[youngblood]

It has nothing to do with splitting hairs, it has to do with where the information came from and more importantly what is its basis.

In this case, the consortium is worried that increased vehicle speeds will result in increased wear on the vehicles - which means that they will need to be serviced more often, and thus affects their bottom line. Of course they are going to complain about it, and because the contracts are written in the way they are, they win in this case. Which is patently absurd.

Dan

The way you wrote this, it seems as though the case is shut. Does the city/Metrolinx have any path to improving service at all?

 

[Bojaxs]

It has nothing to do with splitting hairs, it has to do with where the information came from and more importantly what is its basis.

In this case, the consortium is worried that increased vehicle speeds will result in increased wear on the vehicles - which means that they will need to be serviced more often, and thus affects their bottom line. Of course they are going to complain about it, and because the contracts are written in the way they are, they win in this case. Which is patently absurd.

Dan

Who's the consortium? Mosaic? Do they own the trains? I thought Metrolinx owned the trains?

In regards to Line 6, can someone give a brief break down of what the responsibilities are for each party?

This seems to be the cause of so much confusion.

 

[lastcommodore]

Good point, I didn't catch that. It's the old "between point A and point B" problem, when they mean to say from and including A to B. How do people get jobs writing media stories, but never learned about common mistakes like this? Most of us learned these things in high school English class, or just from life experience. (And it's not an ESL problem; it would be the same logic mistake in any language.) (Pardon my grumpiness.)

Actually, I think its the diagram thats wrong here. I took Line 1 last weekend, with the same notice (btwn college and osgoode) and it terminated at college... I think a good amount of people interpret between as inclusive for some reason

My friend also asked how long a walk it was from Wellington... Thought it terminated there

So they somehow messed up their own diagram. Impressive, really

 

[txlseries4]

Good point, I didn't catch that. It's the old "between point A and point B" problem, when they mean to say from and including A to B. How do people get jobs writing media stories, but never learned about common mistakes like this? Most of us learned these things in high school English class, or just from life experience. (And it's not an ESL problem; it would be the same logic mistake in any language.) (Pardon my grumpiness.)

Actually, I think its the diagram thats wrong here. I took Line 1 last weekend, with the same notice (btwn college and osgoode) and it terminated at college... I think a good amount of people interpret between as inclusive for some reason

My friend also asked how long a walk it was from Wellington... Thought it terminated there

So they somehow messed up their own diagram. Impressive, really

You two are seriously underestimating how challenging communication is through words and images. If it was as easy as you make it out to be slip ups wouldn’t happen as often as they do.

But the irony is that you’re criticizing an “impressive” mess up when you’re not even looking at the map from the TTC. The graphic on the CityNews site is attributed to CityNews because they made it themselves. I mean come on, take a deep breath and use your head before you jump to conclusions.

Here’s the map from the service advisory:

The most bewildering part is that this has nothing to do with Finch West Line 6...

 

[lastcommodore]

You two are seriously underestimating how challenging communication is through words and images. If it was as easy as you make it out to be slip ups wouldn’t happen as often as they do.

But the irony is that you’re criticizing an “impressive” mess up when you’re not even looking at the map from the TTC. The graphic on the CityNews site is attributed to CityNews because they made it themselves. I mean come on, take a deep breath and use your head before you jump to conclusions.

Here’s the map from the service advisory:

The most bewildering part is that this has nothing to do with Finch West Line 6...

I stand corrected. Thank you!
I did not know the diagram was made by CityNews. CityNews messed it up, not the TTC.
For the record, I do not believe communication is easy. It is very challenging. For me the advisory was very clear and the idea that College was not in service did not occur to me until a friend made the mistake.

 

[KevinT]

The TTC brought their own "experience" while GRT actually went through the effort to learn best operating practices and apply them

We hired out, Keolis runs iON on behalf of GRT.

Sadly the terms of the DBFOM contract seem to preclude them making any improvements to the line, like eliminating the weird slow downs in some of the off-street ATP zones, or tuning the crossing gate timings to avoid crazy long traffic backups. It's insane how early some of the gates go down, and how long they stay down after the trains have passed.

At least we have okay-ish average speeds.

 

[A 6264]

You two are seriously underestimating how challenging communication is through words and images. If it was as easy as you make it out to be slip ups wouldn’t happen as often as they do.

But the irony is that you’re criticizing an “impressive” mess up when you’re not even looking at the map from the TTC. The graphic on the CityNews site is attributed to CityNews because they made it themselves. I mean come on, take a deep breath and use your head before you jump to conclusions.
View attachment 702539

Here’s the map from the service advisory:
View attachment 702538

The most bewildering part is that this has nothing to do with Finch West Line 6...

I stand corrected as well. The official TTC map is very clear, I wonder why CityNews didn't use it. The article is, after all, purporting to pass on info from the TTC.
As for excusing CityNews and saying communication is hard, I don't buy it. A quick glance by the writer looking at his own map should have made it obvious that it could be misleading.
HOWEVER, the map isn't actually wrong. It shows the route the shuttle bus takes. It's just that it could be mistaken as showing which stations are closed.
I'm not picking on CityNews. All media outlets no longer use proofreaders, it seems to me, and I'm sure a proofreader would catch things like this.
Or maybe they use AI instead, which is worse than no proofreading at all.

 

[fungus_eater]

TTC is playing too safe with the signalling systems and transit priority. They should give operators more freedom to navigate through intersections so the line can go faster.

 

[TRONto]

‘It will be so much better,’ Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow says Finch West LRT should be faster by the end of the winter - NOW Toronto

Mayor Olivia Chow says the Finch West LRT could become faster by the end of the winter, as she pushes for transit signal priority.

nowtoronto.com

"“When the train gets to a traffic signal, they should have priority. In the past, they didn’t because what Metrolinx had was a system that is conditional priority. They need to have much higher priority because there’s like three or four cars making left turns, and it blocks a train that has 40, 50, 80, 100 people in it. There’s no reason to do that,” she said. "

Looks like Chow wants priority over car turning left. If this one change goes through I imagine the line could get closer to 30 minutes. If all the changes go through (aggressive TSP, raised speed limit) would we be able to get less than 30?

 

[JJTheJetPln]

‘It will be so much better,’ Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow says Finch West LRT should be faster by the end of the winter - NOW Toronto

Mayor Olivia Chow says the Finch West LRT could become faster by the end of the winter, as she pushes for transit signal priority.

nowtoronto.com

"“When the train gets to a traffic signal, they should have priority. In the past, they didn’t because what Metrolinx had was a system that is conditional priority. They need to have much higher priority because there’s like three or four cars making left turns, and it blocks a train that has 40, 50, 80, 100 people in it. There’s no reason to do that,” she said. "

Looks like Chow wants priority over car turning left. If this one change goes through I imagine the line could get closer to 30 minutes. If all the changes go through (aggressive TSP, raised speed limit) would we be able to get less than 30?

What would you suggest they should do in terms of TSP? Conditional in some corridors and unconditional in some? Completely conditional? Completely unconditional?

 

[Bordercollie]

‘It will be so much better,’ Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow says Finch West LRT should be faster by the end of the winter - NOW Toronto

Mayor Olivia Chow says the Finch West LRT could become faster by the end of the winter, as she pushes for transit signal priority.

nowtoronto.com

"“When the train gets to a traffic signal, they should have priority. In the past, they didn’t because what Metrolinx had was a system that is conditional priority. They need to have much higher priority because there’s like three or four cars making left turns, and it blocks a train that has 40, 50, 80, 100 people in it. There’s no reason to do that,” she said. "

Looks like Chow wants priority over car turning left. If this one change goes through I imagine the line could get closer to 30 minutes. If all the changes go through (aggressive TSP, raised speed limit) would we be able to get less than 30?

How about at least getting trains up to 50kmph?

 

[Rascacielo]

I took Line 6 for the first time today. Not end to end, just from Finch West to Milvan and back. The outbound journey was painfully slow. The train stopped for about 4 minutes at the tunnel exit (at the point where it joins the street barely 20 seconds after the Finch West platform). For no reason - it's not a stop, there's no intersection. Then it crawled along at 10-15km/hour. It took maybe 6 minutes to get from Finch West to the next station, which is probably no more than 600 m away. Beyond that it continued to crawl at the same speed and only accelerated to maybe 25-30km/hour after the 3rd or 4th stop. So for that trip at least transit priority wasn't even an issue - the main factor was the speed. And the onboard announcement (both 'written' and spoken) was a total mess. At some point it said the next stop was 2 stops AFTER Milvan, which almost made me get off the train. Good thing I checked Googlemap - we were actually about 4 stops BEFORE Milvan. The return trip was much better: the train moved at 'normal' speed (ie. about the same speed as the St Clair or Spadina streetcar) and as far as I noticed the stops were announced correctly. TTC should really change their slogan from "The Better Way" to "Faster Than Walking (most of the time)".

 

[smallspy]

The way you wrote this, it seems as though the case is shut. Does the city/Metrolinx have any path to improving service at all?

The way things are written, as I understand it, the City has no unilateral path to improving things on the line, save for signal priority at intersections. (They can modify their own equipment to change the settings, not the equipment installed on the line itself to be clear.)

Metrolinx, being the contract holder, does. But there will have to be a discussion with Mosaic about it, as they are the ones in charge of maintaining the equipment and plant for the foreseeable future.

And in fairness I have not laid eyes on the contract itself, so I don't know if there are clauses for things such as system performance (beyond availability and downtime). I'm not particularly optimistic that there are, to be truthful.

Dan

 

[Jonny5]

What would you suggest they should do in terms of TSP? Conditional in some corridors and unconditional in some? Completely conditional? Completely unconditional?

I was in Laval recently, and they seem to have a very advanced and complex priority chain for signals. Not sure how a medium sized suburb can do it and we cannot.

Left turn signals for cars could be before or after the green phase, and they sometimes used the flashing green which would then turn into a solid forward arrow, sometimes a regular green. There were many three-phase signal intersections.
There were advance right turns on occasion, which seemed to be connected to a bus being present.
Buses clearly held lights green, whether there were stops at that intersection or not.
Pedestrian signals in Laval and Montreal also now appear to have some flex timing in them too in that they sometimes were shorter or longer for crossing, but are then linked to the signals such that the left turn phase was bumped to the end of the cycle so the next pedestrian crossing phase happens earlier and lasted longer.

This all at the same intersection, and it seemed to change by conditions both of buses present and the amount of traffic in each direction. I don't have any research on how they manage to do this, but they are doing it there.

I also saw some of their new snow plow signals at the entrance to the neighbourhood which are no parking signs that have LED "no parking" times that update wirelessly with the time snow plow trucks will come and you have to move your car off the street.

 

[crs1026]

And in fairness I have not laid eyes on the contract itself, so I don't know if there are clauses for things such as system performance (beyond availability and downtime). I'm not particularly optimistic that there are, to be truthful.

There are clear lessons learned to any future contracts, around a) ensuring transparency and b) providing options to alter specs based on operating experience

If Mosaic is simply concerned about the added wear on railcar components eg wheels and brakes, COT/TTC/ML ought to be able to offer to pay for these on some accelerated schedule.

If the issue is rail and track life, it's a bit more tricky, as that may imply more intensive construction sooner than planned. But even there, it's a matter of advancing whatever dates are in the current plan, and then costing an incremental replacement program late in the contract term.

If the contract doesn't have any clause contemplating change orders or reopening the contract after a period of time, that's a big mistake. Sounds like cellular service in the subway all over again. Or 407.

- Paul