At the forum Tuesday evening, the TTC poured cold water on my proposal to swap the CLRV and ALRV fleets between the 501 Queen and 504 King routes claiming that their studies showed that headways below 4 minutes could not be operated reliably in mixed traffic.

Others commented on the length of time it takes to get from The Beach or Long Branch to downtown, and as the evening wore on, comparisons became as bloated as the headways on the 501.  One speaker claimed he could get from Buffalo to Toronto faster than a trip on the Queen car.

This post examines those two issues, and I will update this item if additional follow-up topics come to mind.

[Updated 4:20 pm, December 8:  Bad links to charts corrected plus minor textual revisions.] 

Continue reading →

In this installment, I turn to the question of whether all of the scheduled service actually shows up when and where it is intended during the AM peak.  Previously, in the analysis of 504 King, we saw that many cars intended to provide extra service through Parkdale and Bathurst-Niagara eastbound during the am peak either did not operate, or operated badly off schedule to the point where actual service was far different from advertised.

On 501 Queen, I will look at the route at a few points to show how this effect also is present and how it affects the service. Continue reading →

This is the final section of a three-part post about link times on the Queen Car.  Previous sections dealt with Neville to Yonge, and Yonge to Humber.  A detailed description of the concepts used in these analyses is in the first post.

Long Branch has been particularly hard hit by TTC service decisions over the years.  Originally a separate route, the 507 Long Branch car ran between Humber and Long Branch providing a 10-minute off-peak service and a 7-minute peak service supplemented by a few trippers than ran downtown to Queen & Church in the AM peak with outbound trippers in the PM.

This changed when the TTC amalgamated the 501 Queen service with the 507, and further with the replacement of CLRVs (50-foot cars) by ALRVs (75-foot cars).  The scheduled headway on Lake Shore is now:

• 9’45” AM Peak
• 11’00” Midday and PM Peak
• 14’45” Early evening M-F
• 20’00” Late evening M-F
• Saturday service ranges from 11’30” in the afternoon up to 18’00” in the late evening
• Sunday service ranges from 14’30’ in the afternoon up to 23’00” in the late evening

The posted schedules on the TTC’s website are a complete mess with irregular headways shown throughout the day.  This is clearly a problem with their schedule-production software which has been known to produce other gaffes in the generated timetables.  The fact that such timetables are created for public consumption with such glaring errors tells us a lot about quality control at the TTC.

It is bad enough that riders on Lake Shore must endure much wider scheduled headways than on many other parts of the system, but as we will see, the actual service provided is much, much worse.  When scheduled service is infrequent, provision of on time service, and all of the service, is essential. Continue reading →

This post continues the series looking at link times between various points on the Queen route.  The ideas behind this are discussed in more detail in Part V.  In brief, if we look at the time taken by every trip between two points, and we collect data from several similar days together (weekdays, weekends), we should see patterns that recur every day and can be planned for, as opposed to individual, unpredictable events.

The first post in this series dealt with the section from Neville to Yonge, and the next one will look at the section from Humber to Long Branch. Continue reading →

[My apologies in advance if you are getting tired of reading about the Queen car. In anticipation of the public meeting on this subject on Tuesday, December 4, I am trying to push a lot of material out the door.

[Updated at 7:45 pm December 2:  Full-month charts for headways at Woodbine bothways have been added to show the range of values over the entire month.]

This post concerns link times, something I didn’t go into in the previous series on the King Car (I will be adding a post on King link times soon).

First, a bit of background to explain why anyone should care about these charts.

If we break a route up into segments, we can look at the time taken by each vehicle to tavel from “A” to “B”, the beginning and end of the segment. If these times stay fairly steady over an entire day, then it follows that conditions at all times match those at the best of times. In other words there is no improvement to be achieved by relieving “congestion” or any other source of delay unless we can prove that it’s there all day, every day.

A related issue is the degree of scatter in the values. Even if the average stays constant, we could have widely varying individual times for each car. This would indicate something was happening to randomly delay cars over this segment of the line.

In many areas, we will see increases and decreases in the average time, as well as changes in the scatter of times showing conditions as they evolve over the day. Put multiple days’ data together on one chart, and we can see whether there are events on specific days that are out of the ordinary behaviour of the line. Such events cannot reasonably be planned for, although it would be helpful to have a routine strategy to deal with the common types of events (e.g. major events in The Beach, at City Hall, at the CHUM/City building).

This series of posts will look at the line from end to end to review the way each segment actually operated in December 2006. Continue reading →

Weekend operations on Queen have some problems in common with the weekday service, but these show up at different times and locations.  In place of rush hour effects, the line is affected by shopping and entertainment-related congestion that builds and ebbs over longer periods.

On Saturday, the service is reasonably well behaved until early afternoon, but at that point, bunching sets in.  As on weekdays, there appears to be no effort to space out the service and pairs of cars travel across the city together.  This is difficult to justify especially considering the long layovers most cars get at Humber and Long Branch. Continue reading →

December 4 was an odd day.  The weather was uneventful, and service on the nearby King route was well-behaved (see the analysis of 504 King).  CIS Control seemed to adopt an unusual strategy to “managing” the Queen service to the point that short turning must be described as “aggressive” if not “pre-emptive”.

• Most of the “Humber” service actually short-turned at Roncesvalles.
• Many of the cars on both branches short-turned at Woodbine Loop.
• There is little evidence of serious traffic congestion or major delays in the charts, but ragged headways and bunched cars were common.  

Continue reading →

December 1, 2006, was not a good day for transit operations.  As I have already discussed for the King route, it was probably the worst day of the month.  The weather was bad through the afternoon and early evening, and severe congestion problems affected many routes.

This is a contrast to Christmas Day, discussed in the previous post, where good weather coupled with little congestion or passenger surges made for ideal conditions.

Among the problems we will see for December 1 are:

• bunching of cars due to congestion
• pairs of cars running together over the entire route
• large gaps to the termini
• congestion, most severely in an area well away from downtown, and only in one direction

This shows what the line looks like under worst case conditions.  Even though the service is seriously disrupted, this data has important lessons about how the line is scheduled, managed and operated. Continue reading →