Service Analysis

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Analysis of 504 King: Part II – Christmas Day 2006 (Updated)

Updated August 25 at 10:30 pm:

For some time, I have been working on a different version of the program that produces the headway and link time charts, and this work is now complete.  This will simplify future work on other routes, but also it cleans up the existing charts.

I have made the following changes to the charts that are linked from this post:

  1. The data points are shown on the charts so that readers can see exactly where they are.  Each point represents a car on a specific headway at a specific time, or a car’s travel time between two points.
  2. I have added a moving average trendline based on 7 consecutive data points to show the reliability (or lack of it) of the detail as opposed to the longer term average which approximates the scheduled headway (provided there are no delays or short turns).

Otherwise, this post is unchanged.  Information about other days will appear soon.

Continue reading →

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St. Clair Extension Trial?

Ray Kennedy writes:

Why doesn’t the TTC take advantage of the current bus substitution to extend service west to Jane Street? This would allow a chance to judge demand for extending the tracks westward.

During a previous substitution I waited on a Saturday afternoon nearly half an hour at Gunn’s Loop for a 71 Runnymede bus to go west to Runnymede to transfer again.  3 buses accumulated in the loop before finally making their way eastward one at a time.  Then, 2 more showed up and sat waiting time.  Finally, a Runnymede bus showed up.  It would have been quite possible for one or two of the five buses to run west rather than sit in the loop.  It’s called service.

Bus substitutions are always tricky things to schedule and often have a lot of padding in the running time.  Right now, there really isn’t much going on on St. Clair, and they will always be early.  In some cases, they will run more or less as the operators feel like it because leaving on time just means a dreary, slow ride across the line.

The TTC’s attitude to this part of the world (the old stockyards) is a good example of how they don’t actively promote ridership.  If St. Clair from Keele to Jane is a potential streetcar line, then there should be a lot more riders than the level of service on the 71 suggests.  Indeed, that service (really a short turn of the longer route), does little to encourage transit use in an area where the land use is changing a lot.

We hear a lot about a “Transit First” policy, but even without recent budget woes, it’s the small neighbourhoods like this that are overlooked.

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Lost Signs: Hula Hoop Man

One of my favourite street signs has disappeared.

Northbound on Spadina Crescent at Russell Street, there is a pedestrian crossing into the grounds of 1 Spadina Crescent, originally Knox College.  There was also the standard “walking man” crossing sign in plain view especially to riders of the Spadina Streetcar as it rounded the circle.

Over a year ago, someone added a hula hoop giving the impression that, just maybe, 1 Spadina Crescent was home to an international competition — maybe the Hula Hoop Man was the only one still, er, standing after all these years.

Then, probably after the publicity it got, someone cleaned off the hoop, but the sharp-eyed could see a ghostly ring.  Who knows what Hula Hoop Man got up to in the dead of night, a spin or two by the moonlight.

Now, alas, there is a traffic light about to be activated and Hula Hoop Man is gone.

Let’s hope that his replacement doesn’t spend too much time holding up the Spadina streetcars.

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Ten Years of Spadina Streetcars

Today, July 27, 2007, marks the tenth anniversary of the Spadina streetcar/LRT.  Despite the transit crises of past weeks, we celebrate an important birthday for the Spadina line and for our transit system.

I started writing this piece for the Jane’s Walk series back in late April, but there was just too much else going on, and it didn’t get finished in time.

Without Jane Jacobs and the many who fought beside her, there would be no Spadina streetcar, the heart of the Annex would be an expressway, and the renaissance of Spadina south from College would not have happened.  Indeed, had the road designers had their way, Dundas would be widened out to six lanes through downtown to the DVP, and much of Chinatown would be arterial roads bereft of late 19th century architecture.

The many condos whose populations fill the King-Spadina-Front area would not be there because western downtown would be like so many other expressway cities, a sterile land of interchanges and new office blocks, but no people. Continue reading →

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St. Clair & Dufferin: Cars 1, Pedestrians 0

City Council, in its infinite wisdom, overturned the recommendations of their staff and of the Community Consultative process set up to review the design of the St. Clair LRT project.

Although the original design for Dufferin and St. Clair did not include an east-to-north left turn lane, this feature has been added by Council direction.  See the Decision Document at item EY7.38 for details.

The staff report on the subject includes drawings of both configurations, and you can see clearly the degree of curb cuts that this decision will entail at an already-crowded intersection.

Two follow-on actions were included in the Council decision:

  • Future studies for the redevelopment of this area should include setbacks from the new curb lane to provide wider sidewalks.
  • The proposed U-turn two blocks east of Dufferin at Northcliffe (part of the 2008 phase of the LRT project) should be reviewed.

This decision bows to those who drive on St. Clair by providing a left turn at the expense of pedestrian space.  Once the construction is finished, we can expect to hear howls of outrage about this change.

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From The Archives: The Queen Street Streetcar Subway

Today’s Star contains an article beginning a series about the hidden corners of the TTC with a look at the ghost station at Queen and Yonge.  This was built back in the 50s with the Yonge Subway, and passengers crossing between the northbound and southbound platforms walk through an underpass on the platform level of that station. 

Back in 1968, a few years after the original Keele-Woodbine section of the Bloor-Danforth subway had opened, the TTC was thinking about the Queen Street subway.  One proposal floated through the Commission for streetcar subway through downtown operation.  The full report is interesting reading because clearly, in 1968, the TTC was still thinking of new ways to use its streetcars.

The proposal was for a subway from west of Sherbourne to east of Spadina.   Schemes for streetcar subways had been around for a while, and I described an earlier one in a post last year.

The report throws cold water on this scheme saying that it would not materially improve the capacity of the streetcar line, and it is clear their sympathies lie with a full subway scheme.  Things did not change much for decades thereafter.   It is worth noting that in the late 1960s, there were more than 60 cars/hour on Queen Street east of Yonge.  Today, the service is equivalent to 23 cars/hour allowing for the larger size of the ALRVs. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part I – General Observations [Updated]

This post is a summary of the major issues I have seen so far in the CIS data for the King route.  The supporting detailed analyses will follow in separate posts, but I wanted to get the main issues out early so that readers would see where this is going. 

Acknowledgements and Disclaimers

I wish to thank Bob Boutilier and Steve Perron at the TTC for making available the data that allowed this and many other analyses to come.

The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the position of the TTC.  They provided the data.  I did the analysis, and I am sure that there are changes and improvements that will come to light with feedback, official or otherwise.

For those readers who are ATU 113 members, I want to clearly state that my intent is not to point fingers at anyone, but to provide some of the raw material needed to address how service can be improved.  Although CIS records them, I specifically asked that operator badge numbers not be included in the data I received from the TTC. 

Inevitably, some dubious operating practices, most commonly “soaking” (running early so that your vehicle is near-empty and the operator behind is overworked), are clearly visible in some of the charts, but this is fairly rare.  Indeed, I must ask how two vehicles can be left running nose to tail for hours with no intervention.  The responsibility falls at least as much on line management as on the operators involved.  Other problems are evident and far more common.

Continue reading →

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Analysis of Transit Operations: Massaging the CIS Data

In a previous post, I introduced the subject of analysing route operations using data from the TTC’s vehicle monitoring system called CIS.

Before I get into comments about any routes, this post is intended as an overview of how the data from CIS works (or doesn’t) and the limitations of any analysis based on it.  In a way, this is a gigantic footnote, but the information here is common to everything that will follow in this series, and I don’t want to spend my time answering questions about how the analysis was actually conducted.

For those of you who just want the gory details on the King car, wait for the next post. Continue reading →

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St. Clair & Dufferin: Public Meeting

On Thursday evening, July 12, at 7:00 pm, there will be a special meeting of Etobicoke-York Community Council at York Council Chambers to discuss the design of the St. Clair and Dufferin intersection. 

Please note that erroneous information has appeared elsewhere stating that this meeting will be at the Etobicoke Civic Centre.  This is incorrect, and if you schlepp out to Burnhamthorpe and The West Mall, you won’t find any meeting.

The background for this meeting is that the proposed configuration for this year’s construction on St. Clair is opposed by “Save Our St. Clair” for the elimination of the east to north left turn lane at Dufferin.  The TTC/City proposal uses this space for an eastbound nearside safety island and, by doing so, avoids a major curb cut on the southeast corner. Continue reading →