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“One Stop” Doesn’t Stop Here

The video advertising screens in our subway stations prompted robust debate when they were first proposed.  Many felt they were the thin edge of an invasion of our commuting space by relentless video ads especially on the vehicles.

Those who supported the video screens argued that they were a huge improvement over the old “Metron” displays, and touted the wondrous things this new advertising medium would bring us.  As we all know, the video screens were installed in many stations, and then everything stopped cold.

Where are the rest of the signs?  If this was such an important, profitable project, why haven’t all of the Metron units been replaced, indeed, why hasn’t there been a proposal to increase the number of screens?

Many stations, notably Davisville at TTC Head Office, still have Metron units, some of which are operating with ancient news items or commercials, not to mention clocks that are on time give or take a few hours.  These were supposed to be long gone, but they linger on.

One important function claimed for the screens was the ability to broadcast system status information.  How can you do this when many stations don’t even have them, and those that do have only one on each platform, and none in other areas?

Could it be that the advertising market is only lucrative for busy, high-activity locations such as Bloor-Yonge Station?

Is this an example of the shortcoming of expecting the private sector to provide an important piece of infrastructure that should be everywhere, but which is only where they have a hope of making money?

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All Roads Lead to Spadina

With the construction projects now in progress, the service on Spadina Avenue is an impressive mixture of cars from other routes.  Scheduled PM peak service now consists of:

  • Spadina cars every 2 minutes from King north to Bloor
  • Queen cars every 5’30” from King to Queen
  • Bathurst cars every 5’20” from King to College

Some of the turns to and from Spadina have working transit priority signals, while others don’t and the streetcars have to fight their way through traffic.

Weekend service is almost as frequent especially when extras are thrown in on Queen and Bathurst to compensate for diversion delays.

The new Bathurst/Queen intersection is now assembled, and concrete placement was in progress on the north-east quadrant when I visited earlier today.  Once that work is out of the way, the new intersection track must be connected to the existing tangent rails in all four directions.

This intersection, like other recent work, includes a large amount of vibration insulation including rubber sleeves around the running rails, and rubber encapsulation of the castings except where they are bolted together.

Ed Drass passed one observation about the Bathurst service on to me:  Why is the Bathurst car diverting via College, thereby missing an important destination, Western Hospital, even though the track layout allows a diversion via Dundas?  Did the people planning the diversion not know a Dundas route was possible?  Is there any possibility of changing the diversion before north-south service resumes on November 5?

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Cherry Street EA Update

If you were not able to get to the Public Information Centre meeting last week, the handout can be accessed on the Toronto Waterfront website (scroll down to the end of the list of reports). 

This package does not include drawings of proposed treatments of the underpass at the railway viaduct.  Although there have been some proposals, detailed design and evaluation is part of the study of the area south of the railway including the complex problems of connecting both parts of Cherry, Lake Shore and Queen’s Quay.

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A Small Fix for Page-to-Page Links

Page-to-Page Links: 

Some of you may have noticed that if you tried to follow links to “previous” pages, you were dropped into a message telling you that it didn’t work, and to go to the main page again.

Without going into the details, this was related to security hooks added to this site.  Unfortunately, those hooks sideswiped another piece of code.  This has been fixed.

For those of you who get messages saying that your address has been listed by Spamhaus:

This is an inevitable problem with the fact that people (like me) who have high speed access but don’t stay camped on or have a permanent IP address will occasionally inherit an address that someone else used for spam.  I have found that simply recycling my DSL modem to pick up a new IP address gets around this problem.

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A Visit to Fleet Street

Monday afternoon, I took advantage of the balmy Thanksgiving weather to look at the state of Fleet Street, an oxymoron if ever there were one in its current state.  The construction is working its way east from Exhibition Loop, and is currently at the Strachan intersection where the coming realignment of the tracks is already visible.  From here east, the street is a mess, pedestrians are walking along the roadway because the sidewalks are torn up, and the former brewery site is now a vast and empty lot awaiting more condos.

All of this doesn’t warrant a post, but two observations do.

First, despite the fact that the 509 Shuttle only has to run back and forth from Spadina to the Princes’ Gates, there are three buses on this service, and two of them were running almost as a pair.  I was one of a handful of people on the trip east from the CNE, and I didn’t see many on the other two buses either.  Isn’t it amazing how the TTC can run such frequent, if erratic, service for construction replacement, but when it comes to basic everyday service, well, you know the rest.

Second, I saw the best example of a transit priority signal in Toronto.  Eastbound at Strachan and Fleet, there is a signal to let the streetcars out of Exhibition Loop.  Despite the physical impossibility of any streetcar actually appearing here for several months, the light dutifully cycles through its “transit” phase.  Clearly, the presence or absence of a streetcar has nothing to do with this “pro transit signal”, and it is simply one phase in a multi-phase progression.  That’s what I see elsewhere and indeed it’s the sort of thing that is actually “anti-transit” because streetcars must wait for their own phase rather than using the regular green time that had been available to them for decades.

The TTC and the Works Department need to start being honest about which signals are true “transit priority” and which are rather expensive decorations whose main effect is to keep streetcars out of the way of other traffic.  There is supposed to be a report on this subject coming to the TTC, maybe even at its October meeting.  Stay tuned.