On August 28, 2023, Mayor Olivia Chow and TTC Chair Jamaal Myers held a press conference at Scarborough Centre Station, hosted by TTC CEO Rick Leary, to announce planned service improvements for coming months. The map below shows routes affected by plans for October and November 2023.

The routes in blue, the former SRT colour, are part of the restructuring for the Line 3 replacement service. Note that they are shown as running west from STC via Progress, Brimley and Ellesmere. This is the final routing, although the 903 express bus is now using Progress all the way to Kennedy. The reason for this is that a queue jump lane is planned for Brimey and Ellesmere, but it is not yet ready. When it is completed, the buses will shift to the originally announced route via Ellesmere.

Other routes will see improvements to service and/or to reliability. No details were announced.

Service hours are planned to increase through the fall:

• In September to 93% of prepandemic levels
• By November to 95% of prepandemic levels with bus service rising to 99%.

Note that this does not mean that late 2023 service will be identical to early 2020, but that similar numbers of service hours will be provided. The bus network is especially important because it has the strongest ridership recovery rate.

The improvements planned include restoration of school trippers (a normal fall event), increasing service based on demand, reducing wait times by improving the Ten Minute Network, and adding unscheduled, Run-As-Directed service to supplement capacity.

Funding for the improvements comes from the unspent budget headroom created by the delay in opening the two Provincial LRT projects on Eglinton/Crosstown and on Finch.

I expect to receive the details of September service changes soon and will publish them when they are available.