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.
The charts below show the statistics (left) and raw data (right) for departures from UTSC Loop and from Kennedy Station in July and August 2025.
Careful readers will note that I have set the maximum y-axis (headway) value to 90 (1.5 hours). This was necessary to fit in data points that would otherwise be “off the charts”.
On the left, the averages start off stable in the morning and midday, but bounce more particularly later in the day. The standard deviations (a measure of the dispersion in values) show just how wildly irregular headways become from the PM peak onward.
On the right, the raw data show that problems are not isolated on a few days. There are wide gaps (points well above the 30 minute line) and bunching (points below 10 minutes) from the early afternoon onward on many days in both directions.
If there were only wide headways, but not narrow ones, and if the averages were not fairly consistently around the scheduled 22-25 mminute values, then the problem would likely be missed trips. However, the buses are generally all present, but running on very widely dispersed headways.
Westbound from UTSC
Northbound from Kennedy Station
Weekends
Headways from the terminals are much better behaved on weekends than weekdays, although problems with reliability do show up in the evenings. Sunday, August 31, the first day of the September schedule period, was notably bad in the evening.
Saturdays
Sundays
Travel Times
The first set of charts below show the statistics (left) and raw data (right) for travel times between the terminals in July 2025. Note that the travel time values generally lie in a band 10 minutes wide, although wider in peak periods. The SD values generally stay below 5 minutes, but rise as the day goes on.
The screenlines for these measurements are just outside of UTSC Loop, and just east or west (as appropriate) of Kennedy Station. The values do not include time circulating or laying over at the terminals.
Looking at segments of the route, the main area with varied times over the day is the segment along Lawrence both ways from Midland to Scarborough Golf Club Road.
Service Tracking Charts
The charts in this section show the movement of buses between Kennedy Station (at the top) and UTSC (at the bottom). There is a gap in the trace for westbound buses because they take a shorter route via Midland to Kennedy Station compared to eastbound buses that travel north on Kennedy.
The speed of a vehicle is indicated by the slope of the line because the vertical axis is scaled to the street spacing. Where a line is horizontal, the bus is stationary, and the length of the segment shows how long (commonly at Kennedy Station, but to a lesser extent at UTSC.)
In many cases, there is no layover at the UTSC end of a trip, but there is at Kennedy Station. There could be periods where added running time might be contemplated, but this needs to look at the behaviour over the round trip.
The horizontal space between the lines shows the gaps and bunching of service.
Friday, July 4, 2025
July 4 shows an example of congestion westbound on Lawrence that does not appear on most days. It begins at about 8:30am and affects all buses up to 4pm. Service begins to bunch in the early afternoon and there are some wide gaps in service notably westbound from UTSC just after 4pm. There is one bus just after 4:30pm, but it travels a short distance, and then turns around (turquoise). Irregular service persists into the mid-evening.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
July 24 includes the largest gap in service in the two months: 84 minutes westbound from UTSC at about 4:45pm. Service is reasonably well-behaved through the morning, but by mid afternoon there are signs bunching. One bus short turns and another goes out of service between 4 and 5pm. There is a second gap of 32 minutes just after 5pm.
Regular spacing is not recovered until after 6pm.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
July 29 is a comparatively uneventful day with no short turns or disappearing buses. Even so, there are a few cases of uneven headways.
Friday, August 1, 2025
August 1 shows very bad service from early afternoon through mid-evening including two gaps at Kennedy Station caused by buses that short-turned back eastward to UTSC without completing their trips (between 4 and 5:30pm) because they are already running as a pair with other westbound buses.
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
August 12 is another day with no short turns or missing buses, but with bunching and gaps from late afternoon to mid-evening.
Sunday, August 31, 2025
August 31 has reliable service until about 5pm, but then bunching and gaps set in until late evening.
Steve Munro 
I use this route everyday. It’s a disaster. It’s not even a long route and constantly has missing buses and long gaps or bunching. There is absolutely no line management and during rush hour they always seem to be running behind and leaving Kennedy Stn late. I thought this would be some relief on the Lawrence Ave E corridor but it ends up being useless and many times people are better off catching a 54 and transferring to any of the line 3 routes at Midland Ave to go to Kennedy Stn.
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Which transit systems do a good job of surface route management and would make good examples for the TTC to learn from? I’m assuming the best examples will be outside of Canada and U.S.
I’m frankly unimpressed by the approach of sticking a few supervisors out in the middle of a handful of routes and seeing what happens. Others do better, and we should learn from them rather than reinventing the wheel—or worse, throwing up our hands and saying that no improvements are possible.
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This route is kind of strange, the amount of times I go into Kennedy Station and see the bus arrival dashboard saying the 154 is due and then moves to like 5 or 10 minutes because the one bus that is on the route at the station is just sitting there doing nothing is insane, it is an alternative to going to Kennedy from UTSC but it is quite possibly the worst one.
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I’ve used this route every day since it was established, and since then, I’ve been advocating for something to be done about it, since as it stands, this route is abysmal. I’ve often had to wait upwards of 30, 45, sometimes even an hour for a bus, and other times I’ll see three buses pass at once then nothing for the next hour, reminiscent of the old 54B route that this “new and improved” route is supposed to replace. I originally had an idea for the planned Brimorton route to be implemented, as it would remove issues with traffic, since it wouldn’t be traveling on such a busy road like Lawrence Ave East, but after some consideration, I’m not so sure about that original idea.
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No surprise to anyone who lives in Scarborough that many of the Fridays and weekends with service standard deviations are when there are events at Thomson Park. The city of Toronto and the TTC need to partner together to provide better service amendments to account for the additional loading and offloading times during these events where passengers spike.
The ttc (and metrolinx) are still extremely difficient in their expertise at working with the city, large event venues and even the school boards in addressing seasonal variations with passenger counts.
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