Day: December 9, 2025

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Scheduled Travel Speeds on TTC Lines 1, 2 and 6

From the moment Line 6 opened in a magisterial whoosh of grandeur, well, maybe not exactly a whoosh, the issue of its glacial operating speed has fuelled many debates in social media.

One comparison that is always made is between the “LRT” and subway speeds. Yes, the LRT has closer stops, it has to deal with traffic signals, errant motorists and pedestrians, but it gives a new meaning to “glacial”. The downtown streetcar lines are in the same ballpark, and some of them best the brand new “LRT”.

There are many factors at work which I will leave for another day. This post is intended to provide info on the scheduled travel speeds of the two major subway lines and the new 6 Finch West.

The data are taken from the GTFS version of schedules used by trip planning apps. They do not match the actual speeds, but give a sense of what the TTC expects these to be, in general, for trains running “on time”. (The GTFS data includes times and spacing for every stop from which the scheduled speed can be calculated easily.)

In the charts for Lines 1 and 2 (Yonge-University and Bloor-Danforth), data are shown for both the AM and PM peaks. For Line 6 Finch, only one set of data is shown because the TTC has used a generic all-day schedule for the initial service.

The vertical scale is set at 60 km/hr for all charts. The average values for each set of data are at the right end of each chart labelled “Route”.

It is self-evident that subway speeds will be higher for many reasons including stop spacing and the fact that trains both accelerate to and run at higher speeds. However, the LRT speeds are embarrassingly slow. Riding the line even on a trip that makes its scheduled time, the car crawls across the route.

As a matter of comparison, the 512 St. Clair car is only slightly slower than 6 Finch and at times faster. The 507 Long Branch running on Lake Shore Boulevard in Etobicoke is consistently faster than 6 Finch.

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TTC Service Summary Update Dec. 7, 2025

With the mid-period update of schedules for opening of the 6 Finch line, TTC has published a revised Scheduled Service Summary. There are only a few changes, and they are listed here for convenience.

6 Finch

Here is the service summary for the new LRT line and the late evening shuttle bus. Note that the shuttle bus is interlined with the 37S Islington short turn service from Humber College to Humberwood Loop, although this is not mentioned in the summary.

Note that the scheduled speed of the bus is much higher than the LRT, and the buses get generous recovery time.

The peak requirement is 15 cars out of the 18 in the fleet.

37 Islington

In the December 7 summary, a 37S Islington short turn service is shown between Humber College and Humberwood Loop, although the effective date of the schedule is supposed to be mid-November. This does not appear in the November 16 version of the summary.

During the late evening, these buses interline with the Finch West shuttle which has an internal route number of 806 even though it operates as “6”.

32 Eglinton West
63/363 Ossington
90 Vaughan
109 Ranee
164 Castlefield

Schedules changed to reflect the renaming of Eglinton West Station as Cedarvale Station. No change in service levels.