Service Analysis

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Analysis of Route 29 Dufferin — Part III: Link Times

In the previous post of this series, I looked at headways along the Dufferin route for December 2006.  Now, I will turn to the Link Times, the length of time taken to get from one point on the route to another.

If these times are well behaved, this indicates that the requirement for a bus to cover this particular section is predictable even though it may vary over the course of a day or by day of the week.  Random interruptions occur rarely and the schedule can reliably make assumptions about travel times.

If Link Times are spread out over a wide range of values, particularly for trips at similar times of the day, then something in this area is making travel unpredictable, likely some form of congestion. 

When we are considering the reliability of a service and how it might be improved, areas and times with widely varying link times are a good place to start looking.   Conversely, if link times for a route are generally well-behaved, then variations in headways have some other cause than random interference from traffic. Continue reading →

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Analysis of Route 29 Dufferin — Part II: Headways

In the previous post, I began my analysis of the 29 Dufferin route with a look at service on Christmas Day 2006.  Before turning to other specific days and their events, let’s look at the month overall as seen by the reliability of headways and link times at and between various points on the route.  This post presents the headway data, and in the next installment, you will see the link times.

The picture revealed by these data is not a happy one, although it will not surprise any regular user of the route.  Headways are a mess, especially in the evening.  The oft-cited “flexibility” of buses does not appear to yield service any more reliable than on the King car, and in some cases, the service is worse.  The fundamental problem is that very frequent services are left more or less to their own devices, and less frequent periods on such routes suffer from the effects of laissez-faire management.

Of particular note is the service on Sunday evenings, a period when classic TTC excuses about “traffic congestion” simply are not credible.  Headways are scattered over a range up to 20 minutes even though the schedule says 10. 

Continue reading →

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Mimico By The Lake

At its upcoming meeting, Etobicoke and York Community Council will consider an information report on the revitalization of Mimico.  A great deal of the report concerns a public meeting held in June 2007 where, judging from the notes, there was much discussion and many ideas.  Clearly people in Mimico want their neighbourhood to improve its look, its economy and its attractiveness without simply yielding to piecemeal, uncontrolled development.

Mimico is one of the old towns on the Lake Shore highway west of Toronto.  The study area lies between Park Lawn Road (just west of Humber Loop) and Royal York Road.  This area has a mix of residential uses with high-rise condos west from Park Lawn and an established low-rise neighbourhood of houses and small apartment buildings east from Royal York.  There is a small commercial area around Mimico Road.

Although the report deals with a variety of issues affecting Mimico’s future, transit does pop up here are there with some interesting comments including:

  • Don’t just concentrate on transit to get people downtown, but also to allow travel along the Lake Shore itself.
  • Consider special fare structures to encourage local travel.
  • Consider separate local and express services to downtown.
  • Abandon the Park Lawn Loop proposal and concentrate on making Humber Loop more attractive and pedestrian friendly.
  • Extend the right-of-way to Long Branch.
  • Increase parking at GO and TTC subway stations.

Local service was once an important function of the 507 Long Branch car when it operated as a separate route.  Since its integration with 501 Queen, service west of Humber Loop is unreliable with very wide gaps in service caused by short turns.  Some cars that do get west of Humber short-turn at Kipling (18th Street) and miss serving the outer end of the route to Brown’s Line (40th Street).  Service that does reach Long Branch does not run on a reliable schedule.

The proposal for a local “shopping fare” echoes the existing arrangement on St. Clair West where a time-based pass using transfer is in effect to encourage system use during the right-of-way construction project.  Whether we get time-based fares on the TTC as part of a smart-card project (e.g. one “fare” provides up to two hours of riding regardless of direction or stopovers) remains to be seen, but this would extend the concept system wide.

A separate express route to downtown will arrive as and when the Waterfront West LRT is actually built.  This project is now in the EA stage looking at the section between the CNE and Sunnyside where there is some debate about the appropriate alignment and the number of stations to serve south Parkdale.

Extending the right-of-way to Long Branch Loop won’t make much difference in transit operations given the current lack of serious congestion.  No choke points showed up in my review of TTC’s vehicle monitoring data from December 2006 for this segment of the route. 

The important thing will be to provide good, reliable service on Lake Shore, something that can be done by giving southern Etobicoke back its own route.  The eastern terminus is a matter for discussion, but the service should definitely be independent of the 501 Queen car.

Park Lawn Loop is one of those TTC mysteries.  It is a remnant of the original WWLRT proposal and has the distinct odour of a scheme to allow abandonment of the streetcar line west of Etobicoke Creek.  However, the WWLRT is now part of Transit City and it goes all the way to Long Branch.  Is Park Lawn an appropriate place to relocate the Humber Loop terminal?

Finally, I cannot help but worry about calls for more parking.  What this shows is that people don’t have any faith in the surface transit system to get them where they want to go, and they are now focussed on rapid transit lines, particularly the Bloor subway, for east-west travel.  Some of this will be demographic change, but some will be the long-term effect of decline in east-west streetcar service.

As Mimico and the communities west to Long Branch redevelop, good transit will be essential.

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Analysis of Route 29 Dufferin — Part I: Introduction

Early in 2007 when I started looking at the TTC’s vehicle monitoring (CIS) data, I thought to be finished with it long ago, to have blazed through many routes and written wonderful commentaries on all of them.  Things didn’t quite work out as I had planned, and I got bogged down with competing issues and other calls on my time.  Also, the programs that digest, massage, and otherwise render presentable the TTC’s data needed some housecleaning both to make them more robust and to reduce a lot of the manual work that went into the early analyses on 504 King.

Things are much simpler now, although the challenges of interpreting the data remain with each route offering its own peculiarities.  Now I turn to the Dufferin Bus, a frequent route for which the TTC receives many complaints about service.  How will it compare to routes we have seen already?

The route is 13.56km from Dufferin Loop to Wilson Station, although half of the scheduled peak service runs only to Tycos Drive about 3/4 of the way to the north end of the line.  This is in the same range as the Carlton and King cars, although they spend much more time in “downtown” conditions.  It is shorter than the 16.65km Queen-Humber route, and of course much shorter than the 24.43km Queen-Long Branch route.

The scheduled service is generally more frequent than on the streetcar lines, although with smaller vehicles so that headways are better for any level of demand scaled to capacity.

As I have done on previous routes, I will look first at the data for Christmas Day 2006 as this shows the route in its simplest state without any effects from traffic congestion, weather or heavy passenger loads. Continue reading →

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There And Back Again: Neville to Long Branch and Return

Intrepid travellers, egged on by rosy tales in National Geographic, may find themselves attempting a round trip on the 501.  All manner of dangers lie in wait for the unwary — just to get started, you have to actually find a Queen car at Neville Loop!

As a public service, I have reviewed the Queen car data to see what might await our adventurers.  [Yes, you thought I was finished with the 501, didn’t you.  Fooled you!] Continue reading →

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TTC’s Revisionist History — Where Have The Queen Car Riders Gone

Today’s Star contains a pair of articles by Tess Kalinowski and Christopher Hume on the joys of the Queen car.  Recently, National Geographic listed the 501 as one of the world’s ten top streetcar rides in Journeys of a Lifetime.  Some riders may feel that’s an apt description of their typical journey.

A few nuggets from the TTC in the article show that this organization still refuses to understand and accept its own role in the destruction of riding on this line.  Marilyn Bolton, speaking for the TTC, is quoted:

Much of the 501’s ridership decline coincided with the expansion of the Bloor-Danforth subway and the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, according to the TTC.

“Riders moved up (north) to take advantage of the new subway lines and moved away from the Queen streetcar,” said Bolton.

A look at the statistics [discussed here on December 11] shows that ridership on the Queen Street corridor fell during a period long after the Bloor Subway opened in 1966 (extended to Islington and Warden in 1968, then to Kipling and Kennedy in 1980).

That old chestnut about congestion shows up again:

The sheer length of the route is also a problem. When a car blocks a streetcar by making an illegal left turn or someone parks on the tracks or some other delay occurs on the line, the reverberations travel a long way.

As my analyses of operations on streetcar routes have shown quite clearly, major blockages of service are rare and the disarray in operations can be traced substantially to poor line management and dubious on-time performance even when there is no external source of delays.  Without question, the length of the route magnifies any event, but minor delays are a fact of life for transit operations.

The article also includes a claim that it takes up to five hours to make a trip on Queen.  That’s for a round trip, not a one-way, and even then, this is a rare situation belonging to major storms and regional traffic snarls.

If riders migrated north to the BD subway, they were driven away by poor, unreliable service on Queen.  After the Fix the 501 Forum, the TTC claims it will change its operations and address reliability issues.  Inventing new excuses for driving away riding at a rate unmatched elsewhere on the system is no way to tackle the problem.

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Analysis of 508 Lake Shore Service

For those of you who have been wondering, this is the end of the series of posts analyzing service on 501 Queen and related routes.  Unless someone comes up with a really interesting question that deserves further public discussion here, I am now going to focus on other lines.  [You can stop cheering any time now.]

The Lake Shore Tripper, for those who don’t even know it exists, is a remnant of the old Long Branch to downtown service that was a rush-hour extension of Long Branch cars (before they were called route 507) to Church Street via Queen.  Inbound trips operated in the am peak, outbound in the pm peak.

When the Queen and Long Branch routes merged, this service disappeared, but in due course we got a new route, 508 Lake Shore running from Long Branch Loop to Church Street via King.  Three trips operate inbound in the am peak, and four in the pm peak, at least on the schedule.  This post looks at how these trips behave and how, for the am peak, they merge with the 501 Queen service on Lake Shore. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 503 Kingston Road Tripper (Updated)

In a previous post, I discussed the chaotic headway situation on the 502 Downtowner car.  Now, I will turn briefly to the 503 Kingston Road Tripper.

Updated Dec. 17 at 6:45 am:  Information about the combined 502 and 503 services on Kingston Road added.

For those who are unfamiliar with the service design for Kingston Road (the street), here is how things work between Queen Street and Bingham Loop (at Victoria Park). Continue reading →

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Ridership and Service Since 1976 (Updated)

At the 501 Queen Forum last week, I and others talked about the declining service and ridership in the Queen Street corridor.  This post reviews the published statistics from 1976 to 2005, the latest information available so far.

Streetcar Ridership and Mileage 1976 to 2005

These data are taken from the annual Service Plan and related documents.  The most recent counts are on the TTC’s website.

Updated December 11:  A consolidated count has been added for the Queen services (501, 502 and 503) to show the ridership and mileage in the three routes serving this corridor. 

Continue reading →

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Getting From “A” to “B” — Is There More Congestion?

Those who have come to this site in the past year to read, among other things, detailed analyses of route operations on King and Queen Streets may not be aware that this has been done before.  Back in May 1984, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee organized manual observations of the major streetcar routes for three days.  A detailed post on the subject appeared here in April 2006 and it makes interesting reading for any who think that service problems are new to the system.

At that time, we documented a very high proportion of cars short-turning in the afternoon peak and a systemic problem that the actual times required to make trips across the system was higher than the scheduled time.  Short-turns were poorly managed and contributed to the general chaos in service.  Not much has changed, although the headways are a lot wider now than they were in 1984, and the reliability of service much lower.

Considering how much store the TTC puts in “congestion” as the explanation for all its woes, it is worth looking back two decades to see what changes have been made in the schedules. Continue reading →