St. Clair Car

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St. Clair Spring 2009 Update

When I contemplated a title for this article, I felt compelled to include the year simply because this project has gone on for, it seems, forever.  The Environmental Assessment started formally in September 2003.  Detailed community consultation on the approved project began in February 2005.  By way of an attempted legal derailing and reordering of project priorities, we come now to almost the last year of construction.  I say “almost” because the 2009 project will almost certainly spill over into 2010 if past experience is any evidence.

For the benefit of readers who don’t get a chance to visit the line regularly, here is the status as seen on a field trip by your interpid reporter yesterday, March 16. Continue reading →

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Analysis of Route 512 St. Clair — Part 3: When Things Go Wrong

In this, the final installment of the St. Clair analysis, I will look at the problem of short turning, as well as the details of operations on some days when service was disrupted. 

Previous installments included full-month charts of headway and link time behaviour.  To start off here, the chart linked below shows the destinations and spacings of cars westbound from Yonge Street.  As in previous route analyses, the spacing between the vertical bars allows quick identification of headway irregularities, and the length of the bars shows how far the cars actually went on the line.

Westbound Destinations from Yonge

A few caveats in reading the charts:

  • Only cars (and buses) leaving Yonge Street westbound are shown.  If a westbound trip originated at St. Clair West Station, it is not included.
  • When I did the analysis, there were reference points at Bathurst and at Dufferin.  The short turn charts cannot distinguish between cars going only to Vaughan (and thence to Roncesvalles Carhouse) and those going to Oakwood because both points are in between the same pair of reference locations.  Reasonable assumptions about which destination applies can be based on the time of day when a westbound carhouse trip is likely, or not.  (This is a problem of my own creation by the choice of reference points and has nothing to do with the TTC’s data.)
  • Starting at about 11am on Friday, April 20 through Sunday, April 22, streetcar service operated between Yonge and St. Clair West Station with buses going further west.  A few trips show up on the “short turn charts” which were operated by buses that came through to Yonge Street and therefore were picked up in the westbound analysis.

Continue reading →

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Analysis of Route 512 St. Clair — Part 2: Headways and Link Times

In the previous article, I reviewed the operation of the St. Clair route on Easter Sunday, 2007, as a starting point for a review of the route’s overall behaviour.  In this post, I will turn to data for the entire month that shows overall patterns and the amount of variation we might expect to find.

If the headways (the time between successive cars) range over a wide band, then service is perceived as irregular by riders regardless of what the printed timetable may say, and regardless of the “average” loads riding counts might report over an hourly period.  When headways are a mix of long and short values, the cars on long headways will carry heavier loads and the “average” experience for a rider is that they wait a long time for an overcrowded car.  The half-empty one a few minutes behind is little benefit to anyone, but it brings down the “average” load in the statistics.

Link times (the length of a journey from one point to another) reveal how predictable (or not) the time needed for a car to travel along a route will be.  If link times are consistent, this indicates that external effects (including unusual loads that stretch stop service times) are rare.  Even if the times vary over the course of a day, but do so within a predictable, narrow band, a route should be fairly easy to manage.  If the times vary a lot with no obvious pattern or are scattered within a wide band, then running times and service are hard to manage.

In reviewing St. Clair, I found that the operating environment, as it existed in April 2007, was quite benign compared to routes like King and Queen, the subject of previous analyses here.  This has important implications for the right-of-way project now underway on this route.  Congestion and random delays do play some role, but not an overwhelming one, in service quality.  Reducing the impact of congestion when and where it occurs will be beneficial, but more is needed than just getting autos out of the streetcars’ way to ensure reliable service. Continue reading →

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Analysis of Route 512 St. Clair — Part I: Introduction

If we try very hard, we can remember a time when the St. Clair line was not under construction.  With last year’s project still unfinished, and this year’s barely underway, it will be a while before we see streetcars running all the way from Yonge to Keele.

For a brief period in 2007, the line was back in one piece, and as a “before” comparator of operating conditions, I asked the TTC for the vehicle monitoring data (CIS) for the month of April.  We won’t be to an “after” condition until early in 2009 when this year’s project is completed and only the stretch from Caledonia westward remains to be rebuilt.

Rather than wait, I decided to spin through the April 2007 data to see what they revealed.  What I found was disquieting especially considering all the hooplah around the construction of a dedicated right-of-way.

Although congestion does affect the line in some places and at some times, the overwhelming source of headway variation is the time spent sitting at the terminals and, to a lesser degree, at St. Clair West Station.  If you have read my analyses of routes like Queen and King, you know what real congestion looks like on the charts with large changes in running times through segments of routes.  None of this shows up in the St. Clair data. Continue reading →

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The St. Clair Right-of-Way Debate (Updated)

Updated July 5:  Christopher Hume wrote again in yesterday’s Star on the issue of giant fire trucks.

The St. Clair transit right-of-way issue surfaced again recently with the publication of a report by  Toronto District Fire Chief Robert Leek claiming that the design was unsafe for emergency vehicles.  Only a day later, the Fire Chief Bill Stewart walked the route with TTC Chief general Manager Gary Webster and concluded (also here) that with some minor adjustments, there was nothing wrong with the route.

Disagreements like this are nothing to scoff at, and they come in the context of rumours that various municipal agencies were forced to toe the line on approving the St. Clair design.  We will never know how much truth lies there, and the issue remains clouded in politics. Continue reading →

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New Carhouses for New Cars (Updated)

The TTC Supplementary Agenda for May 21 includes a report on the Master Plan for new carhouses.  These will be needed both to house the replacement fleet for the existing downtown network and for the far-flung Transit City system.

In brief, the proposed scheme involves the building of five new carhouses:

  • One in either the Portlands or in New Toronto to house the downtown network’s fleet.  The New Toronto option is mentioned only once in the text  (with “new” in lower case), and the map shows only the Portlands location.  This would be the primary carhouse for the core area routes, but Roncesvalles and Russell would continue to have a role as regional yards for new cars once the CLRV fleet starts to retire.
  • A Sheppard East carhouse would initially operate the Sheppard line, but later take on the Scarborough/Malvern and part of Eglinton once the Malvern link was in place.
  • A Finch West carhouse would serve that line and, eventually, part of the Jane line as well.
  • An Eglinton West carhouse would serve the Eglinton line initially, and later the Jane and, possibly, the St. Clair line.
  • A Don Mills carhouse would serve the Don Mills line and possibly part of Sheppard.  By the time we get this far into the plan, there will no doubt be more Transit City proposals on the table and it’s anyone’s guess what the real carhouse needs will be.

The four Transit City carhouses are estimated at about $770-million (reference year not stated), while the new downtown carhouse is estimated at $330-million due to the larger fleet it must house.    It’s clear that the long-term status of the existing Russell and Roncesvalles buildings is dubious both because they are not suited to house and maintain the new cars, and because of building code issues if they were to undergo major changes.  However, these properties provide a few advantages over a consolidated operation in the Portlands.

  • If they are used as yards with basic servicing facilities, the dead-head time for cars entering and leaving service will be shorter than if everything funnels back to a Portlands carhouse.
  • As riding grows on the existing system, the TTC needs somewhere to store more than the initial 204 low flow cars they plan to order this year.  The existing yards will provide an overflow.  Whether both of them are needed once all of the existing CLRVs and ALRVs are retired is another question, but that’s almost a decade away.

Note that the map used in this report is the original Transit City map and does not reflect any of the optional changes that have cropped up in discussions about some routes.  It also doesn’t show the new Waterfront East lines, nor the Kingston Road project.  With luck, one of these days, the TTC will start using a new base map for all of its surface rail project reports.

Updated May 21:

The dates for new carhouse availability are driven both by the expected arrival of the new fleet for the downtown system and for the opening dates of the Transit City lines.

The demonstration prototype cars are to arrive at the end of 2010, and it is likely they will be temporary stored and serviced at Hillcrest.  The first 20 production cars will arrive by the end of 2012, and they will need a carhouse and shops.  This sets the date for the Portlands carhouse to be available.  The complete replacement fleet arrives by the end of 2017.

There are seven Transit City lines (not to mention other plans such as Waterfront East and Kingston Road).  The startup dates and estimated fleets for each of these lines are:

  • Sheppard East:  2012 / 35
  • Finch West:  2013 /37
  • Eglinton:  2015 /129
  • Waterfront West:  2015 / 23
  • Don Mills:  2016 / 46
  • Jane:  2017: /41
  • Scarborough Malvern:  2018 / 53

At least 90% of this fleet, possibly with the addition of cars for the St. Clair line, will be housed in the four new carhouses all of which should have room to accommodate growth in requirements.

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Service Changes for March 30, 2008

Updated March 30, 2008: The attached spreadsheet has been updated to include information on the projected changes in vehicle loads and the list of outstanding changes that are awaiting sufficient resources to be implemented.

One of my readers, Brent, sent in a long note with a summary of service changes that will take place in one week. His introductory comments were:

I see the service summary is out early like usual this time (as opposed to the top secrecy back before the February improvements) and it shows most of the main service changes. (Searching the PDF for “Mar-08″ and “Apr-08″ highlights all the adjustments.) I have compiled them below (I have no life!!), except for cases where there is no noticeable change and it may relate to minor trip adjustments.

Note that the Bathurst streetcar has service reductions on Saturday what with the replacement of CLRVs with ALRVs…

The St. Clair service sounds interesting. With tracks to the carhouses cut off, they’ll just run the same 7 streetcars at 3-minute intervals all day until the late evening, when presumably they’ll just park them somewhere on the ROW and run buses instead (since of course we can’t run the buses on the ROW anyway…)

One service change that doesn’t show up as a change in the schedule is the decoupling of the Evans bus from the Prince Edward bus on weekends, which means that the Evans bus will end up with a 15-minute layover (plus 45 minutes round trip traveling) to maintain a 30-minute headway.

Special arrangements for St. Clair are required because track from Bathurst Station Loop north to St. Clair will be replaced, and a captive set of cars will remain on St. Clair for the duration. These will run a three-minute headway between the two subway stations until mid-evening when the full route will switch over to bus operation.

The TTC has not posted a service advisory for this project on their site yet, but I suspect that this arrangement will carry through until June given the speed of track construction jobs of this size. Even then, until the reconstruction from Vaughan to Dufferin is completed, streetcars will be limited to serving the east end of the line.

One notable problem that the TTC has not addressed is overcrowding in the AM peak period on 509 Harbourfront. With the construction diversions, this seems to have fallen off of the radar, but there was a deputation at the TTC last year from people complaining that cars were full eastbound before they reached Bathurst Street. The new service is actually slightly worse than what was there a year ago in the AM peak, although some off-peak headways have been shortened.

As we know both from riding experience on the 509 and the analysis of CIS data for this line I published earlier this year, the schedule for service on Harbourfront is often more creative writing than reliable fact. In an analysis of the 511 Bathurst route now in preparation will confirm, layovers at Exhibition Loop are quite generous and eastbound service on Fleet is quite erratic. The TTC really needs to start treating the new residential neighbourhoods on Queen’s Quay and Fleet to good, reliable service, not as a seasonal tag end of a route serving an amusement park.

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Joe Mihevc Visits St. Clair West Station

There is a post on youtube by Joe Mihevc, Vice-Chair of the TTC, showing the situation at St. Clair West Station that has kept streetcars out of the loop for months.

When the contractor started to excavate to install a new expansion joint, they found electrical cables buried in the concrete that were not on the station plans. These are being rerouted.

I talked to the Vice-Chair last week, and the TTC hopes to have the streetcars fully back into the station in about a month.

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Will The TTC Ever Finish On St. Clair?

I spoke to Vice-Chair Joe Mihevc at the TTC meeting on Wednesday about the situation at St. Clair West and on the portion of the line east to Yonge.  Here is the current status.

The problem with rebuilding the track is that there is one section on the east side of the loop where there are electrical cables buried in the concrete.  Breaking up the concrete so that these can be moved is a delicate business and won’t be done for a few months.  Meanwhile, the rest of the loop is being installed.

In about two weeks, this will allow pavement restoration in most of the loop.  At that point, the buses that enter from the west will be able to loop down the ramp and around the west and north sides of the platform.  They will all exit via the ramp that comes out in the Loblaw’s building on the north side of the street.

Meanwhile, Mihevc is getting a complete runaround from staff on the installation of new shelters.  It’s always something that will happen in a week or two, and has been like this since the summer.  He is getting very frustrated because he takes the blame every time he parrots information to his constituents.

TTC staff should carefully consider what they are doing.  Mihevc has defended staff positions on the St. Clair right-of-way against all criticisms and burned up some of his credibility, with me among others, in the process.  The last thing the staff needs is to lose that champion in the Vice-Chair’s office.  If he stops believing what he is told, they are in big trouble.

Of course, many of us stopped believing what staff said about St. Clair a long time ago.  Vice-Chair Mihevc has some catching up to do.