Service Analysis

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 →

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Humber Bay Gets Its Express Bus

Today, the TTC, in the best tradition of oiling the squeaky wheel, agreed to a one-year trial operation of a premium fare express bus from eastern Mimico to Union Station.  This ran contrary to the staff recommendation that the route would not meet the criteria for a financially viable operation.

During the debate, Commissioner Hall suggested that, as a condition of this trial, the Humber Bay condo owners should stop operating their own private bus service over the same route.  However, this idea was withdrawn.  Chair Adam Giambrone supported the scheme with reservations, but expected that the ridership numbers would bear out what staff predicted and the route would not survive its one-year review.  We shall see.

This service will require 3 additional peak buses to provide 5 inbound morning and 4 outbound afternoon trips.

I cannot help observing that this situation (the demand for a special bus) mirrors the situation in the Beach.  The TTC is reaping the effect of two decades of ignoring the poor quality of service offered on Lake Shore.  Despite all the claims of better operation on the 501, the efforts at managing operators to avoid short turns only takes place in the east, and has yet to be implemented westbound at Roncesvalles.  Moreover, the 3 morning trips on the 508 Lake Shore, trips that should run like clockwork, are not predictable or worth waiting for.

It will be amusing to see whether the TTC manages to get the buses to their stops on schedule, and how long it takes for the would-be riders to complain about infrequent, unreliable service.

It’s always interesting to listen to people talking about how fast they can drive downtown, and therefore how good the bus would be.  They ignore the need to walk to a stop, to wait for a bus and to get through downtown traffic to their stop.

Meanwhile, all of you whose routes are still crowded will wait a little longer for service meeting the TTC’s own standards.  Even with recent increases, there remains a considerable number of routes that are overcrowded and for which the TTC has no spare equipment.

Sometime late in 2009, we may see the 501 Queen service extended from Humber to Park Lawn, provided that the forty-two municipal agencies that appear to be incapable of co-ordinating any transit-related construction can get their acts together.  It will be intriguing to see what effect this has on demand for the premium fare bus service and what the comparable running times, including waits, really are.

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TTC’s October Supplementary Agenda

The supplementary agenda for this month has now been posted, and it contains some reports of interest.

At this point, I am only posting links here for information, but will comment on these after the meeting on October 23.

Queen Car Update:  No route changes at this time.  Continue attempts to improve line management.

Transit City Update

Yonge Subway Richmond Hill Extension

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Analysis of Route 39 Finch East: Part II — Monthly Views

In this post, I will review the behaviour of the Finch East route over the month of December 2006.  As I mentioned in Part I, the schedules have changed a bit since then, most notably in the extension of a frequent service to Neilson Road in the PM peak period.

First let’s look at where all the buses went outbound, and how well-spaced the service was.  This chart shows the destination of all buses eastbound from Victoria Park.  The horizontal spacing measures the headway at that location, and the vertical axis measures how far the bus actually went.  The ongoing problem with service reliability to Neilson Road is quite evident on all weekdays except for those when special schedules operated.

Destinations eastbound from Victoria Park

In this chart, any short turns at Seneca College have already been filtered out as they are west of the reference location.

On every weekday, the clustering of vehicles is evident and this even show up at times during periods of the supposedly 12 minute headway to Neilson Road. There is a variation in what I can only call the “texture” of the service from day to day, but the overall pattern is clear. When service is very frequent, close management is not generally needed as long as the overall scheme is maintained. However, as is evident, there are gaps and when these are on the less-frequently served part of the route, they can be quite large. Continue reading →