Now and then, in the interest of actually experiencing the wonderful transit system I write about so much, I make a longer-than-usual journey that could work brilliantly or be a complete disaster. Today was the occasion for such a journey.
My mission: Travel from Scarborough Town Centre starting at 5:30 pm to Fifth Street in New Toronto for a 7:30 pm meeting of the Lakeshore Planning Council. Continue reading
Robert Wightman sent in the following comment about problems maintaining service on, mainly, the streetcar system on Tuesday, March 25.
I spent yesterday afternoon rush hour working at home and listening to the scanner for TTC surface operations and this is what I heard.
Russell could not send out all scheduled service because they did not have enough equipment available. A car on Carlton and one on Queen went disabled and had to be pushed to Russell. This took 4 cars out of service and screwed up the lines for awhile. The line inspectors must know that a Commissioner lives in the Beach because they turned two WB cars at Russell and sent them back to Neville.
A fight broke out on a WB Queen car in front of the City Hall so the WB service went along Richmond to York thus bypassing the delay and the subway.
A Spadina car went disabled in the Station and had to be pushed out. They decided to push it out to the street before locking out the brakes, bad move as it lost air on the curve and they had to crank the brakes off. They could not use the spare track as there was a car using it to “dry out”. It was waiting for the emergency truck as it had no fans and the windows were too steamed up to see out. This screwed up Spadina for a while.
Another car broke a bar under the front truck and had to be escorted back to Russell by the emergency truck. Again there was no vehicle available to replace it.
The emergency trucks were running all over the system making minor repairs to cars that were still in service but had no heat, one wiper missing, doors that wouldn’t open, lights that didn’t work.
The subway had a train with a pair of cars that went disabled so they drove it onto the tail track at Finch until they could fix it.
The system is broke and it isn’t getting fixed. The Inspectors managed to find enough cars that were to run in to replace the missing cars after the rush hour. How much of the service problems are caused by equipment failures each day? Yesterday was not good weather but this still seemd like a lot of problems for one rush hour.
Both equipment and operator shortages remain a big problem especially for the streetcar system. We need some honest answers from the TTC about just how many cars are really available for service and why so many are sitting in the shop. I don’t think the situation has been presented with as much urgency as it deserves, and we still face the impact of having the St. Clair line fully back in operation sometime this fall or winter. New cars won’t be here for years, assuming we somehow find a way to find them this fall when it’s time to place the order.
[Updated March 17, 2008: I have received various comments with schemes for alternate ways to operate the 501/502/507 in various combinations. None of these will be posted here as this debate could go on forever. The next round in the discussion will come with the TTC’s own proposals expected in May.]
On March 6, Ed Drass wrote about the Queen car’s problems and the various options that might improve service, some day. The article is not yet up on the Metro News website, but the link here will take you to an index of Ed’s columns.
Recently, I received a long note from an operator about the problems of the new way the line is being managed. These are grouped in blocks by general subject with my own comments interspersed. Continue reading
If you don’t read spacing regularly, you must read Waiting for the 501.
Theatre and streetcars in the same post. Well, actually, no streetcars today, but maybe tomorrow.
A few items have come in recently about service on the 501 that continues to leave people waiting in the cold for ages. I have collected them here to start a new thread. Continue reading
Update 3: Here are preliminary comments on the report which is now available (see link below). I have left this as a single item so that the comment thread is kept together.
What is most striking about this report is the sound of multiple authors. One intently defends the status quo, while the other airs various problems at the TTC that have contributed to poor service.
We begin with the usual excuses about running streetcars in mixed traffic “where the TTC has no control over the multitude of factors which delay or obstruct service”. Later on, we hear about the difficulties of running a two-minute streetcar service even though (a) this has not been the case on Queen Street for decades and (b) the only place it does happen in mixed traffic is for the 45-minute eastbound wave on King in the am peak. These excuses are getting quite tiresome as anyone who has read my analyses of vehicle monitoring data for these routes will know.
There are all sorts of blockages, but true stoppage of service is rare. Yes, left turns can be a pain in the butt, but they are there every day, and the schedule can make provision for them. They are a chronic delay, not an unpredictable source of gaps in service.
The TTC’s actions over past years concentrated on on-time performance to the detriment of reliable service frequency, and the TTC acknowledges this. However, management tools (the CIS vehicle monitor) support schedule-based, not headway-based goals. Moreover, on-street route supervisors have no way of seeing the CIS data and must resort to the time-honoured tradition of peering into the fog to see where the next car might be.
CIS, as I have discussed elsewhere, does not yet use GPS technology and often errs in locating vehicles, especially when they are in an unexpected location such as a short turn or diversion. This makes line management more difficult at the precise time when it is so important.
Irregular departure times and the lack of headway management are big problems with off peak service even when there is no congestion or other interfering effects. The report is nearly silent on this issue, and speaks only of changes in route management and in the measures used to assess the quality of service.
We learn that vehicle reliability is not what it might be, and this affects both the number of cars available and the mix of CLRVs and ALRVs on the route. This is the first time the TTC has acknowledged that there are problems maintaining service due to vehicles. If the ALRV fleet is not reliable, why has the schedule not been adjusted to match the characteristics of the available fleet?
The TTC plans to split the route apart in the fall of 2008, and they now allow that service is worse on Lake Shore than it was before the 501/507 amalgamation in 1995. Why has it taken 13 years for the TTC to admit this?
As for workforce problems, we know that there are two issues. First, the number of operators available in December 2006 was not always enough to ensure that all scheduled runs left the carhouse, or at least did so on time. This may have improved in the intervening year and I hope this will be revealed when I get the CIS data for December and January. Oddly, the TTC blames workforce problems on growing demand on the system. That’s a strange tactic considering that service improvements planned for 2007 didn’t actually materialize, and moreover, what did come was mainly on the bus network.
I think that we are finally seeing some of the TTC’s dirty laundry coming out. Yes, running a streetcar system is no picnic, but there are several changes the TTC could implement to improve things. There is a strong culture in the TTC of blaming problems on external factors, but now they acknowledge that some are internal too.
How long has the TTC claimed that service problems are all beyond its control? How long have they advocated nothing less than a fully segregated lane for transit, something that is physically impossible on most streetcar routes?
It’s good to see this shift, but we need co-ordinated changes in operating practices, route management tools and organizational attitude.
I will add to this post later this evening. Continue reading
At its upcoming meeting, Etobicoke and York Community Council will consider an information report on the revitalization of Mimico. A great deal of the report concerns a public meeting held in June 2007 where, judging from the notes, there was much discussion and many ideas. Clearly people in Mimico want their neighbourhood to improve its look, its economy and its attractiveness without simply yielding to piecemeal, uncontrolled development.
Mimico is one of the old towns on the Lake Shore highway west of Toronto. The study area lies between Park Lawn Road (just west of Humber Loop) and Royal York Road. This area has a mix of residential uses with high-rise condos west from Park Lawn and an established low-rise neighbourhood of houses and small apartment buildings east from Royal York. There is a small commercial area around Mimico Road.
Although the report deals with a variety of issues affecting Mimico’s future, transit does pop up here are there with some interesting comments including:
Local service was once an important function of the 507 Long Branch car when it operated as a separate route. Since its integration with 501 Queen, service west of Humber Loop is unreliable with very wide gaps in service caused by short turns. Some cars that do get west of Humber short-turn at Kipling (18th Street) and miss serving the outer end of the route to Brown’s Line (40th Street). Service that does reach Long Branch does not run on a reliable schedule.
The proposal for a local “shopping fare” echoes the existing arrangement on St. Clair West where a time-based pass using transfer is in effect to encourage system use during the right-of-way construction project. Whether we get time-based fares on the TTC as part of a smart-card project (e.g. one “fare” provides up to two hours of riding regardless of direction or stopovers) remains to be seen, but this would extend the concept system wide.
A separate express route to downtown will arrive as and when the Waterfront West LRT is actually built. This project is now in the EA stage looking at the section between the CNE and Sunnyside where there is some debate about the appropriate alignment and the number of stations to serve south Parkdale.
Extending the right-of-way to Long Branch Loop won’t make much difference in transit operations given the current lack of serious congestion. No choke points showed up in my review of TTC’s vehicle monitoring data from December 2006 for this segment of the route.
The important thing will be to provide good, reliable service on Lake Shore, something that can be done by giving southern Etobicoke back its own route. The eastern terminus is a matter for discussion, but the service should definitely be independent of the 501 Queen car.
Park Lawn Loop is one of those TTC mysteries. It is a remnant of the original WWLRT proposal and has the distinct odour of a scheme to allow abandonment of the streetcar line west of Etobicoke Creek. However, the WWLRT is now part of Transit City and it goes all the way to Long Branch. Is Park Lawn an appropriate place to relocate the Humber Loop terminal?
Finally, I cannot help but worry about calls for more parking. What this shows is that people don’t have any faith in the surface transit system to get them where they want to go, and they are now focussed on rapid transit lines, particularly the Bloor subway, for east-west travel. Some of this will be demographic change, but some will be the long-term effect of decline in east-west streetcar service.
As Mimico and the communities west to Long Branch redevelop, good transit will be essential.
Intrepid travellers, egged on by rosy tales in National Geographic, may find themselves attempting a round trip on the 501. All manner of dangers lie in wait for the unwary — just to get started, you have to actually find a Queen car at Neville Loop!
As a public service, I have reviewed the Queen car data to see what might await our adventurers. [Yes, you thought I was finished with the 501, didn’t you. Fooled you!] Continue reading
Today’s Star contains a pair of articles by Tess Kalinowski and Christopher Hume on the joys of the Queen car. Recently, National Geographic listed the 501 as one of the world’s ten top streetcar rides in Journeys of a Lifetime. Some riders may feel that’s an apt description of their typical journey.
A few nuggets from the TTC in the article show that this organization still refuses to understand and accept its own role in the destruction of riding on this line. Marilyn Bolton, speaking for the TTC, is quoted:
Much of the 501’s ridership decline coincided with the expansion of the Bloor-Danforth subway and the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, according to the TTC.
“Riders moved up (north) to take advantage of the new subway lines and moved away from the Queen streetcar,” said Bolton.
A look at the statistics [discussed here on December 11] shows that ridership on the Queen Street corridor fell during a period long after the Bloor Subway opened in 1966 (extended to Islington and Warden in 1968, then to Kipling and Kennedy in 1980).
That old chestnut about congestion shows up again:
The sheer length of the route is also a problem. When a car blocks a streetcar by making an illegal left turn or someone parks on the tracks or some other delay occurs on the line, the reverberations travel a long way.
As my analyses of operations on streetcar routes have shown quite clearly, major blockages of service are rare and the disarray in operations can be traced substantially to poor line management and dubious on-time performance even when there is no external source of delays. Without question, the length of the route magnifies any event, but minor delays are a fact of life for transit operations.
The article also includes a claim that it takes up to five hours to make a trip on Queen. That’s for a round trip, not a one-way, and even then, this is a rare situation belonging to major storms and regional traffic snarls.
If riders migrated north to the BD subway, they were driven away by poor, unreliable service on Queen. After the Fix the 501 Forum, the TTC claims it will change its operations and address reliability issues. Inventing new excuses for driving away riding at a rate unmatched elsewhere on the system is no way to tackle the problem.
For those of you who have been wondering, this is the end of the series of posts analyzing service on 501 Queen and related routes. Unless someone comes up with a really interesting question that deserves further public discussion here, I am now going to focus on other lines. [You can stop cheering any time now.]
The Lake Shore Tripper, for those who don’t even know it exists, is a remnant of the old Long Branch to downtown service that was a rush-hour extension of Long Branch cars (before they were called route 507) to Church Street via Queen. Inbound trips operated in the am peak, outbound in the pm peak.
When the Queen and Long Branch routes merged, this service disappeared, but in due course we got a new route, 508 Lake Shore running from Long Branch Loop to Church Street via King. Three trips operate inbound in the am peak, and four in the pm peak, at least on the schedule. This post looks at how these trips behave and how, for the am peak, they merge with the 501 Queen service on Lake Shore. Continue reading
Steve Munro 