John Lorinc and I co-authored an article on the spacing website on the subject of uploading the TTC to a provincial agency, Metrolinx. John took the “pro” side of the debate, and I took the “anti” side.
Please leave any comments on spacing’s site so that we keep all viewpoints together.
The information in this post just appeared on Facebook, and so I no longer feel bound to treat it as “pre release”.
The NextBus TTC displays now include the St. Clair, Bathurst, Carlton, Dundas and King routes in addition to Spadina and Harbourfront which have been publicly visible for some time.
Real time predictions for next vehicle arrivals are available as well as maps showing vehicle locations and movement.
Now you can monitor the quality of service from the comfort of your own computer. Warning! Some images may be unsettling, such as the view I had earlier today when all but two St. Clair cars were between Oakwood and Bathurst.
The NextBus site works with PDAs and will detect the type of device you are using. This access has its own URL, although you can navigate down simply by going to the home page at nextbus.com and drilling down to the TTC from the selection of locations and systems. Maps on PDAs are available, but they don’t refresh automatically, and they are much simpler as befits the small screen.
Updated March 5 at 16:50: An interview done in association with this article is now available.
Starting today, I will be publishing a series of articles both here and on The Mark, a public affairs blog. There is a Toronto section of that site with issues specific to our city, and that’s where my pieces will appear.
Candidates for public office, especially the Mayor, should understand what they’re talking about when they prattle on about public transit. It’s a big part of Toronto’s municipal budget, and easily the largest of our municipal agencies.
Politics by sound bite is no way to run a railway. In the interest of educating would-be office holders and encouraging them to broaden their views of the subject, my own Transit 101. The first article asks many questions, and in coming instalments I will address many of these topics.
No, I am not running for Mayor, or Council, or Traffic Warden, but could be tempted by a fleet of Swan Boats.
The article itself follows the break.
In previous articles of this series, I reviewed the St. Clair line’s operation on New Year’s Day 2010 as well as the first week in January. This article turns to the last week of January when TTC had implemented a new line management strategy to address the problems of service reliability.
The TTC has announced the makeup of its customer service advisory panel. According to the TTC’s press release, the first work of this panel will be to review the scope of work including:
The panel is expected to report by the end of June.
From my own point of view, a review of how the TTC interacts with its customers is only one part of a three-part problem. Two others must be addressed in parallel. If they are ignored, then this panel’s recommendations won’t go very far.
First of the two is the relationship between the Amalgamated Transit Union and the TTC, and through them with the public. Recent media reports and “gotcha” photos of TTC staff in less-than-productive poses, coupled with public furor over the botched fare increase procedure, raised antagonism between frontline TTC staff and the public. My gut feeling from riding the system is that this is dissipating, but wouldn’t take much to become a major issue again.
If the ATU has specific issues regarding working conditions (the protocols re work hours and breaks, for example), then these need to go on the table in a public forum. If we, the public and the larger political framework in which the TTC operates, don’t know the nature or the scope of the problems, we cannot possibly assess their importance, priority or how they might be addressed.
The contentious nature of public statements by ATU leaders only serves to undermine support for the frontline workers. This may “play to the house”, but it alienates the public whose support is essential.
Second of the two is the nature of TTC management. Far too often we hear what cannot be done, not what can be achieved if only we have the will to do it. Some of the issues are financial, others are organizational. If there are ways to improve the quality of service, we need to have a public debate about how this will be achieved and at what cost, if any. The Ridership Growth Strategy was based on the premise “tell us what you can do” while placing the policy decision for what we considered “good” in the political realm where it belongs.
Meanwhile, the TTC needs to examine everything it does through a customer service lens. Will proposed changes in fare inspection annoy riders and frustrate operating staff? Are operating and management procedures for surface routes appropriate for provision of good service? Can customers and route supervisors benefit from widespread availability of real time displays of service conditions (eg: Nextbus)?
Whatever changes are made, they must not be superficial, but should bring a real sense of improvement for the riding public and for TTC staff. Riders must feel in their bones that the system is improving, and staff must feel that they can actively contribute to this process with the support of TTC management and the Commission.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, February 25th brought regular CBC listeners Andy Barrie’s last show as host of Metro Morning, a role Andy had for the past 15 years. I met Andy by waking up to a new voice coming out of my radio, a new host on a show I’ve listened to, it seems, forever. My bedroom radio is never tuned to any station but CBC Radio 1.
Later that Thursday morning, Andy Barrie talked on The Current (scroll down to “Listen to Part Two”) about his history in broadcasting, as a Canadian immigrant, and his relationship with the radio audience. That friendship, that intimacy comes partly from the nature of morning radio, but also from radio itself, a medium where a good host is part of our daily lives, part of our family because they participate in so many of our routine moments.
I have had the privilege of sitting across the table from Andy or chatting on the phone over the years, as well as the dubious joy of a call from a story producer who would love to have me on at 5:50 am to help get the show rolling. Guests show up at outrageous hours, something the Metro Morning team does every day, not just because the show has a good audience, but because everyone there cares about the importance of local radio and local issues.
Many people are studio guests for one story, and we never hear them again. Others, like me, are repeat visitors. We are all treated well, our stories given respect on air by a host who actually listens, who lets the story unfold even as he gently aims it through an arc to fit the time available.
The sense of family, the rapport between everyone that sounds so good on air is just as real in the studio.
Starting Monday, Andy will be “just down the hall and around the corner” from his old studio, still active at the CBC, but with the luxury of sleeping well after 4 am, of having a life after 9 pm. He signed off with an “Au Revoir”, and I wish him the best of not-quite-retirements.
Steve Munro 