Route 154 Curran Hall was created in September 2024 in part by carving off the Orton Park branch of 54 Lawrence East. It operates from Kennedy Station to University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC) and uses the Midland/Kennedy red lanes between Eglinton and Lawrence. From there, the 154 runs east to Scarborough Golf Club Road and then dodges north to Ellesmere via Brimorton and Orton Park. The route continues east to Military Trail and then south into UTSC.

Service is not frequent with headways from 22-25 minutes. The schedule summary below is dated November 2024, but the headway pattern is the same as the original September 2024 version.

For services less frequent than every 10 minutes, TTC Service Standards dictate that buses should be no more than 1 minute early or 5 minutes late 60% of the time. This is a rather generous target, but as charts later in this article show, the 154 misses the maximum target by a very wide margin in many cases. However, that 60% is almost a “get out of jail free” card for service reporting and allows wider headways with no upper bound for 40% of the service.

A problem common to shorter routes with infrequent service is that headways can be quite erratic. This compounds the already wide gaps between buses with unpredictable arrivals. These arise from three sources:

• Buses have adequate time for generous layovers at Kennedy Station, but do not leave reliably on time.
• Later in the day, some buses run in pairs even on the very wide scheduled headway.
• Occasionally, a bus will be missing, and there is no effort to dispatch the remaining vehicles on an even spacing leading to double headways of 45 minutes or more.

All of these point to an abdication of line management and a laissez-faire attitude to service quality.

There were no eAlerts issued for 154 Curran Hall during July and August and this suggests that nobody was “minding the store”.

In the detailed portion of this article, I will review headways at the terminals, travel times and the service operation on a few sample days. In future articles, I will turn to other short routes with similar problems.

A route like 154 Curran Hall might not seem important in the grand scheme of things by comparison with the Finch East or Dufferin corridors, but poor service is something riders can see. It is especially galling when a route is announced as “new and improved” but fails to deliver.