Spadina Car

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Analysis of Route 510 Spadina — Part I: Introduction

The Spadina Streetcar has operated now for just over a decade. For all the problems of getting the project approved and built, there is no question that it has transformed travel on Spadina. With such intensive scheduled service and a complete right-of-way, we should have the best possible quality. This series of posts will examine the actual service in December 2006.

As usual, I will start with Christmas Day to introduce the analysis under the best-behaved conditions, and then I will move on to regular weekdays, and to the month as a whole. Among the major points I have found are:

  • The presence of a right of way greatly reduces the sort of variation seen over the course of the day on mixed-traffic routes, but does not eliminate it completely. As demand rises and falls, stop service times vary and this affects trip times.
  • Although the averages are well-behaved, the degree of variation is quite substantial. Indeed, given the short distances travelled, the amount of variation is comparable to that seen on the much longer mixed-traffic Queen route. This variation undermines the benefit of the right-of-way.
  • Some delays due to traffic signals are visible in the data, but the resolution of the TTC’s monitoring system (CIS) is such that I cannot report on this in detail.
  • Short-turning is a chronic problem at Queen’s Quay, and much of the service destined for Union Station never actually gets there. At first sight, I was reminded of Queen Street in the Beach when I reviewed the charts. This is no recommendation for the benefits of exclusive right-of-way.
  • Spadina is a route that demands management by headway, not by schedule. With extremely frequent service, the concept of being “on time” is meaningless to riders.

For those awaiting a review of a suburban bus route, please have patience. With all the discussions of service reliability on Queen, I thought it important to look at a route operating completely on reserved lanes to see just how it behaved.

For those who are new to this blog, I recommend reviewing the early posts about the King car in the Service Analysis category. The techniques used to distill the TTC’s data and present it for analysis are explained there in detail.

Continue reading →

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All Roads Lead to Spadina

With the construction projects now in progress, the service on Spadina Avenue is an impressive mixture of cars from other routes.  Scheduled PM peak service now consists of:

  • Spadina cars every 2 minutes from King north to Bloor
  • Queen cars every 5’30” from King to Queen
  • Bathurst cars every 5’20” from King to College

Some of the turns to and from Spadina have working transit priority signals, while others don’t and the streetcars have to fight their way through traffic.

Weekend service is almost as frequent especially when extras are thrown in on Queen and Bathurst to compensate for diversion delays.

The new Bathurst/Queen intersection is now assembled, and concrete placement was in progress on the north-east quadrant when I visited earlier today.  Once that work is out of the way, the new intersection track must be connected to the existing tangent rails in all four directions.

This intersection, like other recent work, includes a large amount of vibration insulation including rubber sleeves around the running rails, and rubber encapsulation of the castings except where they are bolted together.

Ed Drass passed one observation about the Bathurst service on to me:  Why is the Bathurst car diverting via College, thereby missing an important destination, Western Hospital, even though the track layout allows a diversion via Dundas?  Did the people planning the diversion not know a Dundas route was possible?  Is there any possibility of changing the diversion before north-south service resumes on November 5?

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Lost Signs: Hula Hoop Man

One of my favourite street signs has disappeared.

Northbound on Spadina Crescent at Russell Street, there is a pedestrian crossing into the grounds of 1 Spadina Crescent, originally Knox College.  There was also the standard “walking man” crossing sign in plain view especially to riders of the Spadina Streetcar as it rounded the circle.

Over a year ago, someone added a hula hoop giving the impression that, just maybe, 1 Spadina Crescent was home to an international competition — maybe the Hula Hoop Man was the only one still, er, standing after all these years.

Then, probably after the publicity it got, someone cleaned off the hoop, but the sharp-eyed could see a ghostly ring.  Who knows what Hula Hoop Man got up to in the dead of night, a spin or two by the moonlight.

Now, alas, there is a traffic light about to be activated and Hula Hoop Man is gone.

Let’s hope that his replacement doesn’t spend too much time holding up the Spadina streetcars.

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Ten Years of Spadina Streetcars

Today, July 27, 2007, marks the tenth anniversary of the Spadina streetcar/LRT.  Despite the transit crises of past weeks, we celebrate an important birthday for the Spadina line and for our transit system.

I started writing this piece for the Jane’s Walk series back in late April, but there was just too much else going on, and it didn’t get finished in time.

Without Jane Jacobs and the many who fought beside her, there would be no Spadina streetcar, the heart of the Annex would be an expressway, and the renaissance of Spadina south from College would not have happened.  Indeed, had the road designers had their way, Dundas would be widened out to six lanes through downtown to the DVP, and much of Chinatown would be arterial roads bereft of late 19th century architecture.

The many condos whose populations fill the King-Spadina-Front area would not be there because western downtown would be like so many other expressway cities, a sterile land of interchanges and new office blocks, but no people. Continue reading →