The TTC maintains a list of reduced speed zones on its website, and this constantly changing list is tracked in a previous article here showing how long some restrictions have been in place.
The format of the TTC page has been changed to include not just a map showing where the zones are, but why they were created and, in most cases, a target date for remediation.
The current map and table of repair targets, as of July 31, 2025, are shown below. Note that some of the items on the map are not included in the detail (e.g. Warden to Kennedy eastbound), and the table includes entries that are not reflected on the map (e.g. Sheppard West to Wilson). This does not speak well of the TTC’s ability to communicate consistent, accurate information.
Updated August 1, 2025 at 9:10am: The TTC has updated their page so that the map and tables are now in sync with each other.
Most of the zones listed here are scheduled for removal by early September with only a few continuing into the Fall or beyond (“TBD”). This list will bear watching for additions, and for removals of cleared sections within the expected time frame.
(The spreadsheet has been corrected to refer to Sheppard Yonge rather than Sheppard West Station for bus looping changes.)
Construction Projects
The only change in the construction project list is that paving work at Sheppard Station bus loop is complete, and buses will move back into the loop. There is no change in service on affected routes.
The bay allocation at Sheppard Station is shown below.
Temporary Service Improvements
With a surplus of operators, service will be improved to address crowding and service resiliency on many routes. These are not formal schedule changes.
504 King 20 Cliffside 32 Eglinton West 37 Islington 44 Kipling South 45 Kipling 54 Lawrence East 63 Ossington 66 Prince Edward
67 Pharmacy 68 Warden 80 Queensway 86 Scarborough 89 Weston 90 Vaughan 110 Islington South 111 East Mall 118 Thistle Down
Signs on many routes will change for standardization including:
13 Avenue Rd
30 High Park North (Branch letters removed)
75 Sherbourne
116 Morningside
203 High Park
302 Kingston Rd-McCowan Night
332 Eglinton West Night
924 Victoria Park Express
929S Dufferin (new Dufferin Station short turn for CNE service)
960 Steeles West
Routes renamed:
74 Mount Pleasant
103 Mount Pleasant North
171 Mount Dennis
Streetcar Service Changes
301 Queen Night
Two early morning trips extended west from Roncesvalles to Humber Loop to improve the transition to 501 daytime service.
504 King
Official route standardized to operate via Queen and Shaw. This has been in place since May 2025, but the schedule change will also allow trip prediction apps to “see” cars on the route they are actually using.
Bus Service Changes
22 Coxwell / 92 Woodbine South
The holiday interline at the south end of the routes will be discontinued.
72 Pape
The 72C Commissioners service will be extended on weekends except late evenings to serve Biidaasage Park. The service will operate westbound via west on Commissioners Street to north on Ookwemin Street (formerly Old Cherry Street). Eastbound service will run from Ookwemin Street east on Villiers Street, u-turn to west on Villiers Street, south on Ookwemin Street, east on Commissioners Street
100 Flemingdon Park
Weekend service revised for reliability.
102 Markham Road
Added trips on weekdays SB from Warden Station to Steeles at 4:47 and 5:13 am to reduce crowding.
This report is covered in a separate article. Additional comments arising from the meeting have been added there. See The Troubled State of TTC Green Buses.
Despite the extensive catalogue of issues with the Green Bus program, the TTC Board wasted no time in adopting the report without debate on an enthusiastic motion by Commissioner/Councillor Saxe. There was a sense that they could not wait to get this item off of the table.
However it is likely to come up again at the Strategic Planning Committee in discussions of future service improvements and the resulting fleet size, and the City Auditor’s review of the program will land on Saxe’s Audit & Risk Management Committee agenda sometime in 2026.
In the meantime, the TTC needs honest reporting of the performance of its growing eBus fleet as more buses arrive. In the short term, they can paper over range issues by using these vehicles on blocks of work that do not tax their capacity (buses that are only in service for part of the day, and on less stressful routes). The disparity between charging capacity and fleet size discussed in the report will also affect availability, and “performance” metrics should include not just how far a bus can travel, and how reliable it is from failure, but also whether it is even available for service.
Meanwhile, major systems elsewhere in North America continue to hedge their bets on eBuses with parallel orders of hybrids as Toronto is now doing.
This is a long report, and some key information is buried down in the appendices. It reveals, among other things, that:
Delivery of the battery-powered eBuses is running late. This is an industry-wide supply chain problem.
The TTC plans to buy 200 more hybrid buses as an interim step to allow retirement of their oldest vehicles.
The reliability of the eBuses is below the originally hoped-for “long range” capacity and they are only achieving about 250km per charge. That is with a new battery, and the value is expected to drop as batteries age.
Much of the TTC’s currently scheduled service cannot be operated with standard range eBuses, and planned change-offs will be needed to cover the span of service typical on TTC. This will add to mileage and operator hours.
Charging operations at garages are constrained by a shortage of installed charge points compounded by limitations of electrical capacity.
The problem of shorter range and limits on charging fundamentally change how garages operate for diesel/hybrid buses where refuelling is quick and is performed as part of routine servicing as buses come out of service.
The need to shuffle buses between charge points and storage locations will add to staffing requirements at garages.
eBuses cannot replace hybrids on a 1:1 basis because of the charging constraints.
There is a possibility that the TTC will have to store new buses unused because of charging limitations.
The policy decision to deploy eBuses at all garages simultaneously requires that maintenance equipment, staffing and training must be provided everywhere at once rather than a garage by garage transition, and that concurrent support for hybrids must also exist at all sites.
On route charging (using charge points at key locations to permit buses to “top up” their charge) was considered early in the project, but was rejected for various reasons including a desire to be up and running quickly to secure special eBus subsidies. It is now treated as a possible option, but with implementation five years away.
The comparative performance of hybrids and eBuses in the CEO’s monthly Metrics Report artificially understates the hybrid numbers and makes the eBuses appear to perform closer to hybrid buses than is actually the case.
The TTC does not address garage capacity issues and, indeed, speaks of shifting the need for a 10th garage off by over a decade through a “garage enhancement” project. This scheme echoes other past budget juggling to shift major infrastructure requirements and their funding needs off of the current planning calendar.
The report contains no discussion of the implications of technical limitations for the future of bus service especially in the context of any desire to drive up ridership with significant service improvements.
Overall, the report describes a project that has finally addressed the technical realities of eBuses, something that has been glossed over for years. Some aspects of eBus migration, notably charging capacity, time and garage management issues, are presented almost as new discoveries even though they are not new to the industry. Whether this is wilful ignorance or downplaying of problems on a high-profile project, the effect is the same. As with a few other major Toronto projects, the TTC is saved from some pitfalls because schedule extensions give them more time to deal with issues that should have been foreseen.
The project began in 2017 when, shamefully, the TTC Board under then Chair Josh Colle, allowed reps from BYD to pitch their wares in the guise of a “deputation”. This was “facilitated”, to use City Hall speak, by then TTC Board member Minnan-Wong with behind the scenes support from then-Mayor Tory. The video is still available on YouTube. The original hype from BYD, who hoped for a large untendered contract, is falling away, but the implications for the future of TTC bus service are only now coming out in the open.
(Those of us with long memories will recall the combined efforts of TTC management, MTO “innovative technology” staff, the gas industry and Ontario Bus Industries to replace the TTC’s trolleybus system with “clean” natural gas buses on a sole-source contract. We have been here before.)
As the 60-bus pilot project wore on, BYD was only able to supply half of the 20 buses originally allocated to them. Proterra, now out of business, got 25 and New Flyer got the other 25. At the point I write this article (July 13 at 3:00 pm, none of the BYD buses is reporting a position on the vehicle tracking system. (14 of 25 Flyers, and 8 of 25 Proterras are active.)
New Flyer is supplying eBuses to the TTC, and of the fleet numbers 6000-6203, the highest number reporting its location is 6141. Fewer than half of the delivered buses is reporting a location. Nova Bus deliveries on a 136 bus order are slower, and only 6 buses are reporting locations. (See Appendix E later in this article for information on delivery progress.)
An important issue when considering reliability stats is that a bus that never runs never fails, and so does not contribute to MDBF (Mean Distance Before Failure) stats. These buses do, however, count as part of the TTC’s active fleet and inflate its apparent size including chest-beating claims to the number of eBuses Toronto has. Having them and operating them are two different issues.
When there are only a few trial vehicles in the fleet, how well they work has little effect on service, especially through the pandemic era when service was not running at 100% of former levels. The situation is much different as recovery to full service, notably on the bus network, is in sight, and both City Council and some TTC Board members talk of an aggressive increase in transit service to wean motorists out of cars and accommodate population growth.
The TTC has already reached the point where it must keep elderly vehicles in service to compensate for performance issues with the new fleet, and this situation will compound as more eBuses arrive. There is even a question of where to store all of these buses if they cannot be actively, reliably used. The planned order for hybrids does not simply buy time while supply chain issues are worked out and battery technology improves. It is an admission that the electric fleet plan is not working out and that service at current levels is threatened. Major service expansion is simply not possible.
On the financial side, migration to eBuses is not cheap, and the project is funded only to about 37%. An important discussion nobody at the City or TTC seems willing to address is whether it is better to lower emissions by converting the fleet and all facilities to electric operation, or if buying and operating more buses to get riders out of their cars and improve mobility in the city should take precedence. Capital projects are seductive because they are often funded with “other people’s money”, but even the special eBus subsidies only go so far.
It is both ironic and sad that the electric streetcar system has many surplus vehicles thanks to service cuts, but also from a shortage of operators. The TTC plans to move to a six-minute service on three routes in Fall 2025, but may have to bus one line (503 Kingston Road) for want of streetcar drivers.
Peak streetcar service in July 2025 is 170 cars (on Saturday afternoons, not during the weekday peaks!), but the fleet will soon number 262 cars when the last of the new Flexitys arrives. 50 of the 60 new streetcars, 4603-4662, are actively reporting locations, and the highest of these, 4655, shows how close to complete the deliveries are.
In the rest of this article, I will explore issues with the eBus project and plans in more detail, but the last Appendix deserves to be here, “above the fold”.
A review commissioned by the TTC Board from Deloitte in 2023 flagged issues with “project management improvement in the areas of schedule, cost, scope, reporting, risks and issues, governance, and interdependencies management”. Of the 37 recommendations, 18 are closed and 19 are in progress.
An APTA (American Public Transit Association) peer review is planned to begin in September 2025, and the City’s Auditor General plans to review the eBus program.
It is quite clear reading through the report that the TTC eBus project is in trouble both because of external factors (industry conditions) and because the implications of the technology were not fully understood or appreciated. Moreover, the transition will require far more than buying some new buses and plugging them in. The TTC loves to claim that is a leader in the field, but this is likely only true in comparison with smaller systems that do not have the capacity. Within the industry, TTC is not at the front of the pack.
On June 4, 2025, new reserved bus lanes were installed on Queens Quay westbound from Sherbourne to Bay, and eastbound from Jarvis to Sherbourne. The TTC projected travel time savings of up to 5 minutes, and more reliable service for riders using routes on this roadway including 114 Queens Quay East, 75 Sherbourne, 65 Parliament and 202 Cherry Beach.
Now that the June 2025 tracking data are available, this article reviews the actual change, if any, in travel times and headway consistency. For historic context, the data presented here go back to May 2024 when the 114 Queens Quay East route was split off from the south end of 19 Bay.
Here is a map showing the affected routes and location of the new red lanes.
Over the period before red lane implementation, the 114 Queens Quay East service suffered from schedule problems with an unrealistic high scheduled speed. This was reduced in October 2024, and then raised again recently in anticipation of red lane benefits. The current scheduled speed is not as high as the original design in May 2024. Service frequency has also been changed from time to time mainly in response to seasonal fluctuation, but in some cases to “stretch” buses over a longer running time. (Details later in the article.)
The original eastern terminus was an around-the-block loop via Logan, Lake Shore and Carlaw to Commissioners. This was changed to Lake Shore Garage (the Wheel-Trans garage on Commissioners west of Leslie) to provide a better, off-street location.
Service until the October 2024 schedule change was extremely erratic, especially in the PM peak, as buses could not maintain the original running times. Since October, there has been little change at most times of the day including in June 2025 after red lane implementation.
There is a very strong day-of-the-week effect in the PM peak for westbound travel times on Queens Quay with midweek days being the worst. In June, the worst of the peaks are down from April levels, but that month was unusually bad. There is not yet enough accumulated data to establish whether there will be a permanent “shaving” of peak travel times through the red lane area.
There is an analogy here to the King Street project where the travel times under normal circumstances changed little, but the peaks on days when there was a disruption or special event were shaved off improving overall reliability.
Any analysis of the benefits of the red lanes must be careful not to cherry pick “good” and “bad” days for comparisons.
The data here provides mainly a “before” view of service on 114 Queens Quay East. I will update these charts in the Fall when full traffic conditions have resumed.
Since February 2024, I have tracked the TTC’s posted list of Reduced Speed Zones (RSZs) on subway lines 1 (YUS) and 2 (BD). A pattern has emerged that some RSZs are very long-lasting, others are brief, and some come-and-go.
Former Interim CEO Greg Percy claimed that we should expect about a dozen of these at any time, but the current total as of July 13, 2025, sits at 27.
If these zones came and went in short order as problems were discovered, one might tolerate a period of travel delay. My own recent experiences with glacial trips from Vaughan to St. George makes me thankful that I don’t take this route every day, but regular riders there have my sympathy.
Current reporting makes actual tracking of track defects difficult, and there is no sense of the underlying problems or limitations on performing repairs. Transparency demands that more information is provided for the status of RSZs, specifically:
Location
Date first reported
Defect issue(s)
Planned repairs
Projected date to completion
Actual date slow order is lifted
Whether this will speed repairs depends on available resources (capital, work equipment, crews) and conflict with other works along the subway lines, but at a minimum riders deserve to know when they can expect relief from slow orders. The TTC Board and Council deserve to know how deep-seated the outstanding problems might be, where they originated, and what will be required to fix them.
On January 10, 2025 as part of the budget process, the TTC Board approved:
Establish a Strategic Planning Committee to assist the TTC Board in managing strategic planning and priorities, including through a Ridership Growth Strategy and other existing strategic documents, and direct the Director, Commission Services to report back to the February 24, 2025 TTC Board meeting on a proposed structure and meeting schedule after canvassing Commissioners’ interest in committee membership;
Amend the 2025 Schedule of Meetings to add a Special Meeting of the Board in September 2025 to consider recommendations from the Strategic Planning Committee, receive an update on the 2026 Budget, and discuss budget priorities informing the development of the 2026 TTC Operating Budget; 2026-2035 Capital Budget and Plan and 15-Year Capital Investment Plan and Real Estate Investment Plan Update;
Direct the Director, Commission Services to include a Special Meeting to consider recommendations from the Strategic Planning Committee, receive an update on the next year’s budget, and discuss budget priorities informing the development of the next year’s budgets in future year’s recommended annual schedule of Board and Committee meetings for the Board’s approval, in accordance with Section 20 of the By-law to Govern Board Proceedings;
TTC Staff conduct public consultations and develop a Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0, building upon the Ridership Growth Strategy 2018-2022 and report back to the Board in July 2025;
TTC staff develop a hiring strategy on the basis of the approved Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0 and report back to the Board by October 2025; and TTC staff use the approved Ridership Growth Strategy 2.0 and associated hiring strategy to inform the 2026 TTC Budget process.
I began writing this article before the meeting took place as background based on the then-posted materials. After attending the meeting, I found that it was more productive than I had expected thanks in part to two presentations that were not in the original published agenda.
TTC Chair Jamaal Myers praised Councillor/Commissioner Alejandra Bravo who chairs the Strategic Planning Committee for the work she did in producing a focused agenda that made for a useful meeting. Past attempts by the Board to engage in general policy debates have been rare.
There was much more meat on the presentations than we have seen in a long while at the TTC. Heavy going in places, and some hard truths about the options available. This type of briefing is long overdue, and will provide the foundation for informed discussions at the TTC Board and eventually at Council.
The actual establishment of a committee contemplated in point 11 did not actually occur until the Board meeting of April 16, 2025, and the first meeting only now happened, six months after the original motion. It is not clear how much influence the committee will have on the 2026 budget process considering the length of delay.
Although the next meeting date is currently shown as October 25, 2025, Chair Bravo indicated that she does plan to schedule one in time to feed into the budget.
As for consultations on a Ridership Growth Strategy, these have not yet begun, and the TTC is now only in the first round of its Annual Plan consultations. By extension, any service improvements flowing from a new RGS including hiring required to staff buses and streetcars do not yet exist. How much would be done in the 2026 budget remains to be seen.
The delay in the committee’s initiation places the Board in a familiar position. Actual discussion of policy options is pushed off, if it occurs at all, so late in the year that the next budget is “more of the same” because there was no time to consider alternatives. Options for significant growth are never presented to Council because the TTC Board never discusses what might be done.
“Value for Money”
Almost at the end of the meeting, Chair Bravo made a comment about advising the budget process. She posed two questions about funding:
Is it the best value for money?
Does it create the most value for transit users?
This slipped by quickly, but a vital issue here is that these are not the same question, but two separate issues depending on what one assumes as the role of transit. Best value for money for whom? For taxpayers asked to subsidize transit? For riders awaiting a bus that never comes?
That distinction lies at the heart of every transit funding debate I have heard, but the actual question is never asked, and “value for whom” rarely starts with riders. This can be an important change in budget planning and in advocacy for financial support from the City and Province.
This article continues the analysis of service on routes where the TTC claims to be implementing mid-route headway management. The routes included here are:
24/924 Victoria Park
25/925 Don Mills
29/929 Dufferin
See Part I for a general introduction and details of 7 Bathurst, 100 Flemingdon Park, 165 Weston Road North, 506 Carlton and 512 St. Clair.
A common factor evident in the charts for these routes is that service near the origins of routes is barely within the target range for headways, and more commonly well beyond it. AM peak service might squeeze within the target, but service falls apart from midday onward and does not recover in the evening.
Although the TTC reports performance based on “on time” departure from terminals, they actually have a headway standard, but never report on how well routes meet it. Note that the standard actually is very generous and allows a wider range of headways than the “on time” standard. For example, a bus operating every 10 minutes is allowed a 50% headway deviation either way meaning that the actual headway could be anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, and 40% of the service can be even worse. This is a standard designed to make management look good to those who don’t peer “under the covers”.
For services that operate between 5 and 10 minutes, passengers do not rely on printed schedules, but expect vehicles to arrive at prescribed headways. Therefore, on-time performance for frequent service is measured by how well actual headways correlate to scheduled headway intervals. Trips are monitored at a location based on arrival time, without regard to whether the trip that arrived was scheduled for that time slot. The vehicle is considered on-time when the headway deviation is less than 50% of the scheduled headway. For example, a service that operates every 6 minutes is deemed on-time if the headway deviation falls between 3 minutes and 9 minutes. TTC’s goal is to have 60% of all trips operated within +-50% of the scheduled headway over the entire service day. [Service Standards at pp 15-16]
The TTC plans a review of its Service Standards in coming months. That review and much-needed reporting on service quality are long overdue.
Express routes can have very wide ranging headways making their benefit to riders dubious. The wait for an express bus can be longer than the travel time saving from skipped stops. Meanwhile riders at “local” stops cannot benefit from the express vehicles. The TTC plans a review of its Express Network later this summer, and service reliability should be a major issue. It is not enough to advertise a faster trip, but the network must actually provide it, including waiting time, reliably.
Another factor that appears in some of these charts (as well as in Part I) is that for some periods there is more service on a route than is scheduled. This is due in part to the assignment of the “run as directed” buses to supplement regular routes. However, the base schedule is not adjusted, and the RADs do not create a uniform combined headway. They can even contribute to bunching by running close to a scheduled run.
TTC still has not deigned to release detailed data from their APCs (Automatic Passenger Counters) and only coarse information (corresponding to the three levels of loading shown on their real time info) is publicly available. I have asked many times, but this request goes nowhere. Without detailed data it is impossible to know the loads on buses or to differentiate between a modest seated load and a partially standing one. Considering that the Service Standards call for at most a few standees in the off peak, this distinction is crucial to evaluating how service matches the standards.
When the use of RADs to supplement service began, the intent was to soak up spare bus operators (not to mention spare buses) without committing to a permanent service improvement. There has been no external report on whether the added service improved ridership, or the effect of its withdrawal.
The TTC “Annual Service Plan” has been rebranded as the “Network Plan” in the interest of clarity, but based on the 2026 edition’s meagre content so far, this is an infinitesimal network. In particular, it really does not deal with the transit network as a whole, but only small tweaks at the edges. Big decisions such as long range, city-wide plans, budgets, service levels and the future of transit as part of Toronto are all made elsewhere.
Issues such as strategies for improving ridership and budget reviews which bear directly on the amount of service riders see are not in this plan. Nor is any discussion of basic service quality and management, nor of the fractured nature of TTC information for and communications with its riders.
Round One of the Network Plan consultation addresses only a handful of proposed route changes. More substantial work including an Express Bus Network review and discussion of construction-related service changes won’t appear until Round Two in August.
The Network Plan presentation lists several parallel studies under development parallel to but not included in the Annual Network Plan consultations. Only those keen transit watchers know about all or most of these, and it is a hard slog keeping up. The table below is from the Round One presentation deck.
2026 Annual Service Budget
Sets service levels for each board period in 2026
Includes number of vehicles, service hours and distance
2026-2028 Ridership Growth Strategy (RGS)
Cost-benefit analysis of service, fare, infrastructure and customer experience initiatives
Could achieve ridership growth over the next 3 years (if funded)
RapidTO Transit Priority Lanes
Completed: Queens Quay East
Next: Dufferin St and Bathurst St corridors (pending July 2025 Council approval). Target: ready for 2026 FIFA World Cup
Feasibility and design studies are on-going for the Jane Street, Finch Avenue East, and Lawrence Avenue East roadways
FIFA World Cup Transit Service Plan
Increased service on key downtown routes
Additional service on match days and during Fan Festival
Reducing bunching and gapping
Efforts to reduce bunching and gapping on 10 of the most problematic routes with enhanced on-street presence as well as scheduling related changes
This may suit the TTC’s fragmented internal structure, but it drives people outside of the TTC mad. One does not have to be a seasoned transit advocate, merely a daily rider, to rail at the frustration of “consultation” on a handful of minor route changes. Basic service issues across the system must wait for the budget (no public consultation there at all), the Ridership Growth Strategy (budget limits again) and a Board that, until recently, actually believed (or chose not to challenge) management claims about quality.
Two burning issues are service quality (with associated crowding and unpredictable waits), and the effect of construction projects on routes (not to mention abjectly poor and inaccurate communications to riders). We will have to wait until Round Two in August to address at least some of these problems.
Consultation
An online survey opens July 7-16. There are separate consultations with the Advisory Committee on Accessible Transit (ACAT) and the TTC’s Planning Advisory Group which after many years now has a formal name. (Full disclosure: I am a regular contributor to that group.)
Pop-Ups will be held from 4-6pm at the following dates and locations:
July 9th: University of Toronto Scarborough Campus
July 10th: St. George Station
July 15th: Sherbourne & Rosedale Stations
July 16th: Lawrence West Station & Sunnybrook Hospital
In February-March 2025, the TTC added on-street supervisors on eleven routes in an attempt to reduce the incidence of gaps and bunching. This is described in the June 2025 CEO’s Report and the associated Metrics Report containing performance stats for the system.
Bunching and gapping of TTC service
Last March, the TTC expanded a pilot to improve service reliability on 11 key bus and streetcar routes. Working through the Transit Control Centre, uniformed Supervisors have been deployed mid-route to ensure our service frequency meets customer expectations and that we reduce the bunching and gapping of our buses and streetcars, which is a source of frustration for riders.
The pilot involves the following routes: 7 Bathurst, 24/924 Victoria Park, 25/925 Don Mills, 29/929 Dufferin, 100 Flemington Park, 165 Weston Rd North, 506 Carton, and 512 St Clair.
Starting in July, the CEO’s Report will include a Hot Topic that will provide news and updates on the progress – and challenges – related to this important issue. [CEO’s Report, p. 9]
Also:
TTC expanded a pilot to improve service reliability on key bus routes. Mid-route Field Supervisor presence on the nine priority bus routes was increased throughout the February and March Board Period, where the focus is on reducing bunching and gapping, in order to improve the reliability of service. Bunching and gapping is measured by “Headway Adherence”: the vehicle is considered on-time when the headway deviation is less than 50% of the scheduled headway. [Metrics Report, p. 15]
Mid-route Field Supervisor presence on the two priority streetcar routes continued throughout the February and March Board Period, to reduce bunching and gapping and improve the reliability of service. Bunching and gapping is measured by “Headway Adherence”: the vehicle is considered on-time when the headway deviation is less than 50% of the scheduled headway. [Metrics Report, p. 16]
Although there is a Service Standard for headway adherence, this is not measured and reported publicly, and results are never cited in ongoing service quality reports. For many years, the TTC clung to the concept that if routes were on time at terminals, the rest of the line would look after itself. However, the “on time” standard is sufficiently lax that badly bunched and gapped service can meet the target. That, combined with reporting only average results, hides the real character of service that riders experience day-to-day.
At the June 23 Board meeting, management gave the impression that they would not report on all routes in July and might have to farm some of the analytical work out.
This is a sad admission considering the years of articles I have written on service analysis showing what could be done with the hope that the TTC would develop internal tools to perform similar tasks. Sadly, however, I have been told by some at TTC they have what they need, and, in effect that I should run along and not bother them.
Partly to hold their feet to the fire, and to provide the type of information that should be routinely available to the Board, management and the public, this article will do the work the TTC claims they cannot. Here are headway reliability analyses for the routes involved over much or all of the period from January 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025.
In a very few cases, it is possible to see a change in service quality (measured as a smaller spread between minimum and maximum headways, or gaps between vehicles) around the beginning of March 2025. These are rare, and short-lived. February was a really bad time to try to implement any new practice as the city was digging out (or not depending on where you live) of a huge snowstorm. (The extended effect of the City’s poor snow clearing on transit routes is evident in the multi-day peaks in irregular service on some routes.)
I have presented 18 months of data to show that problems with headway reliability have existed for some time. There is more data going further back, but 18 months makes the point. Moreover, a consistent pattern is that headways might be well-behaved in the AM peak and Midday, but evening service does not fully “recover” from PM peak conditions, and erratic service is common.
Quite bluntly, service on all of these routes was poor, well beyond the TTC’s own Service Standards, for 2024 and early 2025, and showed little sign of improvement through to mid-year. It will be interesting to compare whatever stats TTC comes up with to the performance shown on charts here.
Part I of this series includes data for 7 Bathurst, 100 Flemingdon Park, 165 Weston Road North, 506 Carlton and 512 St. Clair. Part II will include 24/924 Victoria Park, 25/925 Don Mills and 29/929 Dufferin.
There are a lot of charts and this is a long read. I will put the “more” break here. Those readers interested in specific routes can soldier on. Thanks for reading!
Steve Munro 