To build or not to build and a certain streetcar route...
It's important to remember that you can't build your way out of some problems.
Dr. Jonathan English had an interesting Twitter thread a few days ago talking about Toronto’s Spadina Streetcar and the inconsistent and quite slow service it provides, despite appearances as the line has dedicated lanes. This is something I can concur with, because I like riding the 510 — if only for the neighbourhoods it runs through, and because it used to be something I used daily to get to the University of Toronto.
The Spadina Streetcar is a fascinating project, as it is a wonderful example of one of the many unintuitive things about public transportation. Infrastructure is not a silver bullet — even dedicated lanes that you’d think could make any surface transit fly along.
Now, I mentioned speed and consistency, but more specifically, what are the Spadina Streetcar’s problems? Well, the first one I need to mention (particularly as a UofT alum) is the frankly silly stop spacing on parts of the route: For example, Harbord and Willcocks stops heading southbound are just 100 meters apart, and in my experience this delays a lot of trips.
Another recurring issue on the route is the presence of numerous intersections with other routes. The switches used on the TTC network are single point, which pose a higher than otherwise risk of derailment, and so streetcars have to go through them relatively slowly while also staggering with other streetcars operating in the opposite direction to avoid risk of collision.
It might be surprising due to the slow service (which is quite likely not time-competitive with other north-south surface routes), but the 510 Spadina is actually quite busy and crowding on the vehicles is common, which again poses a couple of issues. For one, if you’re paying cash it can be very difficult to actually get to the fare vending machines (I always use Presto, but the 510 serves lots of areas that visitors tend to frequent) and it can also be difficult to get off when things are super crowded. This delays cars because riders hold doors, and the door open buttons also get abused and are used by people running up the vehicle at the last minute and holding the door to get on in a way that wouldn’t be possible with old style doors. Funnily enough, this is probably a time when the door buttons should not be active, and the TTC doesn’t really use them when they would be useful, which is to maintain the hot or cold in the vehicle during low demand periods.
To be fair, vehicles on the route do spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around, and that’s also in part due to the way the signals on Spadina operate. Left turning cars take precedence over the streetcars despite a streetcar virtually always having multiple times more people than a line of 3 or 5 turning cars. Signals also take a long time to change because pedestrians are expected to fully cross Spadina in one cycle (in practice this still doesn’t work well and many end up standing in the middle), and since streetcars take a long time to cross the intersection, they often have to wait an extra long cycle.
All of these various factors come together to create some major service headaches on the 510. The service suffers from very inconsistent frequency and bunching — which means sometimes you’re waiting fifteen or more minutes for a streetcar and other times you have two or three in a row. There were frequent complaints in the Byford TTC era about short turns, but honestly we really might benefit from some more on Spadina. Of course, that inconsistent spacing of vehicles doesn’t help with crowding and long dwell times, and some of the problems are infrastructure-related. These issues are almost certainly exacerbated by infrastructure, which is sort of ironic because on first look you might expect Spadina to be very reliable because of its infrastructure. In particular, the aforementioned switches around intersections and the restrictive loops at terminals. All of this isn’t good for the 510 given 1) it’s busy and 2) it’s not even very long — just a little over 5 kilometres.
I hate to talk about a problem without at least floating some possible fixes, so I’ll try to do that here. I think for boarding speed and dwells, there’s a really solid case for level boarding on Spadina and other lines with fully dedicated rights-of-way; the new LRT lines that are functionally nearly identical to the Spadina and St. Clair streetcars will have it, and there’s not good reason the dedicated right-of-way lines cannot in my eyes. As I said before, I also think changing how door buttons work would also be helpful. On the issue of intersections, double-point switches should exist where switches exist, and we probably should also get rid of a lot of switches: Look at the disrupted service patterns that run year-after-year and build those in, and maybe a few extra switches here and there for flexibility and remove the rest (as many cities with trams have far fewer switches at intersections than Toronto). A longer term scenario that I also implore us to move towards is more aggressive signal priority; it will impact car traffic and that is okay — Spadina has a crazy number of cars on it. As within many other technology scenarios ,there is a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. The other issues like signals and route management have issues that could be the topic of entire articles in themselves, so I will probably address those later.
All of these issues with the 510 should tell us something about infrastructure — and that’s that it certainly isn’t a panacea. I mentioned before the issue of left-turning cars, and interestingly the 504 King route with its scrappy (and fairly sloppy looking) priority measures doesn’t face this problem despite not really featuring any dedicated lanes, because at almost all intersections cars can’t even go straight through (much less turn left). This policy decision has been pretty effective even with the low quality temporary infrastructure and is a great example of the German transit maxim of organization before electronics before concrete.
Even though the fact that basic policies can (but not always of course…) be so much more powerful than infrastructure, it feels almost universally to me that infrastructure is valued over service management and policy, probably because while service management and policies require a lot of active attention, you can allocate some funds to an infrastructure project, contract it out, and wipe your hands off of it.
One example is in Denver, where the city has built out an impressive rail network but runs so few trains on most lines that the service is not at all attractive. Another example closer to home is the Eglinton Crosstown, which was long championed as a new era for transit in Toronto as a modern LRT, but ever since construction has started has received very little attention even from politicians seen as transit supportive, even as things like limited signal priority and infrastructure design are set to make service quite slow and inconsistent.
I think all of this makes it valuable to try and categorize capital investments into categories based on the cost of supporting them in properly working and maximizing their value. What do I mean by this? Well, some transit and infrastructure projects need little active management and additional spending (of which active management is just one item which spending can go to), while others rely incredibly heavily on it.
In North America and especially the US, there seems to be a lack of projects that do not require a high continuous funding stream, and a high number which do. For example, BRT systems are increasingly popular continent wide as a cost-effective transit solution, but without running lots of buses — of which the per-unit capacity is quite expensive — the BRT is not very valuable. A great example of this is of course York Region’s VIVA system (it comes up a lot because it really is a great example of what not to do), where you have incredible infrastructure that gets very little use because there is no desire to spend on a large amount of service for it. By comparison, random suburban backroad buses in Toronto often run a higher frequency service and have the ridership to match. This is bad because capital dollars spent on an asset that doesn’t get used and just sits and deteriorates (which is more of an issue in a place like Toronto) are being totally wasted. Going forward, it would be great to see capital investments from higher-order governments made contingent on the allocation of funds for operations and active management, lest communities eat up transit funds to build nice bus terminals that are great for selling condos, but hardly ever actually get used.
The good thing is that there are capital investments which reduce long term opex or at the very least make transit systems and cities better places to be. A great example of this are grade separations. Removing pedestrian and rail or road and rail crossings, while adding things like multi use paths or bike lanes are awesome projects, and designed well shouldn’t require a ton of long term upkeep.
Thinking about these things is critical for the future because much of the world has a ton of transit capital flowing, and much more limited recurring operating funding. Optimizing how we use this funding is key to getting more transit for the same funds.
To build or not to build and a certain streetcar route...
Thanks Reece for a very interesting article. If I understand you correctly, route 510 has a (largely) segregated right of way, but the service is still slow. This is because, firstly there is no tram priority at intersections, not even over vehicles turning left across the tram tracks. Secondly stop dwell times are too long, partly because there is not level boarding into the streetcars.
There are clear lessons for the rest of the world. Firstly there must be ABSOLUTE PRIORITY for public transit at intersections. Secondly, it is crucial that stop dwell times are as short as possible.
On this second point European experience confirms that 'level boarding' speeds up services.
On your recent video on the Zurich S-Bahn, a commentator resident in Zurich complained about the slowness of TRAM services. Some Zurich tram routes (eg 10 and 12) are 100% low floor, but most routes are still worked by a mix of low floor and high floor cars. The high floor cars are of course slower at stops. as people have to climb up into the tram. I am sure you can guess the result. The high floor cars tend to run late.
The streetcar platforms should be "refugee islands" for pedestrians. They don't need to get all the way to the other side of Spadina. Even the so called "safety islands" in the suburbs (safety for motorists that is) should become "refugee islands" with radar detectors for the pedestrians instead of buttons.
https://youtu.be/7KPGVP85WpU