Service Analysis

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My Little Jaunt to Forest Hill

This evening, I attended a concert at Grace Church in Forest Hill.  Because I was coming from Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton, the logical way to get there was to go to St. Clair Station, take the 512 bus, and then walk north on Russell Hill.  My experience shows that the TTC still doesn’t get it. 

I arrived at the Pleasant Boulevard loop in time to see the 7:25 South Leaside trip sitting on the platform.  No St. Clair bus.  After a 10 minute wait, one arrived, but it parked down at the far end of the loop for a crew change.  About 5 minutes later, a second bus arrived and parked behind the first one.  It was now 7:40 and I was in danger of missing my concert.

I walked out to St. Clair and Yonge (if I got really lucky, the first bus might make it to the stop by the time I got there), and found that a third bus was coming east on St. Clair.  This means that 3 of the 4 buses on the route (on a 7 minute headway no less) were at one end of the line.

I took a cab.

The TTC is fond of telling us how it will build ridership for new rapid transit lines by running really good surface routes in anticipation.  The 190 Rocket from Don Mills Station to STC is a good example, and ridership is building up on this route (although to nowhere near subway levels). 

The service on St. Clair is a disgrace that bears absolutely no relationship with the schedule.  This is not the first time I have found packs of buses and seen long layovers at St. Clair Station.  Please don’t tell me about traffic congestion.  There was none.  If anything, the TTC is driving riders away from St. Clair, a line that is to be the shining example of what we can do with LRT.

Memo to both the TTC and the ATU:  Better service means more riders.  “Better” includes properly managed, well-spaced, predictable service.  More riders means more justfication for expanding the system, and more work for union members.

Also, someone might like to take down the timetable for the Christie bus as well as the handwritten sign telling people that both the Christie and Vaughan buses will take them along St Clair.  They don’t run to St. Clair Station any more.

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Always A Car In Sight

That, believe it or not, used to be the TTC’s slogan years ago when transit service was a far more important part of the life of Toronto than it is today.  Three love affairs have brought us to where we are now:

  • The automobile
  • The subway which moves huge numbers of people provided they’re going where one was built
  • Tax cuts and changes in public spending priorities

From time to time, people ask me both about how service has declined and about the practical limits on streetcar service.  I am not going to pretend that the answer to our problems is to build streetcar lines running in mixed traffic everywhere.  For one thing, there’s a lot more of that “mixed traffic” than there used to be.  But it’s interesting to see what streetcars were doing even well into the “modern” automotive era. Continue reading →

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Service For January 2007

January 2007 does not bring much in service changes beyond the return of streetcars to St. Clair west of the Spadina Subway.  Buses will continue to run east to Yonge Street until, it is hoped, the middle of February.

The RT will continue to operate with buses on Sundays to allow testing of the new RT signal system.  As a regular user of this line, I am looking forward to it actually working on those cold mid-winter days (which surely will be here eventually) when the old system regularly froze up.

There are several minor changes in running times and a few added trips here and there, but nothing major in improved service.  Current expectations are that we won’t see anything significant until the fall when sufficient operators, buses, and budget headroom will, in theory, be available.

Meanwhile, the list of services that should be improved or operated, but are not due to funding and other constraints, continues to grow. Continue reading →

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Howard Levine Writes About St. Clair

Howard Levine, a former member of City Council and one of the founding members of Streetcars for Toronto back in 1972, writes in today’s National Post about the St. Clair project.  Howard and I sit on opposite sides of the St. Clair fence these days — I still believe in the scheme and wish it were done better, while he sees it as irredeemably flawed.  I share his despair that what we fought for in 1972 took so long to achieve and was such a botched piece of design and community relations. Continue reading →

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St. Clair Update

Christopher Hume has a column in today’s Star about the St. Clair line (Click here) where he discusses the gap between theory and practice in major urban design/construction projects.

This morning, CBC’s Metro Morning had a discussion about the impact on businesses with the owner of the Retro Cafe (at Vaughan and St. Clair) and David Crichton, the city’s manager for design and construction.  With luck this may show up later today as a podcast on the CBC site here.  It may have been early in the day, but Crichton continued the city’s unhappy stance of saying “it’s too bad, but we have to rebuild the street” while ignoring that the design and the construction phasing have considerable impacts. Continue reading →

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How Joe Mihevc Got Conned On St. Clair [Updated]

[I received a very long response to this item via email which contains enough information that I believe it is worth having alongside the original post here.  I have added it below.]

Back in the dark ages when we had public participation meetings on St. Clair, there was a huge amount of concern about intersection design and curb cuts.  The folks along St. Clair were deeply suspicious, and rightly so.  As I have often written, the road engineers cannot be trusted with anything and need to be wrestled to the ground for the slightest design improvements.

Then, finally, construction started.  I had talked to Councillor Mihevc several times about the need to corral the engineers, and met with him and Jim Teeple, the TTC’s project manager, in the cafe over Loblaw’s one day.  I was assured that Joe had his eyes open and was working hard to minimize the intrusions of the project.

That was when the project stopped at the east ramp into St. Clair West Station.

Then something odd happened.  In the interest of speeding up construction, the work for 2006 was extended west to Vaughan Road.  What we now see is the same ridiculous curb cuts that were in the original TTC plans, and which many had assumed we would be able to fix as part of the detailed design for the section from Bathurst west.

It didn’t happen.  The road folks got their widenings, the community got ridiculously narrow sidewalks, and Joe has turned into an apologist for this outrage.

Now we have to go into detailed design for the next section actually believing that we have a chance to get proper treatment for pedestrians and businesses along the street.

The TTC and Council must insist that roads be designed for people and neighbourhoods, not just for cars. Continue reading →

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What’s Up On St. Clair? (With A Glance at Spadina)

Today’s Star has an article about the ongoing woes of construction activity on St. Clair.  I will leave you to read the text yourself, but there are a few important points that deserve comment.

The intention of the right-of-way is not to save time, it is to make the service reliable.

Well, yes, but saving time wouldn’t hurt either.  Indeed, if the service is reliable, then people would not have interminable waits for a car that eventually shows up as a pack.  This will probably save more time than anything else. Continue reading →

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Waterfront West and St. Clair LRT Projects

St. Clair Streetcars Return in Late November

The St. Clair line will resume streetcar operation on the last weekend of November 2006 when trackwork from Vaughan Road to St. Clair Station and elevator construction at that station will be completed.  We will have wonderful new track and maybe even working priority signalling (although I doubt we will actually see that for years, if ever), but the cars will still tiptoe over the rotten track at St. Clair West Station whose loop won’t be redone until next year.  So much for good construction planning.

There are rumblings that the section from Vaughan to Keele won’t be finished in 2007, but I have not tracked down anything definitive on that.  As for a possible extension beyond Keele, this is mired in redesign of the underpass at Dundas, Scarlett Road and St. Clair.

Isn’t it nice to know transit has such a high priority?

Waterfront West

Meanwhile, work is underway on the EA for the Roncesvalles to CNE portion of the waterfront line.  The TTC has the good sense to recognize that running this service into downtown via the Tonnerville Trolley operation on Queen’s Quay is a non-starter, and they are looking at branching off from Fleet Street via Fort York/Bremner Boulevards coming into Union Station in a tunnel along the north side of the Air Canada Centre.

No word yet on a redesign of Union Station Loop to handle the substantial additional loads that the eastern and western waterfront lines will bring.

All this will, of course, require funding for construction and for additional vehicles. 

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A Short Trip to Long Branch

A few days ago, I set out to visit friends in darkest Long Branch (for an East Ender, Long Branch is near the edge of the planet).  My destination, roughly, was Lake Shore and 32nd Street.  I had a few choices of how to get there from home base at Broadview Station:

  1. Subway to Kipling, 44 Kipling South to Lake Shore, 501 Queen to 30th Street
  2. Subway to Islington, 110 Islington South (30th Street branch) to Lake Shore
  3. Subway to Dundas West, 504 King to Sunnyside, 501 Queen to 30th Street

Being a streetcar fan, and trusting on the speedy service available on the broad boulevards of Queensway and Lake Shore, I chose option 3. Continue reading →

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St. Clair Update

Construction is finally underway west from Avenue Road and St. Clair to Tweedsmuir.  At this point, the work is on sidewalks and utilities, but you can see the extent of the road widening from the cuts into lawns between Avenue Road and Russell Hill.  Traffic in the construction area is now confined, more or less, to the streetcar lanes in the middle of the road. Continue reading →