Service Analysis

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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 →

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Analysis of Transit Route Operations

Over the next month or so, I will be posting a series of articles here about the operation of surface routes and will concentrate on lines in the King and Queen corridors.  This analysis will look at the way the line actually operates — how the vehicles move around (or not) — as opposed to the question of whether service is adequate to demand.  These topics are related by the long-standing question of why service is so bad:  congestion, number of vehicles, operational screwups, or some other factors.

This work arises from the TTC’s oft-cited claim that they can only improve transit service with exclusive lanes.  That is a self-defeating position because the TTC will never get reserved lanes on most transit routes.  Rather than figuring out how a route might be improved, the TTC claims its hands are tied.  This is not a useful stance, but it’s sadly typical of an organization whose first response to criticism is (a) you’re wrong and (b)  someone else is responsible.

I remember the initial reaction to the Transit’s Lost Decade report that I did with Gord Perks (then at TEA).  The TTC huffed and puffed and said that service had not been cut so badly and how dare we say things like that … then there was a little pause … and finally they realized that this was just the ammunition they needed to beat the drum for better funding.  Suddenly then-CGM Rick Ducharme was quoting our figures as an example of how badly the system had deteriorated.

Service on major routes was cut through the 1990s by from 25 to 40 percent, and only recently have we seen some of this restored despite ongoing ridership growth.  One major constraint is the size of bus and streetcar fleets that declined to match the lower levels of service.  This only affects peak service capabilities.  Another change has been in the operator workforce through a combination of re-sizing to current service levels and of work rules restricting the length of the work day.  (This is due both to Provincial labour standards and revisions to the collective agreement.)

Traffic congestion is a problem in many areas, and the length of the peak period has definitely grown longer over past decades.  However, is congestion the only reason service is bad, or are other factors at work?  Are there problems with regularity of service and line management?  How often is scheduled service cancelled?  How often are there major blockages (especially a problem for streetcars) as opposed to random events, delays at busy stops for overcrowded vehicles and general congestion?

How effective is the TTC’s current vehicle monitoring system, CIS (Communications & Information System), in tracking vehicles and how well is the service managed?  The TTC is seeking information for a possible “next bus” announcement system.  Will this be compromised by an attempt to recycle decades-old CIS technology?  Will it include features needed to properly manage and report on actual service and operations?

In Setember 2006, I asked the TTC for sample data from CIS in an attempt to learn how vehicles actually behaved on various routes with the hope of identifying problem areas both for congestion, where it really exists, and in line management.  CIS is incapable of reporting on vehicle loads, and its data are not fine-grained enough to allow reporting on stop service times in most cases.  Therefore, my analysis has to concentrate on vehicle movements.

Through the fall, I worked through various sample sets of data refining the process of converting it to various usable formats, and by the end of the year had a workable version.  Based on this, I have obtained CIS data for all streetcar routes plus a number of major bus routes for December 2006.  This month contains a variety of days with good and bad weather, pre-Christmas shopping and a holiday week.

The King route received the first detailed analysis, and I will present excerpts from this here over the next few weeks.  I have begun work on the Queen line (and related routes Lake Shore, Downtowner and Kingston Road) and will comment on these as well.

All of the posts will be linked via their own topic “Service Analysis”.

Please stay tuned.

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How Long is it from Woodbine to Yonge?

In a separate thread here, there is an extensive discussion of whether it is faster to take the Queen car from Woodbine to Yonge, or to take a bus north plus two subway trips.  I originally quoted a running time of 20 minutes for this trip, but was subsequently convinced to up this to at least 25.

Recently, I began looking at the Queen car’s operating data for December 2006.  [For all of you who have been waiting, the grand work on King is now complete and I will be publishing a much abridged version here soon in installments.  In time I will also address the perennial Spadina vs Bathurst question.]

For the first three weeks of December, the running time from Woodbine to Yonge sits quite consistently on 25 minutes from about 7:30 am until 6:00 pm.  The spread in values ranges mainly from a low of 20 to a high of 30, although the majority of observations are within a few minutes of 25.  For trips leaving Woodbine from about 8:00 to 8:30, the running times can be extended to over 30 minutes although this tends to occur moreso on poor weather days.

A related problem is the reliability with which each scheduled car actually shows up for the peak inbound trip.  In my analysis on King, I had already discovered that several cars scheduled to pass through Parkdale during the height of the peak do not always show up, or show up late leading to erratic service just when it is most needed.  I looked for the same effect on Queen and was not surprised by what I found.

In the two hour period from 7:00 to 9:00, there should be about 25 cars westbound on Queen (I say “about” because the actual value is fractional thanks to the 4’52” headway).  As on King, some of these cars do not show up reliably or at all, at least east of Woodbine Loop, and the problem is more severe as the rush hour goes on.  Missing runs are particularly a problem starting around 8:00. 

This means that just at the point when most people want to get downtown for a start in the 8:30 to 9:00 period, the service gets reliably worse.  Because of crowding, this also means that travel times will be extended.

I have not yet had a chance to examine this in detail for the Queen route, but on King the origin of the problem is quite clear.  Some runs, especially those scheduled to enter service comparatively late, don’t always make it out of the carhouse, or if they do, they are late.  Those that are late are often short-turned, or make their trips well off-schedule.  Either way, they are missing from the time and the place when they are most needed.

The reason for this, I believe, is that these runs do not have assigned operators but use either staff from the Spare Board (operators with no assigned work who fill in for absences) or volunteers working overtime.  There is, of course, a good chance that the number of operators available for these runs will be lower on days when the weather is bad.  People who are marginally ill choose not to come in to work, and people who might take overtime prefer not to work in snowstorms.  Just when all the service is needed on the street, critical peak period cars are missing.

Intriguingly, there is very little variation through the day in running time over this section, and systemic traffic congestion does not appear to play a role in westbound trips over this segment of the route.

Often, I have discussed the question of the adequacy of service to meet demand, and the TTC routinely talks about the level of scheduled service.  The problem here is that anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the “scheduled” service may be missing on any weekday during the morning peak westbound at Woodbine.

Congestion is a serious problem on parts of the system.  However, this is not a question of transit priority or rights-of-way, this is a question of the TTC actually operating all of the scheduled service. 

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Mysteries of Poles on St. Clair

No, this is not a commentary about immigration, but about the seemingly mundane issue of street lighting, hydro and TTC poles on St. Clair Avenue.

Regular readers here will know that I am not impressed by designs including centre poles because:

  • they take up an extra metre of road space that could be used at the sidewalks,
  • they interfere with emergency vehicles (or even TTC buses) using the streetcar right-of-way, and
  • they are just not very attractive.

People involved with the project from both the City and the TTC have steadfastly maintained that these poles are essential to the project and that they were “selected” by public participation.  This is complete nonsense on both counts. Continue reading →

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Another View From The Beach [Updated]

I received the following comment from Tina R., and there are enough separate issues here that it deserves its own thread.  This deals with service to The Beach as well as general questions about buses versus streetcars and LRT, and express operations.

An update about running times on the Queen car, added on May 27, appears at the end of this post. 

Continue reading →

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Improving Service on King and Queen

[Those of you who want oodles of details won’t find a complex spreadsheet or chart here, and you will have to take some of the numbers on faith.  Trust me.  The reason for this post is to stimulate discussions and to ask the question “Why Not?”.]

We all know that service on the King and Queen routes leaves a lot to be desired, but little is done about the situation beyond the usual complaints of congestion and the need for an exclusive right-of-way.  Although major changes won’t happen until we have a larger fleet, improvements are still possible if only there is the will to make them.

I have been looking at a number of route configurations (some of you will know of my schemes for the Long Branch car), but believe that in the short term the first issue we must confront is the assignment of vehicle types to these two routes and the number of cars available for service.

My proposal, briefly, is that the King line operate exclusively with ALRVs and that Queen run with CRLVs.  Service and capacity would be increased in both cases.

The following discussion concerns the AM peak when service is at its height.  All other times of day would be adjusted accordingly. Continue reading →

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Shelters on St. Clair (Updated)

The TTC will install new shelters on St. Clair starting in late July.  They are currently at the stage of approving drawings for the manufacture of the shelters, then there will be a prototype, then the installation.

I can’t help wondering why on a project that has seen so many delays we are only just now getting around to the preliminary stages of building the shelters.  This is one more example of a project with equal measures of bad luck and bad planning.

On a brighter note, I was at a community meeting tonight regarding the detailed plans for this year’s construction between Westmount and McRoberts, and things went much more smoothly than the raucous gatherings of earlier times. 

Update May 9:  The presentation materials are available online.

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Jane’s Walk 2: My Home Streetcar Lines — Mt. Pleasant & St. Clair

Back in the days when goodly chunks of “the suburbs” were still farms, I grew up in North Toronto near Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton.  This neighbourhood dates from the building boom of the 1920s, although our house was older, 1906, the third one built in our block.  The old farmhouse up the road was replaced by two monster homes a few years ago, and now ours is number 2 in seniority.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time down at Mt. Pleasant Loop watching the streetcars.  This was a typical old style TTC loop with trees and benches, a house to the north and a BA gas station to the south right on the corner.  All of that’s gone now, and the loop is simply a hole in the front of seniors’ building where, infrequently, one can find a Mt. Pleasant bus.

The other corners held Ted’s Restaurant (gone — replaced like other stores around it with an ugly midrise office block), Eglinton Public School (replaced by a new building that turns its back on the intersection with a dead wall where once there was a playground), and the Bank of Commerce (now a Second Cup, but at least the original building).

Tracks ran west on Eglinton to Yonge, but these were never used for revenue service.  These had been installed in 1930 to allow operation of the St. Clair line from Eglinton Carhouse, but this never happened.  The junction at Mt. Pleasant came out in 1959, but the track to Yonge, buried under pavement, remained years longer until Eglinton was repaved. Continue reading →