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Where Have All The Riders Gone? (Update 2)

[Updated December 14:  A chart of the top 30 bus routes has been added in response to requests from readers.  Comments on this chart are at the end of the post.] 

[Updated December 12:  Charts of ridership and vehicle mileage for most of the system from 1976 to 2005 have been added.  Comments on these appear at the end of this post.] 

My title may seem an odd choice, but my evening spent foraging in TTC statistics was quite sobering.

Some have commented here that I spend an undue amount of time on the streetcar system, and so for a moment, I will turn to the buses.  The TTC likes to believe that its system is growing, and in some very limited places, yes, that is true.  However, the service cuts of the 1990s decimated service and ridership on the entire system, not just downtown.

The count of boardings (one person on one bus regardless of whether they pay a fare or transfer) hit a peak of about 1.42-million in 1989.  This went into  long decline and by 2005, the number was 1.17-million.

Service, measured in vehicle miles, took a hit, although not as deep, through the 1990s, and by 2005 was growing back to almost the same level.  However, this masks what was really happening.  Routes in the handful of growing areas were getting more service, but the TTC was not recapturing riders it had lost.  Major routes now carry only a fraction of what they handled in 1989. Continue reading →

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Ridership and Service Since 1976 (Updated)

At the 501 Queen Forum last week, I and others talked about the declining service and ridership in the Queen Street corridor.  This post reviews the published statistics from 1976 to 2005, the latest information available so far.

Streetcar Ridership and Mileage 1976 to 2005

These data are taken from the annual Service Plan and related documents.  The most recent counts are on the TTC’s website.

Updated December 11:  A consolidated count has been added for the Queen services (501, 502 and 503) to show the ridership and mileage in the three routes serving this corridor. 

Continue reading →

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Getting From “A” to “B” — Is There More Congestion?

Those who have come to this site in the past year to read, among other things, detailed analyses of route operations on King and Queen Streets may not be aware that this has been done before.  Back in May 1984, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee organized manual observations of the major streetcar routes for three days.  A detailed post on the subject appeared here in April 2006 and it makes interesting reading for any who think that service problems are new to the system.

At that time, we documented a very high proportion of cars short-turning in the afternoon peak and a systemic problem that the actual times required to make trips across the system was higher than the scheduled time.  Short-turns were poorly managed and contributed to the general chaos in service.  Not much has changed, although the headways are a lot wider now than they were in 1984, and the reliability of service much lower.

Considering how much store the TTC puts in “congestion” as the explanation for all its woes, it is worth looking back two decades to see what changes have been made in the schedules. Continue reading →

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Before We All Say “Presto!”

Over at spacing.ca, there’s a post about the difference between Montreal and Toronto transfers, and comments arguing whether Toronto is hopelessly archaic, merely quaint, or actually a system that encourages friendly contact with the operators.

In the midst of this, I thought it would be worth looking back at older forms of transfers in Toronto, and this post links to two of them.

Toronto Railway Company September 1892

Souvenir Toronto Transit Commission 1953

The TRC transfers (shown slightly larger than actual size) are printed on very flimsy paper, and were intended to be given out by a conductor.  Note that the corner fold/cut indicates the direction of travel, and there is provision for the conductor to write in the time after which the holder had ten minutes to make their connection.  Obviously, these were intended to be issued as someone left the car.  This format didn’t last long.  (Note also the evolution of the printing of the date with the larger numerals for September 14.)

The souvenir transfers are from the display of the first two subway cars at the CNE in 1953.  I have shown both the back (left) and front (right) here.  The two that I have are printed on different coloured stock, but I don’t know if a wider selection was used.  At the top, you can see the area reserved for a station and time imprint from a machine.  Passengers picked up a blank transfer (yes, there were new ones printed for each date) and they manually validated it .

These transfers include one howler of an error:  one station is missing from the map!  This missing station almost had a different name from the one by which we know it today.  Rosedale is called “Crescent” on many early maps of the Yonge line.

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Fix the 501 Queen Car: Follow-up to the Forum

At the forum Tuesday evening, the TTC poured cold water on my proposal to swap the CLRV and ALRV fleets between the 501 Queen and 504 King routes claiming that their studies showed that headways below 4 minutes could not be operated reliably in mixed traffic.

Others commented on the length of time it takes to get from The Beach or Long Branch to downtown, and as the evening wore on, comparisons became as bloated as the headways on the 501.  One speaker claimed he could get from Buffalo to Toronto faster than a trip on the Queen car.

This post examines those two issues, and I will update this item if additional follow-up topics come to mind.

[Updated 4:20 pm, December 8:  Bad links to charts corrected plus minor textual revisions.] 

Continue reading →

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West Don Lands LRT Update

The final report for the West Don Lands LRT (the Cherry Street Car) came to the TTC meeting yesterday.  Thanks to the TTC’s embrace of PDFs for their reports, this is available on the web in full, living colour!

Much of the detail has been discussed here in other posts, but this provides a good overview as well as a statement of the “final” version of the EA.  From here, the report goes to Council for approval in January after which there will be a 30-day period for public comments.

Detailed design (together with that of the surrounding new neighbourhood) will continue through 2008/09 with construction in 2009/10.  Operation is planned to start late in 2010.

This isn’t the biggest extension to the system ever, but it marks an important change in the way transit is integrated with the neighbourhood as you can see from sample views of the line in the report.  This is also the first step in a network of lines to serve the eastern waterfront including Queen’s Quay, itself the subject of a major redesign project now in the planning stage.

Members of the Commission were tripping over each other with enthusiasm for this project and hoping to see work of comparable quality when the Transit City design teams come to their neighbourhoods.

For those who are unfamiliar with plans for the waterfront, the Central Waterfront Transit Plan includes a network of new streetcar/LRT lines that will be built in conjunction with new residential developments eastward from the Don River.  Whether we will see the whole network depends on continued commitment to transit and on the continuing boom in downtown residential construction.

This project has set a new, high standard for community participation in transit project planning.  Public participation can seem tedious, especially to professional staff who just want to get on with the job.  However, the collegial manner in which the West Don project evolved has shown the benefit of involving the community in the design work rather than imposing a finished product.  This will continue through the detailed design over the coming year.

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Fix The 501 Queen Streetcar Forum (Updated)

[Updated December 8:  I have added a link to James Bow’s post with his observations of the meeting.] 

For the benefit of those who could not attend last night’s forum, here are a few comments from a rather jaundiced participant.

The meeting was well-attended (about 90 people)  Even though the original venue was changed to a larger room in anticipation, we were full around the edges.  I was pleased to see that we had folks from both The Beach and from southern Etobicoke so that we had the flavour of both ends of the line.

Ed Drass started off with introductions, and managed to keep the meeting rolling along.  We consumed a full 2 1/2 hours. Continue reading →

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Schrödinger’s Cat, The Queen Car & Other Mysteries

In case people think all of this talk about headways and link times and clouds of data points and 19th-century railway timetables is getting far too technical, a respite.

In the course of this analysis, I have often thought that there may be some relationship between Quantum Physics and the operation of the Queen Car.  After all, a cup of tea can provide a model of random motion (and power the Infinite Improbability Drive).  We may presume that some deeper forces are at work on Queen Street that are manifest at the visible level in what passes for service on that route.

By analogy:

Einsteinian Time Dilation tells us that the faster we run for the car, the slower time will move, and we will never quite catch up before the car leaves the stop. 

Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradox demonstrating the concept that we cannot know the state of something until we actually look at it.  This is roughly akin to not knowing where the Queen Car is going until we have been on it long enough that the gods of improbability reveal our ultimate destination.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle deals with the problem that the act of observing an event can interfere with the event itself, and that we can never know simultaneously the position and momentum of a subatomic particle.  Applied to the Queen car, we all know that there are always lots of streetcars, except when you want one, and then you can never be sure that the one that has space is also going to your destination.

I invite suggestions for other possible explanations for the behaviour of transit service.  With centuries of scientific thought, we can unravel the mysterious behaviour of the Queen car.

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We Now Return To Our Regular Programming

Inevitably, just when things are heating up and there’s a real buzz around an issue, the Internet gods intervened to take this site offline yesterday afternoon and evening.

The problem lay in Bell Canada.  Although the ISP to which this site is connected has many redundant links, all of them are routed through one switch inside Bell’s network, and that switch failed.  It took Bell over nine hours to acknowledge, locate and repair the problem.

We are not amused.

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Analysis of 502 Downtowner: Part I — Headway Reliability

In past route reviews, I have started out looking at a few days’ operation in detail to get an overview of the route.  By now, readers are familiar with the conventions of the charts I have been creating, and for 502 Downtowner, I will jump in to the middle of the discussion.

This post gets headway information about Downtowner online in advance of the public meeting on Tuesday, December 4 about the Queen car of which the 502 is functionally a branch.

Downtowner (originally called Kingston Road) operates, on paper, from Bingham Loop at Victoria Park and Kingston Rd. to McCaul Loop west of Queen and University.  Although service on Kingston Rd, including the 503 Tripper interlined with it, was once quite frequent, headways are now much wider and reliability of service becomes crucial to the sense that there is any service at all.  Offpeak scheduled service is every 20 minutes, and this is one of the few places that has better service evenings and weekends (when the 22A Coxwell bus serves Kingston Road) than during weekdays.

The four charts here show the distribution of headways at Woodbine and at University.  Why did I choose these locations?

Woodbine shows us the service leaving Kingston Road inbound before it merges with Queen, as well as the effect of any short-turns at Woodbine Loop.  Yes, cars intended to serve Kingston Road are short-turned before they get more than a few hundred metres onto that street.

University shows the service eastbound from McCaul without various artifacts in CIS data near McCaul Loop, but more importantly at a location that is not polluted by CIS errors in tracking short turns on Downtowner.  As we will see in a future post, a lot of the 502 service never gets to Yonge Street, and this plays havoc with service as seen by would-be riders.

Westbound at Woodbine Ave.
Westbound at University Ave.
Eastbound at University Ave.
Eastbound at Woodbine Ave.

There are five pages for each chart of which the last shows the distribution of headways over the month.  Pages 1-4 show the detail for each week including trendlines.  Those trends generally follow the level of the scheduled headways, but the unreliability of service causes huge swings, especially in the offpeak when gaps of 30-40 minutes are common at Woodbine.  At University, the situation is much worse because of short-turns east of Yonge Street with gaps of nearly one hour on several days.

There is really very little to say about this situation.  After looking at the Queen car, I am running out of ways to express my disgust at what passes for service from the TTC.  I knew that service on the 502 was spotty, but actually seeing it “in print” is shocking.

In a coming post, I will look at the link times for this route and, yes, there is congestion on Kingston Road itself between Woodbine and Victoria Park.  This usually occurs during the afternoon rush hour and has little impact on the service quality at other times.

I will also review the combined 502 and 503 services in the morning and afternoon peak periods when, in theory, these lines combine to provide a blended, regular service.

As for the 502 itself, this is an excellent example of how the TTC destroys the attractiveness of transit service by cutting service and failing to properly manage the leftovers.  Back in the days when headways were five minutes or better, careful line management was less important because cars simply couldn’t get too far apart.  Now, with headways of 10 to 20 minutes, routes can become badly disorganized and riders have no idea when a vehicle might turn up.