[steveintoronto]

This seems like utterly the wrong question, because it sets up a zero-sum game as between transit agencies.

The right question would be: Can public transit gain more riders? (Or, for the moat-focused: Can public transit gain more riders in the 416?) Or even: can public transit gain a greater share of riders [in the 416]?

If you read the article linked, that's discussed, in detail.

 

[Spicy Garage]

There's a couple of blog posts of interest, calling into question the City's numbers related to the pilot project. I'd love to hear the resident experts' take on them.

Here are some excerpts; [bracketed] and bold text are mine. Later clarifications, based on replies to this post, are bracketed and dated.

http://algorithmicculture.com/the-king-street-pilot-lie/

it’s clear the methodologies used for both public transit and vehicles are different in how they’re being presented to the public: 65K+ passengers traverse along the entire 14 km stretch of the 504 line, not the Pilot zone; 20K vehicles is even more suspicious as the cordon data provided by the City shows a tally of 21K+ vehicles traversing at only one intersection in the Pilot zone over an 8 hr window. In short, if you were to tabulate the correct numbers for the same areas and times, the numbers would favor passengers in vehicles, not transit riders. […]​

[Jan. 26] The conclusion is a teaser of things to come, based on later statements; it doesn't strictly follow from the quote above.

According to one 2014 TTC report of passenger “ons and offs” along the 504 King line, approximately 37% did not traverse through the zone and approximately 38% of the 65K ridership did not traverse through the zone all day. The number of transit riders in the zone during peak hours is closer to 20-22K, similar to the vehicle count of 20K. Where’s the 3:1 ratio? […]

cordon data provided by the City shows vehicle traffic at King & Bay streets (with a one-day 8hr tally) totaling 21,640 vehicles; this fact immediately disproves the suggestion that only 20K vehicles touch the 504 line, especially the entire 14 km stretch. […]

When you factor in 1.2 passengers for the private vehicle count, you have 24K vehicle passengers. That leaves a 24K passenger count for private vehicles and approximately 20-22K 504 King line passengers for peak hours (in any case a ratio more 1:1 if we are to take the “20K” figure by the City as fact); while the comparison outside of peak hours immeasurably favours vehicles over transit. Also, the cordon counts for vehicles were dated, in some cases almost ten years old, so the numbers are conservatively low. […]

As someone who is a strong advocate for public transit, I still have to take issue with the deception of the data that launched the Pilot and on the very idea itself that the Project would be a solution to congestion in the city. On both of these principles, I felt compelled to address the lies. […]​

He* cites Melbourne, Montreal, Bogota… so he's apparently not ignorant of transit issues.

http://algorithmicculture.com/king-street-pilot-lie-part-2-the-integrity-behind-the-numbers/

The cordon counts provided by the City along this stretch [the entire 14-km 504 King line —SG] includes 40 intersections, and the 8hr total exceeds 480,000 vehicles counted. Now, one still has to understand that there’s a likelihood of vehicles repeating in such counts, thus a simple addition of these counts would be inaccurate. […] to go from 480,000 to 20,000 is an extreme consideration of vehicle repetition along such a distance of road that covers diverse communities (commercial, residential, etc.) where much of that traffic is localized; that is to say, in order to reach 20K from 480,000, the City has excluded 96% of the total count! Ergo, 20,000 vehicles appears, even to the untrained eye, as completely arbitrary. […]​

[Jan. 26] He didn't take one cordon count and multiply by the number of cordons along the entire 504 King route; he added all the City's individual cordon counts along the route. (Image 1, Image 2)

These are bold claims, which have been quoted on Twitter with the #ReverseKingCarBan hashtag. Clearly, his logic is flawed: when a rush-hour streetcar drives through the pilot-project area 3 minutes faster, it picks up passengers along the rest of the line 3 minutes sooner — thus, their own total travel time decreases by 3 minutes, regardless whether they're travelling through the pilot area or not. The only way that faraway riders wouldn't benefit is when the streetcar is short-turned. I'm curious, what portion of 504 trips are short-turned?


So, what do you think? Is his analysis sound or flawed? In what way? Do we have some details on how the City derives the 20K-vehicle figure?

I'd love to fact-check Twitter mentions of this analysis, but want the real goods from UT to ensure my points are solid.

(* The unsigned posts probably come from "mark j" or "derek a. fisher", so I used "he" and "his".)

 

[steveintoronto]

As someone who is a strong advocate for public transit, I still have to take issue with the deception of the data that launched the Pilot and on the very idea itself that the Project would be a solution to congestion in the city. On both of these principles, I felt compelled to address the lies. […]

A very interesting post. Without addressing the figures presented, let me point out that even Steve Munro has stated that (gist) "the figures are not sufficient enough to make any compelling conclusions at this time". I'll quote him directly later, as I'm sure to be challenged on my assertion, but he also makes the case that jumping to conclusions with so little collated information just lends itself to being debased, and taking down the whole pro argument with it.

What truly concerns me is that this project was grossly underfunded, and really hasn't had a chance to show what a well-designed and financed pilot could show. As soon as the shine comes off the claims being made by some quarters, this project could sink fast, if for no other reason it wasn't given enough oxygen to breath and perform. I can't think of anything more indicative of that than the lack of integrated state-of-the-art signalling and control systems for both streetcar and vehicular intersection light control and dispatching.

The TTC is still a year away from instituting its latest digital communication system. It's like entering a dog in a race with legs tied and mouth taped shut. And then bragging how well he ran out of fear.

 

[SunriseChampion]

http://algorithmicculture.com/the-king-street-pilot-lie/

it’s clear the methodologies used for both public transit and vehicles are different in how they’re being presented to the public: 65K+ passengers traverse along the entire 14 km stretch of the 504 line, not the Pilot zone; 20K vehicles is even more suspicious as the cordon data provided by the City shows a tally of 21K+ vehicles traversing at only one intersection in the Pilot zone over an 8 hr window. In short, if you were to tabulate the correct numbers for the same areas and times, the numbers would favor passengers in vehicles, not transit riders. […]​

This paragraph's conclusion doesn't follow from its assertion.
It is not logical to say that vehicle passenger numbers would be greater than transit riders at any given intersection because passenger numbers are for the entire transit line for transit and for a single intersection for vehicular.
Given the information provided in that paragraph it is impossible to deduce the number of passengers using either mode at any given intersection.

According to one 2014 TTC report of passenger “ons and offs” along the 504 King line, approximately 37% did not traverse through the zone and approximately 38% of the 65K ridership did not traverse through the zone all day. The number of transit riders in the zone during peak hours is closer to 20-22K, similar to the vehicle count of 20K. Where’s the 3:1 ratio? […]

"...approximately 37% [transit passengers] did not traverse through the zone and approximately 38% of the 65K ridership did not traverse through the zone all day."

This sentence doesn't mean anything. The second figure is a redundancy of the first, as written, and so can't be added to the other to come up with the number 20-22k transit passengers. The two figures aren't exactly the same so it's possible that the paragraph contains incomplete information identifying the two figures, but as written doesn't make sense.

cordon data provided by the City shows vehicle traffic at King & Bay streets (with a one-day 8hr tally) totaling 21,640 vehicles; this fact immediately disproves the suggestion that only 20K vehicles touch the 504 line, especially the entire 14 km stretch. […]

This is true, if the vehicle passenger count is really only from a single intersection.

When you factor in 1.2 passengers for the private vehicle count, you have 24K vehicle passengers. That leaves a 24K passenger count for private vehicles and approximately 20-22K 504 King line passengers for peak hours (in any case a ratio more 1:1 if we are to take the “20K” figure by the City as fact); while the comparison outside of peak hours immeasurably favours vehicles over transit. Also, the cordon counts for vehicles were dated, in some cases almost ten years old, so the numbers are conservatively low. […]

What's the assertion you highlighted based on? First of all, that 20-22k transit passenger number is based on the--as quoted above--redundancy of adding the number of transit passengers who didn't transit the study zone to the same number again.
Second of all, nothing you quoted lets one deduce the number of passengers outside of peak hours.
​

The cordon counts provided by the City along this stretch [the entire 14-km 504 King line —SG] includes 40 intersections, and the 8hr total exceeds 480,000 vehicles counted. Now, one still has to understand that there’s a likelihood of vehicles repeating in such counts, thus a simple addition of these counts would be inaccurate. […] to go from 480,000 to 20,000 is an extreme consideration of vehicle repetition along such a distance of road that covers diverse communities (commercial, residential, etc.) where much of that traffic is localized; that is to say, in order to reach 20K from 480,000, the City has excluded 96% of the total count! Ergo, 20,000 vehicles appears, even to the untrained eye, as completely arbitrary. […]

This is also nonsense. The author takes the count from a single intersection and multiplies it by the number of intersections along the transit route to come up with a number of vehicles travelling the transit route and then goes on to call the city's number arbitrary. Well, he'd know what arbitrary is, given his formula for calculating vehicular traffic, so I'll give him that.

So, what do you think? Is his analysis sound or flawed? In what way? Do we have some details on how the City derives the 20K-vehicle figure?

The logic is flawed as all hell if you haven't omitted anything from the blog post.


I'm not defending the city's numbers, just deconstructing the assertions made in the quoted blog. I have no idea where the city's numbers came from. In fact, I'm sort of embarrassed that I took them at face value now that you've posted this. Is it true that the vehicle count is only from a single intersection?
I always knew the transit passenger number was for the whole line and not just the pilot project section, but as you mentioned that's besides the point entirely as speeding up transit flow in the most congested section of the route should obviously help passengers along the whole route.

 

[Streety McCarface]

The cordon counts provided by the City along this stretch [the entire 14-km 504 King line —SG] includes 40 intersections, and the 8hr total exceeds 480,000 vehicles counted. Now, one still has to understand that there’s a likelihood of vehicles repeating in such counts, thus a simple addition of these counts would be inaccurate. […] to go from 480,000 to 20,000 is an extreme consideration of vehicle repetition along such a distance of road that covers diverse communities (commercial, residential, etc.) where much of that traffic is localized; that is to say, in order to reach 20K from 480,000, the City has excluded 96% of the total count! Ergo, 20,000 vehicles appears, even to the untrained eye, as completely arbitrary. […]

This statement immediately voids all credibility of this "article". By actual counts, the Yonge line carries fewer passengers than what the article is claiming King Street carries in terms of single-occupant vehicle users. I can guarantee for a fact that this is BS.
Let's also be clear, if we take that 38% figure quoted for streetcar passenger usage outside the pilot zone and apply it to the car counts (21,640), we get a vehicle usage of around 29,683 vehicles along the entire corridor (this is probably flawed, but granted, the majority of people travelling on King street are going through the core). If we multiply this number by 1.2, the number rises to 35,836 car users per day. Compare that to the 71,000 streetcar riders (I don't believe this figure includes 503 ridership), that's still %50.47 more streetcar users than automobile users along king street.

But this isn't the point. It doesn't matter if transit is carrying half the users along the corridor as single-occupant vehicles or 3* as many. The point is that the presence of single-occupant vehicles downtown significantly increases the travel time for everyone. They are extremely inefficient because they run on gasoline, block traffic (especially at left turns), take up 30* the space of public transit users, make the streets more dangerous, and most importantly, take away money from lost productivity. People bitch about the gain being only about 3 minutes in travel time. Let's say this is the case (at peak times, when most people use the corridor, therefore, it's not the case): 50,000 rides at 3 minutes per ride savings. Assuming 300 business days and value for work being around $30 an hour, here is the amount of money in lost productivity along the corridor: $22,500,000 per year. Over 30 years, $675,000,000 (assuming no inflation). For one corridor, that's a huge benefit that's never considered. How about the cost of electricity and increased costs of drivers wages for idling behind a vehicle trying to make a left turn or the constant stop and go? What about the benefits of a walkable king street? That's never talked about.

 

[nfitz]

There's a couple of blog posts of interest, calling into question the City's numbers related to the pilot project. I'd love to hear the resident experts' take on them.

Here are some excerpts; [bracketed] and bold text are mine.

http://algorithmicculture.com/the-king-street-pilot-lie/

it’s clear the methodologies used for both public transit and vehicles are different in how they’re being presented to the public: 65K+ passengers traverse along the entire 14 km stretch of the 504 line, not the Pilot zone; 20K vehicles is even more suspicious as the cordon data provided by the City shows a tally of 21K+ vehicles traversing at only one intersection in the Pilot zone over an 8
hr window. In short, if you were to tabulate the correct numbers for the same areas and times, the numbers would favor passengers in vehicles, not transit riders. […]

​

​

Given the "pilot area" is the entire downtown, I think we can assume a significant number get that far. And many that don't, board here (in AM peak), and leave the cordon. Even those whose trip is entirely outside the downtown, have a more regular service, and less streetcars passing them by unable to get on. This sounds like typical Nimby-whining.

The actual ridership at the peak point (which is surely somewhere in the pilot area) is easy enough to calculate. Take the number of streetcars in the peak-hour and multiply by the peak capacity.

 

[innsertnamehere]

The car numbers really AADT numbers, which are measured from a single point, correct. That doesn't mean every car can be recounted at every intersection, as cars typically travel a significant distance on a street. The amount of daily vehicle trips on the street is likely higher than 20k, but it's not going to be 450,000, or even 60,000.

 

[Spicy Garage]

Based on comments on the initial post, I added a few clarifications, labelled "[Jan. 26]":

• The conclusion in the first paragraph quoted ("the numbers would favor passengers in vehicles, not transit riders") is a teaser of things to come, based on later statements; it doesn't strictly follow from just the statements above it.
  
• In "the 8hr total exceeds 480,000 vehicles counted", he didn't take one cordon count and multiply by the number of cordons along the entire 504 King route; he added all the City's individual cordon counts along the route. (Image 1, Image 2)

 

[W. K. Lis]

Toronto’s been road-raging about cars, bikes and streetcars for over 100 years. We’re not about to stop

The King St. transit pilot is just the latest flashpoint. Residents have argued about previous changes. All were denounced, feared and seen as lethal (often correctly). Has it gotten us anywhere other than stuck in traffic?

See link.

In the long history of Toronto streets, change has never come easily.

Downtown, where the streets are narrow relics of a Victorian age, there is little middle ground, only middle fingers.

The flipped bird on King St.’s restaurant row is the latest symbol of irritation, a stand-in for the frustration certain business owners feel toward city hall, and a transit pilot they say isn’t working for them.

Toronto was a city of walkers when it was incorporated in 1834, and that remained the main form of transportation (supported by transit) until the growth of its suburbs after the Second World War, says Phillip Gordon Mackintosh. The geography professor at Brock University researched Toronto’s streets for his book Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935. Torontonians paid for concrete sidewalks long before they agreed to finance asphalt roads, because most people simply didn’t use them, he notes.

Toronto has greeted change on its streets with excitement, anxiety, finger pointing, politicking, gloomy predictions and ideological bickering for most of its history. Even in the 1860s, when Toronto had close to 45,000 citizens and the roads were covered with filth and roaming animals, we argued about the “itinerant Toronto hog.”

“Have we no ‘health inspector?’ What are our ‘police’ doing?” one citizen wrote to the Globe in 1862, complaining about the pig nuisance. Another defended the pigs, because they were performing a valuable trash-disposal service. When a tenacious gutter pig bit the skirt of a woman walking on King St., the Globe demanded that the pig nuisance be an election issue.

...

 

[SunriseChampion]

Based on comments on the initial post, I added a few clarifications, labelled "[Jan. 26]":

• The conclusion in the first paragraph quoted ("the numbers would favor passengers in vehicles, not transit riders") is a teaser of things to come, based on later statements; it doesn't strictly follow from just the statements above it.
  
• In "the 8hr total exceeds 480,000 vehicles counted", he didn't take one cordon count and multiply by the number of cordons along the entire 504 King route; he added all the City's individual cordon counts along the route. (Image 1, Image 2)

Hahaha, I thought something was missing else the dude was just rambling nonsense.
Thanks for clarifying.


Though, I still don't understand the redundancy in the second quoted paragraph.

 

[nfitz]

The car numbers really AADT numbers, which are measured from a single point, correct. That doesn't mean every car can be recounted at every intersection, as cars typically travel a significant distance on a street.

Though, I see a lot of cars turning on King. I walk along it every day, and always cross the same unsignalled intersection (just a stop sign on the cross street). A car or two tries to turn there most times I cross it.

King in particular that many people never drove far on, because of the streetcars and congestion. They tend to use parallel one way streets because they were faster. The pilot really shouldn't impact most regular drivers, and simply targets those too stupid or lazy to navigate without an app (or to be fair, those who are visitors). Or sociopaths who probably did drive elsewhere much of the time, but are trying to make a point.

 

[SunriseChampion]

^Yeah, I agree as a daily driver. At most I drive King west of Bathurst. It was never fun driving east of there.

 

[Spicy Garage]

cordon data provided by the City shows vehicle traffic at King & Bay streets (with a one-day 8hr tally) totaling 21,640 vehicles; this fact immediately disproves the suggestion that only 20K vehicles touch the 504 line, especially the entire 14 km stretch.

That claim has been bugging me for days: how indeed, if King/Bay showed almost 22K vehicles, could the City honestly claim only 20K vehicles on King in the pilot-project area?

I think I've found the fly in the ointment! His list of City cordon counts:

shows vehicles traveling on Bay at King, not traveling on King at Bay! Look at the MAIN column.

(This is confirmed by examining source data and comparing nearby counts on King (12,865; 10,235; 7,847) and Bay (20,382; 19,660; 19,155): the author used a vehicle count that is not from King Street to disprove the City's 20,000-vehicle King claim.)

8-hour daytime counts on King Street range from 4,535 at River Street to 15,742 at Bathurst. So (whew) the City's count of 20,000 vehicles in the King Street pilot project area is credible.



God, I wish these algorithmicculture.com people allowed comments and debate on their pages…

 

[PinkLucy]

Road hockey! http://www.metronews.ca/news/toront...reaks-out-on-king-st.html?cq_ck=1517336465298

 

[Juan_Lennon416]

Be ever so careful! A hockey stick or a puck may get jammed in the streetcar tracks or a high-stick may bring down the streetcar wires