Service Analysis

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Past and Future Streetcar Service Capacity

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.

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Analysis of 29 Dufferin for March 2012 — Part I: Headway Reliability

[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.

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Queen Street and New Streetcars: Less Service, Fewer Stops, Wider Gaps?

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.]

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Getting to the End of the Line: Short Turns on the Queen Car

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.

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Running Times for the Queen Car: The Long Ride from Neville to Long Branch (Update 2)

Updated February 16, 2013 at 11:00 am:  The graphs of average trip times have been revised to show the data in two ways — grouped by calendar week, and grouped by day of the week.  The commentary has been updated to reflect this change.

Updated February 14, 2013 at 6:40 pm:  Graphs showing the average values of trip times in hourly blocks have been added to this article.  This consolidates information from the scatter diagrams showing values for individual trips, and simplifies comparison of averages to the scheduled times.

Recently, I wrote about the reliability of headways on the Queen route during the month of November 2011.  That article was intended both to confirm the erratic nature of service well-known to riders of the line, and to put in context the TTC’s own “punctuality” claims and targets.

A common rejoinder from the TTC is that services operated in mixed traffic are subject to unpredictable delays causing not only bunching, but also such a variation in running times that short turns are an inevitable result.  Operators, on the other hand, complain that scheduled running times are less than what is needed for a car to actually traverse the city, and late running is built into the timetable.

This article reviews data from the service operated during November 2011.

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Headway Reliability on 501 Queen for November 2011

This is the first in a series of posts about service on the Queen car following on from my article about evaluating the quality of transit service.  Queen is a major TTC route that includes many problems including its length, traffic congestion in certain parts of the route, and a general dissatisfaction among riders.

Just how bad is the service?  A common observation from riders is that they can walk to their destination without being passed by a streetcar.  On the outer ends of the route, service can be unpredictable especially west of Humber Loop where only half of the service is even scheduled to travel and some of that is short-turned.

The TTC’s goal is to operate 70% of streetcar service within 3 minutes of the advertised headway.  On Queen, scheduled headways at most times lie in the range from 5 to 7 minutes, and this translates to an acceptable band of service that treats gaps of up to 10 minutes as “punctual”.  In practice, the route rarely attains that 70% score.

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Queen East Construction News (Updated September 21)

Updated Friday, September 21

The TTC has announced that the 501 Queen service will revert to its normal routing between Broadview and Coxwell effective Monday, September 24.  Service on Kingston Road will continue to be provided by buses for the remainder of the current schedule period.

Plans called for the 502 Downtowner to operate from Bingham Loop to Wolseley Loop at Bathurst Street, and the 503 Kingston Road will operate from Bingham to York & Wellington effective Tuesday, October 9 (the first weekday of the new schedule period).

For the next two weeks, we should see amazingly good service on the outer ends of the 501 Queen route because cars will have the extra running time for a diversion they are not taking.  This will be an interesting point of comparison once the normal running times return with the October 7 schedules.

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Looking Back: Services to the CNE

With all the recent talk about Ontario Place, and with Exhibition season almost upon us, I thought this would be a good excuse for photos of streetcar services to the Ex.  Decades ago, the CNE raised much bigger crowds and there was a time it really was a showcase, an “exhibition”.  I remember when the “Better Living Centre” was brand new, and its intent was to give fairgoers a look at all that was new and exciting in household goods.  The Internet didn’t exist yet, and the phenomenon of the shopping mall full of goods manufactured anywhere but here was in its infancy.

The TTC ran many streetcar services into the Ex over the years, and parades of cars would leave the grounds following the evening fireworks.  (Transit Toronto has a short history of the CNE services on its website.)

The photos here have been chosen not just for the fact that cars might be operating on Exhibition routes, but also for interesting details about what is, or is not, still in the city today. Continue reading →

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OneCity Plan Reviewed

The OneCity plan has much to recommend it even though in the details it is far from perfect.

The funding scheme requires Queen’s Park to modify the handling of assessment value changes, and they are already cool to this scheme.  Why OneCity proponents could not simply and honestly say “we need a 1.9% tax hike every year for the next four years” (not unlike the ongoing 9% increases to pay for Toronto Water infrastructure upgrades) is baffling.  A discussion about transit is needlessly diverted into debates about arcane ways of implementing a tax increase without quite calling it what it is.

On the bright side, Toronto may leave behind the technology wars and the posturing of one neighbourhood against another to get their own projects built.  Talking about transit as a city-wide good is essential to break the logjam of decades where parochialism ruled.  Couple this with a revenue stream that could actually be depended on, and the plan has a fighting chance.  Ah, there’s the rub — actually finding funding at some level of government to pay for all of this.

Rob Ford’s subway plan depended on the supposed generosity of Metrolinx to redirect committed funding to the Ford Plan (complete with some faulty arithmetic).  Similarly, the OneCity plan depends for its first big project on money already earmarked by Metrolinx to the Scarborough RT to LRT conversion.  If this goes ahead, we would have a new subway funded roughly 80% by Queen’s Park and 20% by Toronto.  Not a bad deal, but not an arrangement we are likely to see for any other line.

On the eastern waterfront, there is already $90m on the table from Waterfront Toronto (itself funded by three levels of government), and OneCity proposes to spend another @200m or so to top up this project.  Whether all $200m would be City money, or would have to wait for other partners to buy in is unclear.

Toronto must make some hard decisions about a “Plan B” if the Ottawa refuses to play while the Tories remain in power.  Even if we saw an NDP (or an NDP/Liberal) government, I wouldn’t hold my breath for money flowing to Toronto (and other Canadian cities) overnight.  A federal presence is a long term strategy, and spending plans in Toronto must be framed with that in mind.

Sitting on our hands waiting for Premier McGuinty or would-be PM Mulcair to engineer two rainbows complete with pots of gold landing in Nathan Phillips Square would be a dead wrong strategy.  Bang the drum all we might for a “one cent solution” or a “National Transit Strategy”, Toronto needs to get on with debating our transit needs whether funding is already in place or not.  Knowing what we need and want makes for a much stronger argument to pull in funding partners.

In some cases, Toronto may be best to go it alone on some of the smaller projects, or be prepared to fund at a higher level than 1/3.  If transit is important, it should not be held hostage by waiting for a funding partner who will never show up.

The briefing package for OneCity is available online.

My comments on the political aspects of OneCity are over at the Torontoist site.

To start the ball rolling on the technical review of the OneCity network, here are my thoughts on each of the proposals in the network. Throughout the discussions that will inevitably follow, it is vital that politicians, advocates, gurus of all flavours not become wedded to the fine details. Many of these lines won’t be built for decades, if ever, and we can discuss the pros and cons without becoming mired in conversations about the colour of station tiles.

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