TTC needs Better Detour Mitigation

 The TTC has long struggled with how to manage construction and other events along routes. There are pronounced issues of lack of proper communication between management and the public, as well as with operators, but there are also issues with how they are planned. In this short piece, I will speak to how TTC has failed to properly adjust service to meet temporary challenges, and how it can be improved.

Example 1: 36 Finch West during the culvert washout, 2005

In 2005, Finch over the Black Creek, was washed out during a rain storm. As repairs would take months, the TTC devised a plan for temporary service in the area. The 36 Finch West route detoured off of Finch via Driftwood, Grandravine and Sentinel, shown in the map below with the red line. They also began a short local service, shown in purple, that connected customers closer to the washout to local shopping centers and other services. What this plan showed was that TTC was willing to find a way to service isolated areas when challenges appear, which is not something that they have done since.

Example 2: Line 5 Construction on Eglinton

For the past decade, Metrolinx has been building Line 5 along Eglinton. This has made the 32 Eglinton West and 34 Eglinton East routes terribly unreliable. The 34A branch, in particular, runs the whole way from Yonge to Kennedy, and gets no breaks from construction. Important to this as the B and C branches, the former of which runs between Don Mills and Kennedy, the latter from Yonge to Don Mills.

Because of the fact that the Don Valley and Sunnybrook Park are large obstacles that ridership breaks when travelling through, the TTC could have arranged services in a way that better served people travelling shorter distances, as opposed to the few who took the whole route. 

One way of doing this would be to have the long 34A trips be infrequent, say, every 25-30 minutes. The 34B and 34C would operate frequently (maximum every 10 minutes), ending at Don Mills. That way, buses would spend less time on the long routes, and schedules could be adjusted to better serve local traffic conditions. The 34A still runs, so those travelling across Don Mills still can do so.

Example 3: 939 Finch Express and Scarborough Subway Extension

Due to work to extend Line 2, traffic conditions at Sheppard and McCowan are rough. The 939 bus, which runs up McCowan before turning onto Finch, gets stuck in a lot of this traffic, and has become very unreliable for Finch customers. This is particularly frustrating since the ridership on McCowan is very low compared to that on Finch.

Currently, the 939A and 939B branches use McCowan, but the 939C stays on Finch and is not affected by the construction. My idea would be to relegate some of the 939AB service onto the C, or a short-turn at Finch and McCowan, in order to keep as much service as possible away from Sheppard and McCowan. If half of the service on these two difficult branches was converted to 939C service, 75% of peak and 50% of off-peak service would be protected from the construction-related delays (presently 50% and 0%).

Example 4: Crockford Shuttle

This upcoming weekend is the Taste of Lawrence, which is my favourite street festival (sorry, I'm biased). This requires the 54 Lawrence East bus to detour via Warden, Bertrand, and Birchmount. This isn't terrible: only two stops are skipped. However, one of the stops is at Crockford. Crockford is a long industrial street between Lawrence and Bertrand that has a single access point otherwise, at Minford. As such, some people who already walked out to Lawrence a significant distance have even further to walk. 

My suggestion for the TTC would be to provide a shuttle service using smaller buses, notably, the Wheel-Trans vehicles. I suggest, as the map shows below, that the 54 Lawrence East (red line) stop on Bertrand at Crockford, where customers can switch to a Wheel-Trans shuttle (blue line) running the length of Crockford. While an additional transfer sucks, it reduces some very long walks.

Conclusion

For the sake of customers, noting issues with reliability, TTC needs to do a better job realigning service to match reality when temporary challenges are exposed. If the TTC's mission to mobility, it cannot be reacting to challenges without any sort of nuance.