Template talk:Toronto Transit Commission

Question

Has a grey 5 and a light green 7 actually been applied to the ever changing plans for the Sheppard and Finch lines? Should we get rid of them in the meantime? - Epson291 (talk) 20:33, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Mods related to service suspensions

I wish to challenge two mods made to the template since an unrelated May 15 mod:

• A User:PollardKay mod created a "Suspended services" category and moved 503 Kingston Road (sic) and 508 Lake Shore there along with mentioning the suspended express bus routes. I feel the table should exclude route status other than current (Streetcars) versus discontinued (History).
• A User:EelamStyleZ mod eliminated the category Corridors and presented King Street Transit Priority Corridor as an addendum to 504 King in the Streetcars category. The corridor is also used by routes 503, 508 and the downtown express buses which is why it was in a separate Corridor category along with York University Busway.

(EelamStyleZ also reclassified Pollard's "Suspended services" as "History", i.e discontinued. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 23:50, 30 May 2020 (UTC))

Both mods appear to be related to the temporary suspension of routes 503, 508 and the downtown express buses. I feel temporary suspensions should not be reflected in this table but rather in the Toronto streetcar system#Routes table and individual streetcar route articles. Do we want to reflect suspensions in this table? Should we revert the mods now or wait until the route suspensions have been lifted? TheTrolleyPole (talk) 21:21, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

@Joeyconnick and Blaixx: Request for comment. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 21:21, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

The 'corridors' and 'suspended services' categories only had 2-3 articles linked under them - links that can easily be incorporated under more relevant categories. The York University Busway itself is a temporary transit measure by the Govt of Ontario, currently only servicing one bus route, thereby reducing its notability. King Street Transit Corridor was initially created to improve service of 504 and 512 (the latter is now incorporated with 504) as per the City of Toronto. All other routes that use King Street are just limited service routes. So it's better kept as an addendum to 504, the namesake streetcar route. Suspended streetcar lines are only temporary (until ridership is restored) and this dynamicity need not be reflected in the infobox, something that their respective articles can illustrate. Keep the infobox simple as per MOS. - EelamStyleZ (talk) 21:30, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

I saw no guidelines on "keep the infobox simple" and I feel the older format was simpler. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 18:55, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm fine with the "corridors" section being eliminated and the York University Busway works better under buses. The suspended services should not be in "History", though: they should be listed in the "Streetcars" section unless they are officially discontinued. Their articles make clear (or should make clear) if they are suspended. —Joeyconnick (talk) 03:31, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Bidirectional

Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates says:

Every article that transcludes (i.e. includes) a given navbox should normally also be included as a link in the navbox so that the navigation is bidirectional.

The word "normally" seems to apply to Sheppard East LRT and Jane LRT but not to other Transit City lines such as Don Mills LRT and Scarborough Malvern LRT which also use the template. Question: What is the rule that includes the former two lines but not the latter two? Is it because two lines received line numbers as per page 63 of a 2018 TTC corporate plan but the other two did not? None of these lines are supported by the current provincial government. All four lines are mentioned in the Transit City article which is included in the template. I just like to clarify because the template suggests that lines 7 & 8 are still under serious consideration. Thanks. @Joeyconnick: Please comment. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 18:13, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

First I just wanted to say I appreciate your approach to all this editing, TheTrolleyPole; it's nice to actually have conversations about stuff like this rather than just a bunch of people editing over each other.

I think your point re: "None of these lines are supported by the current provincial government" (emphasis mine) provides some guidance. So... Wikipedia was around long before the Doug Ford government and (hopefully) will be around long after it, and this is all about transit planning and execution, which we know takes place over decades and involves multiple levels of governments and spans multiple municipal, provincial, and federal regimes. Just looking at Transit City, if we had based all our decisions around which pieces of it were notable/worthy of including/worthy of fleshing out based on how things were that right after its cancellation and decided it was totally gone/kaput, never to be revisited, we would have set ourselves up for a lot of having to eat our hats given how much of it has since been resurrected. This was my objection to how swiftly people were discounting the Relief Line (Toronto) immediately after the D. Ford administration had made a splashy announcement about the Ontario Line, which is basically the Relief Line with some tweaks. I think in hindsight, the Ontario Line should have been a subsection of the Relief Line article. It's (far) more than possible that in 10 years, or even 5, the Ontario Line proposal will revert to something even more clearly near-identical to the Relief Line. It's why really we should probably wait until shovels are in the ground before all these "lines" get their own articles, and in Toronto's case we know even that is not necessarily a good indicator of what's to come.

I recently stumbled across WP:TENYEARTEST, which is the succinct version of my paragraph above and I think is really relevant to editing transit-related projects on Wikipedia. Anyway, this bit of digression is context for me saying that I've never seen anyone successfully argue against WP:BIDIRECTIONAL, even though it says "normally", and I would say that if we're going to have a "Proposed" section in the TTC navbox (which I'm not saying is necessarily a good idea), then it should definitely include Don Mills and Scarborough Malvern even though those aren't on the active list of proposals. It makes sense that those two articles use the TTC navbox, so they should definitely be in that navbox somewhere. Maybe we break History into subsections, where one is "Past proposals", "Events", "Former services" and rename "Proposed" to "Active proposals" to indicate they have the support of the politicians currently in power? (I'm just spitballing here...) But there is indeed no good objective reason to leave out Don Mills and Scarborough Malvern. I can see wanting to make a distinction between them and Sheppard East and Jane, although from the sounds of it Sheppard East has also fallen out of favour recently. We should definitely take out the (7) and (8) chevrons, though, as those were never official, so I'll do that, at least, since we already got rid of them in the respective articles. —Joeyconnick (talk) 19:05, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Taking out the chevrons is a good compromise, indicating that these two projects are at least no further along than other proposals. I will, however, update the two linked articles to show their current political status. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 19:52, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Customize Colour for Template Revisited

Though WP:NAVCOLOR prohibits changing the colour of the template without justification, I have a justification for changing the colour of the template to red. Template:GO Transit for example uses GO Transit green. Template:Metrolinx uses black. Johnny Au _{(talk/contributions)} 15:42, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

I think there's enough association between the TTC and the colour red to justify this change. The only issue I have is the poor contrast of black or white text on a red background. Most accessability guideline discourage  white on red  but personally I find  black on red  much harder to read. BLAIXX 16:02, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah no: both of those fail MOS:COLOR so we are 100% not doing that. You can check using this tool. —Joeyconnick (talk) 17:37, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Surprisingly, that tool does not flag black on red! BLAIXX 23:24, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

We have to make sure that the red we use on the TTC template matches the TTC's red as used on the logo (#DB2017) (which is slightly darker than standard red (#FF0000) and white text is easier to read on TTC red than on standard red). Here is the colour scheme to be used: Toronto Transit Commission It even passes the test the tool Joeyconnick posted here uses. What do you think? Johnny Au _{(talk/contributions)} 01:31, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Looks good to me! BLAIXX 02:00, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

It looks great! However, we will need to form a consensus before we change the colour of the TTC template to TTC red. Johnny Au _{(talk/contributions)} 00:54, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

It actually does flag black on red for smaller text, Blaixx. And no we can't use #DB2017 as it fails at the triple-A level for white on red normal-sized text. It would need to be #AF1A12 or darker. —Joeyconnick (talk) 04:25, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

The navbox does not use "normal-sized" text though. It's larger and boldface which loosens the contrast conditions. BLAIXX 15:38, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

That doesn't matter... we should be aiming for colours that pass triple-A.

Also, another reason to just leave it as standard Wikipedia template colours is this mess when links change colour after having been visited (screenshots here and here). —Joeyconnick (talk) 17:57, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Actually, the font size does matter... From W3: "Text that is larger and has wider character strokes is easier to read at lower contrast. The contrast requirement for larger text is therefore lower." I'm pretty sure the standard navbox title style is not even AAA compliant at  12pt standard weight.  BLAIXX 23:20, 20 June 2021 (UTC)