GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

[reaperexpress]

I'd say that 36,000 pph is insufficient even without seeing the photos of the crowd. Probably double that and you might get close to moving everyone through the station. I get it, there's staffing issues, but we were downtown last year for NYE and it was a crush load crowd then too.

Imagine a hypothetical weekend day where there is an event at Rogers Centre, and SBA, that's nearly 100,000 people along counting fans & event staff. Add in other venues such as Sony Centre etc, and that people have begun to return to the entertainment (club) district, and other hangers on just because. Now we are probably looking at 200,000 to 300,000 people. Not to mention BMO field, bud stage, Coca Cola Colosseum.

For NYE I wouldn't be surprised if there were close to 750,000 people DT.

Yeah given that a single event at the Skydome could be 50,000 people on an ordinary day it's pretty safe to say the NYE influx was well over 200k.

In addition to GO there's also Line 1, which should normally be able to run 30,000 pph on each side of the U, with 1000 people per train and 30 trains per hour. But given the general rowdiness and incompetence of NYE crowds, I don't think there's any way they could get a train through the downtown stations every two minutes. So maybe they could achieve 20 tph, for a total of 40,000 pph on the subway.

Even then, NYE is extreme in that there is a fairly "hard stop" after the event, where everyone tries to get home in a fairly short time. The Raptors parade was in daylight in good weather. So a more gradual pace was manageable.

There may be unique individual events that draw crowds which the transit network can't handle, and we can't build our transit system for one-of peaks. But it would be very enlightening to know how close this event came to being a new record.

Although the subway may have actually been at its limit (assuming they tried to run at least 15 trains per hour), the GO network was nowhere near its infrastructure capacity. They were only running 1 train per hour on most lines, and the most frequent line was only 4 trains per hour.

Assuming all 12-car trains, the capacity of the ordinary PM peak service is:
6 tph (18,000 pph) Lakeshore West
3 tph (9,000 pph) Milton
4 tph (12,000 pph) Kitchener
2 tph (6,000 pph) Barrie
2 tph (6,000 pph) Richmond Hill
2 tph (6,000 pph) Stouffville
4 tph (12,000 pph) Lakeshore East
Total = 69,000 pph

And even that is nowhere near the limit of the infrastructure. We have run as much as 8 tph on Lakeshore West, 6 tph on Milton and 4 tph on Barrie in the past.

So in total with the subway and GO, we could have been running about 140,000 pph for that peak hour (100k GO + 40k subway) which is double what they actually ran.

The other half of the question is how many people try to go home during that peak moment, rather than staying downtown and going home later. I assume that a fairly large proportion of the crowds would head to bars or other parties and not head home during that 00:30-01:30 peak hour anyway, so it's not like we'd need to achieve 750,000 pph to carry the crowds.

Perhaps if GO Transit were also free on the 1st and overnight parking rules were waived, it would encourage more people to crash at a friend's place and go back home the following morning, which would spread out the demand so much that the ordinary holiday service on the 1st could probably handle it.

 

[urbancog]

I don't dispute that ML has a staffing challenge generally, but.... I'm a bit hard nosed on this topic.

As the role of transit grows, we will have to see a different employment bargain that exchanges (whatever) for an expanded requirement to work holiday shifts, or any other time when the public needs peak service.

I'm quite familiar with the realities of what workers do to improve their lot....and I get some interesting input from people who hold union rep roles about what today's workers will and won't accept.... sounds like there is a generational shift .... but at the end of the day, if the employer needs staff for more trains on New Years, the employment bargain should enable that (with appropriate consideration in the other direction, I would stress).

- Paul

I gather aircraft crew members were paid triple-time to work on NYE at small airlines.

 

[Dan416]

They only had 2 outbound Milton trains, which seems really sparse. I’m sure that didn’t help.

 

[dowlingm]

Interesting comment on Twitter. Maybe GO should invest in an RDC pair to get train crews across town as required?

 

[Allandale25]

Interesting comment on Twitter. Maybe GO should invest in an RDC pair to get train crews across town as required?
View attachment 530957

Reminds me of this: https://www.railpictures.ca/upload/...-employees-coming-from-the-nearby-toronto-agi

 

[Jonny5]

Interesting comment on Twitter. Maybe GO should invest in an RDC pair to get train crews across town as required?
View attachment 530957

They should have taken public transit there,

 

[dowlingm]

They should have taken public transit there,

GO Ferry except it’s a speedboat to shuttle train crews from Mimico to the Don Lands

 

[Allandale25]

GO Ferry except it’s a speedboat to shuttle train crews from Mimico to the Don Lands

And then for the last mile this but electric and yes I'd volunteer to peddle them.

 

[Metroscapes]

Interesting comment on Twitter. Maybe GO should invest in an RDC pair to get train crews across town as required?
View attachment 530957

Reminds me of this: https://www.railpictures.ca/upload/...-employees-coming-from-the-nearby-toronto-agi

Makes sense to me. Hell, even a couple hi-rails or an extra UPX car.

 

[Allandale25]

^ I see your hi-rail truck and raise you this: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1999803

 

[dowlingm]

Makes sense to me. Hell, even a couple hi-rails or an extra UPX car.

If only there were such a thing as an “extra” UPX DMU.

Now I want to see the YouTube where Chris Fox McGyvers ETCS into the Rapido RDC…

 

[Allandale25]

This could also be posted in the TTC or Union Station threads but I'll put it here.

New Year's Eve transit fiasco may result in fatalities next year

If we cannot handle the crowds of a large event, and refuse to learn from the past, how on earth are we going to be able to accommodate an increase

www.thestar.com

 

[anb]

Maybe this is the push needed for GO to introduce more frequent services all cross the board for this year, and for TTC to create a better and efficient crowd control plan.

For next year, a thing that could've been done differently is to try to divert people throughout the 2 concourses depending on the platform of the train instead of making both concourses available. For example if LSW was on Platform 8/9 and Kitchener was on 10/11, make York concourse handle the former only, while Bay handles the latter. Letting people know ahead of time through updates like days before the new year would be nice so the detour wouldn't come as a shock or confusion and people would know where to go.

They should close streets and give them to pedestrians/transit only. Maybe closing Lake Shore to them only would help a lot and GO buses can get in and out of the city efficiently. If they can close Lake Shore for summer weekends, they can definitely do it for New Years as well.

As for the TTC, they should either only run 1 side of Line 1 at Union while detouring riders for the other side, or completely detour both sides to St Andrew/King so we have a better flow despite the short walk, but it is a massively better idea than what had actually happened.

But another thing that should happen are the improvements to the overall public transit itself that should be the focus of this entire year.

GO finally introducing more frequent all day service to Bramalea and Unionville while bringing back 15 min service to Oakville will be a nice start, and making new express trips on these lines a little before peak times could help a lot more.

UPX should run at least until 2AM to match with the subway, and for events it should aim to run at a 10 min headway if the Kitchener line can't do 15 min Bramalea service just yet.

Aside from the mentioned TTC idea above which they could also do during events, aiming to get Eglinton and Finch open for sure this year should be the plan. Although both are far from downtown, they both can help in different cases in other parts of the city that needs relief badly.

That's just my take on the situation. Not sure if its the best plan, but there needs to be change as this might be the tipping point. 2023 for transit in the GTA as a whole had routes and lines at the highest capacity they've ever been and at times it made travelling completely insufferable, so for it to end like this was unfortunately extremely fitting but it obviously shouldn't be like this at all. Let 2024 be the redemption year as we know ourselves that there's so much potential for Toronto to change into a potential transit city.

 

[Dan416]

Maybe this is the push needed for GO to introduce more frequent services all cross the board for this year, and for TTC to create a better and efficient crowd control plan.

For next year, a thing that could've been done differently is to try to divert people throughout the 2 concourses depending on the platform of the train instead of making both concourses available. For example if LSW was on Platform 8/9 and Kitchener was on 10/11, make York concourse handle the former only, while Bay handles the latter. Letting people know ahead of time through updates like days before the new year would be nice so the detour wouldn't come as a shock or confusion and people would know where to go.

They should close streets and give them to pedestrians/transit only. Maybe closing Lake Shore to them only would help a lot and GO buses can get in and out of the city efficiently. If they can close Lake Shore for summer weekends, they can definitely do it for New Years as well.

As for the TTC, they should either only run 1 side of Line 1 at Union while detouring riders for the other side, or completely detour both sides to St Andrew/King so we have a better flow despite the short walk, but it is a massively better idea than what had actually happened.

But another thing that should happen are the improvements to the overall public transit itself that should be the focus of this entire year.

GO finally introducing more frequent all day service to Bramalea and Unionville while bringing back 15 min service to Oakville will be a nice start, and making new express trips on these lines a little before peak times could help a lot more.

UPX should run at least until 2AM to match with the subway, and for events it should aim to run at a 10 min headway if the Kitchener line can't do 15 min Bramalea service just yet.

Aside from the mentioned TTC idea above which they could also do during events, aiming to get Eglinton and Finch open for sure this year should be the plan. Although both are far from downtown, they both can help in different cases in other parts of the city that needs relief badly.

That's just my take on the situation. Not sure if its the best plan, but there needs to be change as this might be the tipping point. 2023 for transit in the GTA as a whole had routes and lines at the highest capacity they've ever been and at times it made travelling completely insufferable, so for it to end like this was unfortunately extremely fitting but it obviously shouldn't be like this at all. Let 2024 be the redemption year as we know ourselves that there's so much potential for Toronto to change into a potential transit city.

While I’m generally supportive of more pedestrian areas, closing Lakeshore to traffic on new years when the Gardiner was already slammed with traffic strikes me as insane.

 

[drum118]

They only had 2 outbound Milton trains, which seems really sparse. I’m sure that didn’t help.

Were you on any of those 2 trains going in or out???

I was on the first one both way and a huge different in ridership both way. Very few on the one going on, but full load leaving and no clue on the 2nd one..

The QQ was to be closed between X-X, but it wasn't adding to traffic issue.

Lake Shore is a gridlock at peak time without pedestrian flow not like New Year Eve 10'000's of pedestrian using Bay and Yonge St. The only way onto the Gardiner going west is at Jarvis and York St well Going east is at Spadina and Bay.

Bay was the worse compared to Yonge that it goes back to my 2008 recommendation that it be close permanently from QQ to Queen as a pedestrian transit mall

Police hard a hard time trying to stop the flow of the crowd crossing the intersections that they gave up.
Yonge & Lake Shore