Service Analysis

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King/Bathurst Reconstruction Project (Update 8)

Update 8:  August 10, 2011 at 7:40 am:

Construction of the new safety islands has completed early, and the 511 is back to its normal routing.

Update 7:  July 26, 2011 at 8:00 am:

The TTC has revised dates for resumption of service through the intersection:

  • Wednesday July 27:  504 King and 508 Lake Shore routes return to King Street
  • Saturday July 30:  511 Bathurst route returns temporarily for Caribana
  • Tuesday August 2:  511 Bathurst route resumes diversion via Spadina
  • Monday August 15:  511 Bathurst route diversion ends

Update 6:  July 24, 2011 at 5:00 am:

An excellent overhead view of the completed intersection dated July 17 is available on Flickr.

Service on King Street through the intersection resumes on Monday, July 25.

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Roncesvalles Renewed Celebration (Updated)

Updated July 24, 2011 at 11:00 pm:  Links to archival photos of Roncesvalles Avenue from the City Archives have been added to the end of this article.

Apologies to those who expected to find the PCCs running on Ronces.  In turned out that one car had already been hired out for another event, and the second PCC was in the shop for repairs.  Two CLRVs don’t have quite the same effect.

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Service Changes in July 2011

In a previous post, I described the diversions that will begin on July 11 around the reconstruction of the King/Bathurst grand union.

Beginning July 18 and continuing until early September, the 506 Carlton diversion around the Gerrard Street bridge, originally announced for June 19, will actually get underway.  Trackwork on the bridge has been in rough shape with slow orders for some time.  The planned date for return of streetcars to Gerrard Street is September 11.

Westbound service will run via Broadview, Dundas and Parliament.  Eastbound service will run via Parliament, Queen and Broadview.  Cars have been added to the schedule to compensate for the added mileage.

Effective July 31:

192 Airport Rocket: On the northbound trip, buses will serve the upper level bus stop at Jetliner first, then the arrival level at Terminal 1 and the arrival level at Terminal 3.  On the southbound trip, buses will exit the Airport via the ramp to southbound Hwy 427.  These changes are intended to free up running time to improve service reliability.

504 King: Streetcar service will return to Roncesvalles Avenue, although King cars will continue their diversion around the track and overhead work in Parkdale via Shaw and Queen.  There are only minor changes to some off-peak headways so that the running times work out.  However, I suspect with the traffic congestion on Queen and the inevitable streetcar short turns, service on Roncesvalles will not be as good as what is now provided by a dedicated bus shuttle.

Runnymede Station: The construction at Runnymede Station is supposed to be officially completed now, and 71 Runnymede, 77 Swansea and 79 Scarlett Road will return to their normal routings.

512 St. Clair: Overhead between St. Clair and St. Clair West stations will be retrofitted for pantograph compatibility.  Buses will replace streetcars on this section of the route after 10:00 pm weekdays, and all day on weekends.  The TTC claims that there will be timed transfers at St. Clair West.  Regular service resumes on September 4.

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Streetcars Return to Roncesvalles, Sort Of

Work is now complete on Roncesvalles Avenue, and it is open for streetcar service.

Starting June 25, carhouse trips for the Carlton and Dundas routes will resume via Roncesvalles, but the 504 King bus shuttle will remain until July 30 because that is the next regular change in TTC schedules.  It is possible that some streetcar shuttles may appear, but the TTC’s press release is a bit vague on the details.  The TTC’s route diversion page for King has not been updated to reflect the change.

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TTC Meeting Wrapup May 2011

The TTC Agenda for May 11 contained a number of items of interest.  In a previous article, I reviewed the preliminary report for the Finch bus service improvements.

Items detailed below the break are:

  • PRESTO Update
  • Adam Giambrone’s Office Expenses
  • Station Ambassadors
  • Chief General Manager’s Report for January-February 2011
  • 510 Spadina Additional Service South of King Street
  • Additional Commissioners

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South Spadina Headways: What the Riders See

The matter of service on Spadina south of King has been before the TTC on two previous occasions, most recently in March 2011.

In brief, local riders and their Councillor, Adam Vaughan, complain that service is poor and riders are packed into streetcars.  TTC staff reply that the average load on a streetcar south of King is 29, and therefore additional service is not justified.  This matter was held down in March in order to get updated riding counts on the route.

The problem with the TTC’s analysis is that it looks at overall averages, not at the specifics of actual experience on the route.  Most importantly, if a service that is supposed to run every 7’30” is badly disrupted and unreliable, then wide headways will be common.  Because more riders accumulate waiting for long gaps than short ones, the “average” rider’s experience will be a long wait followed by an overcrowded car.  This situation exists on many TTC routes, but it is particularly troubling if that is the case on a short route with an entirely private right-of-way.

First, let’s have a look at how well behaved headways are in this area.  Before you even open the file, I will warn you that it’s a real mess.  The intention is to show the mess before attempting an analysis.

South of King Northbound Headways February 2010

Those of you familiar with my previous analyses of TTC’s vehicle monitoring data will recognize this chart as a scatter diagram of headways by time of day.  Each dot represents one car.  The vertical position on the chart is the headway as seen just south of King Street northbound, and the horizontal position is the time of day.

If the service were well-behaved, these points should be clustered on either side of the scheduled headway through the day.  However, the points appear as a cloud with little discernible concentration.  This means that the actual headways seen by customers are essentially random, and they are spread over a wide range.  Many cars run close together, and gaps over 10 minutes are common.

My next step was to break down this information based on the TTC’s standard that service ±3 minutes of schedule is considered to be “on time”.  Of course riders don’t care about the schedule, only the headway, and it is the headway that determines the wait time and average load on a car.  For the purpose of this analysis, I subdivided the information about each car into three categories:

  • Early (headway less than 4.5 minutes on a 7.5 minute schedule)
  • Late (headway greater than 10.5 minutes on a 7.5 minute schedule)
  • On time (headways between 4.5 and 10.5 minutes)

It’s worth noting that, assuming a uniform arrival rate for passengers, that a car carrying a 10.5 minute headway will have over twice the passengers than one carrying 4.5 minutes.

Headway Distribution ±3 minutes South Of King Northbound February 2010

There are four pages for this chart, one for each half-hour interval from 0700 to 0900.  The vertical bars represent each weekday, and the rightmost bar averages the values over the month.

The dark red portion of each bar shows how many cars were “on time”.  The cream and blue portions are the “early” and “late” cars respectively.

On a 7’30” headway, there should be 4 cars in each half hour, although minor variations may give us 3 or 5 where a car expected in one period actually arrived in an adjacent one.

Between 0700 and 0730, things are fairly well behaved, but the service becomes less reliable as the AM peak continues.  At least half of the service fails the TTC’s own “on time” test, even averaged over the entire month.  For some periods and days, most of the headways lie outside of the acceptable range.  This means that a large proportion of the riders on the south end of Spadina receive far worse service than is advertised, or even what is considered acceptable by the TTC’s own standards.

If we considered a tighter standard allowing only ±2 minutes, the situation is even worse.

Headway Distribution ±2 minutes South of King Northbound February 2010

When the TTC reports its riding counts, it does not include any information about the reliability of service.  Moreover, if short turn trips are mixed in, these may be counted and dilute the average even though they are not of use to all riders.

In the case of northbound service at King, this isn’t an issue.  However, short turns southbound do affect the quality of service on Queen’s Quay eastbound to Union Station, as well as westbound for riders wishing to travel northwest to locations on Spadina.  During the AM peak, almost all of the scheduled service reaches Union Station, albeit on an erratic headway.  However, starting about 9am, short turning at Queen’s Quay Loop becomes fairly common and disrupts service reliability on Queen’s Quay.

York Eastbound Headways February 2010

This chart contains five pages.  The first is the monthly headway scatter diagram similar to the one shown above for service northbound at King.  Once again we see a cloud of data points spread over a wide range of values.  It is worth mentioning what the scheduled headway is supposed to be here:

  • AM peak: 7’30”
  • Midday: 5’40”
  • PM peak:  6’00”
  • Early evening:  6’00”
  • Late evening:  6’00”

The next four pages of the chart break down the cloud of data into individual weeks and add trend lines for each day.  These lines show how the typical headways are, overall, higher than the scheduled value.  This is due to short turns at Queen’s Quay Loop.  The variation in headways with many values well over 9 minutes (the high end of the “on time” standard for a 6 minute headway) shows just how far actual service quality is from what the TTC advertises.

Soon, the bus network will switch over completely to GPS-based vehicle tracking, and the data stream is supposed to be made public.  Whether this actually happens depends in part on the success of TTC managers, who prefer to hide information about service quality, in convincing the new Commission of the need for this secrecy.  In our new era of “Customer Service” and “Transparency”, there will be no excuse, and we may finally start to see just how bad service is on the system as a whole.

Meanwhile on Spadina, TTC staff will again claim that there is lots of service.  The problem is that it does not run reliably.  Capacity could be provided out of thin air simply by spacing cars regularly so that wait times were predictable and loads accumulated more evenly.  However, that would require the TTC actually do something about its service rather than gripe about the cost of more service, the lack of equipment or traffic congestion.

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Trackwork Delayed at Queen & Connaught?

Both the TTC and the City of Toronto websites include announcements of major watermain and trackwork near Russell Carhouse that is scheduled to begin in late May.

This project involves replacement of streetcar tracks including the special work at Queen and Connaught, the west entrance of the yard at Greenwood, and the track on Connaught south to Eastern Avenue.

However, it is unclear whether this will actually occur in 2011 as there have been requests from local merchants that they be spared a second year of construction in a row (the City had Queen Street torn up for watermain work in 2010).

Needless to say, any track construction affecting access to Russell Carhouse will have a considerable effect on operations there.  No details have been published yet on alternate schemes for providing service during the project, whenever it might occur.

When there is a definitive answer on this issue, I will update this article.

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Roncesvalles Construction Resumes

Completion of the Roncesvalles reconstruction will proceed over the next four months from mid-March to early July.

The City’s Construction Notice explains the staging of the remaining work between Queen and Dundas Streets.

  • March 21 to 30:  Housekeeping work on sidewalks left over from 2010.
  • March 28 to May 16:  Sidewalk work on the east side of Roncesvalles south from Fern to Queen, and on both sides between Dundas and Howard Park.
  • April 4 to 25:  Enbridge Gas will relocate a main between Geoffrey and Howard Park on the west side of Roncesvalles.
  • May 9 to June 13:  Sidewalk work on the west side of Roncesvalles south from Howard Park to Geoffrey.
  • June 20 to July 4:  Road reconstruction on the west side of Roncesvalles from Geoffrey to Howard Park.

From March 27 onward, the 504 King service will revert to the schedule used in fall 2010 with a bus shuttle running from Dundas West Station to Sunnyside Loop.  Southbound service will run via Lansdowne, and northbound service will run via Roncesvalles.  In early May, construction will reach the point where buses can operate southbound diverting via Howard Park, Parkside Drive and High Park Blvd.  Streetcar service will resume in July.

A related project, the reconstruction of track on King from Roncesvalles to Close, is scheduled to begin in late May and continue until mid August.

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TTC Service Changes Effective March 27, 2011

The list of changes for the “March” (actually almost April) schedule period is rather short because the TTC deferred implementation of service cuts on lightly used routes to May 8.

One intriguing side-effect of that decision is that the amount of service operated will be “over budget” because the cuts were incorporated in budget plans in November 2010, long before there was any public discussion, and at a time when rumours of cuts were met with denials from the TTC.

In our wonderfully new “transparent” Toronto, how many other changes are lurking, unpublished, in the budget?

Changes in Hours of Service

53F Steeles East Staines Express: Two new morning trips will be added weekdays from Morningside at about 5:21 and 5:48 am.

Diversions

505 Dundas: With the resumption of watermain work on Dundas, streetcars will divert via Spadina and College until late June.  Headways at all times will not be changed, but one car will be added to the route to handle the longer round trip times.  There will not be any replacement bus service on Dundas.

504 King: Reconstruction of Roncesvalles Avenue will resume to allow work by Enbridge Gas as well as completion of the sidewalk reconstruction.  During this period, the same bus shuttle that operated in 2010 will run from Dundas West Station to Sunnyside Loop, and King cars will loop through Roncesvalles Carhouse.  The Jane night bus, which runs on Roncesvalles, will not be affected.

In May, work is expected to begin on track replacement and paving between Roncesvalles and Close on King Street.  This will complete the rebuilding of the King route to the new resilient track standards.  While this is in progress, King and Lake Shore cars will divert via Queen and Shaw.  The work is expected to be completed before the CNE (with associated traffic problems in Parkdale) opens in mid-August.

Unlike the period of watermain work on King West in 2010, there will not be any replacement bus service on King west of Shaw.  I can’t help wondering why the TTC doesn’t simply route the 504 to Dufferin Loop so that service would be maintained for riders from Shaw to Dufferin whose access to Queen is limited by the rail corridor.

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If One Bus Is Good, Seven Must Be Better

Recently, I received a note from a reader about bunching on the 29 Dufferin bus.  This is one of two routes on which increased supervision has led, or so the TTC claims, to improved service (as discussed in my recent article about the Customer Service plan).

I’m wondering what TTC is doing to prevent bus bunching as this seems to be a big problem on many routes…

I wrote to TTC customer service but of course I didn’t hear back from them. I would be interested to know what measures are in place to space out the buses. It seems to me that buses are just rushing to get to the end of the line; they basically do not care if they have 2-3 buses traveling together or if the last buses have no passengers.

I took this video as an example, there are 7 buses passing Bloor stop in under 3 minutes … such a waste from TTC. Just imagine being the “lucky” one that just missed all 7 buses. How long they will need to wait for another bus?

The TTC talks a good line about service management, but a casual look at any of the routes where real-time monitoring is possible (through the open data interface to GPS vehicle data) routinely shows bunching even at 7am when there cannot possibly be “traffic congestion” effects.  Two basic questions about bunching emerge from all of the service reviews I have done:

  • Why are vehicles allowed to leave termini very close together rather than regularly spaced?
  • Why are vehicles entering service from yards or from short-turns not spaced between through runs so that even headways are provided?

This does not require millions in high technology to implement, only the will to manage the service, something the TTC once did regularly with no more than route Inspectors on the street.  With the tools now available for vehicle tracking, it should be much easier as all vehicle locations are available online.

I plan to review the Dufferin bus operations again in the Spring (my last review was published in January 2008) once the effects of winter weather are not a concern.

Short turns disrupt service near the ends of routes, and on Dufferin this can show up as poor service to Liberty Village thanks to turnbacks southbound at Dundas.  On King, short turns eastbound at Parliament and westbound at Roncesvalles deprive riders on Broadview and on Roncesvalles (which have demands to some degree independent of the route downtown) of service.

If the TTC is going to strive for having 99% of the service advertised actually on the street, it must also strive to have that service on the route, not sitting in a short turn, or running in a pack followed by a large gap.