St. Clair Car

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Service Changes for November/December 2010 & January 2011

There are few changes in service planned for the remainder of 2010, but many improvements for January 2011.

Continuing riding increases on the TTC network will pose an early problem for the new Commission in that these service improvements are driven by loading standards.  If the Commission wishes to save money by reducing (worsening) the standard, then it will have to answer to riders for the effect this will have.  Service is the only thing that the TTC has to sell, and cutbacks, as we have seen before, are counterproductive.

Service on the 28A Davisville to Brick Works which operates only on Saturdays was planned to be dropped in October, but will continue operation through the winter to serve ongoing weekend activities at the Don Valley Brick Works.

Effective Sunday, November 21:

501 Queen: Weekend bus replacement from Dundas West Station to Long Branch will end, and streetcar service will resume 7 days/week west of Roncesvalles.

504 King Shuttle: The weekend shuttle service on Roncesvalles will revert to the weekday routing as through operation with the 501 shuttle will not be required.

49 Bloor West: Early morning service on Saturday will change from every 20 to every 24 minutes to improve reliability.  The average load will rise from 27 to 32 which remains below the service standard of 38.

145 Humber Bay Express: The Park Lawn short turn service will be extended to Mimico Avenue and Royal York to reach customers on Lake Shore west of Park Lawn.  There are no additional trips, but schedules will be adjusted to reflect the extra mileage and actual operating conditions on the route.

39 Finch East and 199 Finch Rocket: Early evening running times on weekdays will be increased to reflect actual operating conditions.

Standby buses scheduled at various divisions will be revised to reflect the additional need for service on weekends before Christmas.  Offsetting reductions will occur on weekday peak standbys.

165 Weston Road North: Seasonal service to Canada’s Wonderland ends.

Effective December 19, 2010:

504 King: Service will return to Roncesvalles Avenue.  The schedules to be operated are identical to those in effect in May 2009, and these will stay in effect until the January 2, 2011 schedule period when weekend service improvements that were made in September 2009 will also be included.

2010.12.19 King Service Comparison

Effective January 2, 2011:

Riding increases on many routes trigger additional service as shown in the table linked below.

2011.01.02 Service Changes

The Steeles East route will be extended into Morningside Heights.

2011.01.02 Steeles East Map

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Service Changes Effective June 20, 2010

Many service changes take effect on June 20, 2010.  Most of these are seasonal route changes and, in some cases, improvements.  Many routes lose peak service, particularly in the AM peak, during the summer because school traffic falls off.

2010.06.20 Service Changes

The 512 St. Clair route is scheduled to return to Gunn’s Loop on June 20, but the actual implementation date has not yet been finalized.  Cars will operate to Lansdowne with geneous layovers pending the opening of the line.

The TTC has published a comparison of running times and headways for the route before and after the implementation of the right-of-way on St. Clair.  Particularly striking is the improvement in running times on Saturdays when St. Clair was the most congested before the reconstruction.  Advocates for transit priority often forget that there are many more hours, and much more traffic, outside of the peak period on some routes.

An operational change effective on June 20 is that AM peak cars running out of service will now operate east to Yonge, then return westbound and go out of service at St. Clair West Station.  This will avoid having cars bound for Roncesvalles Carhouse drop inbound passengers eastbound at Vaughan Road rather than taking them to the subway.

2005-2010 St. Clair Schedule Comparison

For details on individual route branches, please refer to the TTC’s Scheduled Service Summary.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair for Jan-Feb 2010 (Part 1: Headways)

In the previous series of four articles about the St. Clair car, I review operations in January 2010.  Quite noticeable within the data for January was a change in line management style in the last week of the month with a more regular pattern of short turns and generally more reliable service.

On February 14, the TTC implemented new schedules with longer running times in an attempt to overcome problems with the original versions.  Headway reliability on weekdays improved slightly, although the largest change had already come with the new line management scheme.  On weekends, although the worst of the bunching and gapping was reduced, there continued to be wide variation in vehicle spacing suggesting that the level of management necessary to ensure reliable service was not present.

I have now received February 2010 data for the St. Clair route, and this series of articles will review what it shows about the effect of the new schedules on various aspects of the operation.  Here I will review headways at key points, and in future articles I will look at link times, general line management and intersection delays.

Continue reading →

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Service Changes Effective May 9, 2010

Construction diversions on several routes will begin or continue in May.

504 King and 508 Lake Shore: 

King cars will continue turning back at Roncesvalles and Queen, but will reach there via Shaw and Queen Streets.  Watermain construction which last year caused Roncesvalles to be torn up last year moves to King between Ronces and Jameson.

The 504 shuttle bus will be rerouted and extended to run between Shaw and Dundas West Station bothways via Roncesvalles looping via Strachan, Douro and Shaw.

No date has been set yet for resumption of streetcar service on Roncesvalles, but this is expected to be in the late fall.  The diversion via Queen and Shaw is expected to last to the end of August 2010.

502 Downtowner and 503 Kingston Road Tripper

The reconstruction of Bingham Loop, deferred from 2009, will occur this summer.  Buses will replace streetcars over both routes until mid-August.

Replacement bus services will loop via Victoria Park, Meadow and Blantyre to Kingston Road.  The peak service on both routes will be improved from 7’30” to 6’00”, but offpeak service on the 502 will remain at 20′.

22 Coxwell and 70 O’Connor

Reconstruction of the bus loop at Coxwell station requires the removal of all bus service.  Routes 22 and 70 will interline, and all of the “O’Connor” service will run through to Queen or to Victoria Park depending on the time of day.

Existing interlines between the O’Connor, Gerrard and McCowan routes will be discontinued during this period.

72 Pape

Construction at Pape Station requires that the Pape bus be rerouted to loop at Donlands Station.  Passengers transferring to this route from the subway at Pape will do so using on street stops.  This diversion will last until the end of 2010.

The seasonal extension to Cherry Beach will operate during the evenings Monday to Friday, and all day on weekends and holidays.  This will run until Labour Day.

512 St. Clair

The mixed streetcar and bus operation on St. Clair is expected to last until the latter part of June 2010 at which point the TTC hopes to restore streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop.

509 Harbourfront and 510 Spadina

The seasonal fare collection scheme on Queen’s Quay will be in effect until Labour Day.  No fares will be collected eastbound on Queen’s Quay between Bathurst and Union Station on weekends after 3 pm, and there will be collectors stationed in the tunnel linking the Union Station Loop to the subway.

One PCC car will operate on the Harbourfront route on Sundays until September 5, 2010 between 1130 and 1930.  This will run as an extra, and will be subject to availability of both a car and an operator.

Seasonal Route Extensions

  • 72 Pape to Cherry Beach (see above)
  • 28 Davisville to the Brick Works
  • 29 Dufferin to Ontario Place (service south of Dufferin Loop will be split between the 29B Ontario Place and 29D Princes Gate branches)
  • 86 Scarborough to the Zoo
  • 85 Sheppard East to the Zoo
  • 510 Spadina King short turn extended to Queen’s Quay on weekends
  • 165 Weston Road North to Wonderland

Other Route Changes

  • 25 Don Mills service north of Steeles removed (York Region request)
  • 29 Dufferin trial service in Exhibition Place rerouted to operate via Manitoba Drive, Canada Drive, Princes’ Blvd., Nunavut Rd., and Nova Scotia Ave to Manitoba Drive.
  • 224 Victoria Park North service extended to Elgin Mills (York Region request)
  • 96B Wilson route changed via Claireville Drive
  • 96C Wilson service removed from Thistledown Blvd. early mornings and late evenings

Service Level Changes

Many route have new schedules starting on May 9 primarily for seasonal changes in demand.  The details are in a spreadsheet linked below.

2010.05 Service Changes

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair, January 2010 (Part 4: Intersections)

When I started the analysis of the TTC’s vehicle monitoring data some years ago, my great hope was to be able to analyze behaviour at stops and intersections.  Alas, the quality of data on the “old” version of the TTC’s system was utterly incapable of this type of use for two reasons:

  • Although vehicle position was polled every 20 seconds, vehicle location was resolved to a nearby intersection, and reported only sporadically.  This made fine grained location analysis impossible.
  • A location, such as a major stop, might not be reported at all for a vehicle’s trip, only the vehicle’s appearance at two nearby locations on either side of the point of interest.

With the new GPS-based data, position information is available for almost all vehicles every 20 seconds.  Anything that causes a vehicle to stop for some amount of time will be registered by a failure to change location in two or more succeeding data points.  (I say “almost” because some GPS units are a tad unreliable, and they report rogue data points causing missing samples in otherwise clean data.)

A great debate about St. Clair (and other routes with the same arrangement for left turns and farside stops) focuses on the following sequence of events:

  • Streetcar approaches an intersection and is caught and held by a red signal.
  • Streetcar waits for the red phase, and the following left-only phase to complete.
  • Streetcar moves through the intersection, serves a farside stop, and then departs.

In some cases, there is no stop associated with a traffic signal, but streetcar service may be held by it in any event.  In theory, approaching streetcars are supposed to extend their own green time, or to shorten the cross-street’s red, but empirical observation suggests that this does not always happen.

This article reviews several intersections on St. Clair to determine how transit-friendly the traffic signals actually are, and whether any change in their behaviour was visible over the month of January 2010 while many aspects of the line’s operation were still being adjusted.

An obvious and troubling observation from these data is that in general, streetcars spend more time waiting for green lights than they do serving the farside stops at the same locations.  This shows the frustration and inefficiency from an arrangement where cars must stop twice because they do not get the so-called transit priority they are supposed to receive at major, and even some minor, locations.

Continue reading →

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Wandering Streetcars (Updated)

Updated March 1 at 10:00 am:  Data for the Queen route for the months of October and November covering the period of split operation are now available for viewing.

George Bell has put together an application that displays the TTC’s vehicle monitoring data as an animation.  The effect is something like NextBus, but for historical data.  You can watch streetcars bunch now from the comfort of your own computer.

He is using the same source data from the TTC as I used for my analyses.  At this point, only St. Clair for January is available.

A few notes from George:

I’ve put together the beginnings of a bing maps viewer for the data. Love for feedback from the community.

Just a word to people before clicking on the link – the data files for each day are about a meg or two each. Silverlight is required, and if you don’t have it a link will be shown so you can get it.

Please leave general comments in this thread, and send bug notes, requests for fixes, etc. to George using the link provided on his site.

When you view a day’s data, be sure to zoom in so that the route fills your screen and you watch things unfold in full detail.  January 8th, a date already mentioned in my analytic article, gives a visual feel for the complete chaos of the line’s behaviour.

There is part of me that SCREAMS out that the TTC should make this data and the presentation format available for every route, every day.  Anyone who wants to know how a route behaved would only need to pull up its animated version.

Real time would be even nicer.  I can imagine a route supervisor (or an interested member of the public) sitting with an iPad to keep track of the service.

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St. Clair From The Archives

The City of Toronto Archives contain many photos and documents of the early days of the TTC and its predecessors.  Among them is a June 1914 schedule for the St. Clair car, a line that had opened only a year earlier.

The line ran from the Grand Trunk Railway crossing just west of what is now called Caledonia Road, but on the timetable shown as “Station Street”.  A one way trip was given 18 minutes to reach Yonge Street during all hours of service.  Headways were 4.5 minutes AM peak, 6 minutes midday, 4 minutes PM peak, 7 minutes evenings.

There were 13 crews for a day’s service with work hours ranging from 8 to 10 hours, most of them over 9 hours with a spread of 11 to 14(!) hours.

Thanks to Martin Phills for alerting me to this item in the archives.

Once you visit that site, it’s hard to leave without much browsing.  Here is a selection of photos of St. Clair before and during construction of the streetcar line. Continue reading →

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair, January 2010 (Part 2: Weekdays, Week 1)

This post examines the details of operations for the 512 St. Clair route from Monday, January 4, to Friday, January 8, 2010.  The next post in this series will review the last week of January for comparison to discover what improvements took place over the intervening weeks.

Future articles in this series will review weekend operations, as well as a month-long overview of the line’s behaviour.

When February 2010 data are available, I will examine the effect of new schedules introduced on Sunday, February 14.

Unlike the New Year’s Day operation discussed previously, the weekdays in week 1 were a mess, and service poor a great deal of the time.

Continue reading →