As you will see below, I have posted detailed information on several days’ operation.  These are extracts from a much longer paper that covers many aspects of the route in detail.  Please don’t ask me to send you one because this is (a) still a work in progress and (b) the full collection of data and charts is quite large.

Still to come are:

• Charts comparing link times for various parts of the line over the month showing the similarities and variations by segment, time of day, and day of the month.
• A review of vehicle allocations (CLRV and ALRV) and change-offs.

In case you have lost the thread of where this is all leading, my aim is that the TTC make substantial improvements in understanding how it actually operates and manages its services.  As a management tool, the information available from CIS for all routes has been more or less ignored for the decades since the system went into operation.  Daily reviews of operations on major lines should be a matter-of-fact way to run the business, and strategies should be developed to deal with chronic and emerging problems.

Far too often, the catch-all excuse of “traffic congestion” and “mixed traffic operation” is used to justify inaction.  Yes, there are traffic problems, but some of them can be addressed if only the TTC and politicians who claim to support transit would actually expend some of their “support” on changing the operation of traffic signals, parking regulations and enforcement.

This day was quite a disaster for service on the King route.  The service operated on the special Christmas-week schedule with the assumption that traffic would be lighter and have a different distribution.  Congestion played havoc with the schedule with a one-way trip from Broadview to Dundas West peaking at about 90 minutes, over half an hour longer than the usual pm peak schedule time.  Eastbound trips peaked well over an hour. Continue reading →

Weather:  Early morning rain

Today we get to watch a particularly spectacular example of how a line can be mismanaged to produce poor service. Continue reading →

Weather:  Windy and cold in the morning

Service on this date shows quite a number of short turns whose primary purpose seems to be to re-space cars that could probably have reached the end of the line.  Particularly notable is the long terminal times by cars that do make their full trips indicating that much recovery time is available and some short-turns may be premature. Continue reading →

This is a fairly ordinary day with no particular upsets on the route.  The weather was “rain and snow in the late evening”.  This is a good example of how service manages to be fouled up even when nothing in particular is going on. Continue reading →

In the previous post, I used Christmas Day as a fairly straightforward example of the data analysis from the King route.  Now, I will turn to an example of a very bad day for service, December 1.  The weather was “rain, heavy at times” according to Environment Canada.

This is probably the worst day in the month both for weather and for disorganized service with the possible exception of Friday, December 22 which I will present in a later post. Continue reading →

Updated August 25 at 10:30 pm:

For some time, I have been working on a different version of the program that produces the headway and link time charts, and this work is now complete.  This will simplify future work on other routes, but also it cleans up the existing charts.

I have made the following changes to the charts that are linked from this post:

1. The data points are shown on the charts so that readers can see exactly where they are.  Each point represents a car on a specific headway at a specific time, or a car’s travel time between two points.
2. I have added a moving average trendline based on 7 consecutive data points to show the reliability (or lack of it) of the detail as opposed to the longer term average which approximates the scheduled headway (provided there are no delays or short turns).

Otherwise, this post is unchanged.  Information about other days will appear soon.

Continue reading →

This post is a summary of the major issues I have seen so far in the CIS data for the King route.  The supporting detailed analyses will follow in separate posts, but I wanted to get the main issues out early so that readers would see where this is going. 

Acknowledgements and Disclaimers

I wish to thank Bob Boutilier and Steve Perron at the TTC for making available the data that allowed this and many other analyses to come.

The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the position of the TTC.  They provided the data.  I did the analysis, and I am sure that there are changes and improvements that will come to light with feedback, official or otherwise.

For those readers who are ATU 113 members, I want to clearly state that my intent is not to point fingers at anyone, but to provide some of the raw material needed to address how service can be improved.  Although CIS records them, I specifically asked that operator badge numbers not be included in the data I received from the TTC. 

Inevitably, some dubious operating practices, most commonly “soaking” (running early so that your vehicle is near-empty and the operator behind is overworked), are clearly visible in some of the charts, but this is fairly rare.  Indeed, I must ask how two vehicles can be left running nose to tail for hours with no intervention.  The responsibility falls at least as much on line management as on the operators involved.  Other problems are evident and far more common.

Continue reading →