Earlier this year, I published two analyses of the 29 Dufferin bus operation for March 2012. Part I dealt with headway reliability, and Part II looked at running times.
In this article, I will review the details of operations on four sample days from the month to illustrate the fine-grained detail of service on some representative days.
Among the TTC’s many promises under its Customer Charter is the provision of quarterly stats on the reliability of each of its surface routes. This information recently went online on the TTC’s website, although you have to dig to find it.
The path is from Customer Service on the top navbar, then to Customer Charter on the side bar, then to Quarterly reports, and finally scroll down. Or you can just click here.
This table covers the first three months of 2013, and lists the reliability of every surface route. “Reliability” is defined roughly as:
The system-wide target for streetcar routes is 70% punctuality (within the headway window), and for buses it is only 65%. Looking at individual routes, there are huge discrepancies.
No route gets over the 90% line, although several are in the mid to upper 80s.
Of these routes, four are relatively short bus routes where congestion is not an issue, and with only a modicum of effort, operators should be able to stay on time. The Spadina car is a special case because it runs with a very short scheduled headway for much of the day, every day of the week. It is physically difficult for cars go get more than (H + 3) minutes apart, and impossible for (H – 3) because this would be a negative number. Service that meets the target is very easy to achieve even if the line appears chaotic at times simply because there are so many vehicles close together.
The City of Toronto is studying transportation in the downtown. The study area is bounded roughly by Lake Shore Boulevard/Harbour Street, Queen Street, Jarvis Street, and Bathurst Street. The scope extends just north of Dundas between University and Yonge.
The intent is to find short-to-medium term improvements that are possible:
… getting more out of the existing transportation infrastructure, in an attempt to make travel in the downtown less challenging and more efficient for all road users.
There will be an Open House for this study in the rotunda of Metro Hall (John Street south of King) on Wednesday, March 27 from noon to 9:30pm. The study’s website includes a link to a short survey of travel patterns.
This post will be used as a repository for updates on the study as well as comments from readers.
The City of Toronto has issued a preliminary notice of the reconstruction of Kingston Road from Queen Street to Victoria Park Avenue. This work will take place starting in June 2013 through to December and will include replacement of all the streetcar track.
This is the last major piece of track in regular service to be rebuilt to new standards introduced almost 20 years ago. (Downtown tracks on Victoria, York, Richmond and Wellington will be replaced over the 2013 and 2014 construction seasons.)
The City of Toronto has issued a preliminary notice regarding the reconstruction of York Street from Wellington to Queen.
This will include pavement and sidewalk reconstruction, water main work, and the installation of new track. This work includes replacement of the intersection at Queen & York, but not at King & York which is comparatively new.
Only the northbound track will be retained and, as I understand current plans, the special work at Adelaide Street will be removed. If at a future date, the TTC decides to reactivate Adelaide Street from Charlotte east to Victoria, the York Street intersection will be dealt with at that time.
The City is studying Richmond and Adelaide Streets with a view to installing cycling lanes, and the reconstruction of Adelaide will depend on the design that emerges from this process. A related issue is the ongoing construction of condos along Adelaide requiring curb lane occupancy and causing damage to the road from heavy trucks.
Co-ordination with the Spadina & King project during August will be needed to ensure that there is one street clear for King and Queen services through downtown.
In Part I of this series, I reviewed problems with headway reliability on the 29 Dufferin route. An issue commonly raised by operators is that there are times when schedules do not provide enough time for vehicles to make their journey, and this results in a variety of problems including irregular service.
In Part II, I turn to the actual time required for buses to make their journey on the route during the month of March 2012.
Updated March 20, 2013: In the comment thread, there was a question about whether different vehicles operating on this route showed any difference in travel times. I have added a section to the end of the article to address this. (The short answer is “no”.)
Now that the first Low Floor Light Rail Vehicle (LFLRV) is rolling through Toronto streets on test runs, the question of service quality and capacity for streetcar routes is once again an issue.
The most recent TTC document setting out their intended use of the new fleet appeared in the 2013 Capital Budget Blue Books. These are not available online, but I presented the TTC’s fleet plan in an article last fall. From the numbers of vehicles to be assigned to each route, one can work back to the service frequency and capacity numbers. In general, peak period headways get a bit wider, but the capacity goes up, in some cases dramatically.
The TTC faces two challenges: one on the budget, and one in operations.
Toronto Council has been extremely stingy with operating subsidies and “flat lined” the TTC over the past two budget cycles. Hard liners will want the TTC to simply replace service on an equivalent capacity basis and maximize the savings in operator costs. This would be a disaster for service quality even if the TTC actually ran cars on the headways they advertise.
On the operational side, any increase in headways brings even wider gaps when the service is upset by weather, random delays and short turns. It is already a matter of record that the largest drop in riding over the past two decades came on the lines where 50-foot long CLRVs (the standard Toronto cars) were replaced by 75-foot long ALRVs (the articulated version) on an equivalent capacity basis. Falling riding led to reduced service and the familiar downward spiral. This must not happen when the new fleet rolls out across the system.
Since at least the mid-1990s, the TTC has told us that they cannot improve streetcar service because they have no spare cars. In part, they are the victims of their own fleet planning. The TTC originally rebuilt some of its old PCC cars (the fleet preceding the current one) in order to have enough to expand operations on the Harbourfront and Spadina lines. However, by the mid-1990s, service cuts on many routes thanks to the economic downturn in that decade and the subsidy cuts by the Harris government, reduced the fleet requirements to the point where the PCCs could be retired and the Spadina line opened without buying any new cars. When riding started to grow again, the TTC had no spare vehicles to improve service, and to make matters worse, the fleet was entering a period of lower reliability thanks, in part, to poor design.
Toronto waited a long time for new cars to be ordered, and this process was delayed both by the decision to go with all low-floor cars, and by political meddling at City Hall. New residential construction along the streetcar lines pushes up demand, but the TTC cannot respond with better service until they have more cars.
Recent discussions about the new cars have included comments about how we cannot possibly have more streetcars on the road. What many people forget is that the streetcar services were once much better than today. In this article, I will look back at service levels once operated in Toronto, and at the service that we might see if the TTC actually operates the new fleet in the manner their Fleet Plan claims.
[Apologies to those of you who are pining for even more articles on the Queen car. They will show up in due course. I have been diverted onto Dufferin by recent events.]
Service on the 29 Dufferin bus has been a burning issue for decades. Buses run in packs, they arrive full of passengers, and the advertised service bears little resemblance to what riders see on the street.
Recently, this was the subject of an article in The Grid by David Topping. In it, the TTC’s Brad Ross trots out many of the usual explanations of why service is unreliable. In deference to Brad (who is really a nice guy), I don’t want to spend an article eviscerating his comments line by line. I will leave readers to contemplate information in this and following articles and make up their minds.
What riders see is “headways”, the time between vehicles, as well as the degree of variation in that time. If the TTC says a bus will appear every 5 minutes, and the service manages to achieve this, more or less, most of the time, then a rider will consider this “reliable”. Even on a wider advertised headway, if buses appear at roughly the expected interval, riders know what to expect.
However, if the headways vary widely from the scheduled value, this makes a service unreliable and riders must, at a minimum, build in additional travel time to account for the possibility of a long wait. Moreover, at the end of the wait, they may be faced with a jammed bus they cannot board. There might be another one (or two) right behind, but that makes no difference to the length of the wait, and those buses might not be going to the rider’s destination. Providing frequent service “on average” is not what riders want to see.
In this article, I will review the actual headways provided by the Dufferin bus at various locations during the month of March 2012. Although this is technically “winter” (most of it), 2012 was a balmy year and the route operated without the kind of severe weather delays we have seen in 2013.
In future articles I will turn to running times and the effects of congestion on the route’s ability to maintain regular service. I will also look at a few days’ operation in detail to see exactly what was going on.
The information used for this analysis comes from the TTC’s GPS-based vehicle tracking system which reports the position of every vehicle every 20 seconds allowing fine-grained resolution of movements at any location.
The Beach Metro Community News reports on a recent meeting to discuss traffic problems on the east end of Queen Street. Some comments echo the type of remarks one hears elsewhere in the city about increased traffic from redevelopment, the absolute essential nature of parking to prevent business bankruptcies, and the need to rebalance road space to serve all travellers, including cyclists, not just motorists.
Most troubling are comments by the TTC:
TTC’s Manager of Planning Mitch Stambler talked to the residents about plans to change the Queen Street route. With the new streetcars being introduced next year, two or three of the stops will be eliminated, said Stambler. This is a result of the length of the new streetcars.
Stambler also admitted that less streetcars will run along Queen Street because of its increased capacity. Cost of operation and studies related to ridership will dictate how many and how often the new streetcars will run.
One resident who lives at the east end of Queen Street expressed concerns with streetcars stopping idle near the Neville loop. Stambler said he hopes that with the decreased frequency of the bigger streetcars the issue will be eased.
The TTC has been inconsistent in statements about how the new cars would affect service. Initially, the idea was that larger cars would provide more capacity, badly needed on many routes including Queen. A few years later, thanks to the penny-pinching budgets of Mayor Ford and TTC Chair Stintz, the idea of actually improving service capacity vanished. Indeed, the TTC has already relaxed its off-peak loading standards for streetcars to allow more standees in a bid to save on operations.
Add to this the highly irregular headways on Queen and other routes, any proposal to run fewer streetcars can only mean one thing: service, which declined substantially when headways were widened for the 75-foot long articulated light rail vehicles (ALRVs), will get even worse with the new larger low floor cars (LFLRVs).
The TTC likes to talk about how running fewer cars will improve service by reducing the bunching inherent when cars are scheduled more frequently than traffic signal cycles. This does not, and has not, applied to Queen Street for many decades. Indeed, the TTC tries to make virtue out of wider headways by generalizing an hypothesis originally developed for a simulation of operations on the busy King streetcar downtown during peak periods. There is no comparison to the Queen car in The Beach.
As for stop spacing, there have been many comments on this site about the excessive number of stops on Queen and other routes. Among the most likely to vanish are the Sunday stops especially if any special sidewalk treatment or fare machine installations would be required. (All of the Sunday stops on Roncesvalles came out as part of that street’s redesign.) Some other stops are simply too close together, and these are often leftovers of historical traffic patterns dating back to the 50s and beyond.
With all its emphasis on “Customer Service”, the TTC owes streetcar riders in Toronto a clear statement on its intentions for service with the new cars. Moreover, as a long series of service analyses here have demonstrated, the TTC must aggressively improve its line management to ensure that the headways it advertises are actually delivered to customers. No more excuses. No more “mixed traffic, congestion and TTC culture”. No more bogus stats that use averages to hide the widespread TTC failure to deliver reliable service.
[Thanks to James J. for sending me the link to this article.]
This article continues the series on 501 Queen car operations in November 2011 by looking at the level of service operated beyond common short turn points on the route. This should be read in conjunction with the previous articles on the route’s headways and running times.
The TTC has a target for headway “punctuality” of ±3 minutes of the scheduled value, and a target that this should be met 70% of the time. In practice, the space between many vehicles exceeds this target, sometimes quite substantially, but much is hidden by averaging of values over multiple locations, times and days. Riders, however, experience service at specific times and locations, and averages are cold comfort when they find themselves in the 30% of service that does not meet the target.
Steve Munro 