Day: May 8, 2023

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TTC Boosts Late Night Subway Service, Restores Beach-to-King Street Service

Effective Monday, May 8, the TTC has restored late night service on Lines 1 Yonge-University-Spadina and 2 Bloor-Danforth to every six minutes, seven days/week. This will be done with extra trains to supplement the scheduled service. The change will be formally scheduled in a future update.

Also, with the disappearance of the 503 Kingston Road car and its temporary replacement by the 505 Dundas, the TTC is now operating a supplementary bus service from Queen & Kingston Road to downtown via Queen and King from 7am to 7pm weekdays.

A direct streetcar service will not be possible until work on the Queen Street Don Bridge finishes sometime this summer, but there is another wrinkle. In the summer, Queen east of Broadview will close for Metrolinx bridge work at the future Riverside Station on the Lake Shore East Rail Corridor forcing all streetcars to operate via Gerrard. In turn that cannot begin until water main and track work at Coxwell & Lower Gerrard completes.

The additional subway service is made possible by an unexpectedly lower absentee rate among operators compared to budget. The TTC made a larger provision for covid-related sickness and finds itself with more available staff.

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905 Eglinton East Express March-April 2023

The 905 Eglinton East Express operates from Kennedy Station to the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus with service also via Ellesmere east to Conlins Road on weekdays. This article primarily reviews the service during March and April 2023.

Major differences in the service after March 26, 2023 include:

  • Articulated buses replaced standard sized vehicles.
  • Scheduled service ran less frequently to compensate for the larger vehicles.
  • Scheduled travel times were lengthened.
  • A stated goal of the new service design was to improve reliability. This was only partially achieved.
  • Although the route officially operates with 18.5m articulated buses, standard sized 12m buses can be found regularly as extras both on weekdays and weekends. This suggests that even before the new service began operating, the TTC realized that they might have cut too deeply. The number of extras varies from zero to three, day by day.
    • These are extras that were reported in the tracking data. Whether there was even more unscheduled service is impossible to tell.
  • Travel times during the weekday daytime between Ellesmere and Kennedy Station, both ways, increased by 10-15% with the new schedule and larger buses.
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