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Bathurst-Dufferin Revisited

Thanks to a recent article about the proposed RapidTO lanes on Bathurst and Dufferin, A Contrarian’s View of Bathurst/Dufferin RapidTO, I was dumped on by several people notably on BlueSky in the type of exchange we are more used to seeing on X. The problem was compounded when several of my comments were incorporated in the now-discredited anti-bus-lane campaigns featuring AI-generated “spokespeople” for affected neighbourhoods.

The existence of those campaigns, however, does not invalidate my basic arguments questioning the purported benefits of the project.

While I was working on a series of articles reviewing the actual operating characteristics of 7 Bathurst and 29/929 Dufferin, the debate about red lanes started to heat up. I already knew from the analysis in progress that the issues on these corridors went well beyond parking, and in some cases were completely separate.

See:

Both routes suffer from appallingly irregular “dispatching”, if we can call it that, of vehicles from their northern and southern terminals. Before service even reaches the proposed transit priority areas, the headways are erratic with gaps and bunching. This worsens as buses travel along routes. This happens all of the time, every day of the week. This is not a case of chronically late buses leaving at random times, and tracking data show that much of the service enjoys a reasonable terminal layover time.

A related problem for riders is that the scheduled service on 7 Bathurst is not frequent, compared to other routes in the city with reserved lanes. This compounds with irregular headways to produce unreliable service.

Although Bathurst was part of the “top 20” identified as possible RapidTO candidates, it was not part of the original RapidTO studies reviewing Dufferin, Jane, Steeles West, Lawrence East and Finch East. Lawrence East is only on that short list thanks to efforts of the recently departed Councillor McKelvie who has gone on to a new career as an MP. Bathurst rose to prominence thanks to the anticipated need for transit priority during the six FIFA World Cup games in 2026.

Even the overnight 329 Dufferin Night Bus, operating half-hourly when there is no traffic congestion, does not maintain regular headways. Buses leave terminals at Exhibition Place and Steeles within a narrow band of headways, as one would hope when they are running “on time” relative to schedules. However, just as with daytime service, bus speeds vary, and as they move along the route, the headways spread out. Midway along the route between 3am and 4am, half of the service lies in a 15-minute wide band, well beyond TTC Service Standards, and the other half lies even further from the target.

This is not a problem of congestion but of the lack of headway and “on time” discipline for night services. In turn this makes wait times unpredictable, and transfers between routes can fail because a bus is badly off schedule. Night service is erratic across the city despite political talk of its important role serving shift workers.

TTC Service Standards give considerable leeway to what is reported as “on time performance” and allow management to report better results than a typical rider would find credible. I have covered this topic in other posts and will not belabour the problems here. The “Standards” badly need revision, and along with them, the quality of service management.

This is not to say that transit priority is unnecessary, but that it will not achieve its stated goals without addressing underlying problems affecting far more routes than the Bathurst and Dufferin buses.

As for the Bathurst Streetcar proposal, this originates in the FIFA games. The TTC hopes to run very frequent service between Bathurst Station and Exhibition Loop with transit priority from Bloor south to Lake Shore where the route joins the existing right-of-way on Fleet Street. The question here is whether the installation should be permanent, or only for the period of the games.

The 511 Bathurst car now operates every 8-10 minutes, although the TTC has plans to improve this to every 6 minutes later this year. The route suffers from many delays at crossings of other streetcar routes thanks to the TTC’s blanket slow order on junctions where streetcars crawl through the special trackwork. Those of us with long memories (or anyone who has visited street railways elsewhere) know that this is a Toronto-specific restriction that grew out of problems with electric switch controller reliability dating back to the 1990s.

If service on 511 Bathurst is to be very frequent for the games, the TTC will have to design a mechanism for crew relief that does not include parking vehicles for extended periods. Operators need breaks, but this should not cause transit traffic congestion at terminals.

On a four-lane road, no parking will be possible with a 7×24 reserved streetcar lane. As with the proposed bus lanes, the issue is whether all-day reservation is needed, and what locations would work with shorter hours. The problem of enforcement is trickier because motorists think of middle lanes as “theirs” while the curb lane might come and go. There will also be an issue with any mix of local and express services, and which of these is provided by the streetcars.

The TTC has not published any service design proposals to indicate what the transit demands on the road will be. Many operational issues need to be sorted out for an intensive FIFA service, and much more than red paint is needed.

Toronto talks a good line on transit support, but this is not reflected in system-wide issues including irregular and crowded bus service, and a sense that growth, if any, will be doled out by a parsimonious Council. This directly contradicts claims for the future importance of transit in moving people around the city and supporting increased density on major routes.

The Alleged Benefits of Red Lanes

Claims for potential ridership gains in the TTC’s report bear repeating:

For transit riders, the lanes will improve bus travel times by up to 29% (i.e., 10 minutes per trip between Eglinton Avenue West and Dufferin Gate Loop) and improve bus reliability by 17%. The enhanced service efficiency along the roadway is expected to increase daily ridership by 23% with 9,300 new riders along Dufferin Street.

[…]

For transit riders, the lanes will improve bus travel times by up to 34% (i.e. 7 minutes per trip between Eglinton Avenue West and Bathurst Station) and improve bus reliability by 18%. […] The enhanced service efficiency along the roadway is expected to increase daily bus ridership by 23% with 4,920 new riders along the 7 Bathurst. [TTC Report, pp 6-7]

The claimed time savings are supported by vehicle tracking data, but only for a limited time period over part of the route in the peak direction. Of the 40,000 daily riders on 29/929 Dufferin buses, many will see little or no effect on travel time, and all riders will continue to suffer from unreliable service. An important consideration in demand estimation is that wait time is considerably more important than travel time, especially when the wait is unknown.

The TTC talks of increased reliability, but this applies to variations in travel time, not headway.

The idea that daily ridership on the corridors will rise by almost 13,000 on a base of 60,000 is simply not credible, and I challenge the TTC to substantiate their estimate with a detailed breakdown of when, where and why these new riders will appear.

On both the Bathurst and Dufferin corridors, the red lanes are planned to end at Eglinton even though there are congested areas to the north. The claim that bus reliability will be improved ignores the fact that headways are already unreliable when buses enter the planned red zones, and without better line management they will stay that way.

The TTC claims a substantial operating saving that will be compounded by additional fare revenue, but says nothing about the cost of improving service for the supposed extra demand. Their entire analysis is, to use parliamentary language, misleading. This has broader implications for other transit priority schemes. If the TTC cannot be trusted to produce reliable plans and financial analyses, future proposals will suffer.

Effects on Parking

Among the critiques of my position, the issue of “support” for continued provision of parking elicited some strong comments. How could a supposed transit advocate say that parking should be allowed?

That is not what I said. Instead, a review of actual travel time data shows that many parts of the corridors show no effect of delay through the presence of parking during certain periods and that a 7×24 parking ban would not necessarily be required to achieve the transit priority goals.

I also mentioned the problem of parking in older parts of the city where off-street alternatives are not available because their built form predates the era when it was necessary. This is a challenge on many streets where car ownership exceeds available space, and residents must jockey for parking.

The question, then, is whether to simply ban parking in general on transit streets, or to figure out, on a site by site basis, what can be accommodated. This approach was an important part of the work that led to the King transit corridor, as well as the redesign of Queens Quay.

Service frequency is a vital part of this discussion. One can easily argue that “thousands” of bus riders should take precedence over a few hundred parking spaces, but this assumes that those thousands actually exist. The Bathurst bus operates every 10 minutes during most periods, and with articulated buses this translates to a capacity of 450 passengers/hour, assuming a full load of 75/bus. This is not “thousands”, even allowing for some “churn” as the passengers leave and board enroute. The 20k daily ridership includes many who do not travel in the times and locations where the red lanes will have their benefit.

The situation on Dufferin is different with more than twice the level of service, and a stronger argument can be made there on the relative importance of transit riders.

Overnight service on these routes is half-hourly, and it is not affected by congestion.

Comparison With Other Reserved Lanes

St. Clair:

St. Clair Avenue is wide enough that parking is allowed in some areas. One can certainly argue about the design where centre poles for the streetcar overhead make operation by buses almost impossible, traffic signals do as much to impede as to aid streetcars with so-called priority and service is erratic in spite of a completely protected right-of-way.

Spadina:

Like St. Clair, the street is wide enough to support parking along the route although there was substantial opposition during design work to the loss of angled parking. Transit service is very frequent, although with some reliability problems, and again with signalling that provides limited “priority” for transit.

Queens Quay:

Queens Quay is narrower than St. Clair or Spadina, and has limited room for storing as opposed to moving autos. Lay-bys have been provided in some places. The built form along the street and the availability of off-street parking means that on-street spaces are not required. This is also a street with heavy pedestrian usage where the intent is deliberately that it not be a major auto/truck corridor, and such traffic can use Lake Shore Boulevard to the north.

Fleet Street:

Fleet Street provides a streetcar right-of-way from Bathurst west to the main loop serving the Exhibition Grounds west of Strachan Avenue. There is no parking on this street, but none is required for the adjacent land use.

Sumach and Cherry Streets:

This is the Distillery branch of the King car and will eventually be part of the link from King to the eastern waterfront. No parking is required for adjacent land use, but stopping routinely occurs at the Distillery.

The Queensway:

The oldest surviving set of reserved streetcar lanes is on The Queensway between Parkside Drive and Humber Loop installed in 1957 as part of the traffic reorganization at Sunnyside for the Gardiner Expressway. The adjacent land uses do not require on-street parking being, primarily, High Park to the north, and the GO Lake Shore West corridor to the south.

The reserved area was extended east to Roncesvalles in a recent reconstruction, and there are plans for an extension of the right-of-way west on Lake Shore from Humber Loop to Park Lawn as part of future changes from the Christie’s lands redevelopment.

When the lanes were installed, service on the Queen car was much more frequent than today. Between changes in demand patterns, service cuts and a move to larger, less-frequent vehicles (starting decades ago with the ALRVs) the number of streetcars/hour on The Queensway is much lower today. The right-of-way has been proposed as part of the Western Waterfront LRT extension, but this project is on a very cold “back burner”.

Scarborough (Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside):

The first RapidTO project was the installation of reserved lanes in Scarborough on roads shared by multiple bus routes including 86/986 Scarborough, 116 Morningside, and 905 Eglinton East with combined service more frequent than on Dufferin or Bathurst. There is no parking along the streets with red lanes, but the land use is typical suburban residential and commercial space with ample off-street parking.

STC Replacement Bus (Kennedy-Midland-Ellesmere):

With the shutdown of Line 3 SRT, many bus routes were extended to Kennedy Station from Scarborough Town Centre. There is a southbound reserved lane on Midland, northbound on Kennedy, and a short stretch of Ellesmere from Brimley to Kennedy. The combined service on this corridor is over 30 buses/hour except late evening (when it is still above 20), early Sunday morning and overnight.

The Kennedy and Midland lanes will be removed when the SRT busway opens to provide a dedicated road from Ellesmere to Kennedy Station.

Eglinton-Crosstown and Finch LRTs:

Line 5 Eglinton-Crosstown will, if it ever opens, run in reserved centre lanes east of the west branch of the Don River (west of Leslie) dipping underground for Don Valley Station at Don Mills, and at Ionview west of Kennedy to enter the underground loop at Kennedy Station. There have been arguments about road capacity and whether the street should have been widened to preserve the same number of road lanes, but this debate did not turn on provision of parking. The area is typically suburban with off-street parking for all properties along the way.

The situation for Line 6 Finch West is similar where the adjacent land uses do not require on-street parking.

King Street: King Street does not have transit-only lanes. The intent of the design was to discourage through traffic and turns that could block streetcars. Some parking, cab stands and lay-bys are provided, and the curb lane is also extensively used for bike-share stations, CaféTO installations and other pedestrian amenities. The nature of the street varies considerably with a primarily residential and entertainment nature to the west, the financial district in the core, and a return to lower scale mixed development to the east.

The primary benefit of the transit zone when it was introduced was to ensure reliable travel times across the core, and this translated to more dependable service on the route as a whole and a growth in ridership. Those balmy days are well in the past, and Toronto lost many of the benefits to non-enforcement through and beyond the pandemic era. Service irregularity was also affected by the move to larger, less frequent streetcars so that any variation was magnified by the widened gaps in scheduled service.

An important consideration in the King Street design work was the availability of parallel streets and closely-spaced north-south links to absorb displaced traffic and maintain easy access onto King itself. These conditions do not exist for many other streets in the “surface priority transit network”, and it would be difficult to duplicate the design.

11 thoughts on “Bathurst-Dufferin Revisited”

  2. Steve, thank you as always for the incredible in depth analysis here — it is very much appreciated!

    I completely agree that the TTC needs to improve on line management on both Bathurst and Dufferin. While the red lanes “look” good for transit riders and sometimes provide a visual impact, the reality is for these two cases, a lot more can be done behind the scenes to improve route reliability.

    It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with both the lanes and the TTC’s plans for service during the World Cup.

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  3. Once again the problems with unreliable streetcar switches come to fore. What is preventing the TCC from installing modern switch mechanisms?

    One would think operators standing in traffic manually setting switches would be a safety issue and I’m puzzled that the ATU doesn’t object to this practice.

    Steve: There is supposed to be an ongoing program of updating the switch controllers, but (a) there is no signage around the system to tell which switches have been done, and (b) several switches that should e electrified are not requiring manual setting. There are also many locations where there should be interfaces to transit priority call-ons for turns, but there aren’t.

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  4. Why not do both? Don’t have to put paint right now but at least fix the dispatching first. Both Bathurst and Dufferin are fairly busy all day all the way to Steeles. Fixing the dispatching and improve frequency now. Evaluate the results. It will also convince the NIMBYs that better transit is in their best interests and then put in the red paint?

    Steve: I agree. It’s the attitude that the service cannot be improved without red paint that is so frustrating.

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  5. I’m curious the thoughts on whether higher travel speeds (which generally benefit longer distance users) versus lower headways (which generally benefit shorter distance users) would be more benefit to the users of the 7 route.

    Although I live on the 7 Bus Corridor, I do not typically use the bus to commute due to the headways (it’s easier to walk to the YUS subway for most of the route). For me, the bus competes with a 15 minute walk to the subway due to the long headways. Much of the 7 Bus route is within a 15 minute walk of a subway station on YUS line all the way up to Eglinton.

    If headways were consistently lower (5-8 minutes), I would certainly shift my behaviour to using the bus since it’s superior to sit on the bus. By contrast, I don’t think higher travel speeds would change my behaviour at all.

    To that end, I’m curious if there is any analysis on the type of users of the 7 bus (short distance vs long distance users) and whether the above logic makes sense.

    Steve: Yes, your logic makes sense. Various studies and books talk about the importance of service frequency as key to riders including the US Transportation Research Board’s Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, and Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit in which a key motto is “Frequency is Freedom”.

    The TTC has many routes that run at a policy headway of 10 minutes. This is seen as the point where riders can just “show up” confident that a bus will appear soon rather than timing their trip to a bus schedule. However, the TTC has many routes where a nominal 10 minute headway can vary from almost zero to 20 minutes. Therefore, although the service is in theory “convenient”, a rider’s actual experience is likely to be of gaps and crowded buses.

    Some transit demand models are very sensitive to travel time, and reveal their origins in road network design by giving high points to faster travel. However, for many transit trips, access, waiting and transfer times are a substantial pat of the journey and a faster in vehicle time represents less of an improvement than it might seem. Access times change depending on stop spacing, and there is a tradeoff between spacing and service speed. the TTC’s Service Standard is a maximum spacing of 400m to a stop. This implies a maximum walk of 200m from any point on a route to the nearest stop. Moreover, riders perceive time that is not spent in a vehicle as less productive (i.e with a higher “cost”) than while on board. A 20% reduction in some component of travel time could translate to 10% or less in overall time, and even less benefit on a weighted basis.

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  6. While I agree with the majority of the comments and article, there is one area that seems to be underplayed, and this is the addition of bus lanes when there is no need or rationale. The example I would like to give is the addition of bus lanes on Morningside between Lawrence and Ellesmere. There is simply no rationale for having bus lanes here and [they have] massively increased congestion. I asked the TTC for statistics to support their addition but never got a reply.

    Steve: My article and the background information on route performance comes at the Bathurst/Dufferin issue from the viewpoint of “what will this improve” and “what other factors contribute to poor service”. These are precisely the items the City and TTC appear to avoid.

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  7. It’s amazing to me, after reading this blog for several years, that neither the TTC nor the city seem to actually care about running a service. I used to be in another country but now I’m just at the other end of the same province so I know that the grifter known as #DoFo has a strong effect on anything (“if #DoFo doesn’t care, no one should care”). SImilarly, I *don’t* know the whole advocacy community in TO but … surely, our hero here is not the only one telling the City to tell the TTC that they are doing it wrong (in the areas where they are doing it wrong). And yet, nothing changes.

    And to those who think “the private sector would do it better!” … yeah, no. No they would not. They would just skim more from the taxpayer.

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  8. Steve writes, “Access times change depending on stop spacing, and there is a tradeoff between spacing and service speed. the TTC’s Service Standard is a maximum spacing of 400m to a stop. This implies a maximum walk of 200m from any point on a route to the nearest stop.”

    This is a common idea from transit agencies and consultants like Jarett Walker. The problem with this is that anyone not living right on the street served by the route has the additional walking distance to get to that street. In the suburbs, due to route spacing, or winding streets, or your destination being set back in a huge parking lot, that can be up to 1 km. I don’t know what the “average” walk is to the nearest transit stop, but I expect it’s well in excess of 200m even if stop spacing is 400m or less.

    If you start to trace out what the average walking distance is, particularly from homes in the suburbs, to the nearest TTC stop (even if the stop is on a route going the wrong way, for example you want to go south but it’s an east-west route), you are going to realize that fairly closely spaced stops are necessary for the service to be attractive to residents.

    Steve: Yes. This is precisely why I get very upset when people, especially transit professionals, pontificate that a 400m maximum spacing is too short. They forget the access to/from the stop, and also that the shorter distance might involve a hill or some other feature that make the longer route preferable.

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  9. Just this Wednesday, I needed to get to Queen and Dufferin at 6pm. I thought I would be clever and take the Dufferin bus from Bloor instead of taking the Queen streetcar across downtown. But there were no southbound buses! I ended up walking down to Queen, passing by lots of northbound buses along the way. Where was the line management? Why weren’t some buses short-turned? There were large crowds of riders standing around at all the southbound stops, with no indication as to when a bus might arrive. A southbound bus finally caught up to me as I neared Queen, but it was packed so full that no one could get on or off.

    Steve: Looking at the tracking info, there was a 50 !!FIFTY!! minute gap southbound at the time you were trying to board. One bus was short turned but that did little to fill the northbound gap. There was plenty of congestion, but it was all northbound from north of Eglinton to south of the 401, all territory where no transit priority is proposed. Some buses took two hours to traverse this distance. No service alert was issued by the TTC.

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  10. Thanks Steve/commenters, and while in theory, it’s very supportable to get the red transit lanes, not sure it’s so excellent in some places, as the streets are often too narrow, like many others in the core, especially with how we goof on our subway locations. So maybe Dufferin needed a subway by now? Yorkdale to the Lake? – on the west side likely better in the older core. Though Curitiba in Brazil got same capacities as subway for a tiny fraction of a subway cost, but with political will.

    Steve: And a very wide road on which their high capacity BRT infrastructure would actually fit.

    As a cyclist, many of these carterials are hostile eg. Deatherin St., and many cyclists aren’t suicycle, so avoidance is survival. But the road grid isn’t good, but many destinations are on the main carterials and direct routes are the best, and far more cyclists can support main street shops with a five minute bike ride than walk, drive or transit. So – somehow – we need to ensure there is cycling safety, which isn’t so much a priority for the City on the main roads, despite the blah-blah, and it’s now worsened by Bill 212, which was a bit predictable from the extension of Bloor lanes west in to Etobicoke, and of course Mr. Ford doesn’t have the tunnel vision to see the subway, right?

    St. Clair was badly rebuilt to be a hostile road for cyclists, but there’s a bit of space in the RoW construct that could have been squeezed for bike safety, just as the Queensway rebuild recently was a Fail for continuing the existing bike lane of Queensway on to Ronces: not even a wider curb lane nor valley curbs and a sidewalk on south side.

    Spadina’s controversy wasn’t merely angled parking with the RoW, but also finding room for bike lanes, which nope, Metro wouldn’t/couldn’t do, and it’s not like the TTC stood up for cyclists either. In fact, there’s enough space not well-used in the central portion of the road that two deaths of cyclists by passing trucks in the curb lanes could most likely have been prevented if it had been built with care for cyclists.

    So why can’t we think of having separated transit RoWs on either side of the road depending on direction? Likely shared with cyclists; and no parking.

    Meanwhile, Caronto! Or is that Carontop? Or Moronto?

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  11. I live on Dufferin and Roger’s. You wrote a novel for no reason.

    Steve: The reason was to document that TTC claims of service management are not true, or that the effort is having little effect.c

    I have been phoning 311 for 4 years to turn the fucken turning signal lights on ALL DAY for down Dufferin to Queen that will resolved your ALL of us idiling behind cars and congestion. Special bus lanes are one mental retard gymnastics to have a whole lane all across Dufferin sitting empty for a bus.

    We WANT the left turn signals turned (the crazy part is that they are there already and just work for one hour a day I know you read that right) on all across Dufferin so we are not fucken idling and busses are not sitting behind cars trying to make a left from Dufferin.

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