Many service changes come into effect for September 2010. These will include both the reversal of the normal summer cuts as well as improvements to deal with growth in demand.
Please refer to my article on the June 2010 schedule changes for a list of the summer service cuts that will end in September.
Updated June 3, 2010:
On June 2, the Commission didn’t decide to implement the 507 Dundas West option (described below), but didn’t kill off the idea entirely either. Some Commissioners balked at the $825k/year pricetag, but the greatest failing was the lack of strong support from the local Councillor who is not a member of the Commission.
I had the sense that individual Commissioners wanted to do what they could to improve service on Lake Shore, but could not figure out a way to do so without out appearing to overrule staff and give in to a local pleading, especially in an election year.
There was a side discussion of the Park Lawn Loop whose installation would extend the 501 Humber service a short distance westward providing better service to some of the Humber Bay condo area, but this project is one of many competing for capital funds in a tight budget.
The motions passed by the Commission were:
Vice-Chair Mihevc:
That the Lakeshore Boulevard Streetcar service matter be referred to staff for consideration during the 2011 budget process.
Commissioner Milczyn:
That TTC staff consult with City Transportation staff on the possibility of constructing a portion of the civil works related to roads, curbs, sidewalks and utilities required for the Parklawn Loop in conjunction with road construction this year, and further authorize the Chair and Vice-Chair to approve any reallocation of funds required for this.
Commissioner Moeser:
The Chief General Manager be authorized within his authority spending level of $100,000.00 to approve any pro-active work considered appropriate for the proposed Park Lawn Loop.
[From draft minutes of the meeting supplied by the General Secretary’s office.]
I spoke to the subject, but nobody from the community appeared probably due to timing constraints and a sense that deputations would be fruitless in the face of TTC staff’s position on the matter.
The original post follows the break.
Updated May 7, 2010 at 12:10 am: On May 6, the TTC directed staff to report back to the June Commission meeting with further analysis of the Dundas West option for the Long Branch service. With luck, this will give staff a chance to moderate their position and show real tradeoffs between the pros and cons of this proposal.
Updated May 6, 2010 at noon: My presentation to the TTC is linked here for convenience.
Updated May 5, 2010 at 09:50 am: By popular demand, charts sho wing the distribution of headways by length of hadway, time of day and date have been added.
Updated May 4, 2010 at 12:45 pm: Charts have been added showing the proportion of service reaching various locations on the route by date and time of day.
Updated May 3, 2010 at 11:30 am: Comments and charts showing the headways on Lake Shore have been added.
As a follow-up to the question of splitting the Queen car back into separate routes with a dedicated service on Lake Shore Boulevard West, I crunched through the vehicle monitoring data for that route for October and November 2009. These data were obtained to allow an analysis of the Dufferin/Broadview split operation, but I have been pre-occupied with other things and have not published any comments yet on what seemed to be a dead issue.
The analysis here looks at only one aspect of the route, the service on the west end of the 501 Queen line.
The TTC agenda for May 6 includes a report on the proposed restructuring of route 501 Queen in two optional ways:
Needless to say, TTC staff recommend against any changes.
The Humber option never made sense because:
Since the construction of much new development on The Queensway, the provision of reliable service is more important than ever.
The Dundas West option is designed to address several problems, none of which are addressed by the TTC report:
The TTC report lists many favourable aspects of the 507 Dundas West option:
On the down side, the TTC claims:
After all of this, the report concludes that “overall, the change would make service better for customers”.
However, the TTC rejects the scheme because it is estimated to have a marginal cost of about $825k annually. As mentioned above, they give no credit for the value of the additional capacity provided on the King line by reassignment of equipment nor for the ridership effect of more reliable service. Indeed, the only ridership change the TTC cites is the potential loss of 300 rides per day from the loss of a transfer-free trip through Humber Loop.
In discussing the route’s history, the TTC states that the amalgamation in 1995 was intended to eliminate the transfer at Humber. What they omit is that this change was made primarily to reduce operating costs. The decline in service quality west of Humber has long been a complaint from the community, and it is a direct result of the restructuring coupled with general service cutbacks on streetcar routes through the 1990s.
The report includes a chart showing ridership declines on the route, and the TTC argues that the fall occurred before the routes were amalgamated due to declining employment. The TTC neglects to mention a large cut in service on the Long Branch car in the early 1990s that drove away riding even before the route’s amalgamation with the Queen car.
An important note about the Long Branch route, something evident in a previous TTC report on the subject and to anyone who rides the line, is that there is considerable local demand that never gets east of Humber Loop. Service that is managed (and short turned) on the basis of somewhat empty vehicles at Roncesvalles will short-change riders who don’t board until west of Humber. This is particularly so during off-peak periods.
The TTC report is self-serving with selective analysis intended to put their preferred option, do nothing, in the best possible light.
At a minimum, the TTC needs to carry out a trial operation of the 507 Dundas West option following restorarion of streetcar service on Roncesvalles late in 2010. This trial needs to run long enough to allow meaningful analysis. A related service change should be improvement of the 508 Lake Shore route to provide more through peak period trips to and from downtown via King Street.
Construction diversions on several routes will begin or continue in May.
504 King and 508 Lake Shore:
King cars will continue turning back at Roncesvalles and Queen, but will reach there via Shaw and Queen Streets. Watermain construction which last year caused Roncesvalles to be torn up last year moves to King between Ronces and Jameson.
The 504 shuttle bus will be rerouted and extended to run between Shaw and Dundas West Station bothways via Roncesvalles looping via Strachan, Douro and Shaw.
No date has been set yet for resumption of streetcar service on Roncesvalles, but this is expected to be in the late fall. The diversion via Queen and Shaw is expected to last to the end of August 2010.
502 Downtowner and 503 Kingston Road Tripper
The reconstruction of Bingham Loop, deferred from 2009, will occur this summer. Buses will replace streetcars over both routes until mid-August.
Replacement bus services will loop via Victoria Park, Meadow and Blantyre to Kingston Road. The peak service on both routes will be improved from 7’30” to 6’00”, but offpeak service on the 502 will remain at 20′.
22 Coxwell and 70 O’Connor
Reconstruction of the bus loop at Coxwell station requires the removal of all bus service. Routes 22 and 70 will interline, and all of the “O’Connor” service will run through to Queen or to Victoria Park depending on the time of day.
Existing interlines between the O’Connor, Gerrard and McCowan routes will be discontinued during this period.
72 Pape
Construction at Pape Station requires that the Pape bus be rerouted to loop at Donlands Station. Passengers transferring to this route from the subway at Pape will do so using on street stops. This diversion will last until the end of 2010.
The seasonal extension to Cherry Beach will operate during the evenings Monday to Friday, and all day on weekends and holidays. This will run until Labour Day.
512 St. Clair
The mixed streetcar and bus operation on St. Clair is expected to last until the latter part of June 2010 at which point the TTC hopes to restore streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop.
509 Harbourfront and 510 Spadina
The seasonal fare collection scheme on Queen’s Quay will be in effect until Labour Day. No fares will be collected eastbound on Queen’s Quay between Bathurst and Union Station on weekends after 3 pm, and there will be collectors stationed in the tunnel linking the Union Station Loop to the subway.
One PCC car will operate on the Harbourfront route on Sundays until September 5, 2010 between 1130 and 1930. This will run as an extra, and will be subject to availability of both a car and an operator.
Seasonal Route Extensions
Other Route Changes
Service Level Changes
Many route have new schedules starting on May 9 primarily for seasonal changes in demand. The details are in a spreadsheet linked below.
The supplementary agenda for January’s TTC meeting includes a report on the various experiments with Queen car operations. Unsurprisingly, it concludes that the split route operation was an abject failure, and recommends that the “step forward” crewing technique be formally implemented on the route during periods when the line is subject to disruption. This scheme keeps operators on time but allows vehicles to continue without short turning.
I will not comment in detail on this report until after the Commission meeting and any discussions there. At this point, I am still waiting for vehicle monitoring data for October and November 2009 so that I can perform a detailed analysis of the split and “normal” operations.
Because this report deals only with the various operational models actually tried to date, there is no discussion of alternative route structures such as splitting off the 507 in some form as a dedicated Long Branch service. I suspect that any mention of this would trigger a “we tried to split the route and it didn’t work” response even though the Dufferin/Broadview split was a completely different design than, say, a 507 service to Dundas West Station.
This post will be updated with further comments or information when available.
Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of flak about LRT proposals for Toronto. Some folks imply that I am personally responsible for leading one or more generations of politicians astray, and that LRT is an invention of my very own with which, like the Pied Piper, I have lured the city away from its true destiny, a network of subways and expressways.
That is an exaggeration, but there are times I wonder at the powers claimed for me, and wish I had taken up a career as a paid lobbyist.
In fact, there was a time when the TTC was considering a suburban LRT network of its own, one that bears some resemblance to plans we are still discussing today, four decades later.
To set the stage, here is an article from the Globe and Mail of September 18, 1969 about the new life Toronto’s streetcars would find in Scarborough. Included with the article was a photo of a train of PCCs on Bloor Street at High Park, and a map of the proposed network.
The TTC’s hopes for streetcars on their own right-of-way are a bit optimistic, and it’s intriguing how the ranges seen as appropriate for various modes have all drifted down over the years. All the same, it was clear that the TTC had an LRT network in mind and was looking eventually for new cars for that suburban network. It didn’t happen, of course, because Queen’s Park intervened with its ill-fated high-tech transit scheme.
A few things on the map are worth noting. North York and Scarborough Town Centres are still “proposed” as is the Zoo. There is a proposed Eglinton subway from roughly Black Creek to Don Mills, and the proposed Queen Street subway turns north to link with the Eglinton line and serve Thorncliffe Park. The network includes links to the airport from both the Eglinton and Finch routes.
I didn’t invent this plan, and Streetcars for Toronto was still three years in the future. Somehow, the TTC and Toronto lost their way, and what might have been the start of a suburban transit network, years before the development we now live with, simply never happened.
One of the joys of year-end housecleaning is that I run across old files — letters and reports from bygone days that show how much, or how little has changed over the years.
Back in 1984, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee conducted a detailed survey of streetcar route operations with particular attention to short turns. We presented our manually collected findings in a manner that will be familiar to readers of this post from the detailed reviews of lines’ operation as graphic timetables.
That study prompted the TTC to commission the Joint Program in Transportation at the UofT to make a detailed, formal study of the Queen car. In due course, that study reported and the findings came to the Commission.
In time, I may dig out and publish all of that material, but one letter says far more than the studies. In April 1985, Alderman Dorothy Thomas (the title had not yet become “Councillor”) who represented the Beach wrote to Julian Porter, then Chair of the TTC, about the study. Her letter shows much of the same frustration with the TTC’s attitude to service quality and management as we have seen over the past quarter-century. (Note that I have scanned in only the text from the letter and have dropped the graphics such the Council letterhead.)
At the time, the Queen route still operated with four-axle cars (PCCs and CLRVs), and had not yet experienced the wonders of wider headways with six-axle ALRVs nor the service cuts of the mid-90s.
Recently, the TTC attempted a trial operation with a split route using turnbacks at Shaw and at Parliament. I have requested but still have not yet received the vehicle monitoring data for the months of October and November 2009 that would allow a detailed review of that operation nor of the “standard” arrangements in place for part of each month and on weekends.
What we do know is this:
A report on the split operation is expected early in 2010, but based on what I saw and heard, it will confirm what some TTC management probably wanted to demonstrate all along, that the community and the advocates should keep their fingers out of operational planning.
Among the comments in Alderman Thomas’ letter we see both how the TTC’s characterization of problems does not fit with empirical data, and that some problems arose simply from the way the line is managed.
Back in 1984/5, it was sad to see how much the TTC attempted to deny the problems they had with service reliability, and the degree to which they simply did not collect real data in the field. Twenty-five years later, the TTC is doing some internal analysis of data from the vehicle monitoring system (CIS), but I have still not seen anything as sophisticated as the articles published here.
I’m an “amateur”, albeit one with a very strong IT background and a talent for making sense out of the large amounts of CIS data. The TTC has never invited me to discuss my work, nor to make suggestions either for improvements or corrections to the methodology.
We’re all still waiting for “Next Bus” to be rolled out with online route displays of anything more than the Spadina and Harbourfront lines even though the contract for this system was awarded over three years ago.
When many routes appeared, briefly, in a beta version of the system, but with less than stellar accuracy in displays, we were told that the problem lay with the completion of the GPS rollout. Either that rollout is going much more slowly than planned, or there are still problems handling additional routes. We’ve seen publicity shots of central dispatchers looking at the Queen car on a real map, not a bare-bones text display from the dawn of CIS. Why are these displays not available to the public?
Promises of new, accurate information channels for TTC riders come frequently, but I can’t help feeling a lot of them short-turn well before they reach their destinations.
Updated November 7 at 11:35 am:
The proposed site for the new streetcar loop sits on the east side of Broadview just north of Queen, and this would make the entrance curves quite close to the Queen Street intersection. Normally this is the sort of configuration traffic planners hate as cars would have to turn off Queen onto Broadview, slow for the northbound facing switch (with the butt end of the car still sitting in the intersection) and then proceed into the loop. A far from ideal arrangement.
The existing parking lot’s rates are 75 cents per half hour to a $4 maximum before 6 pm, and a $3 maximum overnight. At those rates, the atttraction is for long-term parking, not for local shopping.
The TTC has done without Parliament Loop for years and nearby around-the-block loops are quite adequate for buses.
A proposal many years back to build a new streetcar loop here for the King route was cancelled for budgetary reasons, and more recently Cherry Street Loop has been talked up as a turnback. Other than as a possible eastern terminus for a split Queen car, the need for a new loop at Broadview is hard to understand, especially at the expense of a local parking lot.
The proposed new parking site on the west side of Broadview just north of Thompson Street appears as a vacant lot in the satellite view on Google. It is currently occupied by a temporary building which was a sales office for a proposed condo that was completely out of keeping with the neighbourhood and was rejected by Council. As I noted in the comment thread, a smaller loop could be built using this land, Thompson Street and the laneway connecting the two. This would leave the Legion’s building in the middle of the loop on the northwest corner. Why the TTC insisted on taking the larger parking lot for a proposed loop, a project that is not even in the Capital Budget, I don’t know.
Original Post:
Buried in the November 9 agenda for Toronto’s Government Management Committee is a report detailing an exchange of properties between various agencies. One of these is the old Parliament Loop at King Street where an archeological dig has been in progress — this is part of the site of Ontario’s first Parliament Building.
In order to assemble the historic site for public use, there will be a swap of various chunks of land between private owners, the Ontario government, the Toronto Parking Authority and the TTC.
There is now a parking lot on the east side of Broadview just north of Queen, and this would become a new streetcar loop. Although this would be a handy place to short-turn 504 King cars (rather than looping via Parliament and Dundas), it could also be an eastern terminal for a split Queen route should this be implemented on roughly the current route model.
Recent comments in the thread regarding the split operations on 501 Queen, as well as a reported incident where an operator was unaware that GO Transit could be used as a “bridge” between two TTC routes, led me to send questions for clarification to the TTC’s Director of Corporate Communications, Brad Ross.
Here, with my comments, are the replies. The questions have been slightly reformatted so that they can stand outside of the context in which they were written. Continue reading
Steve Munro 
