Service Analysis

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Service Changes for November/December 2010 & January 2011

There are few changes in service planned for the remainder of 2010, but many improvements for January 2011.

Continuing riding increases on the TTC network will pose an early problem for the new Commission in that these service improvements are driven by loading standards.  If the Commission wishes to save money by reducing (worsening) the standard, then it will have to answer to riders for the effect this will have.  Service is the only thing that the TTC has to sell, and cutbacks, as we have seen before, are counterproductive.

Service on the 28A Davisville to Brick Works which operates only on Saturdays was planned to be dropped in October, but will continue operation through the winter to serve ongoing weekend activities at the Don Valley Brick Works.

Effective Sunday, November 21:

501 Queen: Weekend bus replacement from Dundas West Station to Long Branch will end, and streetcar service will resume 7 days/week west of Roncesvalles.

504 King Shuttle: The weekend shuttle service on Roncesvalles will revert to the weekday routing as through operation with the 501 shuttle will not be required.

49 Bloor West: Early morning service on Saturday will change from every 20 to every 24 minutes to improve reliability.  The average load will rise from 27 to 32 which remains below the service standard of 38.

145 Humber Bay Express: The Park Lawn short turn service will be extended to Mimico Avenue and Royal York to reach customers on Lake Shore west of Park Lawn.  There are no additional trips, but schedules will be adjusted to reflect the extra mileage and actual operating conditions on the route.

39 Finch East and 199 Finch Rocket: Early evening running times on weekdays will be increased to reflect actual operating conditions.

Standby buses scheduled at various divisions will be revised to reflect the additional need for service on weekends before Christmas.  Offsetting reductions will occur on weekday peak standbys.

165 Weston Road North: Seasonal service to Canada’s Wonderland ends.

Effective December 19, 2010:

504 King: Service will return to Roncesvalles Avenue.  The schedules to be operated are identical to those in effect in May 2009, and these will stay in effect until the January 2, 2011 schedule period when weekend service improvements that were made in September 2009 will also be included.

2010.12.19 King Service Comparison

Effective January 2, 2011:

Riding increases on many routes trigger additional service as shown in the table linked below.

2011.01.02 Service Changes

The Steeles East route will be extended into Morningside Heights.

2011.01.02 Steeles East Map

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Still Waiting for Transit Priority

Back on June 22, 2005, the matter of transit priority signalling was discussed at the TTC meeting.  Arising from that discussion, then Vice-Chair Olivia Chow moved the following motion:

1. That staff be requested to take the necessary action to implement transit priority signalling on Spadina by September 2005 at all locations where it is not already active, with a report back in the Fall of 2006 on the impact.

2. That recommendations 2 to 6 embodied in Mr. Munro’s submission be forwarded to TTC staff and City Transportation staff, with a joint report back to the fall meetings of the TTC and Planning and Transportation Committee.

This item has sat on the list of outstanding Commission requests ever since, but on the recent agenda, it was closed with the notation:

Memorandum dated September 2, 2010 forwarded to Commissioners.

It took a motion of the Commission and a bit of harassment on my part to get this memorandum.  It was not exactly worth the wait.

Transit Priority — Signal priority on St. Clair is complete.  Signal priority on Spadina will be completed by the City in December, 2010.  Signal priority on Harbourfront will be upgraded when the Queen’s Quay Revitalization Project is undertaken by Waterfront Toronto (date unknown).  Recommended comments and action:  Mark complete, and remove from list.

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Buses vs LRT: “And”, Not “Or” (Updated)

Updated September 6, 2010 at 4:50 pm:

Anna Mehler Paperny of the Globe and Mail writes about the difficulties of getting around on a bus network where service leaves much to be desired.

The better way? Don’t get Janet Fitzimmons started.

The East Scarborough resident lives less than five kilometres from her work in the Kingston Road-Galloway Road area. But the bus ride takes a good 40 minutes – once the Lawrence Avenue bus comes, if it isn’t full. If the weather’s nice, her commute is faster by foot.

“But I’m lucky: I’m able-bodied and healthy.” And, she adds, “my commute isn’t bad for Scarborough.” A colleague of hers takes three buses to traverse what’s barely a seven-kilometre direct trek.

Meanwhile, Tyler Hamilton of The Star tells of the travails of attempting to use service on Kingston Road in The Beach.

Last Tuesday I needed to head downtown – Bay St. and King St. – for an event. […] It was rush hour. I seemed to have plenty of time, so I decided to take the 503 Kingston Rd. streetcar route. Checked the schedule. Walked to my stop and arrived what I thought was 10 minutes early.

No streetcar. Twenty minutes later, no streetcar.

This is rush hour, remember. Finally a bus that would take me along Queen St. arrived and the driver encouraged me to get on. “The 503 won’t be coming. Take Queen St.,” he says. “It will get you close. Hop on.”

I hop on. A man sitting across from me leans over and says, “TTC, eh… it means take the car.” I offer a forced chuckle. The bus drives along Kingston Rd. for five minutes and then reaches Queen St. “Time to get off,” the driver says. Huh? I join a herd of passengers exiting the bus. Apparently I should have known about transferring onto a Queen St. streetcar.

Confused, I wait. I wait. I don’t see a streetcar. I see a cab. Hail it. It will be worth the $20 at this point – enough money, mind you, to drive half a month in my Honda Civic.

I share my frustration with the cab driver. “The TTC is good for the cab business,” he replies with a smile.

Of course, a regular rider would know that there is no such thing as a 503 car, at least not until September 7 when streetcar service returns to Kingston Road.  The scheduled bus service is every 12 minutes on the 502 and 503 providing a supposedly blended 6 minute headway.  Take the first thing that comes along if you’re going downtown.  If it’s a 502, change to the King car at Broadview if you want King rather than Queen Street.  This is the sort of survival tip a regular will know, but a novice won’t.

By the way, the streetcar services will run every 15 minutes, with an allegedly combined service of 7’30”.  Don’t hold your breath.  A big problem with both of these routes is that they are short-turned and wind up missing the very customers they are intended to serve.

Add to this the appalling off-peak service and you have a recipe for driving away customers.  The 502 bus or streetcar is scheduled every 20 minutes, but only a few days ago I waited 36 minutes for one to show up.  I had not just missed one, and so the gap was easily over 40 minutes.  By the time we reached Queen Street westbound, we had a light standing load even on that wide headway, and we had also passed two eastbound 502s.  That’s right:  3 of the 4 buses on the route were east of Coxwell.  This is called “line management”.

The real irony is that the 12 Kingston Road bus comes and goes at Bingham Loop every 10 minutes.  There is better service east of Victoria Park than west of it on weekdays.  Evening and weekend service on the 22A Coxwell is better than on the 502.  This is one of the few places in the TTC where weekday service is worse than at any other time, and that’s assuming the weekday service is vaguely on schedule.

An important part of improving bus services generally is that the TTC must stop thinking of the outer parts of lines as places where short turns and unpredictable, infrequent service are acceptable.

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Catch The Spadina Bus While You Can

Some time ago, I wrote about the haphazard way in which station vicinity maps were replaced (never mind their content).  There are a few spots in the system that time forgot, and, while it lasts, I thought to bring you a map from before July 1997 when the 510 Spadina car began operation.

This is one of the older style of maps, back when the TTC actually put connecting surface routes on them.  If you look closely, you will see that Spadina south of Bloor is served by route 77.  The date on the map is “03/96”.

The “You Are Here” pointer gives away the location — the Walmer Road exit from Spadina Station.  This was built as part of the reconfiguration of Spadina Station to accommodate the LRT line.  Oddly enough, the route map right beside it is recent enough to include the Spadina car.

Another version of this legacy map at the bottom of the stairs from the west side of Spadina has been replaced with the new version.

Elsewhere in Spadina Station, a poster still advertises the August subway diversions for construction at St. George.

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Smart Card Wars (Part III) (Update 1)

Update 1:  July 28, 2010 at 4:00 pm: Comments and clarifications by Ernie Wallace at Presto have been added to this article.

On July 26, I visited the folks at Presto and talked with Ernie Wallace, Executive Project Director, about the system and its plans.  Subsequently, I did some digging of my own, primarily on the Ontario government website.  The information below is organized to keep topics and the logical flow intact rather than to represent the sequence of the conversation.

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Service Changes Effective June 20, 2010

Many service changes take effect on June 20, 2010.  Most of these are seasonal route changes and, in some cases, improvements.  Many routes lose peak service, particularly in the AM peak, during the summer because school traffic falls off.

2010.06.20 Service Changes

The 512 St. Clair route is scheduled to return to Gunn’s Loop on June 20, but the actual implementation date has not yet been finalized.  Cars will operate to Lansdowne with geneous layovers pending the opening of the line.

The TTC has published a comparison of running times and headways for the route before and after the implementation of the right-of-way on St. Clair.  Particularly striking is the improvement in running times on Saturdays when St. Clair was the most congested before the reconstruction.  Advocates for transit priority often forget that there are many more hours, and much more traffic, outside of the peak period on some routes.

An operational change effective on June 20 is that AM peak cars running out of service will now operate east to Yonge, then return westbound and go out of service at St. Clair West Station.  This will avoid having cars bound for Roncesvalles Carhouse drop inbound passengers eastbound at Vaughan Road rather than taking them to the subway.

2005-2010 St. Clair Schedule Comparison

For details on individual route branches, please refer to the TTC’s Scheduled Service Summary.

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Still Waiting For A Long Branch Car (Updated)

Updated June 3, 2010:

On June 2, the Commission didn’t decide to implement the 507 Dundas West option (described below), but didn’t kill off the idea entirely either.  Some Commissioners balked at the $825k/year pricetag, but the greatest failing was the lack of strong support from the local Councillor who is not a member of the Commission.

I had the sense that individual Commissioners wanted to do what they could to improve service on Lake Shore, but could not figure out a way to do so without out appearing to overrule staff and give in to a local pleading, especially in an election year.

There was a side discussion of the Park Lawn Loop whose installation would extend the 501 Humber service a short distance westward providing better service to some of the Humber Bay condo area, but this project is one of many competing for capital funds in a tight budget.

The motions passed by the Commission were:

Vice-Chair Mihevc:

That the Lakeshore Boulevard Streetcar service matter be referred to staff for consideration during the 2011 budget process.

Commissioner Milczyn:

That TTC staff consult with City Transportation staff on the possibility of constructing a portion of the civil works related to roads, curbs, sidewalks and utilities required for the Parklawn Loop in conjunction with road construction this year, and further authorize the Chair and Vice-Chair to approve any reallocation of funds required for this.

Commissioner Moeser:

The Chief General Manager be authorized within his authority spending level of $100,000.00 to approve any pro-active work considered appropriate for the proposed Park Lawn Loop.

[From draft minutes of the meeting supplied by the General Secretary’s office.]

I spoke to the subject, but nobody from the community appeared probably due to timing constraints and a sense that deputations would be fruitless in the face of TTC staff’s position on the matter.

The original post follows the break.

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