by

Analysis of 903 STC Express: September-November 2023

This article is a preliminary look at the service offered by the 903 express bus which replaced Line 3 SRT.

Until Saturday, November 18, the 903 buses provided very frequent service between Scarborough Town Centre and Kennedy Station. On Sunday, November 19, eight other routes were extended from STC to Kennedy Station, the 903 was extended to Centennial College replacing the 134/913 Progress bus, and much existing service on route 903 was reallocated to the extended routes.

I will review the other routes serving this corridor in early 2024 when they have accumulated a few months’ experience.

Travel Times

The charts here show how travel times between STC and Kennedy Station have changed over the past three months. The screenlines for these measurements are located:

  • Leaving STC Loop
  • Just north of Eglinton on Midland and on Kennedy

Note that this excludes time spent navigating roads and construction near Kennedy Station, and any time spent in STC Loop. I will review terminal operations when more data for all of the routes in this corridor have accumulated.

The charts below show monthly data, by week and hour, with North/Eastbound service on the left and South/Westbound service on the right. Note that there are no data for September, Week 1 because the service was provided with untracked extras until the schedule change on Labour Day weekend.

The solid lines show the average headways, and the dotted lines show the standard deviation, a measure of the scatter in the values. The closer the SD values are to zero, the more reliable the service is.

In the early weeks of operation, the transit priority measures were not in place, and service was more affected by traffic sharing the road. This settles down by November, although some peak period effects are still visible.

The TTC had anticipated that a trip between Kennedy Station and STC would take 15 to 18 minutes depending on conditions. Considering that the times shown below do not include access time to and from terminals, the service is close to the TTC’s target.

Service from November 19 Onward

After November 19, the 903 STC Express became more typical of other routes with less frequent service. Variations show up that are similar to other parts of the system. The charts below show headways westbound at Progress and Markham Road, and northbound from Eglinton and Kennedy for the last two weeks of November. The scatter of data points shows the type of service that someone waiting for a 903 bus would experience.

  • Some data are missing on the morning of Friday, November 24.
  • Some of the wider headways (dots higher on the charts) have no correponding short headway (dot near the horizonal axis). This indicates that a bus was missing, as opposed to two buses running close together after a long gap.
  • The weekend charts at the south end of the line include data for the early part of the month when 903 service was much more frequent.
  • Although much of the weekend service stays close to the target headway, there are data points showing wide gaps where a bus was missing from the service. This is a concern for service east of STC to Centennial College.

3 thoughts on “Analysis of 903 STC Express: September-November 2023”

  1. Hi Steve,

    Is this route become permanent for future? I saw they have not added a green sticker at the bus stop at Lee Center of Corporate drive , they just wrote 903 with pen. So I am little bit confused whether this is permanent change or not.

    Steve: Yes. The 903 Scarborough Express was extended from STC to Centennial College replacing the 134/913 Progress bus on November 19 in the big route shuffle that day.

    Like

  2. For a lifelong streetcar advocate like you, I am surprised to see that you REFUSE to support the Eglinton East streetcar extension in Scarborough. Turns out that your vehement support for the ill-fated Scarborough LRT was not because you supported LRT in Scarborough but that you used it as a political tool to try to kill the Scarborough subway albeit unsuccessfully.

    Steve: You are full of crap. I have always supported the EELRT. As for the SSE, if there were a network of LRTs in Scarborough; Sheppard, Eglinton-Morningside and the SRT replacement, plus traffic diverted to GO Transit which will finally have fare integration next year, the need for the SSE would be rather dubious. But it gets votes. I may think the SSE is a waste compared to what we might have had years ago, but to say that I refuse to support the EELR is a complete lie.

    Like

  3. We will need to see the the headways of all the routes combined operating between Kennedy Station and STC to see how well is the new operation. I see this is much more difficult to do as you’ll have to integrated multiple data sets.

    I think the current operation is great for a one seat ride. However, headways are bunched up as buses tend to leave STC or Kennedy in packs oppose to being more spread before Nov. 19. If there is a bus leaving every 5 minutes or less, I don’t think riders would mind as much.

    Steve: It is not difficult to merge the data from several routes, something I plan to do. Thanks for the tip about buses leaving in bunches.

    Like

Comments are closed.