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Transit City

Today the TTC unveiled an astounding plan for a 120km network of LRT lines for the City of Toronto.  You can read all about it on the website created for the plan at this link.

Nothing like this has ever been announced in my 35 years of transit advocacy. Even the 1990 David Peterson government’s scheme for many subway lines doesn’t come close. That plan was mostly bits and pieces patched onto an existing network and recycling a lot of old plans.  Very little was actually built and most remnants of the program were killed off by Mike Harris.

Transit City is completely new.  Many of the lines in this plan have never been part of old transit studies, or have appeared as full-blown subway lines, not as LRT.

This is the plan I have been waiting 35 years for.  Ever since the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to keep our streetcar system as the nucleus of a much larger suburban network, I have waited to see a real LRT network promoted by the TTC and embraced by the City.

Already, some critics are wondering how this will get approved and funded.  We seem to have no trouble proposing subway lines we don’t need at bankrupting prices, and it’s time people knew that there is an alternative.  This will mean some hard political choices about the use of road space — it’s always easier to bury the transit system than to deal with design and traffic issues on the surface.  But now, after decades, we can have this debate with a real plan as a starting point.

I will comment in detail on the plan over the weekend when I have time for a longer post, and will incorporate the many comments received on this subject.

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Light Rail Comes to Toronto

Tomorrow, March 16, will be a landmark day for LRT in Toronto.  At 10:30 am, the TTC will unveil a plan for a large network of lines covering the city.

[I have deleted the links to preliminary articles on the Star and Globe websites as they are out of date.  You can read the latest coverage by going there yourself.  Amusingly, the usually well informed sources have different lists of what’s in the network to be announced Friday morning.  We shall see who’s right.]

This plan provides Toronto with the missing pieces of both the Ridership Growth Strategy and the Official Plan. 

The purpose of RGS was to show what could be done to improve the day-to-day TTC system quickly and without huge expense.  Some fare changes have already been implemented, some service improvements, and many more are to come.  Regular readers will know that I have complained that it took so long, but at least improvements are coming soon. Continue reading →

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Some Day My Parts Will Come

Long time readers here will remember my survey of escalator status, and will also have noticed that I didn’t publish anything on the subject for quite a while.  Why?  I was keeping track, but the problem of escalators being out of service seemed to have faded to a tolerable level.

Maybe it’s a statistical blip, maybe the bad old days are back, but last week, I hit something of a “home run” for out-of-service elevating devices. Continue reading →

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Who Will Ride?

Now that shovels are poised to start digging north into York Region, we need to take a hard look at just who this line is going to serve.  The information is this post is taken from:

The TTC’s own Environmental Assessment report of the line to Steeles at this link, and

The York Region Environmental Assessment report on its plans for Highway 7 and the Vaughan North-South Link at this link.

First we have the TTC study which assumes the line will end at Steeles Avenue.  In Appendix M, starting at page 13 in the PDF (page 22 of the source document), we have the travel forecasts, and the summary appears on page 15 (25).

Assuming that the land use assumptions are met, the extension is expected to carry about 17,000 AM peak passengers  southbound into Downsview Station.  No peak hour figure is given, but typically about half of the 3-hour peak load travels in the peak hour.  This translates to about 8,500 in the peak hour.

Northbound AM peak travel to York University is estimated at 5,500.   This gives us about 2,750 northbound riders to York University in the morning peak hour. Continue reading →

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Signs of the Times

In between all the debate about bus technology, how to run proper transit service, and where to spend the next billion dollars, there are little things that show the bad side of the TTC.

Several people, including me, comment about the lack of proper signage for diversions, special events, maintenance and so forth.  I thought that the sign at Queen’s Quay station, in the dead of winter, telling people about paying their fare at Union was aged, but at Chester Station, we are approaching a record.

At the top of the stair down to the westbound platform, there is a sign advertising the closing of Gerrard Street east of Coxwell for track repairs to start in April 2006.  This is right beside a freshly installed sign advertising the subway diversion at Museum Station.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, for how many subway diversion signs will still be scattered around the system a month, three months, a year after the diversion is just a memory.  Assuming, of course, that the railfans don’t liberate them as souvenirs.

I don’t know by how many people and how many times the suggestion of “best by” dates has been made to the TTC.  Put a “remove after April 1, 2007” [insert appropriate date] line on every poster, and instruct staff to tear down any sign that’s past its time.  Is this so difficult?  Will it take a million-dollar media consulting contract to implement?  I (and many others) are giving the TTC this idea for free, pro bono, hoping that someday we will only see notices that we should actually read.

Yes, it’s a small thing, a tiny thing beside making the Queen car run even close to reliable service, but it shows how simple suggestions are ignored.  How many others that might give us a better system suffer the same fate?

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The Myth of On-Time Performance

I received a comment from Karem Allen in Durham that belongs in its own thread: 

A friend asked me if I knew why there would be an empty bus following closely to a full bus and my anwer was — so the empty one would be able to jump ahead and pick up riders.

He told me at one time they could leapfrog and be able to help the other drive but are now strangled in policy.
He told me that if a Driver gets 2 early’s in a month he is suspended.  So instead of jumping ahead and taking the riders and let the full one continue the empty one will hang back so as to not be early and of course the stop is empty of people.

Is this still in force?

I did not think buses were on a schedule to be early anyways.

There are a few things going on here worth talking about.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with buses playing leap-frog to handle passengers when they are bunched.  This can even out the load and the buses actually make better time going down the street.  Sometimes, however, the following driver will let the poor sod in the first bus take all the load.  Not fair, but it happens.

Having said that, the TTC does have a fetish for on time performance that can have bizarre results from the customers’ point of view.  This is driven by a measure, reported monthly to the Commission, that was introduced by former CGM David Gunn:  what proportion of all trips operated within 3 minutes of their scheduled times.  This sounds laudable, but like many corporate targets, it skews the very process it is intended to measure. Continue reading →

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Half a Loaf

According to this morning’s Toronto Star, Ottawa is about to announce its support for the Spadina Subway extension to Vaughan along with a bunch of other goodies for the 905.  Notable by their complete absence is any transit support for the 416 other than the subway extension.

I’m not going to debate the merits of that line again as everyone reading this site knows my position, but I have a very important question for Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty and David Miller:

Where’s the money coming from for the projects we really need to serve the whole city?

Are we facing the same situation we had with Mike Harris when he agreed to fund the Sheppard line, gave us a pot full of money, and then said, in effect, “bugger off, that’s all you’re getting”?  Will the Harper crowd think that this announcement is all they will ever have to do for the greater Toronto area?

As my readers know, I have always warned about the Spadina line crowding every other project out of the room for the next 8 years.  Will Ottawa and Queen’s Park say “we gave you what you asked for, don’t ask for more”, or the City say “we have over-extended our ability to write new debt, so that new bus you thought was coming next year is on hold”.

To all three levels of government:  Please prove me wrong.  Soon.

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Gas Shortages and the TTC

I received the following comment from Karem Allen who runs the transit_nightmares page on Durham Transit at:

http://www.durhamregion.typepad.com/transit_nightmares

Here is something that never can be studied and is never accounted for:

GAS extreme situations.

My friend and fellow coalition member just called me with the following story.

  • More people were on the GO train then normal- line ups to buy tickets were long as these were brand new riders with no passes or long term tickets. They chose to use transit because perhaps they had not gas or wanted to conserve it. 
  • Upon arrival at Union station they were greeted with broken TTC token machines and out of service lights.

Question– were they down on purpose to force them to pay the cash fare?

Neither systems seem to be prepared to greet the number of people that actually are getting out of the cars.

We will be bringing this incident at the transit forum tonight. People were really mad that they could not buy tokens once they arrived at Union Station.

This is the time to woo the discretionary transit user not drive them away with broken stuff.

Solution could be – more ticket people on hand to cover the increased customer load at both GO and TTC.

Steve:  One thing I have learned in years of looking at large organizations like the TTC is that you should never look for a conspiracy when indifference, bad planning or bad luck can explain a problem.  The real question here is how long the token machines have been down and why.  Can any regular user of Union Station let us know?

I agree that GO and the TTC really need to make an extra effort at times like this, but both organizations have a mindset that they have no spare staff or budget to do anything.  This is dangerous because it can become a strongly entrenched excuse for never even trying.  If the TTC ever reached a point where it had enough funding, enough operators, enough vehicles and no traffic congestion, I am sure they would invent some new reason to explain why the service on Queen Street was still so undependable.

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How “Service Standards” Can Kill Transit Improvements [Updated]

Please see the end of this post for additional text. 

Over the past few years, careful readers of the annual TTC Service Plans will notice that more and more requests for new service are denied because they don’t meet the financial criteria.  Today at the TTC we had yet another example, and it’s worth examining to see, in miniature, the problems brought on by blind, formulaic decision-making. Continue reading →