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TTC Seeks Track Engineering Consultants

On November 16, 2023, the TTC posted an RFP (number P58PW23631) on the Bonfire bidding website for “Track Maintenance Consultant Services”.

The short description, on the title page, is:

The Scope of Work of this Contract includes, but is not limited to the provision of Consulting Services specializing in rail transit to provide track and structure engineering support.

This caught my eye because of the SRT derailment that shut down that line prematurely earlier this year. Although TTC management stated that the full report on this incident would come out “in a few weeks”, it is now mid-December and the report has not been released.

In the September report to the TTC Board, the cause was cited as loose bolts holding the reaction rail which allowed it to be pulled upward by magnetic forces and collide with the train. What was not explained was how the condition of the track reached a point where this could happen.

Recently, the City’s Auditor General reviewed the practices of Streetcar Overhead maintenance, and found them badly wanting. On questioning at the Board meeting, the TTC’s head of infrastructure acknowledged that Streetcar Overhead was likely the worst department on that count, but it was not the only one. This begs an obvious question: what other TTC departments are not producing top quality work and what is the effect on service and safety. A second equally important question is how did TTC practices decline.

We hear a great deal about system safety with homeless people living in the subway, and panhandlers (or worse) harassing passengers, but the context for discussion is that these problems originate outside of the TTC. Is there a generic problem with maintenance, and hence with safety and reliability, within the system itself?

The first of a series of goals here is “Increase passenger and overall system safety”. Another goal to “Increase competence and capability of Track Maintenance and Engineering staff” is equally troubling.

Through the entire Scope of Work is a sense that much needs to be improved within the TTC’s subway track maintenance activities.

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TTC Service Changes Effective December 24, 2023

The TTC will institute a number of service changes for the holiday period between Sunday, December 24, 2023 and Saturday, January 6, 2024.

All of these involve service cuts usually made over this two week period with the removal of school trips on many routes. These will be restored in the January schedules.

On all routes but one, the change is implemented either by switching back to the summer 2023 schedule or by amending the existing schedule to remove the extra trips.

38 Highland Creek has an extended route this year compared to 2022, and so it has a new “summer” schedule for the coming holiday. This will be used in 2024. Other routes extended as part of the SRT replacement do not have school trips, and so they are not affected by the holidays.

Service Changes Effective 2023.12.24

The file linked here contains lists of the routes that will lose school trips and/or will have summer service for the two week period. The last page of this file details the TTC’s plans for service on a day-by-day basis including New Year’s Eve. The arrangements are identical to those for 2022 except that there are no “last train times” for the now-discontinued Line 3.

No new diversions have been announced for the holiday period although it would not surprise me if a whole pack of Grinches is working on a last minute “gift” for transit riders.

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The Politics of Outsourced TTC Vehicle Cleaning and Servicing

Updated December 20, 2023: As of today, Board member Ron Lalonde, whose term was to run until February 2025, resigned creating a vacancy that could be filled with a non-Tory aligned citizen member.

At its December 7, 2023 meeting the TTC Board considered a management report recommending the continued outsourcing of surface vehicle cleaning and servicing. This proved to be a very contentious issue triggering a long in camera session after which the recommendation was adopted in part, but with one amendment, and on a split vote.

Background

Outsourcing of bus cleaning began under CEO Andy Byford as an outgrowth of Toronto’s core services review. It began as a pilot at Mount Dennis and Malvern garages, and from November 2013 was expanded to the (then) full seven garages. When that contract expired at the end of 2017, a new contract was signed covering the period to the end of 2023.

In 2020, as part of the Covid response, the work of disinfecting all vehicles, including streetcars and subway trains, was added to the contract.

Cleaning and servicing of streetcars was added to the contract in September 2021 with a December 2023 end date, and an option for two additional one-year terms. Starting in January 2023, midday in-service streetcar cleaning was added as part of “TTC’s action plan with respect to community safety, security and well-being”.

The contractor, TBM Service Group Inc., uses employees under Local 2 of the Service Employees International Union, and pays wages higher than the statutory minimum, but not as high as comparable work that would be done by Amalgamated Transit Union 113. ATU claims that this work is rightfully theirs, and that the TTC is in breach of contract by outsourcing it. This is a long-standing dispute.

TTC argues that TBM’s employees are 40% female and 85% visible minority, but this does not speak to what the breakdown might have been had the work stayed with ATU. For their part, ATU argues that the cleaning and servicing positions were entry level jobs to the TTC which are no longer available.

TTC also argues that having ATU staff perform these functions created problems at garages because of staff shortages. When other maintenance workers filled in, this left repair work unfinished. The TTC argues on the basis of efficient staff usage without addressing why they were short cleaners in the first place.

TTC also claims that vehicle reliability has gone up over the outsourcing period, but does not address other possible factors such as:

  • the average fleet age which has been falling as the shift to a 12-year replacement cycle builds into the system,
  • the under-utilization of the fleet thanks to pandemic-era service cuts allowing the worst performing buses to be sidelined,
  • the opening of McNicoll Garage relieved bus crowding at other locations that interfered with efficient maintenance.

The TTC acknowledges that the work model implemented by TBM is an improvement over past TTC practices, and they would adopt it although costs would rise because of higher ATU wage rates.

TBM has since refined the business model to adopt a production line approach utilizing dedicated workforce to perform each activity. If the TTC were to perform servicing and cleaning in-house, the TTC would be inclined to adopt a similar business model as TBM to ensure continued success of KPIs. Using TBM’s business model, the TTC would need to increase its workforce compared to the 2012 business model. The expected cost avoidance of second sourcing with the updated workforce model is approximately $101.83 million over the contract term (2024-2028) or an average annual cost avoidance of $20.37 million.

Appendix A – Bus and Streetcar Servicing & Cleaning – Benefits & Performance p. 5

Leaving aside the question of cost, this begs the question of whether the TTC was attempting to make do with fewer staff than needed when the work was in house.

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Moving to Electric Buses: TTC Plan Update

At its meeting of December 7, 2023, the TTC Board received a staff presentation on its bus electrification plan.

The City of Toronto has a goal to move to a zero-emission fleet across all departments by 2040 with interim goals of 20% in 2025 and 50% in 2030. TTC’s electrification plans fit within that timeframe.

Of the TTC’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in 2019 80% of these came from the diesel bus fleet.

The history of a move to an all-electric fleet is shown in the TTC drawing below. Three decades ago, the TTC was seduced into “greening” its fleet by the replacement of electric Trolley Buses by CNG-powered buses. This was the result of an alliance between TTC management who wanted rid of the TBs, the gas industry which has a surplus of product, Ontario Bus Industries who wanted an untendered contract, and the new technology arm of the Ministry of Transportation who were desperate to show some sort of progress. (This was not the first, nor the last time provincial boffins would meddle in transit technology choices.)

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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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