St. Clair Car

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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 →

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair, January 2010 (Part 1: Introduction)

Updated February 26 at 11:15 pm:  The legend on the service chart has been corrected to reflect the actual location of the timepoints.

The 512 St. Clair route resumed streetcar operation from St. Clair West Station to Earlscourt Loop on Sunday, December 20, 2009.  This was the test everyone had waited so long to see — would the right-of-way on the busiest part of St. Clair Avenue make a difference, and how would the line operate.

As we know from complaints that poured in to the TTC and to local Councillors, things did not go well during the first month.  New scheduled were introduced in mid-February, and the decline in complaints indicates that riders are much happier.  Nonetheless, it is worthwhile looking at January 2010 to see where the problems lay.

This series of posts uses TTC vehicle monitoring data to review the operation of the St. Clair route for that first month.  I have requested the February data as well so that a “before and after” comparison will be possible with the new schedules.

This article is an introduction and, for those who have read these analyses before, a refresher on the methodology I have used and the format of the data presentation.  In future articles, I will review the month as a whole, but here the data is from one day, January 1, to set the stage.

Continue reading →

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Service Changes For February 2010 (Updated)

The following service changes will occur effective Sunday, February 14, 2010.

Updated to include a table comparing service levels on 512 St. Clair.

305 Eglinton East Night Bus & 354 Lawrence East Night Bus

These routes now operate separately from each other, with three vehicles on each route, and have difficulty maintaining schedules.  To give both routes more running time, one bus will be added, and the routes will be interlined to give each route an additional 15 minutes for a round trip.

Buses will alternate trips on each route.

44 Kipling South

Saturday afternoon running times will be increased, and service will be improved, to counteract reliability problems.  The existing 15 minute headway with 2 buses will change to a 12 minute headway with 3 buses.

116 Morningside & 86 Scarborough Service Blending

Midday headways on the 116 will be widened from 8’30” to 9’00” to provide extra running time.  No buses will be added to the route.  Midday headways on the 86 will be widened from 8’00” to 9’00”.  One less bus will be needed on the 86.

In both cases, the average load will rise from 36 to 38, within the offpeak service standards.

Early evening headways on the 116 will be changed from 7’45” to 7’30” to match the existing 86 headway.

512 St. Clair

Running times will be increased during many periods to reflect actual requirements for this route.  No cars will be added, but scheduled headways will be widened.  The affected periods are:

  • Weekdays afternoon, pm peak, early evening
  • Weekends morning and afternoon

The table linked below compares the April 2007 schedule (just before the west end of the line closed for construction), the original January 2010 schedule, and the revised February version. 

2010 vs 2007 Service Comparison

Zoo Services

The 85 Sheppard East and 86 Scarborough schedules will be adjusted so that the last trip from the Zoo matches its later closing time (7 pm) beginning in mid March.

Driving Time vs Recovery Time

One of the oddities of TTC schedules is that many routes have “recovery time” that is, in fact, little more than a rounding factor so that the headway will work out to an exact integer.  For example, on the 44 Kipling South change above, the new schedule has a 12 minute headway, but this is achieved with 34 minutes of driving time and 2 minutes of recovery per round trip.

A few routes have schedule adjustments that consist of nothing more than reallocating time from recovery to driving.  This means that the actual time provided for a vehicle to make a round trip is unchanged, but the “recovery” which might be used for a break at a terminal is squeezed.

This affects:

  • 34 Eglinton East (peak)
  • 16 McCowan (weekday early evening)
  • 116 Morningside (peak)
  • 224 Victoria Park North
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A Post Mortem for St. Clair’s Construction

The January TTC agenda includes a report about the lessons learned from the St. Clair construction project and their implications for work on Transit City.

While it is refreshing to see anything the TTC does held up to the cold light of review, I can’t help feeling that the tone avoids the question of why this project ran out of control for so long.  The covering report states:

TTC considers the St. Clair Streetcar experience as an important stepping stone in the evolution of LRT in Toronto which began with the Spadina LRT, then Harbourfront LRT to the St. Clair project. This invaluable experience is an important guide in the delivery of the Transit City program.

That’s not saying much.  Toronto has now built three pseudo-LRT lines over two decades.  The first, Harbourfront, is due for a major redesign with the reconstruction of Queen’s Quay.  That line also features a connection at Union that was woefully inadequate for the demands placed on it, despite claims to the contrary by TTC engineers.

The Spadina LRT, a scheme that took 25 years from proposal to implementation, was a bit better, but like Harbourfront, still suffered from traffic signal timings that favoured road over transit operations.  This has still not been fully addressed even though the line opened in 1997.

Much was expected for St. Clair, a chance to “get it right”, but this project was plagued by:

  • conflicting and changing demands for the use of road space
  • a design process that produced detailed plans too late for proper public review (they appeared while the work was already out to tender), and that inevitably led to construction periods spanning winter months
  • a construction process involving multiple agencies and contractors with nobody in overall control

St. Clair did not “get it right”.  Now that the line is open to Lansdowne, we can see just how appallingly the TTC manages service on a route where there is no excuse for chronic bunching, wide gaps and short turns.  This comes just as the TTC attempts to gain credibility for Transit City as an improvement in suburban transit services.  St. Clair is not a shining example. Continue reading →

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The 512 Rocket

After a few days’ operation, observations about the new St. Clair streetcar right-of-way from Bathurst to Lansdowne are accumulating (see comments in the previous post in this series).

On Sunday, service was a shambles because in general the operators could not achieve the faster scheduled speeds in the new timetables.  Part of this was due to unfamiliarity, part to the operation of the traffic signals, part due to passenger behaviour and part to what I can only call “operator style”.  For anyone used to dawdling back and forth on the old shuttle east of St. Clair West Station, the new timetables are quite a change.

November/December 2009

January 2010

The scheduled speed for the shuttle was 11.3km/h on weekdays and 11.9km/h on weekends.  Headways were supposed to be 3’30” and 4’00” respectively.  All who rode the line know that the cars spent most of their time sitting at terminals, and the schedule was complete fiction.  This operating style established the idea that there was lots of time for layovers.

The scheduled speed for weekday operations on the new route ranges from 12.8km/h (am peak) up to 15.9km/h (late evening).  On weekends the scheduled speeds are higher than comparable periods on weekdays.

It is worth looking at the the 510 Spadina service (also shown in the linked summaries above).  The segment from Bloor to King ranges from 10.5 to 12.6km/h with service to Union at a higher average speed because of fast running south of King. Continue reading →

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A Day To Celebrate on St. Clair

Saturday, December 19, 2009 brought the first passenger-carrying streetcars to St. Clair from Bathurst to Lansdowne on the new streetcar right-of-way.  Regular service starts on Sunday, but the preview day featured PCCs 4500 and 4549 shuttling between St. Clair West Station and Earlscourt Loop from about 11 am to 4 pm.

4500 was the politicians’ car with TTC Vice Chair Joe Mihevc, Chair Adam Giambrone and MP Carolyn Bennett.  Mihevc wryly noted that Bennett (a Liberal) was part of the government when funding came from Ottawa for this project.  It’s been underway for some time.  Mike Filey was along to provide historical commentary.

4549 was generally less loaded, but featured the Hillcrest Choir whose renditions of stop announcements were a distinct improvement over the standard TTC offering, and they even pronounced the streetnames correctly.

After riding several times in both directions, I can honestly say that the weaving track, although unusual, was not at all uncomfortable or any threat to standing passengers.  The first few trips encountered work crews putting finishing touches on parts of the line, but with only two cars operating, it wasn’t hard for them to dodge out of the way.

Everyone was having a marvellous time, and the crowd was fascinating for its makeup — many parents taking their young children out to ride cars built in 1951 on a line that might not have had active streetcar service when they were born.

To my amazement, the heat worked quite well on both cars, something I did not find on any other transit vehicle (bus, streetcar or subway) I rode on the same day.  The biggest problem with the PCCs is that the centre doors were not working on either car, and this made for lots of congestion as people had to push through crowds (at least on 4500) to reach the one working door at the front.  The running joke on board was that if we paid 50 cents more on the fare, we could have cars with doors that worked.  Memo to TTC:  Fix the doors.

Earlier in the week, test runs were made with CLRVs to check out clearances, overhead alignment and track.  Harold McMann sent a few photos of car 4165, the first test car on Monday, December 14.  Many thanks to him for these.

The real test comes Monday morning with a rush hour load.  A few problems were obvious even with the PCC runs, notably difficulties at Lansdowne.  There does not appear to be a dedicated transit left turn, and cars must bull their way through traffic.  This is probably because the westbound switch is not yet electrified, and the traffic lights don’t “know” that they have to give a transit call on.  This should be fixed.

A more difficult problem is the exit from Earlscourt Loop which is close to Lansdowne eastbound, and will regularly be blocked by traffic waiting for a green signal.  Streetcars must push out into traffic from the loop without any sort of signal to assist them.  They may also find an occasional 47 Lansdowne bus laying over, and it will be interesting to see how often this form of “congestion” puts gaps in the service.

The operation of traffic signals generally follows the pattern we have seen elsewhere with a left/U turn phase for autos, followed by a through green for autos and transit.  Some parts of the line now have detectors that will hold a transit green for an approaching streetcar, but I have not seen enough of the operation to know if this is installed or working at all locations.

Here are views of the test run with 4165 and of the PCC operation.

Continue reading →