TTC surface stop spacing

[salsa]

512 moves at 14 km/h, so anyone who walks as fast as the St Clair car must be an awfully fast walker with high endurance.

Presumably if ksun is so utterly wrong about such a basic fact, then he's wrong about everything else they say as well.

+1

 

[nfitz]

You mean 14km on average, including early morning, or at 11pm.
I was talking specifically about busy weekend afternoons.

I was talking about PM rush hour average speeds. 11 pm is closer to 16 km/hr. Early Sundy mornings is 17 km/hr.

As average walking speed is about 5 - 6 km/hr you are are clearly making up stories.

Perhaps you've noticed you can get from St. Clair station to Yonge faster by walking?

OK, show me a city where public transit has systematically 150-250m spacing - not one or two stops on a single line, but on average, system wide, like our entire streetcar/bus fleet.

Again? Didn't we have this discussion the last time you started spinning these lies about how you are the only person in the city who can walk faster than 10 km/hr? Besides, we are talking about St. Clair here - not the entire network. Stop spacing is going to vary on all routes in all cities.

But let's play it your way. Let's take a random example from an Asian city. Here: https://www.google.ca/maps/dir/13.7...90609,100.5065799,18z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e2?hl=en

8 stops in about 1.3 km. That's less than 200 metres. On Ratchadamnoen Nok Road In Bangkok. A city where the traffic is so bad, you likely could walk faster than the bus at some times of the day!

 

[aquateam]

What an absolutely absurd statement. I've been on buses in New York, Montreal, Seattle, Bangkok, and Vancouver that stop just as frequently.

And walk as fast as the 512 even if it stops at every stop? I think you are pulling that one right out of your imagination!

I think that the stop spacing for the 512, which has been semi-LRT-ized, should be further apart than a mixed-traffic bus. If a bus is barely moving in traffic then it doesn't slow down its riders by much to make an additional stop. Whereas if there are signal priority measures and a reserved lane, you aren't taking full advantage of them if you're stopping at the same frequency as before (i.e. you'll have improved the reliability but not the speed).

The other benefit of improving speed is that, for the same number of operator-hours, you'll also improve frequency, which also reduces time spent waiting at the stop.

 

[nfitz]

I don't disagree that the 512 stops should be spaced out a bit more (as I've noted previously). But the supporting evidence to do so being that it's faster to walk and no where else puts stops so close together is clearly falsified. As such, it taints the very suggestion that's been put forth.

 

[DSC]

But let's play it your way. Let's take a random example from an Asian city. Here: https://www.google.ca/maps/dir/13.7...90609,100.5065799,18z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e2?hl=en

8 stops in about 1.3 km. That's less than 200 metres. On Ratchadamnoen Nok Road In Bangkok. A city where the traffic is so bad, you likely could walk faster than the bus at some times of the day!

This is a ridiculous discussion as the spacing of stops is not, and should not be , simply a matter of distance. Stops are to serve passengers and if a transit route goes through a stretch where there are no customers then it won't need any stops. If it passes two large "generators" of customers that are only 150 metres apart it probably needs a stop at both. If there is a hill or a busy cross-street it may need a stop at both the top and bottom of the hill or on both sides of the intersection. I certainly agree that there are places where TTC stops seem to be too close together, not because of the closeness but because there seem to be no reasons why they currently need to be so close - King westbound at Victoria, which is slated for removal, certainly fits that. (The recently removed Sunday Stops are another perfect example; when many more people went to churches and used public transit to get there it probably made sense to have a "church stop" - much less so today.)

 

[Johnny Au]

512 moves at 14 km/h, so anyone who walks as fast as the St Clair car must be an awfully fast walker with high endurance.

There is a very good reason why speed-walking is an Olympic sport.

 

[ssiguy2]

The problem with the TTC is the high number of station it builds on it's supposed "repaid transit" corridors. The TTC seems determined to take the rapid out of rapid transit. If someone needs to go somewhere local that is why god created the bus.

The Finch and Eglinton LRT routes have far to many stations. Not only does this slow down the train but put the reliability of the system at risk. The more often a train has to stop whether for lights, crossings, stations etc the higher the risk of the "bunching" of trains.

Vancouver has a good general rule for the selection of SkyTrain and BLine stations that Toronto should emulate...........if the cross street isn't important enough to have a bus route then it's not important enough to have a rapid transit station. They make exceptions only where there is a very high residential concentration or employment sector such as VCC or Patterson. It's a good rule of thumb that keep the system both rapid, accessible, and connective.

 

[ksun]

The problem with the TTC is the high number of station it builds on it's supposed "repaid transit" corridors. The TTC seems determined to take the rapid out of rapid transit. If someone needs to go somewhere local that is why god created the bus.

The Finch and Eglinton LRT routes have far to many stations. Not only does this slow down the train but put the reliability of the system at risk. The more often a train has to stop whether for lights, crossings, stations etc the higher the risk of the "bunching" of trains.

Vancouver has a good general rule for the selection of SkyTrain and BLine stations that Toronto should emulate...........if the cross street isn't important enough to have a bus route then it's not important enough to have a rapid transit station. They make exceptions only where there is a very high residential concentration or employment sector such as VCC or Patterson. It's a good rule of thumb that keep the system both rapid, accessible, and connective.

completely agree. Toronto seems to have an obsession with close spacing when it makes zero sense. Victoria and Huron stations are cases in point. So are many stops on st Clair and Eglinton.

 

[ksun]

I was talking about PM rush hour average speeds. 11 pm is closer to 16 km/hr. Early Sundy mornings is 17 km/hr.

As average walking speed is about 5 - 6 km/hr you are are clearly making up stories.

Perhaps you've noticed you can get from St. Clair station to Yonge faster by walking?

Again? Didn't we have this discussion the last time you started spinning these lies about how you are the only person in the city who can walk faster than 10 km/hr? Besides, we are talking about St. Clair here - not the entire network. Stop spacing is going to vary on all routes in all cities.

But let's play it your way. Let's take a random example from an Asian city. Here: https://www.google.ca/maps/dir/13.7...90609,100.5065799,18z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e2?hl=en

8 stops in about 1.3 km. That's less than 200 metres. On Ratchadamnoen Nok Road In Bangkok. A city where the traffic is so bad, you likely could walk faster than the bus at some times of the day!

First there are six stops within 1300 meters, not eight; second Bangkok has a much higher density, three, I asked for a "system wide" narrow spacing like TTC, not one selected stretch of one bus line.
Guess you can't find one to refute me after all.

 

[nfitz]

First there are six stops within 1300 meters, not eight; second Bangkok has a much higher density, three, I asked for a "system wide" narrow spacing like TTC, not one selected stretch of one bus line.

First it's spelled metre not meter. Second there ARE eight stops southbound.

Guess you can't find one to refute me after all.

Tell you what. You find me the reference for what the TTC system-wide spacing is - rather than some number you've pulled out of your imagination.

 

[dowlingm]

There is a very good reason why speed-walking is an Olympic sport.

If an alternative to a commuting experience requires performing at world class athlete levels, it's hardly a reasonable transit alternative.

 

[reaperexpress]

As to 440/460m "too far" I also wonder how people manage to do that in other cities such as NYC or Boston.

I didn't say that 440/460m is "too far", I said that it's "too far for the first round of stop rationalization". In other words, let's start removing the stops that bring the stop spacing within our target of 300-400m before we start talking about increasing that target to 400-500m.

And without further ado, here are those stops:

You'll note that many of these were already identified by the TTC in the aforementioned stop rationalization report. But many of them are not.

I've bolded a few stops that I particularly dislike due to their impact on streetcar progression:

Queen & Victoria: We've already talked at length about this stop.
Spadina & Richmond: This stop is right in the middle of a green wave for motor traffic, which means that when streetcars stop they get out-of-sync and then face very long signal delays. Yet if they didn't stop, they'd just cruise through a lot of the time.
Bathurst & Adelaide: Southbound streetcars routinely get stuck in the queue of cars turning left onto Adelaide, while other vehicles simply pass using the other lanes. Obviously the solution is to spread the streetcar tracks to create a left turn lane, but in the meantime, removing the stop would allow us to make the Transit Signal Priority a lot more effective. This is one of the few intersections where it is possible to go directly from the straight through green signal to the left turn signal on the same street without creating a dangerous situation called the "yellow trap". So we could pull up the southbound left turn signal ahead of any southbound streetcar to clear out the queue.

I emphasize that this is not the complete list of stops I'd remove, or even the complete list of stops the TTC plans to remove. Some stops resulting in >400 m spacing are still easy picking if there is a gap in trip generators (over the Don River for example), or if there is a narrow catchment area (Lakeshore & Lake, for example).

Methods:
To identify the stops I'd remove, I created my own 'ideal' stop network then spotted the differences.

Starting with the streetcar network, I first identified all the transfer locations. These would be the fixed points in the network. The remainder of stops could be moved around to optimize spacing, crossing facilities and proximity to trip generators.

Next I filled in the gaps. My target spacing was 300-400m, with all stops located at a pedestrian crossing facility (as per the TTC report). Areas with shallow catchment areas or few trip generators would err at the higher end of spacing (350-450m), and areas with denser pedestrian networks and more trip generators would err at the lower end (250-350m). There are unfortunately many locations where my ideal stop spacing is not possible due to the location of pedestrian crossings.

Finally I turned on the existing streetcar stops layer and picked out the ones that were not at one of my proposed locations. I have not noted the places where a stop is moved a block or two to line up with a signal or PXO since I figure these will happen anyway and they don't have much impact to speed or walking distances.

Tell you what. You find me the reference for what the TTC system-wide spacing is - rather than some number you've pulled out of your imagination.

According to page 3 of the the TTC streetcar stop removals report:
"The current average stop spacing on streetcar routes is approximately 250 metres."

I don't have a stat off-hand about bus routes, but they seem pretty similar.

 

[Voltz]

Bit of an odd situation with the bus stop at the end of my side street, the city recently built sidewalks to the nearby intersections and put up signs stating that the bus stop in both directions at the end of my street would be removed since it is fairly close to the next nearest stop where the sidewalks now extend to.

The stops were removed by the date indicated, but then two weeks later some temporary bus stop signs were put on hydro poles near by, as if whoever did so was unaware that the stop no longer exists, or thought the original stop poles were removed by the construction activity.

 

[DSC]

Bit of an odd situation with the bus stop at the end of my side street, the city recently built sidewalks to the nearby intersections and put up signs stating that the bus stop in both directions at the end of my street would be removed since it is fairly close to the next nearest stop where the sidewalks now extend to.

The stops were removed by the date indicated, but then two weeks later some temporary bus stop signs were put on hydro poles near by, as if whoever did so was unaware that the stop no longer exists, or thought the original stop poles were removed by the construction activity.

Or one of your neighbours complained to their Councillor .....

 

[jcam]

I'll be curious to see how a Mount-Dennis to Kennedy trip takes on the Crosstown compared to a Jane-Kennedy trip on Line 2. Are those numbers out there?