Today, I was down at Fleet Street looking at the site of reconstruction planned for May and found that the 511 service is all running to Union Station. The track on Fleet is in very bad shape including one quite serious drop in the rail height.
I just checked the Transit Toronto website where there is a description of the situation — a car derailed last week and the line is closed west of Bathurst.
Of course the TTC’s own website does not even mention this diversion.
In case everyone thought that this had turned into a blog about the Spadina Subway and intercity rail travel, let’s come back to the real world of the Queen Car with the following note.
Hi Steve
This is not really a comment, but rather a follow-up to my earlier comments re: service in the Beach. It’s not getting any better.Let’s start with a math quiz . What’s the next number in this sequence?
18,33,1,14,2,10,11 ______(??? )
Give up? Well the answer is “who knows, could be any number”. It’s the 501 from Neville.
These were the 501 headways departing Neville westbound on a normal, dry road, no traffic, no accidents type middle of the weekday when all a person wanted to do was spend $10 on a streetcar going to Queen & Lee etc to do local errands. Can you believe it? Is anyone in charge of supervising this major streetcar route???
Walked down to the loop from Fallingbrook at 12:30 and saw 42xx departing westbound. 12:48 (run#7) finally came 18 minutes later. Thought I would hang around and see what followed:
- The next car, 4244 departed at 1:21-33 minute gap!!!!
- Then in a brilliant move, car 4250 left one whole minute later at 1:22 (came empty, left empty).
- 4210 left 14 min later at 1:36.
- Then run 14, 4230 left 2 minutes later at 1:38 (again empty)
- 4225 left at 1:48, and finally
- 4225 left at 1:57.
This is a very common situation, not unusual at all. What happens with this mess down the line? Where do the supervisors supervise from? Do they know what is going on here????
This is sad and funny at the same time. Is anyone in control of this route??
Thought you may find this interesting Steve.
Pete
Yes, it is interesting and far, far too common. The service at Neville Loop is supposed to run every 5’30”.
I am still mired in detailed analysis of the King route (which I hope to finish over Easter weekend) and have not had the heart to look at Queen Street yet. The bottom line, however, is that service is quite irregular even on days, like Christmas, when it should run like a clock.
Bob Brent left a very long comment, and I’m putting it in a post of its own. Please note that I do not intend to do this regularly, and don’t want to encourage people to try to turn this site into their own blog. However, after some of the [expletive deleted] comments I have received here about my pro-LRT orientation, it’s nice to get some fan mail.
[The bad link in the first paragraph has been corrected. Note that it goes to a Power Point file, not a PDF.]
The April 10th meeting of Toronto’s Parks and Environment Committee will consider a proposal to give two-for-one fares for adults travelling on the ferries between 5 and 9 pm (except for special event days on holidays and weekends) from the Victoria Day to the Labour Day weekend.
Most people leave the island in the late afternoon after a hard day at the beach. The Parks Department reckons that there is a growing population who live downtown near the ferry docks for whom the island could be a welcome evening spot. The ferries are running with available capacity, and the cheaper fares are not expected to cost the city anything.
Fortunately, the GTTA has yet to demand that total fare integration be provided so that a rider can board a GO Train in Barrie and travel seamlessly to Hanlan’s Point.
The Star has a story fresh from Associated Press about the TGV which has just set a new world speed record for conventional railway technology:
574.8 km/hour
That’s a little over six seconds per kilometre.
Of course, you need a completely private right-of-way in first class condition, and stops are a very, very long way apart. I don’t think we’ll see this on King Street soon.
In the ongoing discussion about whether the York U / VCC line should be built as a subway, many comments flowed back and forth here and on other blogs suggesting that I (and LRT advocates in general) are a naive bunch.
I was part way through responding to a comment from John Sutka (see below) and decided that this needed its own thread. Continue reading
Many discussions, both on this blog and in some of the Environmental Assessment meetings regarding new transit services, raise the question of a bus route’s capacity. In the previous post, I looked at the question of vehicle capacity and the number of buses we could fit on a typical street or right-of-way. Continue reading
Many discussions here lately have included comments about building networks of “bus rapid transit (BRT) as the truly low-cost solution to our transit woes.
Meanwhile, the TTC regularly trots out a chart showing the relative capacities of various modes. This appears most recently in the Environmental Assessment materials for the eastern waterfront projects. One of the many appearances can be found in the presentation materials for the West Donlands public meeting held last week. (Warning: this file is over 11 mb if you are on a slow link.)
The TTC claims that buses can handle demands of 6,000 per hour or more. Let’s do the math. Continue reading
Effective April 1, several changes will occur on TTC routes. I’m not going to detail them all here (they will show up on the TTC’s website soon enough), but here are the major points. They are all on the streetcar system. Continue reading
Robert Wightman sent in the following comment, and I felt it deserved its own thread. Continue reading
