This article continues a series reviewing major east-west routes in Scarborough that began with:

• Service Analysis of 95/995 York Mills, October-December 2021

Service on Finch East is provided by two routes.

Route 39 Finch East operates from Finch Station with three branches:

• 39A to Neilson Road
• 39B to Morningview Trail
• 39C to Victoria Park & Gordon Baker Road (peak only)

The schedule was unchanged through the October-December 2021 period.

Route 939 Finch Express operates between Finch West Station and Staines Road with three variations. Service east of McCowan serves all stops, while for the section west to Yonge the 939s run express.

• 939B operates from Finch West Station to Scarborough Town Centre Station weekdays until mid evening, when it becomes the 939A and terminates at Finch Station.
• 939C operates only during peak periods between Finch Station and Morningside Heights.
• On weekends until November 20, the service was split between the A and B branches as shown below. This operation was suspended on November 21 as part of the fall 2021 cutbacks. There was no compensating change in the local service, and the weekend service has not yet been restored.
• Weekday early evening service was improved by the addition of 939A service on November 22.

The Finch corridor is among those proposed for “red lane” treatment in the RapidTO program between Yonge and McCowan.

The scheduled headways on the 39 and 939 routes would not blend even if they kept to their schedules, and so this analysis looks at each route on its own.

As with the previous article on the York Mills service, there is data missing from the period immediately after the cyber attack on the TTC in late October and into early November. However, this does not prevent analysis of the overall pattern of service.

In Brief

• Erratic headways are common on both the local and express services. These generally result from bunching in terminal departures or at route merge points, not from pervasive traffic congestion.
• During the period reviewed here, missing buses appeared to be rare, and they fell generally in the latter weeks of the year. There does not appear to be an effort to space service to allow for the missing bus, and rather a double-headway travels across the route where the absent bus should be.
• Average travel times over the proposed “red lane” section of the route between Finch Station and McCowan differ by about five minutes for local and express services.
• Where there are congestion effects, they tend to last for a few days or weeks at a location, and then disappear. This implies that they are caused by short-term factors such as construction projects rather than being inherent to traffic patterns on the street. This has implications for red lane operations because there is no single location where transit priority will “fix” a long-standing problem.

For a detailed description of how to read these charts, please see Understanding TTC Service Analysis Charts: A Primer.

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