The following service changes will occur effective Sunday, February 14, 2010.
Updated to include a table comparing service levels on 512 St. Clair.
305 Eglinton East Night Bus & 354 Lawrence East Night Bus
These routes now operate separately from each other, with three vehicles on each route, and have difficulty maintaining schedules. To give both routes more running time, one bus will be added, and the routes will be interlined to give each route an additional 15 minutes for a round trip.
Buses will alternate trips on each route.
44 Kipling South
Saturday afternoon running times will be increased, and service will be improved, to counteract reliability problems. The existing 15 minute headway with 2 buses will change to a 12 minute headway with 3 buses.
116 Morningside & 86 Scarborough Service Blending
Midday headways on the 116 will be widened from 8’30” to 9’00” to provide extra running time. No buses will be added to the route. Midday headways on the 86 will be widened from 8’00” to 9’00”. One less bus will be needed on the 86.
In both cases, the average load will rise from 36 to 38, within the offpeak service standards.
Early evening headways on the 116 will be changed from 7’45” to 7’30” to match the existing 86 headway.
512 St. Clair
Running times will be increased during many periods to reflect actual requirements for this route. No cars will be added, but scheduled headways will be widened. The affected periods are:
- Weekdays afternoon, pm peak, early evening
- Weekends morning and afternoon
The table linked below compares the April 2007 schedule (just before the west end of the line closed for construction), the original January 2010 schedule, and the revised February version.
2010 vs 2007 Service Comparison
Zoo Services
The 85 Sheppard East and 86 Scarborough schedules will be adjusted so that the last trip from the Zoo matches its later closing time (7 pm) beginning in mid March.
Driving Time vs Recovery Time
One of the oddities of TTC schedules is that many routes have “recovery time” that is, in fact, little more than a rounding factor so that the headway will work out to an exact integer. For example, on the 44 Kipling South change above, the new schedule has a 12 minute headway, but this is achieved with 34 minutes of driving time and 2 minutes of recovery per round trip.
A few routes have schedule adjustments that consist of nothing more than reallocating time from recovery to driving. This means that the actual time provided for a vehicle to make a round trip is unchanged, but the “recovery” which might be used for a break at a terminal is squeezed.
This affects:
- 34 Eglinton East (peak)
- 16 McCowan (weekday early evening)
- 116 Morningside (peak)
- 224 Victoria Park North
Steve Munro 
Is there a word for when one bus serves two routes?
The Coxwell night bus (322 I think) when it goes to Bingham Loop it becomes the 324 and goes to Warden/Steeles, turns around and back to Bingham Loop and becomes the 322 Coxwell.
I always wondered why can’t the night buses continue pass Yonge? Like the Finch East bus becomes the Finch West bus, not like they have to go on the bus bay at Finch station to drop off passengers.
Same thing for York Mills/Wilson, Lawrence East/West (Sort of), Eglinton East/West, 300/302.
I am sure so many buses are sleeping during the blue night times. If they need more buses for this … it is possible.
Steve: It is called “interlining”. This sort of thing works easiest when two comparatively short routes are joined together to form one “standard” sized route (a one-way trip of under an hour). If the routes are long, then you need more padding so that everything stays on time on the wide headways. A route all the way across the 416 is probably a stretch, although that combined Eglinton and Lawrence East route is effectively the same thing.
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Will any of this allow for more coffee/pee break time?
Steve: On St. Clair, probably. I have just received the January vehicle monitoring data for St. Clair, and hope to publish an analysis in a week or so. It will be interesting to see the degree to which the new schedules match the actual behaviour of the route.
On other routes, break time is effectively reduced on the schedule, although the operators may not have actually been getting all of it anyhow.
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“Steve: On St. Clair, probably. I have just received the January vehicle monitoring data for St. Clair, and hope to publish an analysis in a week or so. It will be interesting to see the degree to which the new schedules match the actual behaviour of the route.”
Have you received the CIS data for the October/November 501 route split trial yet?
Steve: Yes, but I have been rather preoccupied lately with other matters. Also, as the TTC isn’t about to change back to the split operation tomorrow, that analysis is less pressing than one for St. Clair.
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There is also the problem that until the straightening of Dufferin at Queen is finished there is no overhead on Dufferin from about 100 m north of King. The TTC took down the overhead to make it safer for the crews working on Dufferin. The water main work that was happening on Dufferin South of King is finished and the track to the loop is usable south of King. The TTC must have known that Dufferin would be unusable for some time before they started the trial. The traffic on Queen west of Dufferin is horrible.There is some construction plus the Lights at Lansdowne and then at Dunn or what ever its extension is make for a horrible delay.
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It always surprises me about the difference in recovery time between Toronto and Vancouver. It’s not usual to have recovery times of 10-12 minutes for a trip that lasts about 50 minutes. On some routes, the recovery time is even higher, up to 20 minutes on exceptionally long routes.
The scheduled frequency is a totally different philosophy too. In Toronto, a route frequency seems to be route length divided by number of buses assigned, plus recovery. In Vancouver, that system only applies for services every 10 minutes or more in frequency (but with recovery times as discussed above). Above every 10 minutes, buses only run every 12, 15, 20, 30, 60, or 120 min.
I leads me to question what is the cost/benefit comparison of these two scheduling philosophies and how is ridership impacted?
Steve: I don’t think the TTC has ever done a cost/benefit analysis. Once upon a time, there was an idea of moving to clock face headways to make life simpler for passengers. However, what happens in reality is that you have a route running every 20 minutes, and it needs a teensy bit more time, so the headway becomes 22 minutes. Also “recovery” time on the TTC is not defined, for example, as being a set percentage of the overall trip time. This situation is rooted in labour negotiations where, as I understand it, the TTC does not want an entitlement for a break to be built in because it would be taken whether the recovery time was needed (say due to bad weather) or not. Of course, having a clockface headway is meaningless if you don’t actually run the service on time.
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