In previous posts in this series, we have seen where cars on 501 Queen actually go, as well as the gaps and unpredictability of service both downtown and at the outer ends of the line.  Now I will turn to the length of time cars take getting from one place on the route to another, and how this varies both over the course of the day, and from day to day through December and January 2007/08.

We hear a lot about traffic congestion and the need for better transit priority.  If such a scheme is to benefit riders as a whole, it must address the locations and times when streetcar service is slow.  Often this is not the “obvious” time or place– the peak period, downtown — and priority schemes focussed on this narrow time and location will do little to improve service.

This article contains a series of charts that are similar to the headway charts in Part 3.  Data are organized into groups by week (for weekdays), Saturdays and Sundays/Holidays.  Instead of headways, the times shown are the intervals between a car’s appearance at two locations. 

When these times are unvaried and show little scatter, then there is no congestion or variable delay due for stop service, and almost no opportunity to change running times.

When these times vary a lot, but in a predictable way (moving up and down over regular times each day), this shows regular variations in traffic levels and stop service time.  Delays caused by traffic signals can be addressed through priority schemes.  Delays caused by stop service can be address by increased use of all-door loading.  Delays caused by congestion, especially those outside the peak, can be address by traffic restrictions on parking and turns at intersections.  These will not be popular in neighbourhoods outside of the core where the main streets are important local commercial strips and the streets are the grid through which drivers access the residential side-streets.

Where these times show unpredictable spikes or move away from a regular pattern, this is the result of some event like a storm, a traffic accident (possibly on a nearby street such as the Gardiner Expressway with a spillover effect), or an unusual rise in traffic (for example around the club district or on New Year’s Eve). Continue reading →

The 501 Queen car is a mess — that’s no surprise to anyone.  In the past two posts, I have looked at where the cars go.  More, to the point, I have looked at where they don’t go thanks mainly to short- turns.

Riders are frustrated not just by the unpredictable destinations of Queen cars, but by the lack of reliable headways.  The schedule may say there’s a car every 6 minutes, but this is at best a general average.  TTC “on time” goals say that an error or plus-or-minus 3 minutes is an allowable margin, and this means that gaps of up to 9 minutes, followed by only 3 minutes , is “on time” performance. 

This ignores the fact that the gap car will carry 3 times the headway, be much more heavily loaded, and the average rider’s perception of the service will be much worse than the average implied by the schedule and the loading standards.

If the service actually stayed within 3 minutes of the advertised schedule, life would be annoying, but tolerable.  There might even be a car in sight much of the time, if not the “always” of the TTC’s slogan for good service from the 1920s.  We should be so lucky. Continue reading →

In the previous post, I presented the information about the destinations of cars on 501 Queen with details over the month.  One issue right at the end of that post was the eternal east-vs-west debate:

Does the Beach get more service than High Park?  Are more cars short-turned in the west end than the east end to keep the Beachers happy?

Although there appears to be some indication this might have developed in late January, overall the level of short-turning is quite bad at both ends of the line, usually in equal measure. Continue reading →

In anticipation of a TTC report on measures to improve service on the Queen car, there will be a series of posts here over the Victoria Day weekend.  These will review data for December 2007 and January 2008 on 501 Queen and related routes.

I am going to take a different approach in the sequence of articles from earlier rounds.  In those analyses, I began with the graphic timetables of route operations showing first Christmas Day 2006 and then moving on to other days of interest.  Later came Headway and Link Time analyses for individual days, and later for the month as a whole.  Finally came charts showing the short-turning and service reliability as seen outbound from Yonge Street.

In practice, now that this entire process is fairly well understood (at least by me), I am going to turn things around and work “backwards” from the monthly charts to specific days.  The monthly summaries reveal days and locations where interesting events or practices might be found, and of course they also show the overall pattern of transit service.

I have made some changes in the charts both to make the headings “friendlier”, and I plan to standardize on the filenames I used for the linked PDFs.  (Really!  I promise!)  Some of the changes that readers have asked for will not be found in this version such as expanding the daily graphs to have more per day (and hence fewer hours per page).  This is a tradeoff between having charts that are too busy and spreading peaks over multiple pages.  Also, I have deliberately kept the pages in letter size format so that people can print them without having legal sized paper.

For this first set of comments, here are the charts of vehicle destinations outbound from Yonge Street.

December 2007 Westbound to Humber and Long Branch

December 2007 Eastbound to Neville

January 2008 Westbound to Humber and Long Branch

January 2008 Eastbound to Neville

These take some explaining, but they provide a lot of information. Continue reading →