Service Analysis

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Analysis of Route 510 Spadina — Part II: A Selection of Weekdays

Now that we’ve had a view at what Spadina looks like on the best of days, Christmas, we turn to a sampling of regular weekdays and quite a variation in the character of service.

Generally speaking, the service between King and Bloor is quite frequent, although there are occasional gaps for which there is little obvious reason. A few genuine traffic delays (yes, they do happen even with a right-of-way) show up, and the stairstep pattern we saw at major intersections appears quite regularly showing the delays at these locations. Continue reading →

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Analysis of Route 510 Spadina — Part I: Introduction

The Spadina Streetcar has operated now for just over a decade. For all the problems of getting the project approved and built, there is no question that it has transformed travel on Spadina. With such intensive scheduled service and a complete right-of-way, we should have the best possible quality. This series of posts will examine the actual service in December 2006.

As usual, I will start with Christmas Day to introduce the analysis under the best-behaved conditions, and then I will move on to regular weekdays, and to the month as a whole. Among the major points I have found are:

  • The presence of a right of way greatly reduces the sort of variation seen over the course of the day on mixed-traffic routes, but does not eliminate it completely. As demand rises and falls, stop service times vary and this affects trip times.
  • Although the averages are well-behaved, the degree of variation is quite substantial. Indeed, given the short distances travelled, the amount of variation is comparable to that seen on the much longer mixed-traffic Queen route. This variation undermines the benefit of the right-of-way.
  • Some delays due to traffic signals are visible in the data, but the resolution of the TTC’s monitoring system (CIS) is such that I cannot report on this in detail.
  • Short-turning is a chronic problem at Queen’s Quay, and much of the service destined for Union Station never actually gets there. At first sight, I was reminded of Queen Street in the Beach when I reviewed the charts. This is no recommendation for the benefits of exclusive right-of-way.
  • Spadina is a route that demands management by headway, not by schedule. With extremely frequent service, the concept of being “on time” is meaningless to riders.

For those awaiting a review of a suburban bus route, please have patience. With all the discussions of service reliability on Queen, I thought it important to look at a route operating completely on reserved lanes to see just how it behaved.

For those who are new to this blog, I recommend reviewing the early posts about the King car in the Service Analysis category. The techniques used to distill the TTC’s data and present it for analysis are explained there in detail.

Continue reading →

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Joe Mihevc Visits St. Clair West Station

There is a post on youtube by Joe Mihevc, Vice-Chair of the TTC, showing the situation at St. Clair West Station that has kept streetcars out of the loop for months.

When the contractor started to excavate to install a new expansion joint, they found electrical cables buried in the concrete that were not on the station plans. These are being rerouted.

I talked to the Vice-Chair last week, and the TTC hopes to have the streetcars fully back into the station in about a month.

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Has The Queen Car Report Been Short-Turned? (Update 3)

Update 3: Here are preliminary comments on the report which is now available (see link below). I have left this as a single item so that the comment thread is kept together.

What is most striking about this report is the sound of multiple authors. One intently defends the status quo, while the other airs various problems at the TTC that have contributed to poor service.

We begin with the usual excuses about running streetcars in mixed traffic “where the TTC has no control over the multitude of factors which delay or obstruct service”. Later on, we hear about the difficulties of running a two-minute streetcar service even though (a) this has not been the case on Queen Street for decades and (b) the only place it does happen in mixed traffic is for the 45-minute eastbound wave on King in the am peak. These excuses are getting quite tiresome as anyone who has read my analyses of vehicle monitoring data for these routes will know.

There are all sorts of blockages, but true stoppage of service is rare. Yes, left turns can be a pain in the butt, but they are there every day, and the schedule can make provision for them. They are a chronic delay, not an unpredictable source of gaps in service.

The TTC’s actions over past years concentrated on on-time performance to the detriment of reliable service frequency, and the TTC acknowledges this. However, management tools (the CIS vehicle monitor) support schedule-based, not headway-based goals. Moreover, on-street route supervisors have no way of seeing the CIS data and must resort to the time-honoured tradition of peering into the fog to see where the next car might be.

CIS, as I have discussed elsewhere, does not yet use GPS technology and often errs in locating vehicles, especially when they are in an unexpected location such as a short turn or diversion. This makes line management more difficult at the precise time when it is so important.

Irregular departure times and the lack of headway management are big problems with off peak service even when there is no congestion or other interfering effects. The report is nearly silent on this issue, and speaks only of changes in route management and in the measures used to assess the quality of service.

We learn that vehicle reliability is not what it might be, and this affects both the number of cars available and the mix of CLRVs and ALRVs on the route. This is the first time the TTC has acknowledged that there are problems maintaining service due to vehicles. If the ALRV fleet is not reliable, why has the schedule not been adjusted to match the characteristics of the available fleet?

The TTC plans to split the route apart in the fall of 2008, and they now allow that service is worse on Lake Shore than it was before the 501/507 amalgamation in 1995. Why has it taken 13 years for the TTC to admit this?

As for workforce problems, we know that there are two issues. First, the number of operators available in December 2006 was not always enough to ensure that all scheduled runs left the carhouse, or at least did so on time. This may have improved in the intervening year and I hope this will be revealed when I get the CIS data for December and January. Oddly, the TTC blames workforce problems on growing demand on the system. That’s a strange tactic considering that service improvements planned for 2007 didn’t actually materialize, and moreover, what did come was mainly on the bus network.

I think that we are finally seeing some of the TTC’s dirty laundry coming out. Yes, running a streetcar system is no picnic, but there are several changes the TTC could implement to improve things. There is a strong culture in the TTC of blaming problems on external factors, but now they acknowledge that some are internal too.

How long has the TTC claimed that service problems are all beyond its control? How long have they advocated nothing less than a fully segregated lane for transit, something that is physically impossible on most streetcar routes?

It’s good to see this shift, but we need co-ordinated changes in operating practices, route management tools and organizational attitude.

I will add to this post later this evening. Continue reading →

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A New Look For Roncesvalles

John Bowker of the Roncesvalles Village BIA (Business Improvement Area) passed on a link to information about the TTC’s new design for Roncesvalles Avenue.

At this point, it is unclear whether this will actually be built in 2008 or 2009 (my own guess is 2009), but this gives an idea of what the TTC would like to do with streetcar stops in locations where the incursions into the road are possible.  At all stops from Dundas down to just north of the carhouse at Queen, sidewalks at stops will be widened out to the tracks to provide a step on-and-off configuration.

Various schemes are used to deal with intersections where there are turns either by using farside stops or moving nearside ones back to leave enough room for a right turn bay.

The PDF with the design is very long and narrow — it really belongs on a roll of paper — but the one drawing covers the entire length of the projecvt.

The community appears to be strongly in favour of this scheme, and within a few years we may see a very new transit and pedestrian friendly street.

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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 →