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Downtown Route Changes Effective December 11, 2023 (Updated)

The City of Toronto will completely close the intersection of Bay & Adelaide from 7am Monday, December 11 to 7am on Saturday December 16 to all vehicles. Bay and Adelaide Streets will be open only for local traffic in the immediate area of the closure. This continues the work of (re-)installing streetcar track on Adelaide for the eastbound 501 Queen streetcar diversion around Ontario Line contruction.

Updated: Work at Bay and Adelaide actually completed on the afternoon of Friday, December 15 and the intersection reopened earlier than planned.

This will require diversion of the 19 Bay and 501B Queen bus routes.

The 19 Bay bus will divert via Dundas, Church and King both ways.

The 501B Queen bus which normally operates on Bay from King to Queen will use York Street for north/westbound trips and University Avenue for south/eastbound trips. Buses will operate both ways via King Street, and there will be no westbound service on Richmond Street

[Apologies for the soft images. They are from a City construction notice, and I used what is available.]

End of the King East Diversions

As the map for 501B Queen above shows, service is supposed to resume the normal routes east of Church with the completion of water main and Hydro work on the coming weekend which has a December 10 end date. This means that:

  • 501B Queen buses return to Queen Street east of Church
  • 503 Kingston Road streetcars return to King Street between the Don River and Church
  • 504 King streetcar service to Distillery Loop resumes

Updated December 11, 2023 at 4:15 pm

Another diversion has been added to the list. The 505 Dundas cars will divert both ways via Parliament and Gerrard. A 505 shuttle bus will run from Jarvis to Jones.

This diversion is required for track repairs, and will last until Thursday, December 21, 2023.

Updated: This diversion ended on Tuesday, December 19.

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Analysis of 903 STC Express: September-November 2023

This article is a preliminary look at the service offered by the 903 express bus which replaced Line 3 SRT.

Until Saturday, November 18, the 903 buses provided very frequent service between Scarborough Town Centre and Kennedy Station. On Sunday, November 19, eight other routes were extended from STC to Kennedy Station, the 903 was extended to Centennial College replacing the 134/913 Progress bus, and much existing service on route 903 was reallocated to the extended routes.

I will review the other routes serving this corridor in early 2024 when they have accumulated a few months’ experience.

Travel Times

The charts here show how travel times between STC and Kennedy Station have changed over the past three months. The screenlines for these measurements are located:

  • Leaving STC Loop
  • Just north of Eglinton on Midland and on Kennedy

Note that this excludes time spent navigating roads and construction near Kennedy Station, and any time spent in STC Loop. I will review terminal operations when more data for all of the routes in this corridor have accumulated.

The charts below show monthly data, by week and hour, with North/Eastbound service on the left and South/Westbound service on the right. Note that there are no data for September, Week 1 because the service was provided with untracked extras until the schedule change on Labour Day weekend.

The solid lines show the average headways, and the dotted lines show the standard deviation, a measure of the scatter in the values. The closer the SD values are to zero, the more reliable the service is.

In the early weeks of operation, the transit priority measures were not in place, and service was more affected by traffic sharing the road. This settles down by November, although some peak period effects are still visible.

The TTC had anticipated that a trip between Kennedy Station and STC would take 15 to 18 minutes depending on conditions. Considering that the times shown below do not include access time to and from terminals, the service is close to the TTC’s target.

Service from November 19 Onward

After November 19, the 903 STC Express became more typical of other routes with less frequent service. Variations show up that are similar to other parts of the system. The charts below show headways westbound at Progress and Markham Road, and northbound from Eglinton and Kennedy for the last two weeks of November. The scatter of data points shows the type of service that someone waiting for a 903 bus would experience.

  • Some data are missing on the morning of Friday, November 24.
  • Some of the wider headways (dots higher on the charts) have no correponding short headway (dot near the horizonal axis). This indicates that a bus was missing, as opposed to two buses running close together after a long gap.
  • The weekend charts at the south end of the line include data for the early part of the month when 903 service was much more frequent.
  • Although much of the weekend service stays close to the target headway, there are data points showing wide gaps where a bus was missing from the service. This is a concern for service east of STC to Centennial College.
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East End Route Diversion Update

This post consolidates information about the diversions affecting east end bus and streetcar services as a convenience for readers.

Construction projects affecting these routes include:

  • Water main repairs on King between George and Sherbourne. This is a permanent repair for the problem that diverted all service in late October due to a sinkhole.
  • Reconstruction of Broadview Station Loop.
  • Adelaide Street reconstruction for the Ontario Line streetcar diversion.
  • Ontario Line construction at Queen and Yonge.

Routes as of Tuesday, December 5

501D Queen East streetcars run between Neville Loop and Distillery Loop via King west of the Don River. The easiest way to connect with these cars is to take any route headed east out of downtown that goes far enough to make a transfer connection with the 501D. Note that this is tricky at King and Sumach because stops are not well-located for a transfer connection eastbound there.

503 Kingston Road streetcars run between Bingham Loop and (officially) King and Spadina diverting via Queen between the Don River and Church Street. In practice, much of this service turns back via the traditional 503 downtown loop via Church, Wellington and York to King. If you want a 503 eastbound from anywhere west of York, it is best to get on any eastbound service and transfer to the 503 at Bay or Yonge. If you transfer at York, the 503 stops on the SE corner. Note that at Church and King Streets, eastbound 503 streetcars stop on Church just north of King. [Corrected 6:05 pm, Dec 5]

501B Queen buses that run between Bathurst (Wolseley Loop) and Broadview and Gerrard have swapped their route east of Church with the 503 cars. The 501Bs run on King Street, and the 503s run on Queen.

504 King streetcars are all turning back at Church Street looping via Church, Richmond, Victoria and Adelaide because they cannot run east on King.

504/505 King/Dundas shuttles operate from King and Parliament to Broadview and Danforth making on street stops on the NW and SW corners of that intersection. Subway connections are via a walking transfer. These buses continue west across the Viaduct to Castle Frank Station.

Both the 501B and 504/505 buses do not stop eastbound on Queen at Broadview, but instead stop northbound on Broadview beside the parking lot. Westbound buses stop at the usual southbound stop on Broadview at Queen.

504 King shuttles to the Distillery run from a downtown loop of Church, Wellington and York Streets, and they serve the eastbound stops on King at Bay and Yonge Streets, among others. At the Distillery, they are supposed to loop west from Cherry via Mill, Parliament and Front to Cherry. They do not serve Distillery Loop.

508 Lake Shore streetcars normally operate east on King looping via Parliament, Dundas and Broadview. They are diverting via Queen and Church. This is a peak only service.

There is no change to the 505 Dundas streetcars which continue to operate to Woodbine Loop via Gerrard and Coxwell east of Broadview.

Beware of TTC notices posted at stops as they are almost certainly out of date, incomplete or inaccurate thanks to the frequent route changes. There is a particular problem with outdated notices remaining at stops sometimes without a current replacement, or the “new” sign might be found in a different location (pole, transit shelter) than the “old” ones.

King Street water main work is supposed to be completed by the coming weekend, Sunday, December 10, and routes should go back to a somewhat less chaotic arrangement.

Effective Wednesday, December 6

Although Broadview Station Loop is still closed for construction, Broadview Avenue itself is open. Effective December 6, the 62 Mortimer and 8 Broadview bus routes will resume operation on Broadview stopping at Danforth at the NW (southbound) and SE (northbound) corners for subway connections.

These buses will continue south on Broadview to Gerrard, but will run out of service and loop via Gerrard, St. Matthews and Jack Layton Way. Riders making a transfer between these routes and the 504/505 King/Dundas shuttle should note that this does not stop at the same stops as the 8 and 62 buses. Southbound 8/62 riders would get off on the NW corner at Danforth and cross to the SW corner to catch a 504/505. Northbound 504/505 riders would get off on the NW corner (farside) at Danforth and walk back to the SE corner to catch a northbound 8 or 62 bus.

Effective Monday, December 11

For one week, the intersection of Bay and Adelaide will be completely closed to traffic. The TTC has not yet announced diversions for 19 Bay and 501B Queen (eastbound) buses.

Traffic congestion on King will no doubt be even worse during this period.

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King Street Travel Times: May-November 2023

This post reviews the evolution of travel times for 504 King streetcars across downtown between Bathurst and Jarvis Streets, the scope of the so-called transit priority zone. There are many problems with how this zone actually operates, but matters reached the meltdown stage in recent months with the combined effect of the Queen Street closure at Yonge for the Ontario Line, the Adelaide Street reconstruction for utilities and an eventual streetcar bypass track for Queen cars, and emergency utility work on King east of Jarvis.

There were other contributors, but there are two important issues. First, everyone assumes that their project won’t bring chaos, often because they only look at local effects for their site (e.g. a new condo construction project with a curb lane occupancy), not for the network as a whole. Second, not only is enforcement of the transit priority rules missing in action, but the added management needed for extra volumes of turning transit vehicles meandering on their temporary routes is also absent.

I recently received the detailed TTC vehicle tracking data for 504 King for November, and have crunched this into a chart that long-time readers will remember from the days when the “King Street Pilot” was in its infancy.

The main set of charts here show travel times for eastbound and westbound streetcars in May through November 2023. Later in the article, there are a few charts to show the historic context for the effects of various changes on King Street over the years.

As in all of these articles about service quality and operations, the data come from the TTC, with much thanks for a long-standing arrangement. The programs to condense the data into manageable charts are all my own, as is the analysis of what they might mean.

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Yet Another King Diversion (Updated)

Not long ago, traffic and transit service on King Street were tied in knots thanks to a sinkhole that undermined the track east of Jarvis Street.

Starting Monday, December 4 and running to Sunday, December 10, the diversions are back, albeit in a slightly modified form for water main repairs.

Updated December 4, 2023 at 12:05 pm: The TTC (@TTCNotices on X) advises that there is a hydro cable installation today that runs until 5pm. After that time, the 501D Queen East service will run to Distillery Loop.

Updated December 4, 2023 at 11:20 am: The notice in the “Updates” section of the TTC’s site has been changed to show a December 10 end date. Meanwhile, as of this morning, the 501D Queen East cars are still running to York & Wellington, not to the Distillery Loop as shown on the map below. I suspect this will change as the day wears on and congestion builds up on King Street.

Updated December 3, 2023 at 8:15 pm: In the best TTC tradition there are conflicting notices on their website. Under “Service Changes” this diversion is to end on December 10, but under “Updates” it will only run to December 7. I will attempt to find out which of these is correct, and post an update here.

Apologies for the soft images. This is the condition in which they were published by the TTC on its Service Changes page. Also note that as of December 3, this information is not included on the omnibus Streetcar Service Changes page. Click on any image to open the gallery.

The changes are:

  • 501D Queen East streetcars will only come as far west as Distillery Loop via King.
  • 501B Queen buses which normally run east from downtown via King, Church and Queen to Broadview will instead remain on King Street
  • 503 Kingston Road streetcars will divert from King via Queen between the Don River and Church Street.
  • 504 King streetcars will loop via Church, Richmond, Victoria and Adelaide.
  • 504 King buses will operate from York Street to the Distillery district looping downtown via Church, Wellington and York, and at the Distillery District via Mill, Parliament and Front.
  • 508 Lake Shore streetcars which normally operate on King will divert via Church and Queen to their normal loop at Parliament, Dundas and Broadview.

In other news, Broadview Avenue has opened between Danforth and Pretoria following completion of track and paving work, but transit service has not yet returned to Broadview Station as work on Erindale and in the station is not yet completed. This is expected to change soon, but the TTC has not announced any details.

The intersection of Bay and Adelaide will completely close to traffic between 7am Monday, December 11 and 7am Saturday, December 16 for track installation. Service diversions have not been announced.

There is no word on whether any special effort will be made to unsnarl the intersection of King and Church with the many additional turning transit vehicles. King is already a total mess thanks to the lack of traffic management at University, among other intersections, and the added turns at Church will only compound this. In the following week, with Adelaide completely closed at Bay, traffic on King is likely to be even worse.

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TTC Streetcar Overhead Maintenance Audit

At its November 22, 2023 Meeting, the TTC Board received a report and presentation from the Auditor General of the City of Toronto reviewing the Streetcar Overhead Maintenance department. This report was also considered a few days earlier at the TTC’s Audit and Risk Management Committee.

The audit was not complimentary. The Auditor General reviewed activities in 2022, and found that:

  • There were major gaps in the tracking of overhead assets, inspections and repairs.
  • Many processes were manual, paper-based or with limited use of technology such as an Excel spreadsheet to maintain a list of inspection cycles.
  • Inspections that should have occurred on a regular basis (e.g. annually), took place at varying intervals if at all.
  • Formal procedures to specify what constituted an inspection were missing, and the actual work done could vary from one inspection to another.
  • A high proportion of identified defects had no matching completed work orders.
  • The average time-to-repair for those that could be tracked was five weeks – two weeks to generate the corrective maintenance order and three to perform the work.
  • The quality of maintenance varied with multiple corrective maintenance orders for the same asset.
  • There was a lack of root cause analysis to identify and correct common failure types and locations.

Electric track switches repairs (for which the Streetcar Overhead section is responsible) were similarly not reliably tracked. The unreliability of streetcar track switches and resulting operational constraints (slow orders, stop-and-proceed rules) has been an issue for more than a decade. I will return to this later in the article.

The management response went into some detail about the work now in progress to improve the section’s procedures, record keeping and asset management. However, there is an inherent contradiction between the implication that this has been underway for some time, and the fact that the Auditor General’s review cites 2022 data, the most recent complete year, with poor results.

In a telling exchange between the Board and Management, Commissioner Diane Saxe asked if there were other groups within the TTC’s infrastructure maintenance suffering from similar problems. Fort Monaco, Chief of Operations & Infrastructure, replied there about 20 groups of which Streetcar Overhead would be the worst, but it is not the only one with problems. He said that these groups are better now, but there is still work to be done.

Arising from this exchange, Saxe moved that the Board:

Direct staff to report to the Audit & Risk Management Committee by the end of Q2 2024 on the state of preventative maintenance for the overhead system, and that the report include a remediation plan, if required.

Chair Jamaal Myers asked if there were similar issues on Line 3 SRT regarding preventative maintenance and work orders. Monaco replied that one would find a lot of the same thing, and the Subway Track team had just changed from an older Maintenance of Way Information System (MOWIS) to the Maximo system now used by TTC to track assets and maintenance work. Myers asked if staff are confident that SRT derailment was not caused by this, and Monaco replied that it was not caused by the changeover.

(The detailed report on the SRT derailment has still not been released.)

Vice-Chair Joanne De Laurentiis observed that maintenance tracking is a risk issue and would it be useful to have the TTC Audit group look at this in more detail, and then report back to Board. However, no motion to that effect was made and it is unclear what reviews will be conducted on the Board’s behalf.

Management has accepted all of the Auditor General’s findings. Their response can be found beginning on p. 89 of the report linked above (p. 72 within the Auditor General’s report proper).

An important note here is that this audit dealt with ongoing maintenance, not with capital projects. Followers of the streetcar system will know that the conversion from trolley pole to pantograph operation has taken much longer than originally forecast, and this has left the infrastructure in a mixed state for many years. Completion of this work appears to be decades in the future, a figure that is hard to believe unless the true aim is to limit the rate of spending within the overall budget.

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Eglinton East LRT Update

On December 5, 2023, Toronto’s Executive Committee will receive an update on the Eglinton East LRT project. Readers with long memories will recall that there was a time when a “peace in our time” solution to the Scarborough Subway debate would have seen both an extended subway and at least part of the EELRT built with the monies already earmarked for the Scarborough projects. This claim was a work of creative fiction, but it got the subway extension’s approval through Council.

We are still waiting for the LRT, and Scarborough will be lucky to see it until the late 2030s at best.

This set of reports keeps the ball rolling on the EELRT, albeit slowly. Until the Provincial aims for extension of Line 4 Sheppard are clear, the degree of conflict with the LRT plans and the scope of the LRT will not be known.

The most recent proposal has a U-shaped line running from Kennedy Station east and north to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus (UTSC), and then north and west to Sheppard and McCowan with a branch to Malvern Centre. These shadow the original Transit City proposals for a Scarborough-Malvern line and a Sheppard East line, although the latter would have run west to Don Mills Station.

The cost estimate for the full EELRT project sits at $4.65 billion based on construction in the 2027-2034 period. This is a class 3/4 estimate with a potential range of -20% to +30%. This excludes key items including: property, procurement, vehicles, lifecycle maintenance, and future operations and maintenance.

With Ontario studying potential expansion of the Sheppard subway west to Downsview and east to at least McCowan, any Sheppard branch of the LRT has an uncertain status.

The map on the left shows the City’s version of the EELRT while the one on the right shows how the Metrolinx study area extends to Meadowvale road.

Metrolinx claims to be reviewing a range of technologies including subway, “light metro” and LRT, but it does not take a genius to figure out that any true extension of Line 4 Sheppard would use subway technology just as extensions to Lines 1 Yonge and 2 Bloor-Danforth already do. This would be especially important for a westward connection to Downsview which would not make any sense as a short, free-standing route.

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Ontario and Toronto Make A Deal

After several weeks of behind-the-scenes discussions between the Ontario and Toronto governments, amid various side-shows such as the Greenbelt scandal, the bribes for planning overrides, the potential destruction of both Ontario Place and the Science Centre, there is a deal, sort of.

In the immediate publicity after the announcement on November 27, the level of information varied depending on which document one read all the way from simple, enthusiastic political statements up to terms sheets and draft legislation.

Toronto comes out of this with a better fiscal situation, including some benefits for transit, but some battles are now over, conceded as part of the deal.

The Rebuilding Ontario Place Act has considerable detail on the redevelopment of Ontario Place, and it is clear that this was not pulled together at the last moment. Although the announcement speaks of design changes and makes passing reference to the Science Centre, neither of these is mentioned in the Act which confers substantial power on the Province to do anything it wants, and compels Toronto to stay out of the way.

The Recovery Through Growth Act, by contrast, is threadbare with only the most cursory provisions recognizing the discussions between Toronto and Ontario, and leaving the bulk of any details to Regulations that might be enacted by the Lieutenant Governor in Council (the Provincial Cabinet).

The new financial arrangements for Toronto extend only three years, roughly until after the next provincial and municipal elections, when the context of any renewal might be different. Meanwhile, the Province and City will “undertake a longer-term targeted review of the City’s finances to be completed by 2026”. [Detailed Term Sheet Cover Letter, p. 2]

Both parties expect added support from the federal government, although the dollar amounts and target projects vary between the City and Province.

The “core commitments” in the Detailed Terms begin with a recognition that housing and transportation are intertwined issues:

Toronto needs to expeditiously streamline and optimize planning approvals and accelerate the delivery of affordable, attainable, and rental housing across the continuum. As density is added, Toronto’s transit and city-enabling infrastructure needs to keep up. The upload of the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway will create significant additional capacity for the City to support building more homes faster in Toronto and across the GTHA.

The City commits to using immediate financial benefits as well as all future financial benefits of the upload (pending Provincial due diligence) to support historic investments in housing and the infrastructure that supports and enables growth such as transit, water and wastewater infrastructure, and local road improvements.

What is needed now from the City is an updated pro forma 2024 budget showing the effects of this agreement. This would inform consultation and debate now in progress leading into the budget cycle at Council.

On the transit front, the entire debate about service restoration and quality must be updated with a sense of the monies that will be available in coming years, and the possible targets Toronto can aim at depending on how much additional support is provided to the TTC.

The following sections are arranged by major topic area and are reordered from the Detailed Terms.

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TTC 2024 Service Plan Update

The 2024 Service Plan was presented and approved at the November 22, 2023 TTC Board meeting.

Construction Plans for 2024

The presentation includes a chart showing major construction plans in 2024. The overhead projects are for the completion of migration to pantograph-only overhead. (It is hard to believe that they would take Queens Quay and Fleet out of service during the CNE in Q3, but I’m not planning the City’s infrastructure projects.)

The overhead projects raise the question of whether they will actually occur on time. Past work has been scheduled, diversions implemented, and then nothing happened. Riders should not have to put up with disorganized project scheduling.

The only major track project (beyond completion of St. Clair West Station and the 501 Queen via Adelaide connection) is on King West from Dufferin to Shaw. In the Service Plan report, one set of diversion routes was shown for the 504 King, 29/929 Dufferin and 63 Ossington routes. This has been revised, and there are now two options under consideration, both different from the one in the report.

Here is the original plan which has two phases with the second being for the duration of the intersection replacement at Dufferin planned for June/July 2024. Note the removal of service on King west of Dufferin in this version.

For phase 1 (mid-February to late June, August to late October) there are two new options which preserve service on King between Dufferin and Roncesvalles by extending 63 Ossington buses west to Sunnyside Loop. In both options, the 504 King service diverts north via Shaw to Queen, but the difference lies in what happens at Dufferin Street.

In option 1 (left below), the 501A Queen cars divert south to Dufferin Loop. Service on Queen west of Dufferin is provided by the 504 King cars with the 504B service running to Humber Loop until late evening. Late evening service through to Long Branch will be provided by the 501C as it is today.

In option 2 (right below), the 501 Queen cars stay on Queen Street, and the 504B diverts south to Dufferin Loop.

508 Lake Shore cars operate via Queen and Shaw in both options.

The 29/929 Dufferin bus service only diverts for the period that the King/Dufferin intersection is closed (not shown here).

The TTC is conducting a survey to determine which of these is preferable to riders.

Their King West project page is here.

Service Reliability

Service reliability will be addressed on various fronts. The phrase “expanding beyond on-time performance and adding emphasis on consistent, well-spaced, and completed service” is very gratifying. If the TTC actually pulls off this change in focus, it should repair many long-standing issues that the simplistic terminal departure metrics completely ignore.

With the change in ridership patterns, there are new periods requiring better service. Even with the system as a whole running at less that 100% of pre-covid ridership, there are routes and time periods that are over 100%. This is compounded by traffic congestion that is, in some places, worse than in 2019.

Budget Directions

The chart below shows two possible futures for TTC service. On the left is at best a stand pat scenario where service is trimmed to reduce the call on City subsidy and savings, if any, might go to reduce deficits, not to support operations. On the right is a scenario for improvement with better funding and service quality.

The 2024 budget will likely appear at the TTC Board in December, but the final choice will be up to Council and, indirectly, to other governments and their support for municipal spending.

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TTC Five Year Service and Customer Experience Action Plan 2024-2028: Final Consultation Round

The TTC is conducting its final round of consultation about its five year service plan covering the period from 2024 to 2028. This is a longer view of what the TTC might focus on over multiple years, a related but separate process from the Annual Service Plan for 2024 that will come to the TTC Board’s November 22 meeting. Although the range begins in 2024, in practice, 2025 will be the first budget year informed by the five year plan.

There is an online survey covering many topics, and I will review that it more detail later in this article.

Of particular interest as background to this process is the result of the third consultation round conducted in late summer. The TTC’s overview of the action plan and consultation includes detailed notes of feedback from various groups: online survey respondents, stakeholders (community groups and advocates), employees, riders, and youth ambassadors. There is a common thread through all of them about problems with information and communications, service quality and management. What remains to be seen will be whether the TTC has any appetite for addressing these issues rather than making superficial changes that sound good but achieve little.

I recommend reading those consultation summaries both to transit riders who might think they are lonely voices crying into the wind for better service, and to politicians who have only a tenuous grasp of what riders really want and need. Open the overview page for the service plan, and scroll down to Consultation Documents, Round Three.

Of course any major change depends on funding if more service is involved, but it also requires an organizational recognition that every transit problem cannot be blamed on uncontrollable, external forces. The issue of communications is entangled with the TTC’s organizational structure and the fractured responsibility for various aspects of getting the message out to riders.

The service plan itself echoes these limitations in that it talks about what might be done in general, but it is silent on basic matters such as how much service the TTC can physically provide (fleet size and availability, staffing limitations), and the magnitude of costs involved in changing service levels. Some issues, such as better management of service frequency and reliability require recognition that simplistic definitions for “on time” have little meaning in the real world faced by riders and operators.

The time is long overdue to stop the kudos for achieving “key performance indicators” that misrepresent the actual quality of operations. Lest this seem a rather broad indictment without background, I refer readers to the many articles I have written both on the content of the CEO’s Report and detailed reviews of day-to-day operations.

A review of the fourth round online survey follows below together with notes on information from this round of stakeholder meetings.

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