This article continues my reviews of bus operations on 512 St. Clair in September 2023 and of streetcar operations in the preceding months.

One aspect of any route’s operation is the degree to which vehicles have time for a layover at terminals. If this time is too small (or worse, none at all), service can be disrupted by the simple need for drivers to answer calls of nature and just decompress for a few minutes.

There is no formal break built into schedules in Toronto as can be found in some other transit systems, but a quick look at the TTC’s schedule summaries will show that most routes have built in “recover time”. This is intended to compensate for random events during a trip, although sometimes it is simply a mechanism to make the round trip time come out to a multiple of the scheduled headway.

Some of the “service reliability adjustments” the TTC advertises with schedule change are nothing more than shifting time from “recovery” to “driving” time without actually changing the round trip time. In other cases, time is added or removed without changing the total number of vehicles causing the service headway to get longer or shorter.

When schedules have excessive travel and/or recovery time, vehicles queue up at terminals causing congestion on the approach if there is no place to park off-street.

In the case of 512 St. Clair, the time spent at St. Clair Station (the eastern terminus) was fairly consistent up to the end of June 2023, but things got really messy. This corresponded to the point where service on the line as a whole became considerably worse as we saw in earlier articles.

This was caused by two competing factors in route operations.

• In July and August, the TTC extended streetcar service to Gunn’s Loop west of Keele even though it was only scheduled to run to Earlscourt Loop at Lansdowne. This made keeping “on time”, the TTC’s holy grail of service management, impossible.
• The approaches taken in July and August were quite different, but a common factor was that streetcars spent more time sitting in St. Clair Station Loop to get back on time at the expense of providing the advertised service on the route.

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