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My Little Jaunt to Forest Hill

This evening, I attended a concert at Grace Church in Forest Hill.  Because I was coming from Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton, the logical way to get there was to go to St. Clair Station, take the 512 bus, and then walk north on Russell Hill.  My experience shows that the TTC still doesn’t get it. 

I arrived at the Pleasant Boulevard loop in time to see the 7:25 South Leaside trip sitting on the platform.  No St. Clair bus.  After a 10 minute wait, one arrived, but it parked down at the far end of the loop for a crew change.  About 5 minutes later, a second bus arrived and parked behind the first one.  It was now 7:40 and I was in danger of missing my concert.

I walked out to St. Clair and Yonge (if I got really lucky, the first bus might make it to the stop by the time I got there), and found that a third bus was coming east on St. Clair.  This means that 3 of the 4 buses on the route (on a 7 minute headway no less) were at one end of the line.

I took a cab.

The TTC is fond of telling us how it will build ridership for new rapid transit lines by running really good surface routes in anticipation.  The 190 Rocket from Don Mills Station to STC is a good example, and ridership is building up on this route (although to nowhere near subway levels). 

The service on St. Clair is a disgrace that bears absolutely no relationship with the schedule.  This is not the first time I have found packs of buses and seen long layovers at St. Clair Station.  Please don’t tell me about traffic congestion.  There was none.  If anything, the TTC is driving riders away from St. Clair, a line that is to be the shining example of what we can do with LRT.

Memo to both the TTC and the ATU:  Better service means more riders.  “Better” includes properly managed, well-spaced, predictable service.  More riders means more justfication for expanding the system, and more work for union members.

Also, someone might like to take down the timetable for the Christie bus as well as the handwritten sign telling people that both the Christie and Vaughan buses will take them along St Clair.  They don’t run to St. Clair Station any more.

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The Myth of Fuel Cell Buses

There are times that the hot air surrounding transit technology forces my hand, and I have to take a stand on what really should be a marginal, non-starter of an issue.

In reviewing possible transit services in the eastern waterfront, one group, the Central Waterfront Neighbourhood Association (CWNA), is advocating not just that we use buses in place of LRT, but that we use hydrogen-fuelled buses.  Their presentation material includes a PowerPoint from Ballard Power Systems who have been trying for years to make a go of this technology. 

According to a Ballard press release dated October 23, 2006, there are only 36 buses operating worldwide that have, collectively, operated over 1.5-million km of service.  Let’s put that in context.  In 2005, the TTC bus fleet averaged just under 70,000 km/vehicle, or 2.5-million km for 36 buses.  That is over 60% more than the total mileage operated by all of the Ballard buses running worldwide.

Meanwhile, worldwide interest is focussed on hybrid diesel-electric buses on which a diesel generator powers an electric motor through a power storage system.  Hundreds of these vehicles are running in many cities, and the TTC already has 90 of its first 150-bus order in service.

There is no question that small-scale trials of hydrogen buses have been undertaken in many places, but it is unclear how this technology will stack up against diesel hybrids, especially considering that far more work is underway to produce hybrid buses that do not require the special fuelling facilities of hydrogen. Continue reading →

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Always A Car In Sight (2)

Not long ago, I wrote about the changing level of service on the streetcar system over the past 50 years in Always A Car In Sight.  Just to recap, my intentions were threefold:

  • Show how much service was actually operated and how many people a network of streetcar lines could carry.  If this could be done in mixed traffic, then it certainly could be achieved with some form of reserved right-of-way.
  • Document the changing service levels especially since 1980 first as the TTC saw the heavy streetcar routes as an easy place to save money, and later where service levels threaten the attractiveness of transit service.
  • Demonstrate why the Bloor-Danforth subway is so different from current and recent subway schemes by virtue of the very heavy, established ridership in the corridor the Bloor line serves.

This produced a number of comments as you can see in the post, but a few other points have come up here and in other threads. Continue reading →

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Greetings for 2007

Here we are on New Year’s Day, although as I write this the effects of a wonderful dinner and bubbly wine (not the genuine article, but bubbly all the same) are limiting my ability to write long complex posts.

I just wanted to wish all of my readers the best for 2007 with the hope that those of you who are in a position to improve transit in Toronto and the GTA will actually do so.  Let’s not wind up a year from now staring at the same problems and wondering how the TTC and the City are ever going to solve them.

Transit can be better if only we will give it the political and financial priority it deserves.

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New Streetcars Sooner, Not Later? (Updated)

[This item has been updated to correct some typos, and to add a concluding paragraph that I forgot to put in before publishing it.] 

Yesterday’s Toronto Sun reported that a proposal for 100 of the CLRVs to be refurbished by Bombardier’s Thunder Bay plant is on hold.  Some history is needed to put this in context.

For quite some time, the TTC has looked at new or refurbished streetcars.  New cars always seemed to have an astronomical price tag, but refurbishing was neither cheap nor a long-term option.

Any price quoted for a new streetcar, commonly $3- to $5-million per vehicle, provoked sticker shock.  Oddly, nobody ever mentioned the size of the vehicles in this discussion.  Given the TTC’s long anti-streetcar history (now mellowed to grudgingly accept that there is a place for LRT), the suspicious among us might think that this was a deliberate strategy to make streetcars look prohibitively expensive.

Current talk is for a $3-million car that will be larger even than an ALRV or subway car, and that’s not a bad price for a vehicle of that size (more about service impacts later).  If we can actually get new cars for that price, the comparison against a $1-million CLRV retrofit doesn’t look so bad (almost twice the car and at least double the lifespan for about three times the money). Continue reading →

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David Soknacki’s Valediction

In today’s Globe and Mail, Jeff Gray brings us farewell musings by the former City Budget Chief, ex-Councillor David Soknacki.  It starts off with comments about the TTC’s unwillingness to market itself, but goes on to meatier issues of property development, splitting up the TTC and private sector involvement.

First off, a few comments about marketing.  Many have written about the TTC’s lacklustre graphics and the fact that such hits as the subway station buttons and the Warm Soupy Butt subway map were not exactly a TTC invention.  But pace my friends over at spacing, we are not going to solve the TTC’s problems with a trinkets for the tourists.

What the buttons and the TTC’s heavyhanded response to the anagram map show us is an organization that has no sense of humour, and certainly little pride in the system.  Paranoia about copyright infringement takes priority over a celebration of a hilarious adaptation of the subway map.  We see a hypersensitive organization that knows the days of sparkling clean stations and vehicles, of good service marvelled at by other cities, are decades in the past.

So what would our former Budget Chief do about this? Continue reading →

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Always A Car In Sight

That, believe it or not, used to be the TTC’s slogan years ago when transit service was a far more important part of the life of Toronto than it is today.  Three love affairs have brought us to where we are now:

  • The automobile
  • The subway which moves huge numbers of people provided they’re going where one was built
  • Tax cuts and changes in public spending priorities

From time to time, people ask me both about how service has declined and about the practical limits on streetcar service.  I am not going to pretend that the answer to our problems is to build streetcar lines running in mixed traffic everywhere.  For one thing, there’s a lot more of that “mixed traffic” than there used to be.  But it’s interesting to see what streetcars were doing even well into the “modern” automotive era. Continue reading →

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A Wakeup Call for Chairman Adam

Ed Drass has an excellent column in Metro for Thursday, December 21 (here) in which he describes a recent visit with Adam Giambrone, TTC Chair, to Finch Station.  The site is a catalog of what many TTC stations look like and the lacklustre attitude the organization takes to passenger information and convenience.

Like so many TTC stations, Finch seems as if under a permanent state of construction.  Ceiling slats are missing everywhere.  Temporary and handwritten signs adorn walls, windows and collector booths.  Wooden hoarding closes off a major portion of a corridor heading to the buses, but there are no signs describing what is going on.

I have a blunt message for Chairman Adam:  This state of affairs has nothing to do with traffic congestion.  It has little to do with whether or not additional funds come from Queen’s Park or Ottawa.  It is an indictment of sloppy project management and an inability to see beyond the limits of each job to how it affects the passengers’ experience.

That’s the sort of message we send to customers.  It doesn’t take a complicated traffic study or an EA or millions of dollars worth of consultants to fix this.  Even Howard Moscoe’s proposed “Station Managers” would be ineffective if they are little more than glorified greeters with no power to change a well-entrenched corporate culture.

It’s astounding that we have a system paying millions for an automated stop announcement system, but they can’t put up and properly maintain signs telling people what’s going on in a construction zone, or take down signs announcing service diversions that finished months ago.  

I’ve seen occasional annoncements about subway service problems running along the bottom of the subway advertising monitors.  Great if you’re on the platform near a sign.  Useless otherwise.

Maybe if we figured out a way to build a multi-million-dollar automated station signage project, the TTC might be interested, but only if Ottawa would pay for it.  Meanwhile, let’s get out those magic markers and practice really neat printing. 

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Going, Going, Gone

I received the following note from a reader here, and this prompted me to dive into the archives. 

Hi Steve,

Do you know if the old TTC tokens have been redesigned since the 1950s?  I have a token that looks completely different from any of the tokens currently in use (with the TTC coat of arms etc; not the bimetallic ones).  It simply says “Toronto Transit Commission” around the edge and the word “Subway” across the middle.  Could this be a very old token or is it a fake?

Thanks,
Arthur

This is an older type of token.  The illustration below (click to open the larger version) contains three token holders of various vintages in the form that tokens were then sold.  There are both the 6/$1 and 5/$1 version dating from the late 1960s, as well as a single token holder that was a complimentary “first day cover” for the Bloor-Danforth subway.  Note that this last one is a brass token, the format used for single-token sales.

If you look at the regular tokens, you will see that they match the one you have.

Old Token Holders

Why stop at 1966, I thought.  Let’s go back a bit further.  The next pair of images are front and back scans of some pre-TTC fare media.

The red ticket is from the Toronto Street Railway.  The TSR was replaced by the Toronto Railway Company in 1891, and by 1911 when the TRC refused to extend its network, the city set up its own company, the Toronto Civic Railway.  These two, plus other bits and pieces, merged into the TTC in 1921.

The TRC tickets are interesting for a number of reasons.  First is the little picture of the electric trolley car.  The TRC was granted its franchise with the express purpose of electrifying the street railway, and so an electric car was central to their purpose.  Next, you will see that there were special tickets for employees that had restrictions on time of use.  Finally, there is the strip of Ferry Service tickets good only for women and children travelling to the docks (note that the service did not yet cross south of the railway corridor, and the destination is Bay and Front).

Old Tickets Front

Old Tickets Back