Service Analysis

by

St. Clair Spring 2009 Update

When I contemplated a title for this article, I felt compelled to include the year simply because this project has gone on for, it seems, forever.  The Environmental Assessment started formally in September 2003.  Detailed community consultation on the approved project began in February 2005.  By way of an attempted legal derailing and reordering of project priorities, we come now to almost the last year of construction.  I say “almost” because the 2009 project will almost certainly spill over into 2010 if past experience is any evidence.

For the benefit of readers who don’t get a chance to visit the line regularly, here is the status as seen on a field trip by your interpid reporter yesterday, March 16. Continue reading →

by

Watch Streetcars Live on Next Bus Beta

Next Bus has the TTC streetcar system up in a beta version on their site.

http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/publicMap.shtml?a=ttc&r=501

That link will take you to a display of the Queen car, although as I write this, no service appears to be running west of Humber Loop.  You can select other routes from a menu provided on the page.  Right now there is no Carlton service west of Bathurst or east of Broadview, Dundas cars are all east of Ossington.  Data for St. Clair is reported only for the streetcar portion east of Bathurst.

This is a trial.  Don’t complain to me if it doesn’t work.  That’s what trials are for.  Apparently there are still cars with no GPS units, and this causes problems.  Of course it is possible that the service really is that screwed up, but one quick cross-check is to compare the number of cars shown on the display with the number of runs that should be in service.  For example, the Bathurst route shows only two cars even though four are supposed to be in service at this hour.

The site requires that you have Java installed to use the live map feature.

by

Coming Soon

The past few weeks have been rather quiet for news, and I, along with half of Toronto, have been getting over a bad cold that dampened my enthusiasm for writing.

Very little of substance happened at the February TTC and Metrolinx meetings, and that’s why there was virtually nothing here about them.

Recently, I received the vehicle monitoring data for Queen and related routes for the months of December 2008 and January 2009, and I have just started to work on formatting it for analysis and comment.  This period includes some truly appalling weather, as well as different approaches to line management.  It also brings GPS location to the route (most of the time, most of the vehicles), and this has required some programming changes in the analysis software.  (The data are still quirky, but in a different way.)

I hope to start publishing articles based on these new data in a week or two.

Meanwhile, work by Waterfront Toronto and TTC on the Queen’s Quay east line has surfaced after a long hiatus, and I hope to report on updated plans for this project soon.

by

Where Are The Queen Car Riders Going? (Updated)

The coming TTC meeting includes a long report on the status of the Queen car and various strategies to improve its operation.  I will comment on that separately when I have a chance to digest the material.

The report contains a fascinating table in Appendix A, at physical page 7, showing origin-destintation data for the route broken into five segments:

  • Long Branch to Humber
  • Humber to Bathurst
  • Bathurst to Church
  • Church to Kingston Road
  • Kingston Road to Neville

We learn here that riders originating in the Beach travel overwhelmingly to the Church/Bathurst segment, and I suspect even they are concentrated toward the eastern end of that segment.

Riders from east of Yonge overwhelmingly are destined for stops east of Bathurst, and only a tiny number travels to Long Branch.

Conversely, of riders originating on Lake Shore, well over half (52% peak, 63% all day) are bound for another stop on Lake Shore, not for stops on the Queen line itself.  Those who do continue downtown don’t want to go past Yonge Street.

What is fascinating about the report is that it completely ignores these data although they have profound implications for route structure and service.

People do not want to ride from Neville to Long Branch, but to the central area.  Claims that split routes would foul up travel patterns don’t quite line up with the O-D information in this table, provided that an appropriate overlap of east and west end service exists for the busy central section.

The TTC has consistently ignored the fact that the “Long Branch” service has a strong local demand that is abused by the through operation with the Queen service to Neville.  It is worth noting that the all day boardings west of Humber are 5,500.

Just after the 501 and 507 were merged, the count stood at 7,700.  In previous years when Long Branch had its own service, daily boardings ranged from 11,000-14,000.  This is a textbook example of destroying a service and its demand, and refusing for almost two decades to acknowledge the mistake.

Even in its weakened state, the demand remains over half local for the rather obvious reason that anyone going downtown has much faster ways to get there.  Part of this lies with congestion problems, but a lot has to do with the unreliable service.

Much work has focussed on fixing service to the Beach where, intriguingly, the all day boardings are less than on Lake Shore even though it gets twice as much service (on paper anyhow).  To be fair, the Long Branch segment is roughly twice the length of the Beach segment and the density of demand on the west end is lower than the east, but the optics are poor.  Assuming that every boarding has a matching return trip (not exactly valid, but close enough for a rough estimate), we are moving mountains for the 7,500 trips to and from the Beach segment every day, but the 11,000 on Long Branch are another matter.

Updated February 15:

Some of the discussion in the comments thread took me back to the original data, and a desire to see numbers of riders, not just percentages.  This information is now available in a consolidated table.

The first part of this table is the data reproduced from the TTC report.  The second part converts the percentages back to passenger counts.  As a double-check, I summed these values, and you can see that some of these do not exactly match the boarding counts no doubt due to rounding errors.  However, this is good enough for discussion.

The third part gives percentages expressed by origin rather than by destination.  For example, 69% of the riders going to the Long Branch section of the route originate there, 14% originate from Bathurst to Humber, 15% originate from Church to Bathurst.

The vagaries of demand surveys show up in the fact that the number of people originating in each segment is not the same as the number of people arriving there.  For example, 5,500 people board on the Long Branch segment, but only 5,034 make it their destination.  Similarly, more people board the Humber-Bathurst segment, 8,750, than travel there, 8,291.  Although it is possible that the 501 is gradually depopulating southern Etobicoke and Parkdale, the more likely answers lie in variations in trip patterns (out one way, back another) and the inevitable inaccuracies of sampling.

Of the folks bound for the Beach, 3,889, only 88 originate west of Bathurst Street.  Conversely, only 101 of the 5,034 travellers west of Humber originate east of Church.  Those among us with long memories might observe that this could be partly due to the long decline in service quality that would drive anyone trying to make a long trip across Queen give up and find another route.  In any event, the O-D pattern is concentrated in the central part of the route from Kingston Road to Humber (and more likely Roncesvalles if the data were more finely divided).

Lost in the mists of time are O-D figures for the era when the Queen car had well over 60,000 boardings per day.  Where did those lost riders come from and where were they going?

by

The Bingham to Long Branch Car

In response to comments in another post about service from Bingham to Long Branch Loop, John F. Bromley left the following:

One car per week from Bingham to Long Branch actually operated for a very short time in 1966 (Feb 26 to May 21), when QUEEN was split at the east end to operate evening and weekend cars alternately to Neville and Bingham. The last QUEEN of the day from Bingham, before the 22A COXWELL night bus took over on Kingston Rd) made that trek. 4745 made the last Bingham-Long Branch run at 1.02 AM on May 15. The car was 1 minute late arriving at Bingham and my planned 8 second exposure was cut to just over a second as the doors slammed open and shut and he took off.

4745-bingham-loop-660515

 

by

Toronto’s Operating Budget and the TTC

This morning, the City of Toronto unveiled its operating budget for 2009.  Included in this material are budget briefing papers for all city departments including the TTC.

This gives a view of planned TTC operations with more information than we have seen at the TTC meetings, and includes the following items (these are selected quotations from a much longer paper):

  • Ridership is expected to grow by 6 million in 2009 to 473 million, and then remain flat for 2010 and 2011 due to the recession.
  • Specifically with respect to the Queen car:
    • Implement additional bus service and service reliability measures on the 501 Queen Street route to compensate for the shortage of streetcars required to meet ridership growth.
      The TTC will hire a total of 20 new Route Supervisors. Of these, six Route Supervisors will manage the 501 Queen route to ensure the optimum flow of streetcars. In 2009, the TTC will split the Queen Street route. In 2009, the TTC will also add buses to the 501 Queen Street route in order to deal with growth in the number of riders in anticipation of the new LRVs with increased capacity which will be delivered in 2011.
    • The 2009 Recommended Operating Budget includes funding of $0.880 million for reliability improvements to the 501 Queen Street route and $0.280 million to address the streetcar shortage on Queen St. As well, there is $1.735 million to fund 20 additional Route Supervisors to deal with congestion and improve the flow of buses and streetcars on heavily traveled routes.
  • Continuation of the Ridership Growth Strategy service improvements is funded for 2009.
  • The 2010 Outlook reflects a net increase of $188 million. For 2010, it is expected that ridership will stay flat at the 2009 level of 473 million riders due to the economic downturn. Collective bargaining agreements, other employee costs, service requirements, energy needs, inflationary increases and the operating impact of capital projects will continue to exert pressure in 2010. In 2010, there will also be an on-going impact of over $11 million from increased growth in service. Given the volatility of fuel prices in 2008, it is difficult to predict future diesel rates. No funding for new service initiatives is included in the 2010 Outlook at this time. No fare increase is included in the 2010 Outlook.
  • The 2011 Outlook represents a net increase of $75 million. As in 2010, other employee costs, service requirements, energy needs, inflationary increases and the operating impact of capital projects will continue to exert pressure in 2011. The impact of cost of living increases is not included in the 2011 Outlook after the end of the first quarter as the latest collective agreement expires on March 31, 2011. No funding for new service initiatives is included in the 2011 Outlook at this time. No fare increase is included in the 2011 Outlook.
  • It is recommended that the Chief General Manager of the Toronto Transit Commission report back to the Budget Committee in Spring 2009, with a five-year plan, driven by ridership and TTC service delivery plans that would include various options for a multi-year fare strategy.

We now learn, through the budget papers, exactly what is planned for Queen Street including a route split and partial use of buses to deal with the shortage of streetcars.  This appears to contradict statements about the Queen car made at TTC meetings and in reports suggesting that the single-route operation would be maintained while various route supervision options were pursued.

Where the TTC will find the extra buses to supplement service on Queen is unknown considering that they don’t have enough to serve their bus network today.

It also appears that any further expansion of RGS beyond its current extent is shelved for the near future at least partly due to budgetary constraints.

by

Where Would a Queen Subway Go?

This post is intended to continue the thread of historical background to the problem of threading a Downtown Relief Line from the Danforth Subway into downtown Toronto.  It is not intended to endorse a specific alignment, but to show the sort of problems that existed 40 years ago and which remain today.

Back in June 1968, the TTC considered a report about an interim Queen Street streetcar subway and a later subway line.  (The linked version of this report has been scanned as text and formatted by me rather than leaving it as page images, but the content is identical.) This contains a number of observations of interest.

  • At this point, the alignment from Queen north was designed to connect with Greenwood Yard as a full subway.  This would be changed many years later to a Pape alignment south to Eastern for a possible ICTS/RT yard.
  • An interim arrangement with a streetcar subway from roughly Sherbourne to Spadina was examined, but it was thought that in the long term, the demand in the Queen and King Street corridors would exceed the capability of streetcar operations.  In hindsight, this is a rather large case of overestimation of future demand.
  • Construction of the Sherbourne Portal would be possible because the buildings on the north side of Queen had recently been demolished to make way for Moss Park.
  • Conversion of a streetcar subway to a full high-platform rapid transit line was considered to be difficult.
  • An alignment south of Queen Street was considered impractical because of the buildings that would have to be underpinned or demolished.
  • An alignment directly under Queen Street would probably require cut-and-cover construction with associated disruption due to soil conditions.  The possibility of more advanced tunneling methods is mentioned.
  • Widening Queen Street is considered an option because, in the good old days, tearing down buildings was the thing to do.  This would not play out quite so favourably as an option today.  The buildings are part of a vital streetscape.
  • An alignment behind the north side properties was considered, although it would still involve considerable building acquisition and demolition.
  • A study by the Metro Planning Department suggested that in the west, the line might travel northwest via the CN corridor to the vicinity of Islington Avenue.
  • The projected cost of the line is in the range of $25-million per mile, or $16-million per km.
  • The report confirms that structural provision exists at Osgoode Station for an east-west subway line.

I have also included here a scan of a drawing showing a possible alignment from Donlands Station south and west to the Broadview (this is labelled “north alignment”, but this portion is substantially the same for all variants).

donlandslegcSeveral points are worth noting from this drawing.

  • The tunnel would pass under Eastern High School and through an existing residential neighbourhood.
  • The alignment would require the demolition of a large number of vintage buildings along Queen Street.
  • The curve south to west begins at Dundas and Alton and ends at Queen and Jones.  This gives an indication of the swath that any subway curve will cut through a neighbourhood, and I commend this to those readers who propose lines with hairpin turns.
  • A curve from Pape onto the rail corridor would be less severe, although not without impacts, because it would not be a full 90 degree turn.  (Pape is the north-south street just to the right of the obscured part of the street grid at the top of the page.)

As I said at the outset, I am publishing this to provide context for the discussion on this site.  The planned construction of the Richmond Hill subway extension and the demand it will add to the Yonge line has side-effects that must be addressed.  None of the options is simple, but we need to understand what they all are and how elements of them might be chosen or omitted from the solution.

by

Service Changes for January 2009 (Updated)

Updated December 29:  The January 2009 Service Summary is now available online.

January 2009 brings a small number of service changes notably on the streetcar system.  Many of these address overcrowding problems during the off-peak (there are no spare cars for peak period requirements).

Of particular interest are the changes on 501 Queen.

The weekday schedules will be adjusted by adding running time and stretching the headways during both peak periods and midday.  The alleged purpose of this change is to improve trip reliability.  Whether this will simply mean that even longer layovers will be available at both ends of the line remains to be seen.

Given the length of the Queen route, the TTC needs to move away from laying over cars to laying over operators by way of scheduled breaks at Russell and Roncesvalles carhouses.  Ad hoc changes to line management are in place at Russell, but still not at Roncesvalles.

I have requested the CIS data for December 2008 and January 2009 for Queen (and related routes) in order to investigate whether there has been any improvement due to recent and pending schedule changes. 

Meanwhile, the service improvements on Saturday and Sunday address crowding that shows up even on the averages, never mind when the service is erratic.  It wasn’t your imagination, there just were not enough cars on the line for the demand.

by

November 2008 Service Improvements (Update 2)

Update 2:  The TTC now expects to have all posted schedules updated by Christmas Eve, subject to delays caused by the weather.  Please hold your cards and letters, folks, about places they have missed at least into mid-January.

Original Post:

This Sunday (November 23) will see a large number of service improvements both during peak and off peak periods to implement the next major step in the Ridership Growth Strategy. Continue reading →