Good luck to anyone trying to get north of Bloor Street today on the subway. Just after the TTC announced a major fare increase, the Yonge Subway line is shut down from Bloor-Yonge to Eglinton due to damage caused by a private contractor doing repairs to a bridge over the subway tunnel near St. Clair Station.
For most passengers, your best bet is to take the Spadina Subway north to the station corresponding to your stop on the Yonge Line and head east from there (i.e., go to St. Clair West instead of St. Clair and take the 512 streetcar back east). Shuttle buses are expected to be overcrowded and slow for the PM rush.
For those heading back to the Yonge Subway from Eglinton northward, your best bet may be to transfer back not on crowded (and slow) Eglinton buses, but get off at Wilson, which has the best level of bus service between the two sections of the Yonge-University-Spadina subway, to get to York Mills Station. GO Transit (particuarly the Richmond Hill Line) and north-south bus routes east of Yonge (the 141 and 144 premium express routes, 25 Don Mills, 100 Flemingdon Park, 24 Victoria Park and 68 Warden) might be faster as well depending on your destination.
UPDATE: Service resumed at 8:30, and was caused by an error by an Enbridge Gas crew that cut into the tunnel. Service resumed earlier than once expected.
29 comments
Or, depending on how far east/west of Yonge you’re going, use the north-south surface routes instead of the east-west ones.
(Although last time I remember a similar major closure on Yonge, I was driving down the route of the 25 Don Mills and saw large crowds at most stops because the buses were packed leaving the subway. It would not take a big increase in demand for this to happen, even on a high-frequency route like Don Mills.)
Good advice. I’m always surprised that the TTC never suggests this themselves. It makes a lot more sense than trying to catch the shuttle buses which are always huge nightmare.
Just how much worse does it have to get, before the province puts its subsidy back? TTC ridership has not increased as fast as the population, because the service is no better, if not worse. Half of those people in cars could have been in transit, if we’d built at a fraction of the pace we did in the middle of the last century. Yes Mr. 905, transit frees up more road-space than building roads does, at the same price.
Taking the subsidy away was Harris’ fault, but consistent with the ‘Conservatives” odious class-baiting. It might just be more odious that a second-term ‘Liberal’ government has not restored it. Building and maintaining roads is a subsidy; building and running transit is a subsidy: the latter is actually an efficient use of money.
Don’t forget, if you’re relatively healthy then Bloor to Eglinton is a 45 minute walk (quite possibly faster than most of the detours or shuttles, all of which are going to be absolutely rammed), and it’s a nice evening out anyways.
The damage may not be fixed for tomorrow. Plan accordingly.
Perhaps it’s too much of an organizational issue to organize on short notice, but surely, in situations such as this, Yonge Street could be closed to regular traffic, so that buses could make the Bloor-Eglinton trip as quickly as possible.
@ jamesmallon: what in the world does the subsidy have to do with a contractor accidentally damaging the tunnel?
Ummm, perhaps you guys should edit this report to be more accurate. The TTC has been saying for hours now that it wasn’t in fact a contractor who damaged a tunnel, but an Enbridge contractor on a surface street that caused the damage. This is NOT a TTC issue, so commentors who are using it to further arguments about the state of the TTC are being opportunistic at best.
I have worked in the tunnels and on top and just feel sorry for the poor guy who broke through the roof. For a guy in construction the thought that you are working away, the ground gives way and you are suddenly looking down on subway trains passing below is a nightmare.
I avoid any shuttle buses if I can. One should always have alternate routes to get around. Personally, I have two different routes to get home other than my primary one.
However, it is getting the right information out to the riders that is needed.
I love the irony of the fare increase and the constant unreliability of the TTC! Ride your bike and avoid the constant hassles of the TTC!
TTC reporting full service restored!
To clarify: this was not tunnel work. A road crew, unrelated to the TTC, cut into the tunnel, compromising its safety.
TTC crews have now secured a large slab of conrete that was threatening to fall into the tunnel. Service resumed at approx. 8:30 p.m.
Brad Ross
To clarify further: this was not a tunnel. This was part of the former open-cut section between St. Clair Stn. and Summerhill Stn. that was covered over, actually occurring on the Jackes Ave. road bridge which spanned the open-cut, similar to the ones north of Rosedale Stn. Some of the roads across the former open-cut still have the old bridge railings, but you’d otherwise never know that they are bridges.
Uh, ‘will’, it has several things to do with it:
– they have lousy provisions for inevitable screw-ups of their own, or others’
– there are only two tracks going N/S on the Yonge line, not the three or four there should be
– they do not have the organizational capacity or spirit to adequately communicate with their customers
You don’t think any of this has to do with under-funding? Think a bit harder.
To the first Rob: At the time I posted this (4:30), the news was vague. I did know that it wasn’t TTC staff responsible, so I said ‘contractor’. If I knew the exact location (rather than “near St. Clair Station”), I would know this was the part that was later decked over for municipal parking and other uses.
I was going by alerts and press releases at the time which eventually said “caused by a contractor doing work on a roadway/bridge south of St. Clair Station”, so I thank Brad and Rob L for the additional information.
Of importance to most people was how to get home, not the exact details of why they had to wait hours for a 45 minute shuttle ride, or to find possible alternates to get around the mess.
It’s a shame that the contingency plans don’t quite work as well as they should. This kind of shutdown is inevitable now and then, so the focus should be on how the shuttle buses are managed rather than tie accidents back to fare increases, etc.
The TTC does a pretty good job of throwing tons of shuttle buses on short notice at any subway disruption. However, the city does a lousy job of then clearing the way for those buses, so they move too slowly, become overcrowded and fail to do their job. When you have a subway shutdown in Toronto, all hell breaks loose because the subway is THE backbone of the system — it’s rather critical. And yet life continues on the surface as if nothing has changed. The city needs to look at any and all of the following when major disruptions occur:
– coning off a center lane that is then used only by buses to express people out of the disrupted area in the direction of rush hour. In this case, have Transportation/Police cone off a lane up Yonge so that buses could speed through without dealing with traffic, left turns, etc. Other traffic would have to squeeze by in the remaining lane. Those cars have a choice if they don’t like the resulting traffic and can divert elsewhere. Buses can’t.
– alter the light timing to speed the direction of the buses. Maybe even turn off the traffic lights at some of the minor intersections to keep the artery flowing. All the traffic lights can be controlled centrally, right?
– if the disruption will last some time, have the police temporarily bag all meters to ban parking along, in this case, Yonge. This will free up more traffic lanes though in practice is pretty hard to pull off
– put cops in the major intersections to ban left turns, override red lights and keep traffic flowing
– I assume TTC stops collecting fares when using shuttle buses, right? Otherwise they are losing in time more than the fares are worth
Any other suggestions? A bevy of shuttle buses running nonstop on empty roads can move a lot of people, but only if they can really motor…
I suggest jamesmallon run for mayor. He has the answers for everything.
I’ll answer my own question with two more ideas:
– express buses. Packed buses are near impossible to get on and off due to the lack of doors. (Oakland buses have 3 doors, but that’s a topic for another day). Think of the time lost at each stop for unloading and loading. So split the routes. At Bloor, where the buses are stacked up, quickly throw up signs (or digitally change the rollsigns) so that you have, say, buses that stop at York Mills and points north and buses that only run from Bloor to Lawrence. This would let the people traveling far to quickly get out of the system, clearing room for others.
– send the police along the shuttle bus routes, clearing double-parkers, cars waiting to enter Sporting Life, delivery vans, etc.
Express buses are an interesting possibility. In this case you would have had Bloor to Eglinton express vs. Bloor to Eglinton stopping at all subway stations. You would save significant time because of how long it takes for passengers to manoeuvre when they are sardines. This would be traded off by simplicity at the end points especially Bloor, where it is a mass of humanity that is hard enough to direct even when it is only to a single service pattern.
Yonge was closed for a portion, but only between south of Bloor and somewhere around Davenport. I don’t think the rest was closed. It would certainly make sense, since the capacity for general traffic would have been greatly reduced from normal. But don’t stop at emergency subway shuttles — for example, when you have masses of people heading to Woodbine Beach for fireworks, the TTC puts out lots of extra shuttle buses, but they end up getting stuck in traffic. Cutting off private vehicle access to Woodbine from Bloor to Lake Shore for an hour before and an hour after would really help TTC serve as many riders as efficiently as possible, and it might not make a big difference for car travel because capacity is so limited at that time anyway.
Here’s another suggestion: if possible, use the older high-floor buses for shuttles. The new Orion 7s have lower capacity, and they are quite a bit slower to load and unload at the back door (in part because the internal layout leads to congestion for entering riders, and in part because the rear doors don’t fully accommodate a dual stream of passengers like the older high-floors or streetcars do).
One thing that the TTC did right today: they promoted alternate routes through the media; they didn’t just say that shuttle buses were in place, but they tried to better manage the shuttle crowds (and direct riders to better travel options) by encouraging the use of the Spadina subway and other north-south routes.
One thing that the TTC did wrong today: those damn OneStop signs that continued to display the usual advertising and blather, while a painfully slow and uninformative announcement scrolled inconspicuously along the bottom of the screen (as seen around 7:00 this evening at Vic Park station):
Ongoing disruption on YUS – Bloor to
…Eglinton stns – due to damage from
…road work unrelated to the TTC.
…Shuttle buses operating
NEXT TRAIN >> Arriving in […]
This message
a) does not actually specify that the subway is not operating;
b) uses an acronym (YUS) that not all riders are familiar with (better to say simply “Yonge subway”);
c) gives absolutely no indication as to how long the delay will be (will it be 20 minutes? will it be the rest of the week?);
d) makes no attempt to advise as to alternate routing options, other than the shuttle buses;
e) uses roughly 15-20% of the limited message space to deflect blame rather than provide useful information; and
f) appears to trail off at the end, as though there might be more useful information following that then never comes.
A lot of these problems likely stem from the TTC being limited to using a single line of text, and being able to only fit in a certain amount. These problems would be a lot easier to solve if the TTC had a clause in the OneStop advertising contract saying that the TTC could temporarily take over the full screen in these types of situations.
Does everyone know the volume of passengers passing by Bloor Street north to Finch.? My understanding is that it is 50,000 to 60,000 PER HOUR at peak. That would require 500 buses to make up the lost subway capacity. Those who think that greater capacity would make a difference are correct – but do you really believe that any other level of government will pony up the billions needed to do this? Toronto is getting over $10 billion for new rapid transit in the coming years. I doubt that new money will be found to ensure speedy workarounds for delays that happen once every 6 to 18 months.
I agree it would be nice, but let’s get off our cynical soapboxes.
I agree with Brent. After hearing on the radio this morning waking up that Giambrone said nothing more can be done because the capacity of a bus is so low, I had to find a place to write a comment.
What CAN be done is improve communication. Here’s what happened to me during a recent delay earlier this year, where communication was terrible and screwed me over badly.
I was travelling to North York when just before Eglinton, they made an announcement: “Due to personal injury at track level at Lawrence Station, there will be shuttle bus service between Eglinton and York Mills stations”, or something very similar. Upon leaving the train at Eglinton, the first question I had was should I go to the bus terminal, or exit to the street? I go to the terminal which is pretty crazy busy, but since we were the first train I get on one of the first busses that come about 10/15 minutes later.
The bus is packed but I don’t mind the ride up Yonge St. to York Mills. We get to York Mills and the bus driver pulls over on the right side. People start exiting the bus, but some stay on to continue north. Other people are yelling “we ALL have to get off here!”. Probably about 60% of the riders exit the bus, including myself. I go down to the station, where a police officer is telling everyone the subways are shut down at York Mills! I couldn’t believe it… after being lucky enough to be on a shuttle bus, we all willingly exited and had to continue further north. This is when I realized there were also hundreds of people at York Mills station and it would take forever to get back on. Fortunately my brother was able to pick me up by car.
Here is what needs to be done. I honestly can’t believe they haven’t thought of this:
– Communicate clearly that there will be major delays on the shuttle busses. This will motivate more people to take alternatives, as some people who aren’t used to the TTC don’t realize the total chaos of shuttle busses (I don’t blame them… the announcements make it sound like everything is fine)
– Communicate alternatives (ie. take Univ line and streetcar or bus back east)
– Tell people whether they need to exit to street level or go to the bus terminals in their stations (if street level, should they get a transfer before exiting? or will the drivers just let everyone on?)
– If there is a change, make an announcement and make sure all the bus drivers are aware and make announcements. Ie. when the subways no longer were operating at York Mills, the bus driver should have told us to stay on the bus longer. Maybe he should have clued in also when almost everyone exited his bus.
I also want to add that the announcements can sometimes be hard to here, and mayeb the TTC would say that’s why they can’t give more details.
However, even if not everyone hears all the details, people can at least guide each other.
Subway delays are the one scenario I often see strangers strike up conversations with each other on the TTC.
This was my first time taking the TTC in years, and it did not disappoint. The experience was exhausting, just the way I remembered it to be.
TTC did not handle crowd control and peole did not know where to go to get the buses. AFter following a crowd, we were lead to another huge crowd. That’s when some of us decided to walk. Good thing the weather was not bad. If I hadn’t left for downtown earlier in the first place, I would definitely had been late to reach my destination.
I will not be taking the TTC again EVER… would rather be stuck in traffic in my own car, where I can turn left or right at the next street if I so choose to do.
I feel sorry for people who are dependent on TTC and they should boycott for the rest of the week.
I believe they do. I don’t know why they didn’t choose to use it for this event.
I strongly agree that streets need to be closed to non-transit traffic for cases like this. However “cases like this” needs qualification.
The typical shutdown lasts at most an hour, often less, and the effort needed to create an alternate surface route must be justified by the length of time it will be in use. Yesterday’s event clearly was a case where this should have been done.
However, the approach will necessarily vary depending on which part of the system is closed. The Yonge line, with a one-way capacity of around 30k per hour at peak, simply cannot be replaced with buses. The best advice is to find an alternate route, or a cafe or bar, and wait for the peak period to pass.
Making announcements about alternatives could get rather tedious if you think of the many, many ways people coming from downtown might change their travel patterns. At some point, people need to be able to look at a map rather than expecting someone to lead them by the hand.
Some advice about alternate routes in the media was downright ill-informed. Yes, there is a bus on Avenue Road, but it runs about once every other week especially outside of the rush hour. The premium express buses are rare, charge extra, and you have to know where they stop. There are really no frequent north-south surface routes parallel to Yonge until you get west to Bathurst or east to Broadview and Pape. The University/Spadina line was by far the best advice to anyone for the central/west part of town.
Shorter delays have big communication problems between the staff of the TTC and other services. This is partly organizational, but also partly due to the quickly-changing nature of the situation. I have seen some bus shuttles well managed and organized, and others that are a complete mess, usually because they happened at a time when staff to manage them were scarce.
The contractor who did the damage should be on the hook to reimburse the TTC for all costs related to the shutdown.
One point is clear here – we cannot rely on the Yonge subway to indefinitely carry the load from central 905 to downtown and vice versa. Imagine the crowds with the subway geared to automatic operation and with 7 car trains.
It’s time that the upgrade to Richmond Hill GO to allow 2-way all day service started making its way up the priority list. Instead the subway boosters have managed to deprioritise it almost out of sight.
Amen, Mr. Dowling, Amen..
Time to fund studies on implementing all day RER/S-Bahn quality service on all the GO lines.