Service Analysis

by

The King Street Diversion Debacle

Starting on October 19 mid-afternoon, streetcar service on King Street east of Church was blocked by a sinkhole caused by a broken watermain. Streetcar service was diverted from King to Queen, and the 501B Queen bus was shifted south to King.

The sinkhole repairs completed a few days ago, and effective October 25, the diversions are only in effect until 7pm while water main repairs continue. While this arrangement does improve evening service, it perpetuates the operational problems caused by the total lack of transit signal priority and traffic management at key intersections.

Updated Oct 27 at 11:15pm: The modified routes will not be in operation over the weekend, but will resume on Monday morning, October 30 according to the @ttchelps X account.

A separate problem occurs at the transition back to “normal” service in the evening. The buses revert to normal or run back to the garage, but it takes some time for the congestion to abate and normal streetcar service to resume. This puts a large gap between the two services.

Diversion Announcement This diversion announcement linked below has disappeared from the TTC site. As the TTC updates their info, I will amend this article.

Diversions in Effect Daytimes on 501, 503 and 504 Services

In summary, here are the normal (now evening only) and modified (daytime) routes through the affected area:

  • 501B bus: Bathurst to Broadview/Gerrard
    • Normal: Via Queen, Bay, King/Richmond (EB/WB), Church to Queen
    • Diverted: Via Queen, Bay, King to Queen at the Don River (Both ways)
  • 501D streetcar: Neville to York & Wellington
    • Normal: Via Queen, Church, Wellington/York/King loop
    • Diverted: No route change, but many Queen cars never get to York street and are short turned further east including to Distillery Loop during the most congested periods.
  • 503 streetcar: Spadina to Bingham
    • Normal: Via King, Queen, Kingston Rd
    • Diverted: Via King, Church, Queen, Kingston Rd
  • 504 streetcar:
    • Normal: From King West to Distillery Loop via King, Sumach and Cherry
    • Diverted:
      • Streetcars short turn at Church via Church, Richmond, Victoria, Adelaide, Church
      • Bus shuttle to Distillery looping downtown via Bay, Adelaide, Yonge to King

This arrangement has extremely severe effects on transit and traffic in general notably at locations where streetcars must turn. There is no Transit Signal Priority (TSP), no Traffic Warden (aka “Agent”), and no attempt to manage the conflicts between turning streetcars, other traffic and high pedestrian volumes at affected intersections. Concurrent work on Adelaide Street diverts traffic to Yonge Street and adds to congestion on streets used for the bus diversion.

Travel times of half an hour and more between Spadina and Church are common.

The situation makes total mockery of the City’s recent Congestion Management Plan by showing how they are utterly unprepared and unwilling to respond to an event that requires major reallocation of road space and time among various types of users, and active management in place of passive acceptance of chaos.

A fundamental part of traffic planning is to determine intersection capacity. This is not rocket science. If there are “N” green phases per hour, and in practice it is only possible for at best one streetcar to turn per cycle, this sets an upper bound on capacity. In fact, one per cycle is amazingly optimistic and could only likely be achieved with both TSP signalling (a “white bar” transit only phase) and a Traffic Agent to ensure the TSP was respected.

Service frequencies on the streetcar routes, and the equivalent cars/hour are:

  • 501D Queen/Neville service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
  • 503 Kingston Rd Bingham service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
  • 504 King Church service: 4′ / 15 cars/hour

This translates to the following demands by turning cars/hour:

  • King/Church
    • Eastbound left: 35
    • Southbound right: 25
  • Queen/Church:
    • Westbound left: 20
    • Northbound right: 20
  • Church/Richmond:
    • Northbound left: 15

A typical traffic signal cycle time is 80 seconds, or 45 times per hour. It is self-evident that attempting to turn 35 cars/hour would be a challenge. This is compounded by the fact that many cars will stop to serve passengers before turning and will almost certainly lose one cycle for that purpose.

Another source of delay is that the electric switches for turns do not always work requiring operators to manually set their route where some cars turn and others go straight through. This can also affect TSP signals where they do exist because the switch electronics “tell” the signals that a transit phase is needed.

This is a crisis-level example of why TSP should be installed everywhere that streetcars might need it, not just for standard scheduled movements (e.g. eastbound at Queen and Broadview, turns at King & Sumach). It is precisely during events where operations go off kilter that the best possible priority is needed. If the facilities were sitting there, they would benefit occasional diversions and short turns, as well as major service interruptions like this one.

The City’s plan is utterly silent on this need, and that must change. For its part, the TTC must insist on improved TSP for streetcar and bus routes. This is not a panacea, but an important contribution to transit reliability and credibility.

by

Streetcars Return to Humber Loop

The TTC has announced that streetcar service west of Sunnyside Loop (where 501A service now ends) will be extended to Humber Loop on Sunday, October 29. Service to Long Branch will be provided by the 501L shuttle bus operating between Humber and Long Branch as shown below.

A 501M Marine Parade bus will operate from Humber Loop.

The 508 Lake Shore streetcar service will resume to Long Branch Loop on Monday, October 30. Cars will leave Long Branch roughly every 20 minutes from 6:40 to 8:10am. Westbound trips will leave King Station from about 4:25 to 5:45pm.

The eastern terminus of the 501A cars will continue to be at McCaul Loop.

The extension is possible between regular schedule changes because running time is already provided in the October schedules for 501 operation to Humber, and for 508 operation to Long Branch.

Full 507 Long Branch streetcar service will be restored at the next schedule change on Sunday, November 19.

Night service will continue with the 301 Queen Night Bus because of the need to divert around Ontario Line construction.

by

The Vanishing Transit Priority on King Street

At its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report about the City’s Congestion Management Plan. I will review that in a separate article, but to set the scene, it is worth looking back at the success and failure of the King Street transit priority pilot.

The original idea was to establish King Street, by far the busiest streetcar corridor downtown with consistently high demand, as a mostly-transit street to speed trips through the core area. A combination of forced right turns, enlarged boarding areas at stops, together with other road changes would make travel by car between Jarvis and Bathurst Streets difficult, if not impossible.

The scheme was quickly watered down thanks to protests from the taxi industry, including carriers like Uber whose vehicles were not branded, and this presented an immediate problem for enforcement. That problem was compounded by the lackluster efforts of Toronto Police who had more important things to do with their time. Occasional blitzes were separated by long periods of laissez-faire non-enforcement.

Despite these limitations, the changes actually did improve travel times, and in particular, the reliability of travel times, over the affected section. Then came the pandemic, and traffic downtown evaporated along with any vestigial efforts to enforce traffic laws. Motorists became used to driving as they pleased, and that has survived into the post-pandemic period along with the unsurprising result that many benefits of the transit priority scheme have been lost.

This article looks back at the actual data for 504 King cars operating through the core to show how travel times have evolved. I have included data going back well beyond the implementation of the King Street transit priority pilot in November 2017. Some of these charts appeared in earlier reviews of King Street, but they are included here for “one stop shopping”.

All data for the analysis here were supplied by the TTC from their CIS and Vision vehicle tracking systems, for which much thanks. The presentation and conclusions are my own.

Continue reading →
by

Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part III

This article continues my reviews of bus operations on 512 St. Clair in September 2023 and of streetcar operations in the preceding months.

One aspect of any route’s operation is the degree to which vehicles have time for a layover at terminals. If this time is too small (or worse, none at all), service can be disrupted by the simple need for drivers to answer calls of nature and just decompress for a few minutes.

There is no formal break built into schedules in Toronto as can be found in some other transit systems, but a quick look at the TTC’s schedule summaries will show that most routes have built in “recover time”. This is intended to compensate for random events during a trip, although sometimes it is simply a mechanism to make the round trip time come out to a multiple of the scheduled headway.

Some of the “service reliability adjustments” the TTC advertises with schedule change are nothing more than shifting time from “recovery” to “driving” time without actually changing the round trip time. In other cases, time is added or removed without changing the total number of vehicles causing the service headway to get longer or shorter.

When schedules have excessive travel and/or recovery time, vehicles queue up at terminals causing congestion on the approach if there is no place to park off-street.

In the case of 512 St. Clair, the time spent at St. Clair Station (the eastern terminus) was fairly consistent up to the end of June 2023, but things got really messy. This corresponded to the point where service on the line as a whole became considerably worse as we saw in earlier articles.

This was caused by two competing factors in route operations.

  • In July and August, the TTC extended streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele even though it was only scheduled to run to Earlscourt Loop at Lansdowne. This made keeping “on time”, the TTC’s holy grail of service management, impossible.
  • The approaches taken in July and August were quite different, but a common factor was that streetcars spent more time sitting in St. Clair Station Loop to get back on time at the expense of providing the advertised service on the route.
Continue reading →
by

Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part II

This is the second part of my review of service quality before and after the substitution of buses for streetcars on 512 St. Clair in September 2023. Part I deals mainly with bus operations in September.

Until May 8, streetcars operated between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop over the full route. Work on the GO bridge west of Caledonia was expected to start in May, and so on May 8 the streetcars were cut back to Earlscourt Loop and the 47A Lansdowne to St. Clair bus service was extended west to Gunn’s Loop.

The work did not occur as expected, and in response to problems with and complaints about service provided by the 47A, the streetcars resumed operation to Gunn’s Loop, but with no added running time, effective on July 4. That condition remained in effect until September 3 when buses took over the full 512 St. Clair route, and the 47A Lansdowne returned to its normal terminus at Earlscourt Loop.

The TTC has a lot to answer for here with the combined effect of service cuts and erratic operation of the service that remained while the line operated with streetcars. Buses look better by comparison because the streetcars, even with their dedicated lane, were so unreliable.

This was compounded by the effect of the long-running bus substitution on travel times discussed in Part I of this series, and by the inadequate preparation for transit priority as of day one of the bus replacement.

Continue reading →
by

Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: September 2023

Effective September 3 and until July 2024, the TTC has replaced streetcar service with buses on oute 512 St. Clair for various construction projects. The length and scope of this work evolved between May 2023 and the point where the full closure was announced at the end of August. See The Changing Scope of St. Clair Construction.

Replacement buses are scheduled far more frequently than the streetcars they replaced, but they are running in the mixed traffic lanes beside a now-empty streetcar right-of-way. Depending on traffic conditions, travel times can be substantially longer with buses.

In the months before the conversion, the streetcar service was already in upheaval for planned work at the GO overpass west of Caledonia, and the St. Clair car was cut back from Gunn’s Loop (Keele) to Lansdowne. It was subsequently restored when the timing of work at the overpass changed, but the schedules were not changed to reflect the longer route.

This article reviews, mainly, the bus service from September 3-30, 2023. In a following article, I will turn to the streetcar service it replaced and the less than ideal quality provided during the on-again, off-again service through to Keele over summer 2023.

Responding to complaints about the bus service, the TTC has stated that they are working with the City on traffic signalling changes, as well as modifications to road lane allocations to remove bottlenecks in the bus operation. For the length and potential effect of this streetcar service suspension, one must ask why these changes are studied and, maybe, to be announced, implemented after the fact rather than as an integral part of the switch to bus service using the regular traffic lanes.

This is not the first time in 2023 (or earlier) that the TTC plays catch-up with getting priority measures for its service during extended diversions and construction projects. The attitude seems to be that problems will be addressed as and when they occur, rather than being anticipated and planned for, with transit service and riders getting a raw deal.

Continue reading →
by

Streetcar Diversion Update, Sept. 24, 2023

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.

Route 512 St. Clair will remain a bus operation until summer 2024 for various construction projects.

by

Streetcar Queues at Spadina Station

Updated September 19, 2023 at 6:40 pm: According to the Financial and Major Projects Update on the TTC Board agenda for September 26, 2023:

Detailed Design Review (100%) for the Spadina Station – Streetcar Platform Extension is underway and expected to be completed by Q3 2023.

Nearby redevelopment planned to occur in the near future will provide access to the tunnel structure for platform expansion.

Regular riders of the 510 Spadina will be familiar with long, sometimes very long, intervals spent waiting in the tunnel outside of Spadina Station just for their car to move onto the platform and discharge passengers.

This is the compound effect of several factors:

  • The Flexity streetcars are too long for two of them to be on the platform at once (as the former CLRV cars could be) with one loading and the other unloading.
  • The Flexitys cannot selectively open doors, except for the very front one, to serve riders while only partly on the platform.
  • A common situation at this station is for a car to wait on the platform while the operator takes a bathroom break or waits for a relief crew to show up.
  • The running times on the 510 schedule are generous enough that there is usually time to sit at Spadina Station rather than leaving immediately.
  • During some periods, service that would normally operate to Union Station is cut back to Queens Quay or Charlotte Loop giving cars even more surplus running time.
  • When service on Spadina is bunched and a parade of cars reaches Spadina Station, only one car can use the platform while those behind wait in the tunnel.

This situation cries out for better line management and scheduling, including shifting away from a strict adherence to “on time” cars and a move to dispatching on a regular headway to avoid backlogs. Step back crews would be essential in allowing cars to leave as quickly as possible while operators had their breaks. (Note that breaks are generally not taken at Union because it is a busy station serving two routes.)

As things are, much of the benefit for riders of a reserved lane on Spadina can be undone by the operation at Spadina Station.

During the month of August 2023, 510 Spadina service to Union did not operate on the following days so that all service at Union could be provided by 509 Harbourfront cars to Exhibition Loop:

  • Saturday, August 5 from about 8am to 8pm during the Caribbean Carnival.
  • Friday, August 18 onward from about 10am to 8pm during the CNE.

In an attempt to see just how bad this problem was, I built a fine-grained “map” of Spadina Station Loop for my usual route analysis programs. This includes screenlines at:

  • The loop entrance where the north and southbound tracks divide
  • The east end of the station platform
  • The west end of the station platform

This allows plotting of how long cars spent queued in the tunnel, and how long they sat on the platform. Unfortunately, it is not possible to resolve the difference between cars sitting at the loading area at the west end of the platform and those almost, but not quite, on the platform to unload.

(The reason for this is that the TTC’s “Vision” tracking system does not accurately map car positions inside the station. Indeed, cars sometimes appear to reverse within the station according to the GPS data. This is likely due to the problem of getting accurate GPS info underground.)

This is a route that should have more reliable service given its operation entirely in reserved lanes, and it certainly should not make riders wait five minutes or more just for a car to reach the platform at Spadina Station.

The TTC’s Real Estate Investment Plan includes an item for expansion of the platform at Spadina Station, but it is not clear that this applies to the streetcar platform. With the current tight budget it is hard to see this sitting near the top of the pile for funding.

Continue reading →
by

Yet Another 501 Queen Diversion

The TTC has announced a diversion of 501 Queen streetcar service between Roncesvalles and Shaw via King due to Toronto Hydro work at Gladstone Avenue.

This diversion took some at TTC by surprise. I was alerted to it by a reader [with thanks] who received a notice from Hydro of an impending project and streetcar service suspension “as per TTC approval”. This was not mentioned in the September Service Planning memo, and when I asked the TTC, nobody seemed to know anything about it.

The services now operating on Queen are:

  • 501L/B Queen bus from Long Branch to Broadview & Gerrard, with downtown diversion around Ontario Line construction.
  • 501 Queen streetcar from Sunnyside Loop to McCaul Loop diverting via King and Shaw through Parkdale.
  • 503 Kingston Road bus between the Don River and Kingston Road.
  • 505 Dundas between Broadview and Woodbine Loop at Kingston Road.

Needless to say, this arrangement completely bamboozles trip prediction apps, although transsee.ca makes a valiant attempt to keep up with the situation.

This will change on September 22/23 with the closure of Queen East at Degrassi for Metrolinx work on the GO corridor, and, in theory, completion of the Hydro work on Queen West. Stay tuned for updates.

by

The Changing Scope of St. Clair Construction

When I published my article about the year-long shutdown of streetcar service on St. Clair, I did not expect it would trigger a wave of complaints on Twitter/X about the scope and length of the project. Late last week, I was busy dealing with the announced service changes overall, but now am taking another look at St. Clair.

In the presentation deck (about which more below) there is a chronology showing that there was consultation back in May 2023. Exactly what this might have entailed is hard to say, but there were certainly no fireworks four months ago.

Anyone who is trying to keep on top of TTC construction plans has something of a challenge finding information. The Projects and Plans page is only linked from the common footer of all pages on the TTC site. If you don’t scroll down to the bottom, you will never find it.

Within that page is a link to the St. Clair project page. It contains links to an August 24 version of the project overview and a construction notice. The August 24 version is the one I used in writing my article. There are, however, three versions of the project overview.

The description of the planned work in the last version is quite different from the May 2023 version on which consultation would have been based.

Courtesy of the Internet Archive, I pulled up the original version of the St. Clair project page posted on August 12. Note that it says “Work will result in intermittent bus replacement on the 512 St. Clair streetcar route”, not a complete shutdown lasting to summer 2024. By late August, the page had changed.

Here are the three versions of the presentation deck:

In the May deck, text on a diversion map talks about intermittent bus operation, and the projected end date is first quarter 2024 for third party works. However, elsewhere we see that the full project including St. Clair West Station would run through to the summer.

It is quite possible that the May version of the deck gave the impression of a shorter, less intrusive project than the one now underway.

This was the version in effect for the original consultation.

By the August 11 version, the dates have not changed, but reference to “intermittent” replacement is gone.

The August 24 version contains the same information in a different form.

What is not clear is whether the TTC ever actually consulted about a more extensive shutdown, or about the problems created by operating buses in the traffic lanes, not on the streetcar right-of-way. The latter is difficult because of the support poles for the overhead system which lie between the eastbound and westbound tracks.

This is an example of scope creep coupled with changing and hard-to-find information. One might think that the TTC has been taking lessons from Metrolinx.