Among the TTC’s many promises under its Customer Charter is the provision of quarterly stats on the reliability of each of its surface routes. This information recently went online on the TTC’s website, although you have to dig to find it.
The path is from Customer Service on the top navbar, then to Customer Charter on the side bar, then to Quarterly reports, and finally scroll down. Or you can just click here.
This table covers the first three months of 2013, and lists the reliability of every surface route. “Reliability” is defined roughly as:
- If the distance between a vehicle “B” and the one preceding it “A” is within three minutes of the scheduled headway, then the vehicle is within the acceptable window of reliability.
- The measure is taken at various points along a route (we don’t know the locations or number for any route), and summed across an entire quarter’s operation. This will smooth out everything but very large scale, long-lasting disruptions, and will tend to give an index that tracks the overall behaviour of the route.
The system-wide target for streetcar routes is 70% punctuality (within the headway window), and for buses it is only 65%. Looking at individual routes, there are huge discrepancies.
No route gets over the 90% line, although several are in the mid to upper 80s.
- 8 Broadview
- 31 Greenwood
- 44 Kipling South
- 78 St. Andrew’s
- 510 Spadina
Of these routes, four are relatively short bus routes where congestion is not an issue, and with only a modicum of effort, operators should be able to stay on time. The Spadina car is a special case because it runs with a very short scheduled headway for much of the day, every day of the week. It is physically difficult for cars go get more than (H + 3) minutes apart, and impossible for (H – 3) because this would be a negative number. Service that meets the target is very easy to achieve even if the line appears chaotic at times simply because there are so many vehicles close together.
Steve Munro 