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Streetcars Return to The Queensway

Sunday, October 29 saw streetcars return west of Sunnyside Loop after a long absence during many construction projects. Service operates as far as Humber Loop on route 501, but with rush hour 508 Lake Shore trippers to Long Branch. The 507 Long Branch car will return on Sunday, November 19 at the next schedule change running between Humber and Long Branch Loops. Late evening service will run through with 501 Long Branch cars.

Here is a gallery of photos taken on November 3 and 5 of the restored operation.

While it is heartwarming to see streetcars back on a right-of-way that dates to the 1950s, the operation is hampered by the TTC’s fetish for caution with stop-and-proceed rules at all facing point switches (four between Queen & Roncesvalles and Sunnyside Loop, and even at the Humber Loop tail track), and at all intersecting roads. The concept of “transit priority” is diluted almost to vanishing.

Humber Loop looking W at the tail track entrance
Humber Loop looking W with Queen cars and the 66 Prince Edward bus
Looking E on the approach to the Humber River bridge
Looking NW at The Queensway and Ellis
Looking SW at The Queensway and Ellis
Looking E across Ellis on The Queensway
Eastbound car on The Queensway at Grenadier Pond
Westbound car on The Queensway at Grenadier Pond
Looking W from Parkside Drive on The Queensway
Looking E from Parkside Drive on The Queensway
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Waterfront East Update: October 2023

Work on the Waterfront East LRT crept forward with the approval by Toronto’s Executive Committee of funding to continue design work, and of a tentative project plan. This must be endorsed by Council at its meeting of November 8-10, 2023.

For the previous update on this project, please see my April 2023 article.

Updated: Shortly after this article was published, the City of Toronto replied to questions I had posed about their report. The replies are integrated with the text of the article.

A combination of several factors push the completion date of this project, assuming that it receives full funding from provincial and/or federal sources, out into the 2030s. There is a danger that a so-called transit first community will actually see much of its redevelopment occur before adequate transit is in place to support it. Conversely, absent the transit service, some planned projects may simply sit as empty lots because they are not viable without it.

The current round of reports includes:

The WELRT has been divided into three segments.

  • Segment 1 (red) contains the Bay Street tunnel and the portals at Queens Quay where streetcars will surface. The existing west portal will be renovated and the new east portal added. Plans for decorative canopies have been dropped from the plan as a cost saving measure. This segment is under the TTC’s control for design and construction.
  • Segment 2 (blue) consists of the surface running on Queens Quay East to a revised intersection at Cherry Street which is realigned to the west. This segment primarily involved the reconfiguration of Queens Quay East similar to what already exists on Queens Quay West. (For details please refer to previous articles.)
  • Segment 3 (yellow) includes the southerly extension of trackage from Distillery Loop under the GO corridor, along a realigned Cherry Street, and east on Commissioners St to Villiers Loop (which is actually an around-the-block terminus, not an off street loop).

There are impediments to the work on segments 1 and 3 that dictate the timing of various works. The many delays in actually launching the WELRT project put other works in the same area in conflict that might otherwise be avoided notably the Ontario Line and the Gardiner/DVP realignment. The Bay Street tunnel has become more complex due to updated fire codes and the need to serve many more passengers than the Union Station Loop does today. Still outstanding is the redesign and expansion of Queens Quay Station and a link to the Island Ferry Docks which has been dropped from the project, as of the last update in April 2023.

The recommendations approved by Executive Committee are that:

  1. Council approve the alignment shown in the report.
  2. Council approve advancing design for the entire project, except segment 1 (underground), to 60%.
  3. Council approve
    • completion of environmental approvals,
    • undertaking of a traffic management plan to address interfacing the WELRT an other projects’ construction, and
    • design and coordination of the scope for the WELRT at the Cherry Lake Shore realignment, the Inner Harbour Tunnel at Jarvis, and the Hydro One relocation project at Cherry Portal.
  4. Council authorize an increase to the Transit Expansion Division’s Capital plan of $63.6 million in 2024-2026.
  5. Council direct the Executive Director of the Transit Expansion Division to report back at some point, unspecified, in 2024 with an update.

The estimated cost of the full project is $2.57 billion over a ten-year period assuming that full funding comes in Q1 2024, and the design work proposed in this report starts immediately. Any delay is a notable concern in an era when construction material and labour costs are rising quickly. It is not clear whether the figure cited is in current 2023 dollars, or includes inflation to the point the money is actually spent. I await clarification on this from the City.

Updated: The City of Toronto advises that:

The City is using as-spent dollars with future escalation included to the anticipated year of the expenditure. The cost estimate relies upon timely funding to meet the implementation schedule which is used as the basis for these inflation numbers.

Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23

The reason that the underground segment is excluded from approved design in recommendation 2 above is that this segment is proposed to be executed with a design-build contract where the detailed design will be undertaken by a contractor who is familiar with work in an underground environment.

Updated: This also keeps the design cost off of the City’s expenses for the moment. The City of Toronto advises that:

As noted in the staff report, staff are not recommending advancing the design of Segment 1 to 60% due to the City’s current financial pressures.

Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23

The project is subdivided into three parts:

  1. Union Station Loop, $932 million.
  2. Remainder of project except Cherry North, $1.3 billion. Includes East and West portals on Queens Quay, Queens Quay Station, Yonge Slip infill, Queens Quay East track from Bay to Cherry, Cherry Street south, Commissioners Street and Villiers Loop.
  3. Cherry North connection to Distillery District, $337 million, to be completed as a separate future phase.

The scope of work planned at Queens Quay Station is unclear because at the last update, much of this work had been dropped (platform expansion, link to adjacent building, link to ferry docks). I have asked the City for clarification of this.

Updated: The City of Toronto advises that:

The current scope for Queens Quay Ferry Docks Station is related to the station access upgrades (upgrade of the west entrance to improve accessibility) and it is part of the Segment 1 scope.

Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23

For the benefit of latecomers to the Waterfront East project, I have included a history at the end of the article. The idea goes back at least to the 2003 Central Waterfront Plan, and has languished without strong political support ever since the Ford era when all focus shifted to subways.

The greatest challenge was and remains that waterfront transit is not “important enough” to many on Council and lacked key leadership from the Mayor’s office through the John Tory era. Under Mayor Chow, it will compete with many other projects for priority and funding both for transit and in the wider context of City projects.

Three decades after the Central Waterfront Plan and a 2011 target opening date, we might still not have good service to our “transit first” neighbourhood by 2032.

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Rick Leary Lives On

At today’s special meeting of the TTC Board, the expectation was that Rick Leary would be dismissed as CEO. This was not to be, for reasons yet, if ever, to be revealed.

Problems with Leary’s performance go back some years, and he is Andy Byford’s worst legacy. His original hiring was intended to bring a focus to operations as Byford’s deputy based on a supposed reputation from his stint at York Region improving operations there. Needless to say, there is a huge difference between a sprawling bus network with mostly infrequent service (YRT has fewer than 600 buses) and the TTC’s bus, streetcar and subway operations.

Leary came to YRT following his retirement under a cloud from Boston’s transit agency, the MBTA, quite a step down in the scale of systems. In Boston, a serious collision on the Green Line (the streetcar subway which has been a major part of the City’s transit system for over a century) led to a Nation Transportation Safety Board condemnation of the safety culture at the transit agency (then the MBTA). Leary was supposed to address the report at an MBTA Board meeting, but never showed up, and retired shortly afterward.

When Byford left TTC to become President of the New York City Transit Authority (one component of the larger Metropolitan Transportation Authority), Leary succeeded to the CEO’s role. There were warning signs of problems from early days with the abrupt departure of many of Byford’s TTC management team, and stories of a hostile work environment. Some were pushed out, some waited until their pension numbers were favourable.

Leary was known to have a quick temper, and stories of a poisonous work environment were common. TTC Board meetings became tightly scripted sessions with rehearsed presentations and responses to likely questions. Leary fit in well with the Tory era which, we now know, had a strong desire for news that “everything is all right” and the minimization of problems, especially fiscal ones.

Labour-management relations left a lot to be desired, although Leary’s moves to outsource some aspects of system maintenance responded both to the hawkish stance of some Board members, and carried over a program started under Byford.

Previous articles here have flagged the shortcomings of the CEO’s Report with metrics that hide more than they tell. Service quality is reduced to “on time performance” with the naive sense that vehicles leaving on time from terminals will magically provide even service across their routes. That, in turn, led to a scheduling regime that favoured padded travel times, and a “no short turns” operating policy that did as much harm as the problem it was intended to fix. More subtly, what was lost was the need to actively manage service, including the necessary skilled staffing, to deal with constantly changing conditions.

Another troubling problem is the size of the transit fleet unmatched by service. This problem existed before the covid-era service cuts, but worsened as service was reduced. Many elderly and/or less reliable vehicles could be sidelined without affecting service. However, as new buses are delivered, the excuse of an old fleet will not hold up, and the fleet should be out on the street, not sitting in garages and carhouses.

This has staffing and budget implications that have not been part of TTC’s planning. The question is not just can we run more service, but how much and how soon. Leary’s history on that point is dubious. After John Tory’s election as Mayor in 2014, he acknowledged that the system had been starved for resources under the Ford administration, a position for which then-candidate Olivia Chow was ridiculed during the campaign. Tory bought the TTC an extra 100 buses, but almost all of them went into the spare pool, not into regular service.

The degree of collusion between TTC management and John Tory’s office was on full show during the 2023 budget debates when the TTC, that is to say Leary, refused to release details of service changes even when they were requested by Councillors and Board members. Keeping secrets won’t hide the information, only delay the public’s seeing what happens with service on the street.

At the end of Byford’s era at TTC, there was a plan for Line 2 renewal including a replacement fleet, new carhouse and yard, automatic train control, power and station upgrades. This plan never saw the light of day, and Leary instead pushed a scheme to rebuild the existing Line 2 fleet. This would avoid a capital spending crunch, but would also limit service growth, including on the Scarborough extension, and expose the TTC to a potentially unreliable aging fleet of subway cars. In time Leary reversed his position, but key years and momentum were lost.

Most troubling has been the matter of safety. In June 2020, there was a “near miss” at Osgoode Station where a train leaving the pocket track nearly collided with a northbound train on the main line. The issue here is not the signal design, training and operational procedures that made this possible, but that Leary withheld any report of the incident from the TTC Board almost a year after the incident. This should have been a firing offense, but Leary remained in his position with an explicit Board directive that major incidents of this nature be reported immediately.

The SRT derailment that abruptly ended service on that route in July 2023 was very public. The full investigative report into its causes has still not been released although an overview was presented at September’s Board meeting. At this point it is not clear whether deferred maintenance was the culprit, but there are unhappy echoes here of another period of TTC financial constraint and maintenance cuts that led to the crash at Russell Hill.

Again the issue is whether a growing problem was not reported, or worse not even detected. This scenario has been seen on other transit systems where operations degrade through make-shift arrangements like slow orders over poor track while the repair backlog grows. We simply do not know the current state of the TTC, and the political focus has been entirely on maintaining service.

Those who follow TTC announcements of delays will recognize the frequently-used term “operational problems”. This can embrace a wide variety of issues ranging from operators who do not show up for their shift to disabled vehicles, derailments or power system failures. Over Leary’s tenure, the amount of information giving specific explanations for problems has declined sharply, and Leary himself is rarely seen as a spokesman and explainer for the TTC. This is much unlike Andy Byford who could articulate problems and more importantly a desire to fix whatever underlying problems might exist.

If Leary had been removed, the challenge faced by a new CEO would lie in rebuilding the management structure, gaining the trust and dedication of 15,000 employees, presenting a credible and thorough recovery plan and budget for Toronto’s transit system, all while keeping the lights on and the wheels turning. Leary is not the man for that job.

No, gentle reader, I am not going to write yet another article about what the TTC should be doing. We’ve been around that bush a few times recently. The context yet to be set is the amount of money the TTC will have both for day-to-day service and maintenance, as well as capital funding for key projects.

Toronto’s political preoccupation, with good reason, is on the housing and affordability crisis. Transit will not be front of the line for funding, although it is a key service. Into this uncertain future should come a new CEO and revived management.

This is a significant failure for Mayor Chow. A too-timid TTC Board has missed the chance for renewal of its senior management.

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The King Street Diversion Debacle

Starting on October 19 mid-afternoon, streetcar service on King Street east of Church was blocked by a sinkhole caused by a broken watermain. Streetcar service was diverted from King to Queen, and the 501B Queen bus was shifted south to King.

The sinkhole repairs completed a few days ago, and effective October 25, the diversions are only in effect until 7pm while water main repairs continue. While this arrangement does improve evening service, it perpetuates the operational problems caused by the total lack of transit signal priority and traffic management at key intersections.

Updated Oct 27 at 11:15pm: The modified routes will not be in operation over the weekend, but will resume on Monday morning, October 30 according to the @ttchelps X account.

A separate problem occurs at the transition back to “normal” service in the evening. The buses revert to normal or run back to the garage, but it takes some time for the congestion to abate and normal streetcar service to resume. This puts a large gap between the two services.

Diversion Announcement This diversion announcement linked below has disappeared from the TTC site. As the TTC updates their info, I will amend this article.

Diversions in Effect Daytimes on 501, 503 and 504 Services

In summary, here are the normal (now evening only) and modified (daytime) routes through the affected area:

  • 501B bus: Bathurst to Broadview/Gerrard
    • Normal: Via Queen, Bay, King/Richmond (EB/WB), Church to Queen
    • Diverted: Via Queen, Bay, King to Queen at the Don River (Both ways)
  • 501D streetcar: Neville to York & Wellington
    • Normal: Via Queen, Church, Wellington/York/King loop
    • Diverted: No route change, but many Queen cars never get to York street and are short turned further east including to Distillery Loop during the most congested periods.
  • 503 streetcar: Spadina to Bingham
    • Normal: Via King, Queen, Kingston Rd
    • Diverted: Via King, Church, Queen, Kingston Rd
  • 504 streetcar:
    • Normal: From King West to Distillery Loop via King, Sumach and Cherry
    • Diverted:
      • Streetcars short turn at Church via Church, Richmond, Victoria, Adelaide, Church
      • Bus shuttle to Distillery looping downtown via Bay, Adelaide, Yonge to King

This arrangement has extremely severe effects on transit and traffic in general notably at locations where streetcars must turn. There is no Transit Signal Priority (TSP), no Traffic Warden (aka “Agent”), and no attempt to manage the conflicts between turning streetcars, other traffic and high pedestrian volumes at affected intersections. Concurrent work on Adelaide Street diverts traffic to Yonge Street and adds to congestion on streets used for the bus diversion.

Travel times of half an hour and more between Spadina and Church are common.

The situation makes total mockery of the City’s recent Congestion Management Plan by showing how they are utterly unprepared and unwilling to respond to an event that requires major reallocation of road space and time among various types of users, and active management in place of passive acceptance of chaos.

A fundamental part of traffic planning is to determine intersection capacity. This is not rocket science. If there are “N” green phases per hour, and in practice it is only possible for at best one streetcar to turn per cycle, this sets an upper bound on capacity. In fact, one per cycle is amazingly optimistic and could only likely be achieved with both TSP signalling (a “white bar” transit only phase) and a Traffic Agent to ensure the TSP was respected.

Service frequencies on the streetcar routes, and the equivalent cars/hour are:

  • 501D Queen/Neville service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
  • 503 Kingston Rd Bingham service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
  • 504 King Church service: 4′ / 15 cars/hour

This translates to the following demands by turning cars/hour:

  • King/Church
    • Eastbound left: 35
    • Southbound right: 25
  • Queen/Church:
    • Westbound left: 20
    • Northbound right: 20
  • Church/Richmond:
    • Northbound left: 15

A typical traffic signal cycle time is 80 seconds, or 45 times per hour. It is self-evident that attempting to turn 35 cars/hour would be a challenge. This is compounded by the fact that many cars will stop to serve passengers before turning and will almost certainly lose one cycle for that purpose.

Another source of delay is that the electric switches for turns do not always work requiring operators to manually set their route where some cars turn and others go straight through. This can also affect TSP signals where they do exist because the switch electronics “tell” the signals that a transit phase is needed.

This is a crisis-level example of why TSP should be installed everywhere that streetcars might need it, not just for standard scheduled movements (e.g. eastbound at Queen and Broadview, turns at King & Sumach). It is precisely during events where operations go off kilter that the best possible priority is needed. If the facilities were sitting there, they would benefit occasional diversions and short turns, as well as major service interruptions like this one.

The City’s plan is utterly silent on this need, and that must change. For its part, the TTC must insist on improved TSP for streetcar and bus routes. This is not a panacea, but an important contribution to transit reliability and credibility.

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Streetcars Return to Humber Loop

The TTC has announced that streetcar service west of Sunnyside Loop (where 501A service now ends) will be extended to Humber Loop on Sunday, October 29. Service to Long Branch will be provided by the 501L shuttle bus operating between Humber and Long Branch as shown below.

A 501M Marine Parade bus will operate from Humber Loop.

The 508 Lake Shore streetcar service will resume to Long Branch Loop on Monday, October 30. Cars will leave Long Branch roughly every 20 minutes from 6:40 to 8:10am. Westbound trips will leave King Station from about 4:25 to 5:45pm.

The eastern terminus of the 501A cars will continue to be at McCaul Loop.

The extension is possible between regular schedule changes because running time is already provided in the October schedules for 501 operation to Humber, and for 508 operation to Long Branch.

Full 507 Long Branch streetcar service will be restored at the next schedule change on Sunday, November 19.

Night service will continue with the 301 Queen Night Bus because of the need to divert around Ontario Line construction.

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Toronto Considers Congestion Management, Again

At its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report titled Congestion Management Plan 2023-2026. With a familiar refrain, the report begins:

The City is facing an unprecedented amount of construction road closures creating congestion issues for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians and surface street transit. There has also been a significant demand for special events in the City post-pandemic with the needs for road closures and more comprehensive traffic management strategies to minimize the impacts. This situation emphasizes the demand for better coordination of access to the right-of-way and the need for improved traffic management overall to help mitigate the impacts of congestion while maintaining safety for all road users.

[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at p. 1]

It goes on to talk about “refocusing” on four key areas:

  • Leveraging Technology to Better Coordinate Construction on City Streets and expanding the Construction Hub program
  • Establishing a dedicated traffic management team that will work with stakeholders such as Toronto Police Services, Toronto Parking Authority, TTC, Metrolinx GO, the Office of Emergency Management and City Councillors to improve traffic management planning efforts around major events while also coordinating with ongoing construction
  • Providing increased traffic management support for surface street transit for both TTC and Metrolinx GO to help mitigate the impacts of construction related route diversions
  • Investigating Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to better optimize traffic signal operations to help all modes move more efficiently and safely with less delay around the City.
[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at pp 1-2]

This appears modestly promising but for the fact we have heard many proposals before and, if anything, congestion becomes worse. If this is a “refocus”, one might ask what the City has been doing for the decade since the first Congestion Management Plan was adopted in 2013. In turn, that goes back to an October 2011 motion by Councillor Josh Matlow asking for “a report on the cost and feasibility of implementing a Synchronized Traffic Signal System”.

Looking back at years of reports, there is a common theme that changes are possible at the small scale with improvements of up to 10% in traffic flow at specific times and locations. However, these are one time effects in the sense that the improvement, once achieved, cannot repeated to cope with traffic growth.

Moreover, there is a finite capacity in the road system, and the major political challenge is to apportion this capacity among competing demands. Motor traffic, as the dominant use, inevitably must give up part of its share to give better service and space to others. This was a fundamental choice needed in the King Street Transit Priority Pilot scheme, and even there, the assumption was that some traffic could shift from King to parallel corridors.

[Full disclosure: I was a paid consultant on a project in 2014-15 to review the major east-west streetcar lines with a view to modifying traffic and parking rules to improve transit operations in the peak and shoulder-peak periods.]

Although Transit Priority is one topic in the report, there is no mention of the RapidTO program which appears to be stalled after the initial implementation in Scarborough on Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside. I am not counting the red lanes for the 903 Scarborough Express bus replacing the SRT as they came from a force majeure situation and would not otherwise have been implemented. Any of the RapidTO proposals will involve substantial change in allocation of road capacity, and they have not been well received in some quarters.

A related question is whether dedicated lanes can be justified in areas where TTC service is not as frequent as it once was on King Street, especially on a fully dedicated 7×24 basis.

In March 2020, the Covid lockdowns made a lot of traffic vanish, although as reported both here and elsewhere, traffic is now above pre-pandemic levels. This is particularly true in the suburbs where there are proportionately more jobs that are not suited to work-from-home arrangements, and where transit’s share of the travel market is hampered by service levels, route structure and trip distances.

The pandemic also triggered a move to accelerate construction projects both as a job creation program and to take advantage of the lower effect on traffic possible at the time. However, construction does not appear to have diminished, but the normal traffic level is back.

The basic problem of finite road capacity is made much more complex by the removal of significant chunks of that capacity for rapid transit construction, utility repairs, streetcar track maintenance (downtown), road and bridge maintenance, and curb lane occupancy permits for building construction. All of this might be “co-ordinated”, but the sheer number of affected locations and the duration of temporary capacity removal means that the road system is rarely at an optimal condition.

This also hampers schemes to reallocate capacity permanently for transit, cycling and pedestrians.

The current report includes only two recommendations:

  • the reconfiguration and expansion of zones served by “construction hubs” which are supposed to provide co-ordination between all projects by various parties in different sections of the city, and
  • expansion of the Traffic Agent Program (aka “Traffic Wardens”) by use of police officers and special constables.

Any other effects would come from continuation of work already approved or in progress, notably from the “Smart Signals” project which is already underway, but which is not yet fully funded.

Notable by its complete absence in this report is the recognition that some congestion cannot be easily “fixed”, and that active intervention in allocating road capacity will be necessary in the worst cases. That is dangerous political territory, especially in a City that has lived through both the Ford and Tory eras where transit did not rank first.

Moreover, there is a danger that a focus on “congestion” will reinforce the TTC’s typical behaviour of assigning all blame for poor service on external factors when their own scheduling and line management practices make a substantial contribution.

In the remainder of this article, I will review various aspects of the City’s plan and actions to date. This is mostly in the same order as sections of the report, with some consolidation to group related items.

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The Vanishing Transit Priority on King Street

At its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report about the City’s Congestion Management Plan. I will review that in a separate article, but to set the scene, it is worth looking back at the success and failure of the King Street transit priority pilot.

The original idea was to establish King Street, by far the busiest streetcar corridor downtown with consistently high demand, as a mostly-transit street to speed trips through the core area. A combination of forced right turns, enlarged boarding areas at stops, together with other road changes would make travel by car between Jarvis and Bathurst Streets difficult, if not impossible.

The scheme was quickly watered down thanks to protests from the taxi industry, including carriers like Uber whose vehicles were not branded, and this presented an immediate problem for enforcement. That problem was compounded by the lackluster efforts of Toronto Police who had more important things to do with their time. Occasional blitzes were separated by long periods of laissez-faire non-enforcement.

Despite these limitations, the changes actually did improve travel times, and in particular, the reliability of travel times, over the affected section. Then came the pandemic, and traffic downtown evaporated along with any vestigial efforts to enforce traffic laws. Motorists became used to driving as they pleased, and that has survived into the post-pandemic period along with the unsurprising result that many benefits of the transit priority scheme have been lost.

This article looks back at the actual data for 504 King cars operating through the core to show how travel times have evolved. I have included data going back well beyond the implementation of the King Street transit priority pilot in November 2017. Some of these charts appeared in earlier reviews of King Street, but they are included here for “one stop shopping”.

All data for the analysis here were supplied by the TTC from their CIS and Vision vehicle tracking systems, for which much thanks. The presentation and conclusions are my own.

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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part III

This article continues my reviews of bus operations on 512 St. Clair in September 2023 and of streetcar operations in the preceding months.

One aspect of any route’s operation is the degree to which vehicles have time for a layover at terminals. If this time is too small (or worse, none at all), service can be disrupted by the simple need for drivers to answer calls of nature and just decompress for a few minutes.

There is no formal break built into schedules in Toronto as can be found in some other transit systems, but a quick look at the TTC’s schedule summaries will show that most routes have built in “recover time”. This is intended to compensate for random events during a trip, although sometimes it is simply a mechanism to make the round trip time come out to a multiple of the scheduled headway.

Some of the “service reliability adjustments” the TTC advertises with schedule change are nothing more than shifting time from “recovery” to “driving” time without actually changing the round trip time. In other cases, time is added or removed without changing the total number of vehicles causing the service headway to get longer or shorter.

When schedules have excessive travel and/or recovery time, vehicles queue up at terminals causing congestion on the approach if there is no place to park off-street.

In the case of 512 St. Clair, the time spent at St. Clair Station (the eastern terminus) was fairly consistent up to the end of June 2023, but things got really messy. This corresponded to the point where service on the line as a whole became considerably worse as we saw in earlier articles.

This was caused by two competing factors in route operations.

  • In July and August, the TTC extended streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele even though it was only scheduled to run to Earlscourt Loop at Lansdowne. This made keeping “on time”, the TTC’s holy grail of service management, impossible.
  • The approaches taken in July and August were quite different, but a common factor was that streetcars spent more time sitting in St. Clair Station Loop to get back on time at the expense of providing the advertised service on the route.
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Analysis of 512 St. Clair Service: Part II

This is the second part of my review of service quality before and after the substitution of buses for streetcars on 512 St. Clair in September 2023. Part I deals mainly with bus operations in September.

Until May 8, streetcars operated between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop over the full route. Work on the GO bridge west of Caledonia was expected to start in May, and so on May 8 the streetcars were cut back to Earlscourt Loop and the 47A Lansdowne to St. Clair bus service was extended west to Gunn’s Loop.

The work did not occur as expected, and in response to problems with and complaints about service provided by the 47A, the streetcars resumed operation to Gunn’s Loop, but with no added running time, effective on July 4. That condition remained in effect until September 3 when buses took over the full 512 St. Clair route, and the 47A Lansdowne returned to its normal terminus at Earlscourt Loop.

The TTC has a lot to answer for here with the combined effect of service cuts and erratic operation of the service that remained while the line operated with streetcars. Buses look better by comparison because the streetcars, even with their dedicated lane, were so unreliable.

This was compounded by the effect of the long-running bus substitution on travel times discussed in Part I of this series, and by the inadequate preparation for transit priority as of day one of the bus replacement.

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