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Analysis of Route 39 Finch East: Part I — Introduction

When I started the analysis of operations on various routes, I requested data for a number of suburban lines as well as the downtown streetcar routes.  Up until now, I have only published material on 29 Dufferin, but it’s worthwhile getting some of the other data out in view before it is completely stale.

The data in this series come from December 2006, but the conditions on Finch have not changed too much in the interim.  The service is not as complete a mess as we have seen on some of the major streetcar routes, but it is far from perfect.  It’s worthwhile looking at how a frequent bus route operates in conditions that should be generally favourable to transit service.

As I have done before, I will start with Christmas Day 2006 because this shows the basics including the route’s behaviour when there is no excessive passenger demand or traffic congestion.  For contrast, I will also present a weekday Friday, December 1, 2006. Continue reading →

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Harbourfront Tunnel Slow Order

In a spectacular piece of bad timing, the TTC has instituted a slow order in the tunnel between Union and Queen’s Quay Stations for track repairs due to problems with the concrete.

One can’t help wondering why they didn’t find and fix whatever was wrong earlier this year when the line was closed down elsewhere.  Were they hoping to save this for next winter, but lost the gamble?

Meanwhile, operators have been directed as follows:

To all operators on the 509 and 510 routes, the following announcement should be read to your customers when entering the tunnel on the Harbourfront route and when leaving Union Station.  The announcement may help the customers understand the slow speeds required.

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE:

SLOW VEHICLE OPERATION IS IN EFFECT WITHIN THE TUNNEL.  THEREFORE, IT WILL TAKE A FEW EXTRA MINUTES TO REACH

UNION STATION (INBOUND) (or)

QUEEN’S QUAY (OUTBOUND)

YOUR PATIENCE IS APPRECIATED.

The TTC’s website is silent on this situation.  Any added information would be appreciated.

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A Scourge of Scratchitti

My daily commute gives me a chance to look at the SRT in all its glory.  Lately, I have noticed that there is either an explosive growth in scratchitti on SRT cars, or that the TTC has simply stopped replacing the glass.

I can’t remember the last time I was on a car that had none at all, and things have now developed to the point where there are layers with one tagger overwriting another.  This problem is also starting to show up on the subway and in some stations.

The TTC embarked on a station cleanliness program last year and it has shown some results (with notable exceptions), but my sense is that scratchitti is getting out of hand.

I would be interested in hearing reports from other parts of the system.  This sort of problem is symptomatic of an organization that may have given up trying, and the real worry is what other invisible maintenance is also left for another day.

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Coming Soon

We’re in a slow news period for the next few weeks, and this is a good time to catch up on some unfinished business.

Way back when I started working on route analyses, I obtained data for several routes that have languished on my hard drive waiting to be transformed into beautiful charts.  Over the past few days, I have been working on 35 Finch East and expect to publish some of the results over the weekend.

Other routes for which I have unpublished data are Finch West, Don Mills, Victoria Park, Bathurst Bus, Carlton and Dundas.  Although this is for December 2006, TTC operations have not changed all that much, and it’s still worth looking at these routes.  I don’t expect to get through them all in August, but I’ll publish what I can.

Some of you may ask “doesn’t he have anything else to do now that it’s stopped raining?”  Well, yes, I wonder that too, but my sense of public duty [you can groan here] calls me back.  There’s another trip to Stratford coming up, concerts in Toronto, and planning for the Film Festival.  Don’t worry.  I will get out into the world now and then! 

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How Many People Will Ride the Eglinton Line? (Updated)

[Update:  As promised, I have received the updated ridership projections TTC is using for Transit City.  They have been added in the body of this post.]

Recently, there has been a lot of ink about the technology choice for an Eglinton rapid transit line, whatever it may turn out to be.  Earlier this weekend, after a nagging period when I thought the ridership projections looked a bit off, I went back to the source material to check.

In the Globe article on July 24, Adam Giambrone says that the route’s projected 9,000 riders in the peak hour of the morning rush in 2021 don’t justify a subway.   Hmmm.  9,000 you say?

[This section has been updated.]

Let’s have a look at the original Transit City projections and the revised values now in use as part of the EAs in progress.  Original values are in parentheses.  Current values are for 2031 and reflect anticipated population and employment growth, although further refinements are possible as the EAs progress.

  • Eglinton:  5,000-5400 (4,700) (see below)
  • Scarborough-Malvern:  4,600-5000 (3,900)
  • Don Mills:  2,600-3000 (2,900)
  • Sheppard East:  3,000 (2,700)
  • Jane:  1,700-2,200 (2,700)
  • Finch West:  2,300-2,800 (2,300)
  • Waterfront West:  2,000-2,400 in 2021 (Taken from EA document) (2,200)

The revised values are current while the originals date from March 2007.

The Eglinton projections do not include Airport ridership.  However, traffic to Pearson will generally not co-incide with the peak time, location and direction and is unlikely to make much if any impact on the required level of service.

In the Sheppard EA, there is a note that peak ridership on a full Sheppard Subway to STC is projected to be about 5,000/hour versus 3,000 projected for the LRT east of Don Mills.  This appears to support arguments that a subway network will attract more riders, but the TTC also notes that the majority of the additional riders are merely diverted from other transit services.  What is unclear is the impact of less accessible transit service for local trips and the effect on transit usage and pedestrian amenities in the areas between subway stations.

If we look at the Eglinton projection of 5,400, we can expect that a full subway would attract more riders, but still well below the level needed to justify that level of capital investment, and still leaving the question of what other routes these riders might have used.

Even with revisions, none of the lines was expected to come anywhere near subway-level demand.  I am particular struck by the drop in the estimated demand on Jane which begs the question of whether it is an appropriate corridor for this technology.

[End of Update]

Eglinton is a particularly important case because it is at least two separate routes west and east of Yonge, and the demand accumulating at any point will be affected by what routes and services intersect it.  For example, as on the bus service, riding east of Eglinton West Station will be lower than to the west because many trips will transfer to the Spadina subway.  East of Yonge, the provision of an alternate, fast route to Danforth or further south via a Don Mills or Downtown Relief line will drain much load that would otherwise continue west to the Yonge Subway.

Many months ago, I asked Metrolinx to release the detailed ridership projections for each component and segment of their various “test case” networks.  I was assured that this information would be published concurrently with the draft Regional Transportation Plan.  Alas, that plan sits in limbo and will not appear until, at best, late September.  The modelling is for the test cases was done long ago, and there is no reason Metrolinx should keep the results secret. 

Of course, the numbers may not back up some of the plans people have for various rapid transit schemes, and the data could set off a debate about just what sort of network is really needed.

The last thing we need is a huge rush this fall to ram through a draft plan just so that Queen’s Park can announce something in time for the next election.  Given both the economic situation and the frosty reception from Ottawa to fund MoveOntario, let alone Metrolinx, the pressure to approve something, anything may have waned a tad.

Without question we need to spend more on transit, but let’s do so where and how it’s demonstrably needed rather than pre-announcing routes and technologies. 

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Scarborough-Malvern and Finch West LRT EAs (Update 1)

The first round of public meetings for the Scarborough-Malvern line will be held on July 23rd and 24th.  Meetings for the Finch West line will follow on July 29th, August 6th and 7th.

Scarborough-Malvern Project Site

Finch West Project Site

Updated July 30:  The Scarborough-Malvern display panels are now available online.  Note that on Page 13 the peak ridership forecast is now 4,600 to 5,000 per hour.  This change from earlier estimates (3,900) I reported is due to the incorporation of updated population and employment projections, and the change to 2031 as the reference year to match the estimates in Metrolinx studies.

Various routes from Kingston Road north to Malvern via UofT Scarborough Campus are shown in the display.  The preferred route travels north on Morningside as far as Sheppard, then west (via shared trackage with the Sheppard East LRT), the north via Neilson to Malvern Town Centre.  The alignment would be generally in the middle of roads except possibly near UTSC depending on what design would best serve that campus.

The Finch West site now was a FAQ which gives a projected peak ridership for the line of 2,300 to 2,800 per hour.  The lower figure matches the earlier published 2021 estimate.  I am not sure if the two studies are drawing on the same source of ridership estimates, and I will follow this up with the planners.

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Analysis of Route 512 St. Clair — Part 3: When Things Go Wrong

In this, the final installment of the St. Clair analysis, I will look at the problem of short turning, as well as the details of operations on some days when service was disrupted. 

Previous installments included full-month charts of headway and link time behaviour.  To start off here, the chart linked below shows the destinations and spacings of cars westbound from Yonge Street.  As in previous route analyses, the spacing between the vertical bars allows quick identification of headway irregularities, and the length of the bars shows how far the cars actually went on the line.

Westbound Destinations from Yonge

A few caveats in reading the charts:

  • Only cars (and buses) leaving Yonge Street westbound are shown.  If a westbound trip originated at St. Clair West Station, it is not included.
  • When I did the analysis, there were reference points at Bathurst and at Dufferin.  The short turn charts cannot distinguish between cars going only to Vaughan (and thence to Roncesvalles Carhouse) and those going to Oakwood because both points are in between the same pair of reference locations.  Reasonable assumptions about which destination applies can be based on the time of day when a westbound carhouse trip is likely, or not.  (This is a problem of my own creation by the choice of reference points and has nothing to do with the TTC’s data.)
  • Starting at about 11am on Friday, April 20 through Sunday, April 22, streetcar service operated between Yonge and St. Clair West Station with buses going further west.  A few trips show up on the “short turn charts” which were operated by buses that came through to Yonge Street and therefore were picked up in the westbound analysis.

Continue reading →

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Stratford Reviewed (3): The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew isn’t a piece of Shakespeare I rush out to see at every opportunity, but with Peter Hinton directing, I couldn’t resist.  His Swanne Trilogy, Into the Woods, and Fanny Kemble established him for me as a director worth watching.  He is currently the artistic director of the National Arts Centre English Theatre in Ottawa.

For this production of Shrew, Hinton has retained the Induction, a framing device that makes the main story of Kate and Petruchio a play-within-a-play.  This device is jetisoned in some performances, but here it is not only retained but modified in a way that changes the character balance in what will follow.

Christopher Sly, a drunkard, staggers about a tavern and falls asleep on the floor.  In the original, a visiting nobleman decides to play a trick by dressing up Sly as a Lord and, once he awakes, feigning that he has lost his memory.  The tavern inmates, a group of actors and the real nobleman’s party will put on a play for his entertainment, and this inner play is The Taming of the Shrew.

In Hinton’s version, the nobleman is none other than Queen Elizabeth who is out on the town (echoes here of Elizabeth Rex, not to mention A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  When Sly awakes, he is attended by his long-lost “wife”, actually the Queen’s page Bartholemew.

In a nice touch for the regulars, the bell traditionally announcing the start of Stratford performances does not ring until the inner play begins. Continue reading →

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Stratford Reviewed (2): There Reigns Love

My second day at Stratford was devoted to Shakespeare, although not “classic” versions of plays.

Simon Callow’s one-man reading of the Sonnets, There Reigns Love, is a short run closing on August 3.  Rarely do we hear this poetry performed as a connected work, yet here we can wallow in both the text and in the thrill of watching a master actor at work.

Peter Hinton’s version of The Taming of the Shrew attempts to blunt some of this difficult play’s  misogyny.  Hinton is moderately successful, but the sweet context he wraps around the plot cannot hide the bitter sexual politics at its core.  (This review will appear in part 3.) Continue reading →

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Metrolinx vs Toronto: What To Build on Eglinton

Jeff Gray and Matthew Campbell report in today’s Globe on the potential for conflict between Metrolinx and the TTC over the future of Transit City and, in particular, the choice of technology for the Eglinton line.

I have written at length about this before and won’t rehash the arguments here, but a few remarks in the article deserve comment.  Rob MacIsaac parrots subway boosters with this gem:

“If you’re going to travel from one end of that line to the other, we think you’d probably better pack a picnic lunch,” Mr. MacIsaac said.

“We would like to find a way to speed it up for people who are travelling longer distances.”

And why, he asked, build something that could end up overcrowded?

“There’s little point in spending a lot of money on an LRT line that will end up with passengers whose faces are pressed up against the windows.”

Why indeed would someone ride from Scarborough to Pearson Airport or Mississauga when MacIsaac’s own plans call for an express route across the 401 corridor?  The whole point of a network is that it must serve a variety of demands — some long haul, some local.  Just as we now have GO Transit for commuters from the 905 to downtown, we would also have high-speed services for trips across the 416/905 region.

A trip from Scarborough to Pearson is longer than a trip from Pickering to downtown Toronto, and comparable to a trip from Richmond Hill.  Misguided planners and politicians insist on treating it as a local trip that should be stuffed into the TTC network.  Having created this straw man, they claim this justifies a full-blown rapid transit line on Eglinton.

As for demand, the TTC’s projection for Eglinton is 9,000 per hour, and this would be on the busy central part of the route that will be underground.  Outer parts of the route will easily be within the capacity of surface LRT which has the added advantage of lower cost and more attractive station spacing for local demands.

Despite its protests that its work is only “test cases”, not formal plans, Metrolinx is showing its true colours by making technology choices long before they have demonstrated the need for their network schemes.  Public consultation is a sham designed to give people a warm fuzzy feeling about Metrolinx rather than engaging them in a real debate.

MacIsaac’s comments about Eglinton show that the real agenda is to push through a major rapid transit project, likely a western extension of the Scarborough RT.

The Metrolinx Board has not met publicly since June 13, and the regional plans were last on the agenda on April 25.  Their next meeting is scheduled for late September.

It’s time for the Board to tell the chair to stop musing about network options that are not yet even a draft plan.