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Streetcar Track Switching (Updated)

Early on June 11, two streetcars collided at Bay and Dundas due to an open switch incident.  Coverage of this can be found at the Globe & Mail and at the Sun.

Reports suggest that the operator of an eastbound car failed to check the setting of the east-to-north switch, drove into the intersection and turned into the path of a westbound car.  Reading the Globe article, I can’t help thinking that a discussion of the situation and the history of streetcar switching is badly needed.

TTC officials say it is the driver’s responsibility to check that every switch on the tracks is aligned properly before proceeding, a rule established in 2002 to avoid accidents like yesterday’s.

From other background, it appears that the Dundas route was diverting on Tuesday evening around events at Dundas Square, and the east-to-north switch would have been left open for that diversion.

Continue reading →

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A Few Questions For Metrolinx

Last Friday, I spent the day at a Metrolinx public consultation session, a meeting of “Stakeholders” who have more than a passing interest in transportation issues.  This was the fourth of six gatherings around the GTAH.

Metrolinx has got to recognize a basic fact:  Activists and community representatives are not consultants, they don’t represent companies for whom attendance at this type of function is part of their job.  Metronauts had the sense to be a Saturday event, and, frankly, it was a lot more productive.  If Metrolinx had to actually pay even half of the crowd who attended last Friday at reasonable consulting rates, they would have blown a bundle. 

The moderator started off by thanking us all for taking time out of our busy schedules to provide “value added feedback”.  Argghhh!  Yes, we added value, and in many cases this represented a day taken off work (vacation, in my case).  At least the food was good. Continue reading →

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Where’s My Transit Shelter? (Updated)

Updated June 9, 2008:  I have now received corrected counts of transit stops served by the TTC and have modified information in this post accordingly.

We’ve heard a lot recently about the amenities needed to attract riders to transit.  These include convenience and services at stops such as next bus information and shelter from whatever the weather might bring.

The City of Toronto is about to roll out their new street furniture program, and this includes new transit shelters.  Yes, those shelters, the ones we’ve all been waiting for all over the city.

We will continue to wait.

The contract for new shelters requires the advertising company to provide 5,000 new shelters, but they have until 2027 to finish the job.  We will get 300 this year, then 400 a year from 2009 to 2018, and then 25 a year from 2019 to 2027.  That doesn’t quite add up to 5,000, but who’s really counting anyhow?

Of the “new” shelters, most will go to replace existing shelters in 2008 and 2009, with only a paltry 30 and 40, respectively, in new locations.  Thereafter, the percentage may rise, but nothing has been confirmed.

[Updated information]  The TTC serves 8,540 bus stops and 715 streetcar stops within the City of Toronto for a total of 9,255.  Of these, about 4,000 have shelters today.  3,000 of those need to be replaced, and so by 2027, we will have:

  • 3,000 replacement shelters
  • 1,000 existing shelters
  • 2,000 net new shelters

This means that one third (just over 3,000 out of 9,000) stops on the system will still not have transit shelters.

The next problem is location.  You can reasonably bet that top priority will be driven by advertising considerations.  After all, we already know that the One Stop monitors in the subway reach over 80% of all riders (according to the company’s own rate card), so why bother going to the expense of putting monitors in lightly-used stations.  (There is huge irony in the presence of old, working Metron units at Davisville which, obviously, is not considered worthy of new monitors.)

Stops that have good visibility for advertising also, likely, have good transit service because they are on busy streets.  The next bus displays at such locations are of little use unless there is a major disruption because service is so frequent.  On routes with wide headways, there are fewer eyeballs, and probably no transit shelter until sometime after 2027.  Why tell someone when the next bus is coming, let alone advise of an unexpected delay or diversion, when there are not enough customers walking, riding or driving by to read the ads?

This is the folly at the heart of the TTC and City schemes for transit information facilities.  Rather than building them where they are needed, they will be built where an advertiser thinks they can make a buck and everyone else can stand out in the rain gazing with despair toward the horizon.

[Thanks to Ed Drass for the source information on plans for the new shelters, and through him to Mike DeToma at the TTC for the corrected info.]

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SRT Extension Open House

The display panels from the SRT Extension Open House are available on the project website.  My comments below follow the sequence of the presentation.

First up, we have a chart purporting to explain why we must use RT technology for this corridor.  The chart on page 7 shows the following future projected demands on the line:

  • North of Kennedy Station 10,000/hour
  • West of McCowan Station about 4,000/hour
  • North of Sheppard about 2,000/hour

As a point of reference, the current line capacity at Kennedy is about 3,800/hour. Continue reading →

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Upcoming Transit City Open Houses

The following open houses have been announced for June 2008:

Sheppard LRT

Tuesday, June 3 at Agincourt Collegiate (Midland north of Sheppard)

Wednesday, June 4 at Malvern Community Centre (Sewell’s Road east of Neilson)

Scarborough RT Extension

Wednesday, June 4 at Malvern Community Centre (Sewell’s Road east of Neilson)

Thursday, June 5 at Scarborough Town Centre Station

Don Mills LRT

Tuesday, June 10 at Rosedale Heights School for the Arts (near Castle Frank Station)

Tuesday, June 17 at East York Town Centre

Wednesday, June 18 at Don Mills Station

Details are available on the project websites (linked above).

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Routes 501/502/503 in January 2008: Blended Service? (Updated)

Update:  The charts in this post have been updated so that each route has its own colour.  Thanks to a reader, Brent, who spotted the problem with rendering them only in B&W.

One of the little myths of TTC schedules is that routes with branches, or streets with overlapping routes, actually have something like “blended” service where some care is taken to even out vehicle spacings.

In some cases, the schedules do make an attempt to do this with identical headways on different services, but after that, the service is pretty much left to its own devices to “blend”.  For many years, the 502 and 503 services on Kingston Road had similar but slightly different headways.  This would mean that there were large scheduled gaps followed by pairs of cars during periods when the departure times at Bingham were almost in sync.  As it happened, this problem was at its worst right at the peak of inbound travel.  Poor service by design, and in time this was fixed.

An example of overlapping routes where the blend is troublesome lies on Eglinton Avenue east of Yonge where many services run together:  34 Eglinton East, 54 Lawrence East (with two branches of its own), 100 Flemingdon Park, 56 Leaside, 51 Leslie and 103 Mt. Pleasant North.  The 103 doesn’t overlap for long and there is no service on the 51 and 56 at some times (although this will change if the proposed Ridership Growth Strategy full-service standards come into effect in November 2008).

On Eglinton there are three major services, each on its own headway.  This causes scheduled bunching and wide gaps.  Given the different requirements of each route, this is inevitable, but it’s important to remember that many riders will see packs of buses and wide gaps and wonder just what is going on.

Down on Queen Street, there are three services merged westbound between Kingston Road and the Don River, and two services between the Don and McCaul.  It’s not uncommon to see cars from different routes running in pairs, and I started wondering just how frequently this happens. Continue reading →

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Thoughts on Taking Down The Gardiner East

On Friday, Waterfront Toronto announced a plan to relocate the Gardiner Expressway from Jarvis to the DVP into a surface road parallel to the rail corridor.  For reasons that are unclear, the Environmental Assessment for this project will take four years — even longer that the infinitely tedious transit EAs for simple lines like Cherry Street through which many of us have suffered.

(The issues about how long or short an EA should be are complex in their own right and I won’t dwell on them here.)

In brief, the scheme replaces the elevated road with an at-grade eight-lane divided street, with  University Avenue cited as the prototype.  The new road would be north of the existing expressway structure allowing all of the land south of the rail corridor to be reconfigured and redeveloped.

Traffic projections indicate a slight rise in travel times for trips through this area.  Not unexpectedly, the motoring lobby already predicts at least doom and gloom, if not fire and brimstone for good measure.  I have no sympathy for them at all. 

The eastern part of the Gardiner is lightly used.  Even during the AM peak, the traffic flowing south on the DVP past my apartment (just north of Bloor) is rarely bumper-to-bumper because so many cars leave the road further north.  Jammed traffic means there has been an accident, not that there is no capacity.  Northbound backlogs on the DVP are inevitably caused by accidents much further north, by early closings downtown on long weekends, and by the end of major sporting events.  The queue rarely reaches to Dundas Street.  Lowering the capacity west of the Don will have little effect on overall travel times because the main areas of congestion lie elsewhere.

The new configuration will simplify the work on rearranging roads at the Don Mouth where a knot formed by Lake Shore, Cherry, Parliament, and Queen’s Quay (not to mention the Gardiner) is a very pedestrian-hostile environment.  Moreover, with the new “Waterfront Boulevard” being a street, not an expressway, connections with local roads will not require ramp structures, only traffic lights.

Why we have to wait eight years for this wonderful new arrangement is a mystery, but I am sure that many consultants will retire, or at least buy a nice house in the country, on this project.

Mixed in with Friday’s announcement are two other items of more than passing interest.

The York Street Ramp

Although we don’t have any details, there is a plan to realign the York Street off ramp, the corkscrew that occupies much of the northeast corner of Queen’s Quay and York.  When I can find out what exactly is involved, I will publish details here.

The neighbourhood groups along Queen’s Quay have been pushing for this for some time, but until we know the details, we won’t see whether all we get is a larger parkette but also a new off-ramp fouling up some other intersection.

The Front Street Extension

This road is now about as dead as it can be without  the requisite wooden stake through its heart.  Even Councillor Joe Pantalone, long an advocate for this road, says it is something for another generation, according to media reports.  Meanwhile, former Councillor Dominelli, a landowner in the Liberty Village area long reputed to be pushing for the FSE, has actually stated he just wants a local road, thank you, so that he can get on with his redevelopment.

Considering how long many people have tried to get just that proposal on the table and been rebuffed at every turn, this is a very strange development.  Finally, we can get on with properly designing and building roads to serve the community from Bathurst to Dufferin, rather than an off-ramp to the expressway serving commuters from Burlington.

In deference to his long battles on this front [you can groan here], I propose that the new road be called Hamish Boulevard.

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Routes 502/503 Downtowner / Kingston Road in January 2008

This is the second part of my analysis of service on routes 502/503, both of which provide weekday daytime service on Kingston Road.  For general comments about the route, please refer to the previous post.

Service in January was not as badly affected by snowstorms or shopping-related congestion as in December.  Except for the week after after New Year’s Day, there were no major storms disrupting service or creating barriers of cars parked foul of the tracks.  Even so, service on Kingston Road was far from ideal. Continue reading →

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Route Supervision on Queen?

I received a note from Pete Coulman in the Kingston Road thread, and moved it here as a separate item.

Quick comment on Queen service also.

Yes, a supervisor is in the loop at Neville (AM&PM only).  These are timings made at Queen & Lee the other day (May 29).  What do you make of these?

On one hand 13 cars in an hour seems good, on the other hand, the actual headways, especially with a supervisor there, seem all over the place.  As most readers will know, Lee is Stop 6 WB from Neville and on a bad day, one-way travel time from Lee to Neville is about 3 minutes tops.  Check this out.

Car    EB   WB

4244 607 618
4233 608 624
4203 616 627
4212 618 632
4251 620 639
4206 625 648
4208 634 650
4224 6xx 654
4240 651 701
4213 651 702
4238 657 707
4237 700 713
4214 700 718

WB headways are : 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 1, 5, 6 and 5.

Traffic is not an issue at this hour, there were no accidents, clear morning, AND a supervisor at Neville.

I don’t know what to say …

Supervision?  What supervision?  What is particularly striking are the long round-trip times from Lee to the loop for some runs.  The erratic departure times may be as much an effect of padded running times as anything.  When running times are too long, operators know that (a) they can make up for a long layover and (b) leaving strictly on time means a dawdling trip across the city at a time when there is little traffic.

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Routes 502/503 Downtowner / Kingston Road in December 2007

The Kingston Road streetcar services are often forgotten by the TTC.  The service itself is highly unreliable, and for no apparent reason, this street has much worse service during weekdays than in the evening or on weekends.  Yes, the riding is a shadow of its former self, but with the almost complete lack of service at times, it’s no wonder.

In the recent review of the Queen car, the TTC totally ignored the question of Kingston Road.  How often should service run?  Should the Downtowner and Kingston Road Tripper be combined into a single route?  Is the line mismanaged, or worse, simply left to its own devices?

In this post, I will look at the service operated on the Kingston Road routes in December 2007, and I will follow up later this weekend with a review of January 2008.

Continue reading →