Route 25 service snapshot: 27 July - 23 August
Summer service means less traffic and more reliable runtimes on Route 25, but problems with bunching and cancellations remain and will inevitably ramp up into the fall.
Route 25 is a frequent route in Orleans, running from Millennium to Blair on Innes Road, then north to Collège La Cité and Waterridge - the latter on weekdays only. As of this past winter, Route 25 was the ninth busiest line in OC Transpo's surface network.
Summer service, as is the case on other routes, is the more reliable season, with generally good off-peak service. But cancellations remain high, and bunching remains an issue in peak periods.
Cancellations
Over the snapshot period, westbound cancellations sat at 6.7% and eastbound cancellations reached 4.2%. This averages to 5.5% of trips cancelled over this period.
These figures are calculated from schedules which include the temporarily cancelled trips (TCTs) from the Customer First Action Plan on weekends, which drove unusually high Saturday cancellations in both directions.
Travel Time
As half of the daytime trips short-turn at Blair in the summer, travel times were calculated from the Blair-Millennium portion of the route, ensuring that all trips would be counted.
The schedules for both directions generally reflects the real runtime; however, performance deteriorates through the day to the afternoon peak. This reflects a seeming reluctance to add runtime in the PM Peak, when routes are at their most unreliable, possibly due to a lack of resources.
It must be noted that this performance is unlikely to exist during the school year. Traffic is heavier in the fall, and there are more riders (ie. longer dwell times) - especially on a student-heavy route like Route 25.
The afternoon peak reality-schedule match is a little worse eastbound, as this is the peak direction in the PM, which increases passenger and traffic volumes.
Travel times are less constrained in the westbound direction, with larger tails; however, the actual variability of travel times is lower throughout the day, and the schedule more-or-less meets reality throughout the summer months. However, this is unlikely to last past the beginning of the school year.
On-Time Performance
On weekdays, summer punctuality is good between Millennium and Blair, and both directions are generally adequately scheduled to *summer* conditions (although bunching appears enroute in both directions). Between Blair and Waterridge, eastbound service remains reliable, while westbound service deteriorates somewhat with long dwell times evident at Blair station. There is also evidence of buses leaving their origin points late in both directions, with unclear causes.
For Transsee reasons, the two branches are separated in the charts.
Despite the recent push for new runtime and reliability on weekdays, weekend service is poor. Not only were a large portion of Saturday trips cancelled during the summer, but the route is underscheduled for weekend (!) conditions, with buses departing their origin point on-time but arriving at the terminal late. This is especially bad westbound; buses are better padded eastbound.
The rate of late eastbound departures from Waterridge suggest a few more minutes of padding is in order; there are almost no late departures from Millennium.
Headways
Gaps on Route 25 show the pattern of padding at the end of the route, which reduces mid-route holds while retaining adequate runtime; it bunches mid-route and generally unbunches towards the terminus (this is also partly explained by tracking weirdness; this also explains the consistently larger gaps mid-route).
Headway adherence is otherwise generally even, although a "base" of bunching remains across all times of day in both directions. There is a spike in bunching at peak, which is visible in both the headway adherence charts and string diagrams.
Evening bunching is also a problem, from the chart. It does not seem to be from cancellations, but I am otherwise at a loss to explain this phenomena.
There is a consistent "base" of bunching across all times of the day, starting at the origin going east but appearing enroute westbound. This is fairly significant, adding an average of five minutes to each gap for an average wait of 20 minutes (nearly a whole trip/hour above scheduled). However, there was some tracking weirdness in this analysis and it must be kept in mind through the headway analysis.
String diagrams
The string diagrams attached represent week 3 of this snapshot, from 10 to 16 August. The PDF is linked with the whole week's worth of diagrams, but I have chosen Tuesday the 11th as the example for this post.
Bunching is evident in both directions throughout the day. There is little attempt to manage it, and pairs or triplets of buses run entire round trips with no intervention; interlining makes management a difficult task either way.
AM Peak and morning service is generally consistent, but bunching begins to build after lunch; gaps of almost an hour are not uncommon in the afternoon peak, and buses run in pairs late into the night.
However, travel time is fairly consistent, and the string charts show few slow points. However, consistent priority treatment at major intersections would save a few minutes in either direction along Innes Road east of Blackburn Hamlet. More queue jumps, such as the existing one westbound at Orleans Boulevard, are needed, along with signal priority, to speed up transit service in southern Orleans and increase its competitiveness with driving.
Service Management
As a snapshot of summer service, no doubt there are many fall-winter problems I missed in this analysis. But from this analysis alone, while Route 25 service works well relative to urban routes operating in constrained environments, there are two major interventions which would improve service quality:
- Service management would reduce bunching, especially in the afternoon and evening; more active management, especially in dealing with buses which leave the origin bunched, would make a major difference, but deinterlining is required to fully solve this problem.
- Transit priority interventions on Innes Road would reduce travel times by a few minutes in each direction. Several major intersections inconsistently slow service, and priority would improve Route 25's competitiveness with driving. Queue jumps and transit signal priority at major intersections should be included when Innes comes up for rebuilding.
Route 25 represents much of suburban OC Transpo service. It would benefit from better managed and better scheduled servicea from priority interventions which can be retrofit during road reconstruction, and from off-peak frequency improvements to reduce wait times and drive transfer traffic.
This requires investment and more importantly political commitment to allocate road space and budget, but the benefits would be disproportionately large, both for transit riders and the City as a whole.
Until next time.