The TTC’s Planning Page includes reports with statistics for each of the years 2019 through 2023 giving weekday passenger counts, vehicle hours, vehicle mileage and peak vehicles for the fall in each year. Collectively, this information shows the status of ridership and service on the surface network just before the pandemic and through the years following.
Updated April 25, 2024 at 4:10pm: 505 Dundas operated with buses in 2019, and so comparisons to later years’ stats when it was a streetcar show a “recovery” that has more to do with vehicle size and service quality than with an apples-to-apples comparison. This article has been updated in a few places to reflect this. Thanks to a reader for spotting this.
Several points emerge when these data are collected together and compared year-over-year at a route level and for the bus and streetcar networks as a whole.
- The TTC talks of service recovery to 95% of prepandemic levels. This is based on the number of vehicle hours operated. This can be misleading for various reasons, notably:
- The scheduled speed of many routes is now slower than it was in 2019 due to adjustments both to deal with traffic conditions and to provide more recovery time for operators. Reducing the speed lowers the amount of service provided and so even if vehicle hours are unchanged, there is less service.
- Streetcar vehicle hours are higher in 2023 than 2019, but this is due to bus substitution on various routes or route segments. The use of smaller buses pushes up the vehicle hours required to serve the streetcar network.
- There has been an ongoing drop in the speed of streetcar routes from 2019 to 2023. This is in part due to replacement of the older CLRVs with the new Flexitys, in part due to schedule changes for congestion and various construction projects, and in part due to more restrictive operating practices that slow streetcar movements at junctions.
- Speed of local and express bus operations also fell from 2019 to 2023, although not as much as for streetcars.
- The replacement of the SRT by bus routes has added to bus hours and mileage, but to a lesser extent to bus ridership because continuous trips through STC to Kennedy Station count as only one boarding.
The recovery rates for subsets of the network vary, as they do for different metrics.
| Metric | Local Bus | Express Bus | Streetcar (*) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boardings | ||||
| 2019 | 1,176,496 | 215,163 | 318,453 | 1,710,022 |
| 2023 | 1,016,106 | 208,537 | 259,734 | 1,484,377 |
| % Recovery | 86% | 97% | 82% | 87% |
| Vehicle Hours | ||||
| 2019 | 19,755 | 3,310 | 3,050 | 26,135 |
| 2023 | 18,717 | 3,752 | 3,688 | 26,157 |
| % Recovery | 95% | 113% | 121% | 100% |
| Vehicle Kilometres | ||||
| 2019 | 344,832 | 71,628 | 41,854 | 458,314 |
| 2023 | 304,480 | 74,845 | 37,211 | 416,536 |
| % Recovery | 88% | 104% | 89% | 91% |
| Passengers/Hour | ||||
| 2019 | 59.5 | 65.0 | 104.4 | 65.4 |
| 2023 | 54.3 | 55.6 | 70.4 | 56.7 |
| % Recovery | 91% | 86% | 67% | 87% |
| Kilometres/Hour | ||||
| 2019 | 17.4 | 21.6 | 13.7 | 17.5 |
| 2023 | 16.3 | 19.9 | 10.1 | 15.9 |
| % Recovery | 93% | 92% | 74% | 91% |
| AM Peak Vehicles | ||||
| 2019 | 1,264 | 295 | 219 | 1,778 |
| 2023 | 1,098 | 294 | 197 | 1,589 |
| % Recovery | 87% | 100% | 90% | 89% |
| PM Peak Vehicles | ||||
| 2019 | 1,240 | 283 | 214 | 1,737 |
| 2023 | 1,171 | 301 | 206 | 1,678 |
| % Recovery | 94% | 106% | 96% | 97% |
A further complication is that with ridership shifts, total riding on a route might go up, but the distribution of riding through the day and week may have changed. This is not reflected in TTC data which simply gives a daily total figure for each route.
This article consolidates five years’ worth of data for all surface routes in one place for easy reference, and shows that “recovery” is a complex subject where details are hidden by looking at only one metric and at overall averages.
At the end of the article there are linked PDFs containing all of the tables.
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Steve Munro 