A few years ago the TTC improved subway service to a minimum 5 minute headway on all lines. The idea was, as the backbone of the system, passengers should not wait more than 5 min for subway service. This lead to an increase of subway, as well as overall, TTC ridership.
The Transit City Bus Plan is a spinoff of this, to tell riders that none of the designated Transit City Bus routes will require a wait longer than 10 minutes. Easy to remember, very convenient to use.
Yet the TTC will not do the same for the streetcar network. First of all, they can't make the streetcars run that reliably. Secondly, they have streetcar maintenance issues that prevent them fielding all the streetcars they have scheduled. Thirdly, the new streetcars they've ordered are much larger, hence less frequent service, as the TTC counts passengers per hour moved, not service quality. This passenger counting method is why the TTC thinks 501 Queen is doing great, running ALRVs (articulated streetcars), whilst the ALRV equiped routes (501 Queen & 511 Bathurst) have both noticable suffered ridership losses since ALRVs were introduced. The other streetcar lines, still running smaller more frequent CLRVs, have seen modest ridership gains over the same time period. See stevemunro.ca posting on this for the stats.
The upshot of all this is that the streetcar network is getting screwed royally. Larger streetcars mean less frequent service, so instead of the streetcar network improving frequency to 10 minute minimum at all times, it'll be 15-20 minute mimumum service. This goes against the experience & benefits realized of the aforementioned other modes (bus & subway).
THe TTC will be a major issue in the November 2010 Toronto election. Hopefully we as transit advocates can make the point that we once again need to save the streetcar system, in the style & spirit of Streetcars for Toronto in 1972.
