St. Clair Car

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TTC’s Dubious Short Turn Statistics

In the monthly CEO’s Report, one of the KPIs (Key Performance Indices) is a measure of the number of short-turned streetcars. This used to be reported as an absolute count, but is now expressed as a percentage of all trips.

Here is the most recent version:

This chart is a fiction born of the Rick Leary era when, in theory, all short turns were banned and the stats were made to fit the objective. Like many KPIs, this suffers from a combination of system-wide consolidation across all routes and time periods, as well as under-reporting of what is really happening.

An easy way to get the true count is to look at tracking data and compare two points on either side of a short-turn location. For example, Woodbine Loop at Queen and Kingston Rd. is a favourite spot for 501 Queen and some 503 Kingston Road cars to turn back. Counting the number of vehicles crossing Coxwell (west of the loop) with the number at Woodbine Avenue (east of the loop) shows how many cars did not travel east of Kingston Road and, therefore, were short-turned.

The TTC claims that they better their 1% target for trips short turned, but it is clear that they rarely achieve this. In some cases, the value rises above 20% indicating that although much service does get to the terminal, there is a good chance that a rider will encounter a short turn. This is separate from frustrations caused by gaps and bunching.

Short turns happen for many reasons including traffic congestion, too-tight schedules, service blockages for collisions, medical problems, parades … it’s a long list. Riders really don’t care. The basic point is that service they expected to receive is not there, and usually with no advance warning.

The table below summarizes the statistics from the vehicle tracking records in November 2024 for the period from 6am to midnight. It is clear that even on an aggregated level, the proportion of short turns is much higher on these routes that the TTC KPIs indicate.

Updated Dec. 6/24 at 1:30pm: Short turn counts for 504 King eastbound, 507 Long Branch and 508 Lake Shore westbound trips added.

Note: The legends on the original charts in this post were misleading. They have been changed to better reflect what the columns and lines on the charts represent..

RouteLocationTotal TripsShort Turns% Short Turns
501 QueenWoodbine Loop EB35471985.6%
Roncesvalles WB35372477.0%
503 Kingston RdWoodbine Loop EB32521364.2%
504 KingSpadina WB64532564.0%
Roncesvalles WB327536411.1%
Church EB63191262.0%
Parliament EB61982043.3%
Dundas EB2943712.4%
505 DundasParliament EB30402127.0%
Lansdowne WB306239713.0%
506 CarltonCoxwell EB30312939.7%
Lansdowne WB325657217.6%
507 Long BranchKipling WB2074883.0%
508 Lake ShoreKipling WB193199.8%
512 St. Clair (*)Lansdowne WB206824912.0%
Oakwood WB21131225.8%

(*) For 512 St. Clair, only data from November 14 onwards when streetcar service was restored are included.

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Temporary Replacement of 512 St. Clair Streetcars

Starting at 11pm on Friday, November 1 until 5am on Thursday, November 14, streetcars will be replaced by buses over the entire 512 St. Clair route. Buses are already covering the east end of the route due to a sinkhole near Avenue Road and streetcars are diverting south to Bathurst Station.

This substitution will allow various works including completion of reconstruction at St. Clair West Station.

The 10 streetcars assigned to the line will be replaced by 15-30 buses.

Full streetcar service will resume on November 14, subject to completion of construction work.

Bus service on 33 Forest Hill, 90 Vaughan and 126 Christie will return to St. Clair West Station on Sunday, November 17, the next schedule change.

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512 St. Clair Streetcars vs Buses: June 2024

With the June 23, 2024 schedule change, buses were replaced with streetcars running from St. Clair Station at Yonge to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele Street. Buses operated mostly in the regular traffic lanes, not on the streetcar right-of-way.

This article reviews the travel times on the 512 St. Clair bus and streetcar services to compare travel times over the route.

Although the streetcars in week 4 of June (beginning on June 23) are overall faster than the buses they replaced, the degree of this advantage varies by location and direction.

This is a companion piece to my review of the streetcar-to-bus change on 510 Spadina that happened at the same time.

The overall observation here is that although travel times are now shorter for many riders, headway reliability is very poor and gaps can undo the benefit of a faster trip.

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Streetcars Return to St. Clair

The TTC has announced that streetcar service will be restored on St. Clair with the June 23, 2024 schedule changes. This follows a long period of reconstruction at several points along the route:

  • Upgrade of overhead power systems for pantographs along the route, at loops and junctions.
  • Worn rail replacement at some stops.
  • Improved lubricators for Oakwood and Earlscourt loops to reduce wheel squeal.
  • City of Toronto work at the Barrie corridor west of Caledonia.
  • Toronto Water construction.

Reconstruction of St. Clair West Station loop will continue through the summer and fall, and streetcars, like the interim bus service, will not enter the station. Riders connecting to/from the subway will have to walk to nearby stops at Bathurst or Tweedsmuir.

This chart gives an overview of the various projects along St. Clair. For complete description of the project, see the TTC’s project page.

Full details of the service changes planned on June 23 have not yet been released, but the electronic version of schedules used by trip planning apps were posted recently.

WeekdaysSaturdaysSundays
AM Peak M-F
Early Morning S-S		8′10′11′
Midday M-F
Late Morning S-S		8′8′9′
PM Peak M-F
Afternoon S-S		8′8′8′
Early Evening8′9′9′
Late Evening10′10′10′

Night service will also change. Streetcars will operate as 312 St. Clair from Yonge Street to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele matching the daytime service. A separate 340 Junction night bus will operate from Gunn’s Loop to Dundas West Station via St. Clair, Jane and Dundas.

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How Slow Is My Streetcar: Part I

At its November 2023 meeting, Council passed a motion proposed by Councillor Chris Moise whose ward covers the east side of downtown, and who also sits on the TTC Board:

1. City Council direct the General Manager, Transportation Services, in consultation with the Toronto Transit Commission, the Toronto Police Service, and the City Solicitor to review and report back to the Executive Committee in the second quarter of 2024, including:
a. an update on streetcar performance over the last five years;
b. suggested improvements to the public realm along King Street until the permanent capital project can be delivered; and
c. the feasibility of implementing automated traffic enforcement on the King Street Transit Priority Corridor, including details on what legislative amendments would be required to provincial legislation including, but not limited to, the Ontario Highway Traffic Act.

This article addresses point “a” with a review of streetcar lines over the past five years. It is important to go back to 2019 before the pandemic fundamentally shifted traffic and transit patterns downtown as a point of reference.

From time to time, there are calls to expand a “King Street” redesign to other parts of the network, but there are two “cart before the horse” issues to address first:

  • Figure out how to make King Street operate as it was intended and return at least to its pre-pandemic behaviour, if not better, as a model.
  • Understand how other streets operate including where and when problems for transit performance exist.

An update on transit priority will come to Council in February 2024, although this will look more widely at the city, not just downtown. In previous articles I have reviewed the growing problem of transit travel times as traffic builds on the proposed RapidTO corridors, some of which exceeded pre-pandemic levels some time ago. In future articles I will refresh these analyses with data through to the end of 2023.

An important distinction between most RapidTO bus corridors and the downtown streetcar system is the design of suburban vs downtown streets. In the suburbs, the streets are mostly wide, have relatively few points of access (e.g. driveways) or pedestrian oriented uses (e.g. shops), and travel distances tend to be longer. In the core, streets are narrow, mostly four lanes with no possibility of widening, access points are more frequent, there is a strong pedestrian orientation, and trips tend to be short. Even if buses were running, express operations would be almost impossible and would save very little time on the downtown routes.

There are exceptions such as some older parts of the inner suburbs that bring physical challenges for transit priority, but also the political challenge that the transit share of road use is lower as one moves outward from the core. King Street is a very different place from Steeles, and Dufferin is somewhere in between depending on which section one considers.

An important message in all of this is that “congestion” (put in quotes because it is so often cited as a get-out-of-jail-free excuse for all transit woes) varies from place to place and time to time. Simply putting transit priority everywhere will not solve all problems and could even be overkill (even assuming that it is true “priority” and not a sham to keep transit vehicles out of motorists’ way). It is simple to colour a bunch of key routes end-to-end on a map, but much harder to identify changes that will actually make a difference. Meanwhile, a focus on “priority” could divert attention from badly-needed improvements in headway reliability and more reliable wait times.

This article begins with a comparison of scheduled travel speed on each route, and then turns to actual travel speeds by route segment. In the interest of length, I will leave a discussion of headway reliability to future articles. This is an important component of total travel time, especially for short trips or trip segments.

I have also included tables showing the constant change in route configurations on the four major east-west corridors thanks to a never-ending procession of track and water main work, rapid transit construction, and overhead changes for pantograph operation. Some of this work was accelerated to take advantage of lighter traffic conditions during the pandemic, and some to bring forward work to keep staff employed.

However, the rate of route changes persisted well beyond the heart of the pandemic and threatens the credibility of transit service on major corridors leaving riders constantly wondering where their streetcar or replacement bus might be. Some changes occurred without the planned work actually taking place, or work started and ended later than announced (sometimes much later as in the never-ending KQQR project).

An important change over recent years, separate from the pandemic, has been the move to larger streetcars on wider headways. What might have been a tolerable unevenness in service when streetcars arrived every 4 or 5 minutes simply does not work for scheduled headways of 10 minutes with much wider swings. Bunching when it occurs leaves much bigger gaps between vehicles. A laissez faire attitude to route management, and especially the assumption that routes under construction cannot be managed, has led both to unreliable service and basic questions of how or if the TTC can recover the quality riders expect.

For all the talk of project co-ordination, the last people who seem to count are the riders. Simply studying raw travel times be they scheduled or actual does not capture the frustration, delay and despair from the ever-changing and unreliable services, be they by streetcar or bus.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part III

This article continues my reviews of bus operations on 512 St. Clair in September 2023 and of streetcar operations in the preceding months.

One aspect of any route’s operation is the degree to which vehicles have time for a layover at terminals. If this time is too small (or worse, none at all), service can be disrupted by the simple need for drivers to answer calls of nature and just decompress for a few minutes.

There is no formal break built into schedules in Toronto as can be found in some other transit systems, but a quick look at the TTC’s schedule summaries will show that most routes have built in “recover time”. This is intended to compensate for random events during a trip, although sometimes it is simply a mechanism to make the round trip time come out to a multiple of the scheduled headway.

Some of the “service reliability adjustments” the TTC advertises with schedule change are nothing more than shifting time from “recovery” to “driving” time without actually changing the round trip time. In other cases, time is added or removed without changing the total number of vehicles causing the service headway to get longer or shorter.

When schedules have excessive travel and/or recovery time, vehicles queue up at terminals causing congestion on the approach if there is no place to park off-street.

In the case of 512 St. Clair, the time spent at St. Clair Station (the eastern terminus) was fairly consistent up to the end of June 2023, but things got really messy. This corresponded to the point where service on the line as a whole became considerably worse as we saw in earlier articles.

This was caused by two competing factors in route operations.

  • In July and August, the TTC extended streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele even though it was only scheduled to run to Earlscourt Loop at Lansdowne. This made keeping “on time”, the TTC’s holy grail of service management, impossible.
  • The approaches taken in July and August were quite different, but a common factor was that streetcars spent more time sitting in St. Clair Station Loop to get back on time at the expense of providing the advertised service on the route.
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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part II

This is the second part of my review of service quality before and after the substitution of buses for streetcars on 512 St. Clair in September 2023. Part I deals mainly with bus operations in September.

Until May 8, streetcars operated between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop over the full route. Work on the GO bridge west of Caledonia was expected to start in May, and so on May 8 the streetcars were cut back to Earlscourt Loop and the 47A Lansdowne to St. Clair bus service was extended west to Gunn’s Loop.

The work did not occur as expected, and in response to problems with and complaints about service provided by the 47A, the streetcars resumed operation to Gunn’s Loop, but with no added running time, effective on July 4. That condition remained in effect until September 3 when buses took over the full 512 St. Clair route, and the 47A Lansdowne returned to its normal terminus at Earlscourt Loop.

The TTC has a lot to answer for here with the combined effect of service cuts and erratic operation of the service that remained while the line operated with streetcars. Buses look better by comparison because the streetcars, even with their dedicated lane, were so unreliable.

This was compounded by the effect of the long-running bus substitution on travel times discussed in Part I of this series, and by the inadequate preparation for transit priority as of day one of the bus replacement.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: September 2023

Effective September 3 and until July 2024, the TTC has replaced streetcar service with buses on oute 512 St. Clair for various construction projects. The length and scope of this work evolved between May 2023 and the point where the full closure was announced at the end of August. See The Changing Scope of St. Clair Construction.

Replacement buses are scheduled far more frequently than the streetcars they replaced, but they are running in the mixed traffic lanes beside a now-empty streetcar right-of-way. Depending on traffic conditions, travel times can be substantially longer with buses.

In the months before the conversion, the streetcar service was already in upheaval for planned work at the GO overpass west of Caledonia, and the St. Clair car was cut back from Gunn’s Loop (Keele) to Lansdowne. It was subsequently restored when the timing of work at the overpass changed, but the schedules were not changed to reflect the longer route.

This article reviews, mainly, the bus service from September 3-30, 2023. In a following article, I will turn to the streetcar service it replaced and the less than ideal quality provided during the on-again, off-again service through to Keele over summer 2023.

Responding to complaints about the bus service, the TTC has stated that they are working with the City on traffic signalling changes, as well as modifications to road lane allocations to remove bottlenecks in the bus operation. For the length and potential effect of this streetcar service suspension, one must ask why these changes are studied and, maybe, to be announced, implemented after the fact rather than as an integral part of the switch to bus service using the regular traffic lanes.

This is not the first time in 2023 (or earlier) that the TTC plays catch-up with getting priority measures for its service during extended diversions and construction projects. The attitude seems to be that problems will be addressed as and when they occur, rather than being anticipated and planned for, with transit service and riders getting a raw deal.

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The Changing Scope of St. Clair Construction

When I published my article about the year-long shutdown of streetcar service on St. Clair, I did not expect it would trigger a wave of complaints on Twitter/X about the scope and length of the project. Late last week, I was busy dealing with the announced service changes overall, but now am taking another look at St. Clair.

In the presentation deck (about which more below) there is a chronology showing that there was consultation back in May 2023. Exactly what this might have entailed is hard to say, but there were certainly no fireworks four months ago.

Anyone who is trying to keep on top of TTC construction plans has something of a challenge finding information. The Projects and Plans page is only linked from the common footer of all pages on the TTC site. If you don’t scroll down to the bottom, you will never find it.

Within that page is a link to the St. Clair project page. It contains links to an August 24 version of the project overview and a construction notice. The August 24 version is the one I used in writing my article. There are, however, three versions of the project overview.

The description of the planned work in the last version is quite different from the May 2023 version on which consultation would have been based.

Courtesy of the Internet Archive, I pulled up the original version of the St. Clair project page posted on August 12. Note that it says “Work will result in intermittent bus replacement on the 512 St. Clair streetcar route”, not a complete shutdown lasting to summer 2024. By late August, the page had changed.

Here are the three versions of the presentation deck:

In the May deck, text on a diversion map talks about intermittent bus operation, and the projected end date is first quarter 2024 for third party works. However, elsewhere we see that the full project including St. Clair West Station would run through to the summer.

It is quite possible that the May version of the deck gave the impression of a shorter, less intrusive project than the one now underway.

This was the version in effect for the original consultation.

By the August 11 version, the dates have not changed, but reference to “intermittent” replacement is gone.

The August 24 version contains the same information in a different form.

What is not clear is whether the TTC ever actually consulted about a more extensive shutdown, or about the problems created by operating buses in the traffic lanes, not on the streetcar right-of-way. The latter is difficult because of the support poles for the overhead system which lie between the eastbound and westbound tracks.

This is an example of scope creep coupled with changing and hard-to-find information. One might think that the TTC has been taking lessons from Metrolinx.

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512 St. Clair Converts to Bus Operation Until Summer 2024

From September 3, 2023 until summer 2024 (the exact date is not specified), the TTC will operate buses on route 512 St. Clair during several overlapping construction projects.

Updated August 28 at 5:00 pm: A response from the TTC about the scope of work for this project has been added.

A major part of this work is the reconstruction of St. Clair West Station Loop.

All transfers between surface routes and the subway will occur on street, and the following route changes will occur:

  • 512 St. Clair buses will operate between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop.
  • 47A Lansdowne buses will return to their normal terminal at Earlscourt Loop.
  • 90 Vaughan will be extended south to Bathurst Station.
  • 33 Forest Hill and 126 Christie will interline as a single route rather than looping at St. Clair West.

The chart below shows the many projects affecting St. Clair in the coming year.

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