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Analysis of Service on Route 6 Bay Bus for January 2016

In previous articles reviewing the quality of service on various routes, I have concentrated on long, major lines such as Queen, Dufferin, Finch West and Lawrence East. However, a review of a few shorter routes has been on my “to do” list for a while because the problems that beset longer routes should not be present.

This brings me to routes 6 Bay and 94 Wellesley (the subject of a future article). Both of these routes are quite short, and they operate in the “old” city of Toronto mostly south of Bloor Street.

6 Bay went through the travails of construction at Union Station and, to a lesser extent, on Queens Quay, but that is now finished. 94 Wellesley didn’t have construction to deal with, but until September 2015, it had an old schedule which the bus operators could not meet.

How are these routes running today?

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A Few Questions About “Emerging Transit Plans”

At the February TTC Board meeting, Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat took the Board through the road show presentation she and her staff have been taking around Toronto with the proposed new Toronto transit plan. This issue was held over to the March Board meeting because, for procedural reasons, there were limited questions in February.

One major issue here is that the body actually charged with setting transit policy, the TTC Board, was being briefed on a plan they had not seen before, and to which they had given no input or direction. This is only partly explainable by the fact that any long-term transportation plan would form part of the city’s Official Plan, and the Planning Department “owns” that document. However, one would hope that members of the TTC Board would have at least a passing familiarity with what was in the works. This situation is complicated by the presence of “citizen” members who are not also Councillors and are not part of the information flow, such as it is, at City Hall.

The plan and supporting reports will go to City Council a week after the TTC meeting.

A major problem, of course, is that “planning” in Toronto consists of catering to the whims of the Mayor, influential Councillors, the Minister of Transportation (and his government), and senior members of the government caucus. To describe planning in this context as unbiased and purely “evidence based” is something of a stretch.

That said, the situation is better today than in recent years because, at least, all of the proposals are on the table at once, and it is more difficult to dress up a bad proposal when it must compete for attention and analysis with many others at the same time. This does not prevent Councillors from making the attempt at advancing their pet projects, but some degree of comparative evaluation might keep them in check.

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TTC Board Meeting March 23, 2016

The TTC Board will meet on March 23, 2016 at 1:00 pm in Committee Room 1 at City Hall. The agenda includes many items of interest:

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New Service for the Waterfront and King Street

At its meeting on March 23, 2016, the TTC Board will consider two reports on major revisions to transit service in the Waterfront and on King Street.

The changes will address a backlog of route and service issues in one package:

  • Through routing of the 72 Pape bus from Pape Station, suspended during construction at Union Station, will be restored, albeit on a different route.
  • Additional service will be provided on Queens Quay East by the 72C Pape to Union Station branch, although this is likely to be infrequent.
  • A new route, 121 Fort York – Esplanade will be created composed of the former Esplanade portion of the 72 Pape (later 172 Cherry) bus route plus an extension serving the Railway Lands and Fort York.
  • A new streetcar route, 514 Cherry, will operate as an overlay to the 504 King car replacing some or all of the supplementary bus service between Dufferin Loop and the new Distillery Loop on Cherry Street south of Mill Street. This service will operate with Flexity streetcars, subject to availability.
  • The conversion of 511 Bathurst to low floor operation will be delayed by about three months.

The changes will be implemented on June 19, 2016. The detailed service plans have not yet been published, but there is some information in the staff reports.

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Charlotte Street Reconstruction

The TTC will be rebuilding the track at the intersections of King & Charlotte and Adelaide & Charlotte beginning on March 29. Charlotte Street forms the eastern part of the loop used by 510 Spadina cars at King Street.

For the period from March 29 to April 10 while King & Charlotte is under construction:

  • 504 King streetcars will divert eastbound via Spadina, Queen and Church, while westbound service will divert via York, Queen and Spadina.
  • 510 Spadina streetcars will all operate at least to Queens Quay loop.
  • A 504 shuttle bus service will operate between Strachan and Church diverting around the construction via Richmond westbound and Front eastbound.

For the period from April 11 to 26 while Adelaide & Charlotte is under construction services will operate on their normal routes, although 510 Spadina cars will continue to operate to Queens Quay rather than turning at Adelaide.

 

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What Is The TTC Policy on Fares? (Updated)

Updated March 11, 2016 at 11:00 am: A section has been added commenting on the TTC’s claim that a two-hour transfer would result in a revenue loss of $20m/year.

Recent discussions about a proposed Toronto transit plan have included, almost as a minor sideshow, the Metrolinx study of regional fare integration. A basic tenet of this study is that “rapid transit” would be a separate fare zone or structure from everything else, but the exact mechanism by which this would be done is as yet unclear. GO Transit fares might be lowered and subway fares increased for certain trips, but there is no worked example to show how various trip types inside and outside the City of Toronto will be affected.

Although City and TTC staff are working with Metrolinx on this study, neither the TTC Board nor Council has been presented with a definitive proposal, and there is limited direction from either of them on guiding factors staff should use.

The only context in which Council has decided anything was for SmartTrack, and their wishes included lots of stations, frequent service and the ability to ride SmartTrack for a TTC fare. We know now that many stations and a good deal of service are no longer part of the package. As for fares, there has been some equivocating about this by staff as to just what a “TTC fare” might be by the time SmartTrack (or more accurately GO Regional Express Rail) begins operating.

As for the TTC Board, there has been a series of reports and decisions evolving over the last year. None of these sets a definitive policy, although the motions passed could be misread to imply this has happened.

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Is Anything Left of SmartTrack?

In the City Planning report at Executive Committee on March 9, 2016, two options for the configuration of a “combined” SmartTrack and GO Transit/Regional Express Rail (RER) service remain on the table. These are referred to as Option C and Option D.

OptionC

OptionD

The number of trains/hour cited here has bothered me for some time, and a recent conversation with Jonathan Goldsbie of NOW Magazine got me digging a bit deeper. Here is the service plan for the Stouffville and Kitchener corridors as shown on the Metrolinx RER website, in the “How Will I Benefit” page.

GORER_StouffvilleService

Peak service on the Stouffville corridor totals 7 trains/hour or one every 8.6 minutes as shown in Options C and D.

GORER_KitchenerService

In the Kitchener corridor, there are 8 trains/hour, but two of these are service to Kitchener which would run express from Bramalea to Union leaving only 6 “local” trains in that segment.

The service levels and station plans have profound implications for the transit network now under study.

  • There is no distinct SmartTrack service, only GO trains and (maybe) a few new stations. There will be no “SmartTrack” branded fleet.
  • If TTC fares will be offered on SmartTrack, this will really consist of giving people cheaper rides on service GO is already operating.
  • If “Regional Fare Integration” means that TTC rapid transit (subway) fares rise and GO fares for short trips come down, then SmartTrack will be a cash grab from subway riders to cross-subsidize SmartTrack riders on GO trains.
  • Demand models for SmartTrack indicate that very frequent service at TTC fares is required to attract substantial ridership, with 12 trains/hour (one every 5′) performing best in the model runs. The proposed service is considerably less frequent. “TTC fares” implies full transfer rights at no premium to and from the TTC network.
  • The existence of frequent SmartTrack service and stations in Scarborough is an integral part of the plan to build the subway extension as a one-stop express route to the Town Centre.
  • Part of the justification for keeping the Relief Line alignment to the north along Queen Street rather than King is to avoid competition with SmartTrack. However, there won’t be any SmartTrack service for it to compete with, only GO trains.
  • Tax Increment Financing requires that SmartTrack contribute something to the uplift in property values that would not occur absent the new service. However, the “new” service will entirely be GO Transit’s, and it will occur whether anything called SmartTrack exists or not.

The obvious question here is “where is SmartTrack”? In fact, it has completely vanished from the map, and at best would be represented by a handful of new stations, none of which is in Scarborough in Option D.

Is this the master plan, the culmination of John Tory’s election campaign and all of the vitriol poured over his critics?

The emperor has no clothes.

 

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Memo To Toronto Planners

This article has been “in the hopper” over the weekend while I worked on other things, and even managed some non-transit entertainment lest my readers despair that I ever leave the keyboard behind. Royson James in The Star beat me to getting the idea out with his own article “Time for Councillors to Ask Tough Transit Questions” yesterday. I have questions too, and some of them will not be easy to answer.

A mountain of reports descended on Council for a bit of light weekend reading when City Planning released its March update on transit plans. I have already commented on the main report over at Torontoist, and more recently on the demand studies, land use assumptions and Relief Line alignment here on my own site.

Council has my sympathy, up to a point, but the sheer volume is, like deferred TTC maintenance, the product of dodging a hard, detailed debate about transit priorities for years, and substituting populist “I deserve a subway” rhetoric.

Here are questions Councillors should be asking of the planners. It’s a long list, but there are a lot of gaps in the reports, despite their volume.

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Transit Network Analysis, SmartTrack and the Mysteries of Future Growth

Among the many reports (scroll down to the bottom of this document for links) coming to Toronto’s Executive Committee on March 9 is a short paper on Transit Network Analysis, three detailed demand projections and a paper about  Growth Assumptions. Although this has the neutral title Population and Employment Projections, it is in fact a review of the effect of SmartTrack on development in the Greater Toronto Area. The main report is titled Commercial & Multi-Residential Forecasts For The Review Of SmartTrack.

The paper is authored by the Strategic Regional Research Alliance, or SRRA, whose primary focus is real estate market tracking and projection. This organization (or its principals) were involved in the reports leading to the original SmartTrack plan in now-Mayor Tory’s campaign, specifically:

A fundamental premise running through all three papers, and perpetuated in the SmartTrack proposal, was that downtown Toronto was more or less fully built-out, and that future commercial growth would occur primarily in two major centres outside of the city, the large area around Pearson Airport and an equally large area around Markham. The potential for additional growth within Toronto itself was regarded as low, and therefore major expansion of the rapid transit network would focus on the two big suburban nodes.

At the Mayor’s direction, SRRA was retained as a consultant to the planning work now underway by the City of Toronto. This raised eyebrows both at Council for the crossover from a campaign support role to consultant, and also at Metrolinx where SRRA’s principal, Iain Dobson, had been appointed to the Board during the latter days of Glen Murray’s term as Ontario Minister of Transportation.

Although there is reason to take the new SRRA report with a grain of salt, the document makes interesting reading including a shift in some of SRRA’s outlook compared to their earlier work.

Which Land Use Model is Toronto Actually Using?

This report is supposed to be background to the overall planning study coming to Executive, but its focus is exclusively on the effects of SmartTrack. There is little mention of the development effects of other initiatives including the Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE), the Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Also, in part because ST and the GO/RER proposal cover the same territory and share stations, it is unclear how much change to development patterns occurs specifically due to SmartTrack and how much to the two services operating in one corridor.

Other background studies examine ridership effects of various combinations of SmartTrack, the SSE and the Relief Line, and these clearly must have an underlying land use, population and job location model. How this was developed or relates to the SRRA study is not clear.

That said, for the remainder of this article, I will concentrate on the SRRA text and its underlying assumptions.

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Reviewing the New Schedules on 501 Queen for January 2016 (Part II)

In January 2016, the TTC implemented new schedules on route 501 Queen making the following changes:

  • The route was split into two sections with an independent Humber to Long Branch service (in effect, a return of the long absent 507 Long Branch route), and
  • Running times were increased so that scheduled and real-world travel times were better matched and short turns could be reduced.

The first article on this subject reviewed headway behaviour (the space between cars) with the new schedules. This article turns to running times (the time required to get from A to B) and service behaviour at terminals.

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