W. K. Lis
Superstar
Will TTC subways ever run really late into the night?
Read More: http://www.blogto.com/city/2014/05/will_ttc_subways_ever_run_really_late_into_the_night/
Politicians and journalists do much squabbling over whether Toronto is a so called world class city. Whether we are or we aren't, it's tough to argue that our subway service doesn't measure up to what's offered by cities that indisputably carry that title. New York City, for example, keeps its subway lines open all night. And in London, five lines will remain open overnight on Friday and Saturday nights, beginning in 2015. Could something similar ever work in Toronto?
TTC spokesperson Brad Ross doesn't offer a whole lot of hope. --- "The reason we don't stay open later is quite simple: it's maintenance," he says. I ask him why is then that whole chunks of some lines are routinely shut down over on weekends. He says those closures aren't for routine maintenance; they're for major upgrades. Daily maintenance takes place from the time the subway closes, at 1:30 a.m., and opens again at 6 a.m.
For a city that ranks consistently at the top of the list of priciest transit cities in North America, a subway closure time that falls half an hour before last call makes me feel a little irate. But Ross says our comparatively early closure time is a function of our system's infrastructure. --- Subways in New York and London, of course, require maintenance as well, but they have alternate capacity available to them. Lines in London, for instance, run "both fairly close to one another and parallel," Ross says, allowing some lines to close for maintenance while proximate ones remain open for service. And similarly, in New York, there are parallel express tracks, allowing one track to close while the other one continues to run.
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Between 12 midnight and 6:30 AM, the New York City subway trains have a headway or interval of about 20 minutes. See link.
In Toronto, the Blue Night Network has headways between 15 minutes and 30 minutes.
