In a recent thread on X/Twitter (and no doubt other venues) there has been some controversy about the relative speed of 6 Finch LRT versus the bus service it will replace. Writers have based their arguments on speeds published in the Scheduled Service Summaries, although these are not always reliable for various reasons:

• The speeds shown are over the full route. For the 36 Finch West service west of Keele Street (Finch West Station), this includes the portion south of Humber College to Humberwood Loop.
• Actual speeds vary from the scheduled ones, and there is a fair amount of scatter around these averages. An important factor in any reserved lane implementation, regardless of technology, is the hope that, as on King Street originally, better reliability can be brought to travel times and hence to service quality.

The purpose of this article is to review actual travel time data on weekdays for selected months between 2017 and 2023. The specific months were chosen both for variety, but also within the limitations of data that I have been collecting for several years. 36 Finch West fell off my radar, so to speak, in 2022 and I was not tracking it, but began again in 2023 in anticipation of the LRT opening to get some “before” data.

The data are shown in two formats.

• Weekly average travel times by hour together with the standard deviations in data values, a measure of the scatter in the data.
• The raw data points to give readers a sense of the range of travel times that can occur on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis.

The challenge for the LRT line is to both reduce the averages times, and to narrow the band in which these times lie.

The section measured is from west of Keele Street to Humber College. This is chosen to ensure consistent data for departures from Finch West Station in the post-TYSSE era, and coincides roughly with the LRT portal from Finch West Station. This also eliminates station time which can vary considerably, especially for the bus service, due to the station’s location.

Data for October 2017 and April 2018 precede the opening of the TYSSE and the start of construction on Line 6, and they are included as a stating point against which any improvement might be compared.

Westbound and eastbound data are shown side by side, and the charts move forward in time from top (2017) to bottom (2023)

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