Updated November 15, 2012 at 7:00am:
Demolition of the trackbed has progressed eastward to Rees Street.
With the eastbound road lanes now closed, passengers looking for the replacement bus service have a considerable challenge as there is no signage anywhere at the former eastbound stops indicating that buses are now operating on Lakeshore and Harbour.
The matter of streetcar track and cycling will be considered by the Public Works Committee on November 14, 2012. How much coverage this will receive, considering that the first item on the agenda is the proposed ban of plastic bags, remains to be seen.
The report, in brief, says that streetcar tracks have been around for a century and the problem is how to improve cyclist safety. Removal or covering over of tracks would be done only for inactive parts of the system.
Most of the inactive track is listed for removal as part of planned road paving jobs in the next decade. The City’s report includes:
This list is incomplete because it does not mention:
It is now clear that the TTC does not intend to retain the eastbound track on Adelaide Street which has been unusable due to various construction projects for years, and which is in very bad repair thanks to many pavement heaves, asphalt patches and utility cuts. I cannot help wondering why the TTC has included replacement of the overhead poles for this street in its ongoing program. Possibly they never got around to deciding until the cycling issue came up, or the electrical planners didn’t know what the track folks had in mind.
Adelaide has been out of service for so long that one could hardly claim that the TTC is losing flexibility because they have done without it for over a decade. In any event, there are many years before the scheduled removal, and if a case can be made for reactivating the track, it will still be around, albeit in appalling condition, for a while.
As for the cyclists, the report is basically saying “be careful”, and the issue is now one of finding ways to make the roads safer for cycling without removing active streetcar lines.
Forty years ago today, the TTC decided to retain its streetcar system.
My comments are on the Torontist website.
A few changes will be made to TTC service in November 2012.
Corrected Nov. 7, 2012 at 11:35 am: Route 504 King trippers which appeared to be a service increase are actually only a TTC correction to a previous error in their Service Summary.
502 Downtowner
Service will return to McCaul Loop operating on the same headways but with one fewer car during peak and weekday midday periods.
29 Dufferin
Service will return to Dufferin south of Queen when work by Toronto Water and TTC track replacement have finished.
504 King (Corrected)
Although this is not mentioned in the service change memo, the Service Summary shows three more CLRV trippers in the AM peak than on the October schedules. This extends the period of 2′ headway eastbound to downtown by 12 minutes (a total of 19 trippers rather than 16 on a 4′ headway).
Correction Nov 7: Scott Haskill at the TTC advises that these trippers existed in previous schedules, but were not included on the Service Summary. Therefore, there is no net addition to service.
45 Kipling
The late evening 11 minute headway will be extended to midnight to relieve crowding, and a new northbound trip from Kipling Station will be provided at about 2:20 am. These changes are on the weekday schedules only.
103 Mt. Pleasant North
All service now operating on a 15′ headway with 2 buses will be changed to run on a 20′ headway to “improve reliability”. The change includes adding six minutes of driving time and four minutes of layover to each trip.
Affected periods are weekdays all day to mid-evening, Saturday and Sunday daytime. Service at other times remains at 30′.
510 Spadina
Streetcar service returns between Spadina Station and King Street with a bus shuttle from King to Queen’s Quay.
Streetcar headways will be:
Period Weekday Saturday Sunday AM Peak 2'30" Midday 1'53" PM Peak 2'00" Early Morning 6'00" 15'00" Morning 2'30" 2'50" Afternoon 2'00" 2'10" Early Evening 2'15" 2'30" 6'00" Late Evening 6'00" 6'00" 6'00"
Bus shuttle headways will be 6’00” at all times except early Sunday morning when they will be 10’00”.
Streetcar service will return to Queen’s Quay & Spadina on December 23, 2012 using the same schedules as in May 2012. Service to Union Station will not resume until late spring 2013.
165 Weston Road North
Weekend service to Canada’s Wonderland ends.
This is the final installment in my review of the TTC 2013-2022 Capital Budget.
The 2013-2022 Capital Budget includes plans for the conversion of streetcar services from the existing CLRV/ALRV fleets to the new low-floor light rail vehicles (LFLRVs), related projects to bring the infrastructure up to the required standard for the new fleet, and continuing system maintenance.
Updated Nov. 4, 2012 at 8:30 pm:
The headway shown for LFLRV operation on Queen was incorrectly calculated in the spreadsheet. This has been fixed.
This article looks at the fleet plans for the conventional bus fleet and for Wheel Trans over the 10-year period 2013-2022.
The lead time to procure new buses is considerably shorter than for rail vehicles (18-24 months vs several years), and this provides more flexibility in responding to changes in circumstances and/or policy regarding bus services. What is striking in both of these plans is the slow rate of growth for the conventional bus fleet and the total absence of planned growth for Wheel Trans. Continue reading
This is the first article in a series examining various aspects of the TTC’s Capital Budget for 2013 and the 10-year plan running through 2022. The report linked here gives an overview, but I have now reviewed the roughly 1,300 pages of supporting information in the “Blue Books” which detail each capital project.
Those books are not available on line, but contain much valuable information. When the Commission considered its Capital Budget, this material had not yet been assembled.
To avoid creating a post as long as the Blue Books, I will break this into separate articles for major topics.
The Subway Fleet Plan
This plan provides for additional trains on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth subways, but only on a limited basis. The fleet of Toronto Rocket (TR) trains will be used exclusively on YUS and the T1 trains (now split between both major lines) will operate on BD and, in four-car sets, on Sheppard.
The TR fleet is just large enough to accommodate the extension to Vaughan with a short-turn operation to Wilson Station, but only at the current level of service. The T1 fleet is larger than required for current schedules on the BD and Sheppard lines, and so the surplus is used up at the rate of about 2 trains every 3 years on BD with no additional service on Sheppard.
The projection presumes that the spare factor for TR trains can be held at 13%, and it is unclear today whether this can be achieved and maintained over the life of this fleet.
Those extra T1 trains have been counted as “free” on more than one occasion for subway expansions proposed for the near future, but obviously they can only be used once be it for extra BD service, or on extended Sheppard or Danforth subways, or on the first phase of a Downtown Relief Line (DRL). Continue reading
For my thoughts on the proposed agreement between the City of Toronto, the TTC and Metrolinx, please read my article on the Torontoist site.
The City of Toronto’s Ombudsman, Fiona Crean, has issued a scathing report about the so-called public consultation regarding proposed second exits at stations on the Danforth subway.
For detailed reporting of events at the time, please see my earlier posting. The Ombudsman’s report details events after July 2010 when the whole discussion and consultation, such as it was, disappeared into private meetings with few benefits. Indeed, after neighbourhoods thought that the projects had been put on hold, design work actually continued unknown to anyone including the local Councillor.
The litany of “I thought someone else was responsible” communication foul-ups goes on and on, even after one might have thought the TTC had learned their processes were broken. “Arrogance” does not begin to describe the attitude of TTC staff and their attitude to community input as an annoyance to be avoided.
The TTC has fully accepted the Ombudsman’s criticism and will implement new procedures and communication models for projects to ensure that everyone knows what is going on. This frankly is an example of a situation where, at the time, neither senior TTC management nor Commissioners knocked heads together to fix a process that was clearly broken. Just how broken shows up in the degree to which staff arguments defending their preferred design shifted as necessary to subvert any public input. This is all documented in the report.
I could not help thinking of GO Transit and their appalling dealings with various communities in the Georgetown rail corridor notably at the West Toronto grade separation. GO is now trying to improve, but the Georgetown project is plagued with the same problem of lost trust brought on by mistreatment of the public participation process that we see with the TTC. It is easy to become an agency thought to be incompetent and untrustworthy, and far harder to win back respect.
This is a sad tale and an indictment of an organization whose reputation for fair dealing with the public has been less then ideal. Things are improving, but lifting the rocks so that we can see all of the creepy-crawlies underneath rarely happens and the Ombudsman has done Toronto a good service here. Other agencies would do well to read her report and see just how badly things can be screwed up, even with, on occasion, good intentions.
The TTC’s response to the Ombudsman’s report is on their website.
Steve Munro 