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What Shall We Do With The Scarborough RT?

Last night (April 24), the TTC and City Planning held a public workshop at Scarborough City Hall.  They presented the results of the technical analysis of what to do when the current fleet of RT cars wears out in 2015.  I am not going to reprise the entire presentation, and you can look at the presentation here.  Note that some of my comments here come from oral presentation and discussion, not from the document itself. Continue reading →

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Jane Jacobs

Last night, Jane Jacobs died at Toronto Western Hospital.  There is a good, long article about her on the Star’s website.

I first met Jane in the early days of Streetcars for Toronto.  David Gurin, then a researcher working for the US Senate committee investigating the role of the auto industry in destroying American transit systems, came to Toronto to see how we had saved our streetcars.  He was a friend of Jane’s, and the three of us lunched near Bloor and Avenue Road.

Jane was a presence for decades in Toronto who kept popping up here and there (usually “there” — she always seemed to be off at some other meeting than the one I was at) with simple, clear words about what Toronto as a City could be despite the worst excesses of our so-called leaders.

Last April, I was privileged to receive the Jane Jacobs Prize in recognition of years of transit advocacy.  To be associated with such a luminary as Jane is a huge honour and it links my own work with that of many other people who make a difference in how our city has grown.  When the award winners gather and I hear stories of what others have done, somehow the battles to make the Queen car run properly don’t seem quite as heroic.

That’s what makes cities great:  people who care about the place they live, how it works, why it works, what makes a neighbourhood rather than a bunch of buildings.

Last year sitting on the podium during the award ceremony, I had the joy of watching as Jane skewered David Miller with a diatribe against his “North York Planning Department”.  Few people could get away with that, and it’s a measure of our city that we have a Mayor who would sit and listen to Jane.  It’s been a while.

Jane’s advice won’t be there in person any more to decry an over-large condo tower or a ludicrous road project or to talk about the role of communities.  Those of us who remain will carry Jane’s torch even if our comic timing and acid wit may not match hers.

Somewhere in the clouds, Robert Moses is trying to build an expressway network and he’s just discovered that Jane has arrived to defeat him, again.

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From The Archives: New Streetcars for Toronto (Updated)

Here’s a streetcar design that’s been around for a while, and it served us all well.  We could have had a new generation of these cars back in the 1970s, but Queen’s Park and the UTDC gave us the CLRV instead.  The Edsel of the streetcar, as a former Chief General Manager once said.

Here is a PDF version of a single file rather than four separate images.

Updated February 7, 2018 with higher resolution images.

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Plans for New Streetcars?

TTC plans for a new streetcar fleet moved onto the front burner at the April 19th meeting of the Commission.  After a staff update on the CLRV rebuild program and possible timetables for new streetcar purchases, the Commission decided that:

  • Only 100 CLRVs will be rebuilt, not 196.
  • New streetcars will be procured with a prototype to be delivered in 2010 and production deliveries from 2011 through early 2014.
  • The Commission will take a package consolidating all information about streetcar fleet planning through the committee cycle (Budget Advisory, Policy & Finance, Council) in May.  Continue reading →
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Coupled or Uncoupled? Spring Is In The Air

Yesterday’s TTC meeting definitely strayed into the realm of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of …

Although few of the Transit Commissioners could be called “young men”, we know that spring and the silly-season following the traumas of budget debates are upon us.

The plans for CLRV rebuilding and purchase of new streetcars were on the table with a status update on both projects.  (I will post a detailed piece on that issue tomorrow after I have finished work on the details.)  Among the topics of discussion was the question of couplers for the CLRVs.  This achieved much hilarity, albeit with some loss of decorum and a sense that the old-boy’s club is still too prevelant at TTC, and masked the fact that they really didn’t address the question.  Here are the important bits: Continue reading →

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From The Archives: 1984 Streetcar Operations Study

Following up from my long post about the King car, I dug into my archives for the 1984 report by Streetcars for Toronto about streetcar operations.  You can read all the details in the report here.

In a few days, I will post information about the responses between SFTC and TTC that followed.  The upshot of this exercise was that we proved the TTC was doing a lousy job of scheduling and running service, and the TTC did an excellent job of showing how unwilling it was to accept criticism.  The single largest effect from all of our effort was that they made the vehicle numbers on the streetcars (PCCs then) bigger so that the Inspectors (now called Route Supervisors) could see them easily.  I am not making this up.

The situation in the Beach raised the locals’ ire enough that the following cartoon appeared in the Ward 9 Community News [apologies if there are any copyright issues here 22 years after the fact].

HijackToNeville

[Ah the simpler days when grannies with guns could be used as a joke.]

Among the significant features of our report was the use of graphs to show the operation of a route.  The full set is not reproduced here because the salient details are discussed in the text.  However, I have scanned and assembled one graph for the King car’s operation on the afternoon of May 24, 1984.  The graph is linked here.

This image is explained in detail in the text, and it provides as easy way to analyze the operation of an entire route.  The technique is not new, possibly only to the TTC who do not use it.

We had over a dozen people standing on street corners recording car movements to get this data, but the TTC could get it today from the computerized vehicle monitoring system.  Alas, they don’t and it’s a great shame.  That part of the computer system was never developed as a budget saving.

Here’s a challenge for the TTC:  Digest all the data you already have, and provide a website where anyone can look at a graph of any route’s operation for, say, the past month.  This is not rocket science, but it would put to rest claims and counterclaims about what quality of service actually exists on the street.  Will the TTC do this?  Don’t hold your breath.

They will go on telling us that any claims of poor service are figments of our imagination or, alternately, the service really is bad, but only with a reserved lane will your bus show up on time.

I will return to the question of service management and what causes delays in a future post.

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Trains on King Street

Today’s Star contains an article by Kevin McGran in which we learn of a scheme to run trains of CLRVs on King Street.  This won’t happen any day soon because the CLRVs haven’t had couplers for years, but they are included in the upcoming CLRV retrofit.

The vital point comes in the article’s second sentence:

The coupling would move more people faster, even though the “headway” — the time between streetcars — during rush hour would increase from two minutes to four, the transit commission says.

This claim of a two minute headway is repeated elsewhere in the article.  Continue reading →