The TTC has done quite a job of massaging press coverage for its planned order of new subway cars. The new cars will run as unified trains with the ability to walk through the entire train as one continuous unit. This is expected to add about eight percent to train capacity.
You can look at two posts on this scheme here:
There are times in my life of transit activism that I get really paranoid. The era of a certain litigious former Chief General Manager was a time when I was not exactly welcome around the TTC and staff who were suspected of consorting with me were persona non grata.
Now life is much better, but I can’t help wondering if there is a special crew whose job it is to ensure that the escalators I use every day are not running a lot of the time. Not under repair, just stopped. I can’t be that unlucky, can I? Continue reading
Who is Steve Munro and why should you read my stuff?
Well, let’s take the second question first. I hope that you’re reading this site because you are interested in transit (or any other topic I happen to take on) and its role in making Toronto a great city. You may not agree with everything I say, and I’m more than happy to listen to alternate opinions. In fact, there are some issues where I really can’t take a hardline position on one side or another. That’s one of the things that make a city work: that people care enough about it to discuss what we do well now, what we screwed up in the past, and where we should go in the future. That discussion, the exchange of ideas is what’s important so that we can build a better city.
Now if we happen to do so with more of my ideas than the contrary ones, I will grin and be happy. Continue reading
The Queen car was once the pride of the streetcar system. It carried more people every day than the entire GO Transit network. This is a story about how demand on that line has been killed off through poor management, service cuts, technology changes and utter indifference to the needs of the riding public.
Route History
Back when I started riding the streetcar system a lot, the Queen car had just been moved onto the Queensway right-of-way from the old alignment on Lake Shore Boulevard through Sunnyside amusement park. The route has run from Humber Loop in the west to Neville Loop in the east for quite a long time. For those who use route numbers, it’s the 501 car.
Meanwhile, the Long Branch car ran west from Humber Loop to Long Branch Loop along the Lake Shore with rush hour trips extended downtown via Queen to Church Street. This route was numbered 507 but this disappeared when the line merged with the 501 to give through service all the time (when it wasn’t being short-turned). There are now a few trips on 508 Lake Shore that run into downtown via King from the west.
In the east end, the Kingston Road car runs from Bingham Loop at Victoria Park to McCaul Loop, and the route is effectively a branch of the Queen car. The current name Downtowner arose from a failed scheme to run extend the line west and north to Bathurst Station thereby providing an alternate route into downtown (much as the pre-1966 Bathurst via Adelaide service did). This didn’t work, not least because chronic short-turning prevented many cars from ever reaching Bathurst Station. This is route 502 where the route name stuck, but the routing didn’t.
The Kingston Road Tripper (now just Kingston Road or 503) also originates at Bingham Loop and runs via Queen and King Streets to loop downtown via Church, Wellington and York returning east via King. Again, this is functionally a branch of the Queen line. Continue reading
After my less than kind words about the TTC and their centre pole design for St. Clair, I received a question about why the poles take up so much space (one extra metre on the right-of-way). The short answer is that emergency vehicles, especially fire trucks, need to be able to drive down the ROW at speed without hitting anything and without falling off of the six-inch curb. This means that the lane (measured from the curb to the pole) needs to be wide enough to give enough dynamic clearance for a large truck that is not tethered to the tracks.
Here is the longer version taken from an email I sent back to various people who asked: Continue reading
This item is a followup to the St. Clair Streetcar item immediately below. My friend Matt over at spacing.ca asked me about the mess of duplicate hydro and TTC poles, and the visual clutter this produces. This is an important issue in the redesign of St. Clair, and I thought that I would post my reply to him here for everyone to see. Continue reading
Yesterday, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Divisional Court, issued its ruling on the matter of Save Our St. Clair Inc. vs the City of Toronto and the TTC. The Court ruled that the proposal for the St. Clair streetcar reserved right-of-way did not meet the test by which a judicial review would block the scheme, and therefore the application by Save Our St. Clair (SOS) was dismissed.
I am not going into the long and sordid history of this project, and those who know me well are aware that my feeling about both the City/TTC proposal and the position taken by its opponents was “a plague on both your houses”. SOS made fundamental misrepresentations about the impact of the line and took positions about aspects of the plan that were diametrically opposed to each other. Increasing pedestrian space, preserving parking and maintaining unimpeded traffic flow give one glaring example.
However, the City/TTC did an appalling job, even with much public consultation, of putting forward a reasonable plan. There are many to blame in this and I won’t try to name names. Here are a few of their worst gaffes: Continue reading
Transit advocates spend a lot of time explaining why we need more and more transit service. Riders spend a lot of time complaining about sardine-can loading on vehicles. Politicians spend a lot of time complaining about “inefficient” transit operations, most likely the empty buses they saw while driving hither and yon across the city.
Where do those buses come from?
Leaving aside the obvious cases of buses enroute to or from a garage, there is a basic fact that may seem rather strange: most buses will not be full most of the time. This flies in the fact of those who demand efficiencies and treat half-empty buses (or worse) as a sign that transit riders live in coddled luxury compared to the hapless drivers stuck on the 401.
Transit routes have many different types of loading patterns, and they may have different patterns at different times of the day and different days of the week. Continue reading
In an earlier posting, I talked about the Forest Hill bus and the methodology used to identify candidate routes for service cuts. The rule is simple: if the number of passengers lost per dollar saved is less than .23, then the service goes on the list for evaluation of cutbacks. The same process is used in reverse for new services: if they will attract .23 riders per dollar expended, then they are implemented on the system.
What is the magic about .23? At least if it were something like .42 we might attribute this to some long and complex process involving much Deep Thought.
To discover the meaning of .23, we need to delve into the history of the TTC Service Standards. Continue reading
From time to time, people suggest to me that the world would be a better place if only we had more subway lines. Many politicians love subway lines, but paying for them is quite another matter [see the following post on Sheppard]. The one thing people tend to forget is that not all subway lines have stations close together the way they are on much of the Yonge-University and Bloor-Danforth lines. The new scheme shows itself in the Yonge line north of Eglinton, the Sheppard line, and the proposed line to York University.
If you want me to design a subway under your street, I will use modern 21st Century design criteria.
Let’s look at what might have happened 60 years ago if we had done this on the original Yonge and Bloor lines. Continue reading
Steve Munro 