In the political hoopla surrounding the City budget, and the level of support transit will get, we regularly hear claims from the TTC that its service is close to 100% of the pre-pandemic level. Further improvements are planned for 2025.

This story is echoed by Mayor Chow as one of the “good news” pieces about our city.

There is only one small problem: it isn’t true.

The metric behind the claim is “service hours”. This translates directly to the number of operator hours in the service budget. Yes, other factors affect total costs, but operator hours relate fairly well to expenditures and provide a simple, single variable to track over time.

However, the rider experience comprises three very different factors: frequency, reliability and capacity. Infrequent service is not worth the wait, especially for short-hop trips. Service that shows up in bunches, if at all, following an interminable wait compounds the problem. Inadequate capacity tells riders that comfort is not important in spite of a customer first focus.

Over the years, a service hour has provided less real “service” to riders because buses and streetcars take more time to make the same round trip than they did in past years. This was acknowledged by a chart in the TTC’s 2025 budget presentation deck. Slower buses and streetcars arrive less frequently and provide less capacity.

Another metric, vehicle mileage, does not tell the whole story either. The average speed varies quite substantially from route to route, and the relationship between vehicle hours and kilometres is not the same across the system by route, time of day, or day of the week. Average values system wide can differ greatly from those for individual routes and time periods.

The charts in the main part of this article review service levels in January 2025 and January 2019, before the pandemic with data taken from the TTC’s own Scheduled Service Summaries (archived copies are available on this site).

All streetcar routes and the most heavily travelled bus routes are included. The streetcar comparisons also include January 2013 data from the period before new, larger vehicles were introduced.

There is no question that traffic congestion across the entire city is an issue, and this shows up in longer travel times scheduled for these routes. However, a larger component of the increase lies in terminal time that is provided not just for a bio-break for operators, but as padding to attempt better on time performance. (I will turn to OTP and how well the TTC achieves its own goals in a separate article coming soon.)

When Rick Leary was CEO, his stock approach to improved route performance was extra time in schedules, coupled with a “no short turns” edict. The result can be seen in clusters of buses and streetcars at terminals thanks to extra time they do not always require. We can argue about the appropriate amount of terminal time, but there is no question that this factor has grown more than the time actually provided for travel along the route. This translates to extra operator hours that only indirectly provide service to riders to the extent that they might provide less erratic service.

The combined effect of traffic conditions and added terminal time is that capacity actually provided on routes has declined and by a far greater percentage than “getting back to 97% of pre-pandemic service” implies.

On streetcar routes, lower capacity combines with larger, less frequent vehicles to produce wider gaps, and to make any irregularity much more pronounced. We have seen the effect of larger vehicles and longer headways before when the 15m CLRVs were replaced by 23m ALRVs on Queen. The wider headways (arising from a combination of vehicle size and slower operation) succeeded in driving away roughly 1/3 of the demand on 501 Queen at a time when other routes were holding their own. This is a major concern with new streetcars that arrive, even if on time, much less frequently than in the era of shorter cars.

By widening the scheduled gap between streetcars and buses (the “headway”), the TTC has avoided increasing its peak vehicle requirements and staffing.

If the capacity of streetcar routes in peak periods were restored to 2019 levels, the TTC would need 40 more cars in service. On the bus network, considering only the routes analysed here, they would require about 150 more buses. (This will be reduced by the opening of Lines 5 and 6 which will eliminate many buses on routes 32 Eglinton West, 34 Eglinton East and 36 Finch West.) This shows how riders are short-changed by a metric that only looks at vehicle hours, not at how vehicles are used and the capacity they provide.

These increases can be accommodated within the existing fleets. The problem is not vehicle availability, but the budgetary headroom to operate the service.

One can argue that ridership has not fully recovered on all routes, and a return to full capacity would waste resources. What we do not know is how many former and potential riders are lost to the decline in service quality especially when the TTC repeatedly claims it is close to 100% of former service.

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