
I have written many times on this site about service quality and there are many factors at play including:
Unreasonably short or long scheduled travel times. This may sound like an odd pairing, but both can produce erratic service.
Too short times lead to short turns to keep operators on time especially for crew changes.
Too long times lead to extended layovers at terminals.
Lack of headway discipline at terminals and along routes.
Lack of headway management for vehicles re-entering service from a short turn to “split” a gap rather than simply running behind a through vehicle and carrying few passengers.
There are, of course, ad hoc situations where accidents, short-term construction or special events produce conditions that are not “standard”. These are normal and have to be managed to the degree possible. One side effect of the overall reduction in service on streetcar lines to a 10 minute level on many routes is that there is no spare capacity when delays occur, and wider headways make the effect on riders of any missing vehicle (either not in service or short-turned) greater.
This is not the first time the system encountered that problem, and tuning out surplus capacity has been a generic issue across the network any time budget “efficiency” takes precedence over service. The phrase “adjusting service to meet demand” goes back over four decades.
Service standards that allow for some empty space on vehicles are important because they guarantee some flexibility to absorb small problems without service collapsing. An analogy for motorists is that a highway totally jammed with cars does not move traffic at all well, and some empty space is necessary to ensure the road is usable. On transit, empty space is viewed as waste while on our roads no congestion is a holy grail.
The remainder of this article reviews the short-turning situation on most streetcar routes and the underlying causes.
On May 7, 2023, the eastern terminus of 505 Dundas shifted from Broadview Station to Bingham Loop due to sewer work, track construction and road paving on Broadview north of Gerrard. This will continue into at least the late Fall 2023.
This operation was not a success by any measure with extremely erratic service on Kingston Road where the 505 replaced the 22 Coxwell bus and the 503 Kingston Road streetcar. Service on the main part of 505 Dundas from Broadview to Dundas West Station has also become less reliable.
July 4, 2023, service changes (505 Dundas was cut back to Woodbine Loop and 503 Kingston Road buses (running as unscheduled extras) provided service to Bingham until 8pm to correct this problem, but riders endured almost two months of bad service. This affected not just Kingston Road but the entire 505 Dundas route.
This article reviews service during the May-June 2023 period when 505 Dundas cars ran to Bingham with comparisons to the “before” conditions on routes 505, 503 and 22. It is a long article with many charts for those who are interested in the details of how this service has behaved over the past six months. In Part II I will turn to reviews of operations on a sample of days in May-June.
In brief, the May schedules unwound improvements made in February that adjusted travel times to better match conditions. Moreover, Februrary saw major service cuts to the 505 Dundas route which compounded with less reliable service to make for much wider gaps between cars. In many ways, this was an “own goal” by the TTC.
Oh the irony! The TTC’s Annual Service Plan consultations are all about how to handle a few (but not all) of the construction projects coming in 2024, but the elephant in the room remains bad communications and changes on the fly.
The new routes implemented in May and June 2023 were in cases impractical thanks to a combination of unduly optimistic running times in schedules, less than adequate transit priority and line management whose priority was not the provision of well-spaced, reliable service. Several changes will take effect on July 4 and 5 to correct some of these problems, but the information is scattered through the TTC’s website, if you can find it at all.
First, a summary of the changes:
The 501/504 shuttle bus (an ad hoc service implemented to cover for the absence of the 503 Kingston Road car to King Street downtown) will be rebranded as “503” and will serve Kingston Road to Bingham Loop until 8pm every day. This will become a scheduled bus service at the end of July, and will revert to 503 streetcars likely in October.
The 505 Dundas car will only operate east on Queen from Broadview to Woodbine Loop, except after 8pm when service to Bingham will be provided by streetcars.
The 506 Carlton car will only operate to Queen and Broadview and will return west to route via Queen and Parliament Streets without running east to Woodbine Loop.
The 512 St. Clair car will be restored, temporarily, west of Lansdowne to Gunns Loop. While it lasts, this will correct for the erratic service now provided there by the 47 Lansdowne extension.
The challenge is to find out that this is happening to your route. The TTC website is very poorly organized with information in many places that is inconsistently placed and linked (or not) to the main route pages affected. Some items are out of date, but remain in place to confuse riders. Some items describe major changes but are hard to find if you don’t know the site in detail.
These are the hallmarks of a site maintained by many groups each with its own (probably jealously guarded) responsibility for providing information. Nobody appears to care about overall site consistency and ease of navigation, or if they do, are in any position to change what is a clearly broken process. Some information is just plain wrong indicating that whoever created or updated the page was either sloppy, or does no know what is actually happening.
Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:10am: Changes to the TTC website since this article was posted are noted in various places below.
Updated July 5, 2023 at 4:30pm: Changes to the TTC website since the July 4 update are noted throughout the article.
The TTC will implement two route changes in July to address, in part, problems with service reliability on construction diversions.
Updated June 30, 2023: The location of Salsa on St. Clair has been corrected.
Updated July 1, 2023: The 506 Carlton cutback to Queen and Broadview has been added.
503 Kingston Road / 505 Dundas
Effective Tuesday, July 4, 2023 (July 3 is a holiday), service on Kingston Road to Bingham Loop (Victoria Park) will be revised on weekdays and Saturdays from 6am to 8pm, Sundays from 8am to 8pm:
505 Dundas cars will turn back at Woodbine Loop in stead of running through to Bingham.
503 Kingston Road buses will operate between Bingham Loop and York Street via King. Because these are “extras”, not scheduled buses, they will not appear on trip prediction apps.
After 8pm on all days, the 505 Dundas car will run through to Bingham Loop as it does now.
This change should relieve problems with tight running times that caused many short turns on 505 Dundas and wide gaps both on Kingston Road and on Dundas west of Lansdowne. (I will publish an analysis of 505 Dundas headways and reliability in early July.)
Effective Sunday, July 30, 2023, the 503 Kingston Road bus will operate between 6am and 1am (starting at 8am on Sundays) over its Bingham to York route.
Streetcars are expected to return in the fall, likely on Thanksgiving weekend. It is not yet clear whether the 503 streetcar will permanently replace the evening and weekend service formerly provided by the 22A Coxwell bus.
506 Carlton (Added July 1, 2023)
The 506 Carlton streetcar service will be cut back in the east end to Broadview rather than running east to Woodbine Loop. This will correct a problem with inadequate running time that caused many streetcars to short turn without getting to Woodbine Loop anyhow.
The map below shows the 506C bus diversion via Greenwood and Danforth around track construction at Coxwell and Lower Gerrard. This configuration will be in effect until mid-July when buses can again operate via Gerrard and Coxwell without diverting.
512 St. Clair
Effective Wednesday, July 5, 2023, the 512 St. Clair car will resume operation west to Gunns Loop. Construction at the GO Barrie corridor bridge west of Caledonia has been delayed allowing through service until August. The date when turnbacks at Lansdowne (Earlscourt Loop) will resume is not specified in the TTC announcement.
On the weekend of July 8-9, 2023, streetcar service will be suspended on at least part of the route (TBA) for the Salsa on St. Clair festival between Oakwood and St. Clair West Station.
Service on the temporarily extended 47 Lansdowne bus on St. Clair has been quite erratic. (Stay tuned for an analysis of this operation in coming days.)
The planned expansion of Broadview Station Loop to allow two streetcars to occupy the 505 Dundas loading bay at a time has been deferred to an unspecified later date.
At the TTC Board meeting on June 12, CEO Rick Leary said that there would be a new operating procedure at the loop where streetcars would not lay over, although just how this will be achieved is difficult to understand. A common requirement at terminals is for operators to have a short “nature break”, and this is really not something that can be eliminated by managerial fiat.
A related problem is that schedules generally have excessive running time to avoid the need for short turns. If cars do not take layovers at terminals they will make even slower trips across their routes than they do today. On King and Dundas, they have the option of putting all of the layover time at their western terminals.
The TTC has an astounding ability to make streetcar service slower and less reliable, and this has become so ingrained it is hard to see any improvement in the near future.
Operational details of the change have yet to be announced, and in any event we will not see the effect until 2024 when streetcars finally return to Broadview Station.
Track work at the station planned for June 2023 will now address the on-street track on Broadview and Erindale while the loop will wait for another day when and if it is expanded.
This article describes the transit services affected by various construction project in the east end and the changes that will take effect on Sunday, June 18, 2023. This is a follow-on to my original article, and some of the information there is out of date due to changes in the TTC’s plans.
Updated June 14, 2023: Information about the 304 King Night Bus added.
Construction projects affecting streetcar service are summarized in the map below. Some of this work is underway or completed already.
TTC overhead upgrades for Flexity streetcar operation with pantographs on King and Kingston Road was completed in the Spring. All routes in the system now operate with pans, although there are selected areas that have not been modified yet and operators must switch to trolley poles if cars run there.
Repairs to the Queen Street Don Bridge were completed a few weeks ago, and streetcars are now operating over the bridge, albeit only for carhouse moves and short turns.
Repairs at Main Station are underway and will continue through the summer.
The sewer work at Coxwell & Gerrard has completed, and work will now shift to track replacement.
Sewer work on Broadview is underway.
Changes Effective June 18, 2023
Here is a map showing the route configuration from June 18 to July 29, 2023.
The major service change is that there will be no north-south service on Broadview from Danforth to Gerrard due to track and road reconstruction. Work in this area includes:
Reconstruction and expansion of Broadview Station streetcar loop to accommodate two streetcars at a time on both the 504 King and 505 Dundas platforms. The first phase of this (June 18 to early July) will require Broadview to be closed to traffic from Erindale to Danforth for track replacement. Work will shift into the loop in a second phase to allow streets to re-open. The planned expansion of the loop has been deferred.
Track reconstruction between Gerrard and Danforth. The first phase (July 4 to early August) will run from Victor to Sparkhall with track storage between Gerrard and Victor. (See maps in the original article linked above.)
The affected routes are:
504/505 Broadview/Parliament shuttle bus: This route will not operate and there will be no bus service on Broadview between Danforth and Gerrard and beyond to King & Parliament. This will be replaced by:
72A Pape: This branch of the Pape bus now operates to Pape and Eastern Avenue, but it will be redirected and extended effective June 18 to operate west from Pape on Queen and King to loop as Parliament the way the 504/505 has been doing.
The 304 King Night Bus will operate to Pape Station via Queen, Carlaw, Riverdale and Pape.
Not shown on the map but also effective on June 18:
100 Flemingdon Park: This route now operates to Broadview Station, but it will shift east to Pape Station effective June 18.
8 Broadview, 62 Mortimer and 87 Cosburn will remain at Broadview Station, but looping arrangements have not been announced for the various stages of construction.
In the previous article, based on maps in a March 2023 presentation regarding Main Station, there was a new route “519” that would split off the west end of the 72B Pape to Union Station service. This proposal is not part of the June 18 package, and the 72B will continue to serve Union Station.
The 501B Queen shuttle bus will be modified to improve its westbound connection with the 501 Queen streetcars. Before June 18, the 501B loops north on Broadview to Gerrard, west to River and south to Queen. This loop will be changed so that buses run south on River only to Dundas, and then return east to Broadview and south to Queen. This will provide an overlap between the 501B and 501 services at Broadview in both directions.
The 501 and 505 streetcars will continue on the same diversions and schedules:
501 Queen cars will operate via McCaul, Dundas and Broadview to bypass Ontario Line construction, and thence east to Neville Loop.
505 Dundas cars will operate via Broadview, Queen and Kingston Road to Bingham Loop at Victoria Park.
The 506 streetcar diversion will be changed westbound:
506 Carlton cars will operate eastbound from Gerrard and Broadview via Broadview and Queen to Woodbine Loop at Kingston Road.
Westbound 506 cars will change their route. Until June 17 it is (officially) via Queen, Broadview, Dundas and Parliament to the regular route at Gerrard. This will change on June 18 to run via Queen and Parliament to Gerrard. Many cars do this already.
The schedule for 506 Carlton has not been updated and is still short of running time. Many cars will likely continue to short turn at Broadview and return west rather than going east to Woodbine Loop.
The pseudo-503 Kingston Road service will continue to be provided by 504/501 buses running from Kingston Road & Queen to York & King. These buses are now scheduled as part of the 501 service and should appear on tracking apps. Current plans call for the 503 service from Bingham Loop to King & York to return as a bus at the end of July, and as a streetcar in the Fall.
Track reconstruction at Coxwell & Lower Gerrard will cause changes in three routes:
22 Coxwell, which has been operating between Danforth and Queen with diversions enroute, will be suspended.
31 Greenwood will operate from Coxwell Station (its current terminus during reconstruction of its home station for accessibility) to Woodbine Loop via Danforth, Greenwood and Queen. The routing at the south end via Eastern Avenue is not known as I write this.
506C Carlton bus service will continue to run between Castle Frank and Victoria Park Stations, but it will divert via Greenwood, Danforth and Coxwell to Upper Gerrard in both directions. 506C buses will make on street stops at Coxwell & Danforth. They will not enter Coxwell Station.
There will be no service on Coxwell between Upper Gerrard and Queen. The normal 22, 31 and 506C routes will resume on July 30.
Reconstruction of Main Station continues through the summer. All of the bus changes with route interlines and extensions to Victoria Park Station will remain in effect.
The TTC has three key messages about the pending changes.
Updated May 26, 2023 at 5pm: In response to a reader’s suggestion, I have added a sample chart that includes average wait times for would-be riders in place of the count of vehicles. To jump directly to this update, click here.
In the many articles I have published trying to review service quality on the TTC, one topic has eluded presentation: how to chart service quality over a long period while preserving the hour-by-hour, day-by-day character of the data? That question has several dimensions because a quality metric is not simply a matter of pooling stats and saying that overall things are not too bad, or even worse that service meets some sort of standard on average.
In the past I have published charts showing headways, and others showing how organized (or not) service on a particular day might be, but it has been more difficult to condense months of data for multiple times and locations.
The TTC standard for surface routes is:
On-time performance measures vehicle departures from end terminals. Vehicles are considered on time if they depart within 59 seconds earlier or five minutes later than their scheduled departure time. (-1 to +5)
The intent is to hit this target 90% of the time, but the TTC does not achieve this with values typically falling in the 70-to-85 per cent range. At an individual route level results can be considerably worse. Streetcar routes fared worse with a 50-to-85 per cent range, and the higher end was achieved during the pandemic era when traffic and demand were light. The numbers have fallen since then.
The TTC’s metrics have big credibility problems because they bear little relation to what riders actually experience.
There are three major reasons:
Quality is measured on an all day basis, or worse on longer periods such as months. Variation by day and time is completely obscured by this approach. Reliable service at 10 pm is cold comfort to a rider whose bus has not shown up for 15 minutes in the peak period.
Quality is measured only at terminals, not along routes where various factors can degrade service that might begin well, but quickly deteriorates with bunching and gaps.
Service is measured relative to schedule on the assumption that “on time” performance will automatically be reliable. However, there is considerable leeway in that standard allowing irregular service to be considered “on time”, and the TTC does not even hit their target levels in many cases.
The CEO’s Report tries to work around the limitations of the metric by noting that some routes do farly well while others encounter a variety of problems. With respect to the bus network, the report notes:
Network performance was negatively impacted by the inclement weather the weeks of February 20 to March 10, where over 60 centimetres of snow fell on the city during this time. Weekday On-time performance was 88% for Weeks 7, 11 and 12. During weekends for the period, OTP was 82%. During February, 32 of 159 weekday routes were impacted by construction for at least three weeks of the period. Overall weekday OTP was 88% for the 127 routes not affected by construction:
48 routes were “On-Time” (90% OTP or better).
53 routes were “On the Cusp” (85-90%).
26 routes were “Not On-time” with OTP less than 85%. In summary, 80% of the routes not affected by construction scored 85% or better.
This still does not address reliability issues at the level riders experience. Moreover, for frequent service, riders do not care if a bus is “on time”, only that service is reliable. TTC assumes that on time service will, by definition, produce reliable service, but they don’t actually operate on schedule and fail to measure service as riders see it.
Irregular service also affects crowding because passenger loads are not evenly distributed. If most riders are on full buses, the following half empty vehicles are not part of their experience (except possibly their frustration with a long wait for the advertised “frequent” service). Average crowding stats do not reveal typical riding conditions. (Analysis of crowding is complicated by the limited availability of automatic passenger counter data outside the TTC. I have tried for a few years to obtain this without success.)
The charts show that bunching (headways of two minutes or less) and large gaps (20 minutes or more) are common, and that they exist across the four months of data here. They are not occasional effects, but a basic feature of TTC service. The stats at terminals, where the TTC takes its on time performance measurements, are less than ideal, but the service degrades as buses and streetcars move along their routes. Most riders do not board at terminals.
This article presents a proposed method of charting service quality on routes to provide both the detail of day-by-day, hour-by-hour conditions and a broader overview. The charts are an experiment in condensing a lot of data into a manageable size, but I am not wedded to the format. Comments are welcome. Regular readers will recognize the format from a previous attempt, but I hope this is an improvement.
The goal is to produce something that can track the quality of service over time so that the decline or recovery of TTC routes is clearly visible along with the effectiveness (or not) of any changes to schedules, transit priority or route management.
There are a lot of charts in this article, and it is a long read for those who are interested. Feedback on this method of presentation is most welcome.
