Service Analysis

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Analysis of 504 King: Part VII – Friday, December 22, 2006

This day was quite a disaster for service on the King route.  The service operated on the special Christmas-week schedule with the assumption that traffic would be lighter and have a different distribution.  Congestion played havoc with the schedule with a one-way trip from Broadview to Dundas West peaking at about 90 minutes, over half an hour longer than the usual pm peak schedule time.  Eastbound trips peaked well over an hour. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part V – Saturday, December 9, 2006

Weather:  Windy and cold in the morning

Service on this date shows quite a number of short turns whose primary purpose seems to be to re-space cars that could probably have reached the end of the line.  Particularly notable is the long terminal times by cars that do make their full trips indicating that much recovery time is available and some short-turns may be premature. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 504 King: Part III – Friday, December 1, 2006

In the previous post, I used Christmas Day as a fairly straightforward example of the data analysis from the King route.  Now, I will turn to an example of a very bad day for service, December 1.  The weather was “rain, heavy at times” according to Environment Canada.

This is probably the worst day in the month both for weather and for disorganized service with the possible exception of Friday, December 22 which I will present in a later post. Continue reading →

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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 →