The TTC will modify service on several routes on June 22, but the majority of these changes are for seasonal reductions or improvements. Seasonal changes will affect:
508 Lake Shore suspended for the summer
11 Bayview
15 Evans
29 Dufferin service to Princes’ Gates Loop removed due to activities within Exhibition Place
329 Dufferin Night Service routed to Princes’ Gates Loop via Liberty & Strachan
34 Eglinton East
36 Finch West
41 Keele
54 Lawrence East
60/960 Steeles West
61 Avenue Road North
62 Mortimer
66 Prince Edward
76 Royal York South
83 Jones
84/984 Sheppard West
90 Vaughan
92 Woodbine South weekday evening service improved
96/996 Wilson
107 York University Heights
108 Driftwood
112 West Mall
114 Queens Quay East
134 Progress
161 Rogers Road
165 Weston Road North
200 Toronto Zoo weekday service added
201 Bluffer’s Park weekday service added
900 Airport Express
924 Victoria Park Express
927 Highway 27 Express
989 Weston Express
All extra school trips are removed from schedules
Service reliability changes will affect:
15 Evans
48 Rathburn
135 Gerrard
With the completion of water main and track work at Bathurst & Lake Shore, various routes will return to their standard configuration:
509 Harbourfront will operate from Union Station to Exhibition Loop.
510 Spadina will operate from Spadina Station to Union with half of the service turning back at Queens Quay Loop.
511 Bathurst will shift from its temporary terminus at Charlotte Loop to serve Exhibition Loop.
See the spreadsheet linked below for service design details on affected routes.
[The original version of this file still had the May 2025 date in its heading, but the information was for June. This has been fixed.]
Some routes will be adjusted so that day and night services blend properly in the late evening and early morning.
501/301 Queen and 507 Long Branch
505/305 Dundas
15/315 Evans, 123 Sherway
The modified diversion for track work at King and Church with buses operating via Jarvis, Front/Wellington and Yonge will be officially in the schedule. It was actually implemented on June 2 because of a change in the City’s project plans.
New Routes:
203 High Park from High Park Station to Colborne Lodge, weekends daytime only, every 20 minutes.
406 Scarborough Guildwood is a new Community Bus that will operate every 60 minutes during the midday and afternoon peak periods (9:30am – 6:00pm) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Bus bay allocations will change at Main Street and Scarborough Centre Stations.
This article begins a series to review the TTC’s overnight services, aka the Blue Night network. Most of these are bus routes, but a few of the older lines still operate with streetcars.
The overnight network is designed so 95% of the population and employment is within a 1,250 metre walk (15 minutes) of transit service. Consequently, overnight services may be provided on different routes than the base network in order to meet these requirements. Where possible, however, overnight routes will follow daytime routing and be identified in a manner consistent with the daytime route. The overnight network is an important part of the TTC’s commitment to maximizing the mobility of people in the City of Toronto and meeting all of their diverse travel needs.
Hours of service: 1:30am to 6:00am (8:00am Sunday)
% of population and employment served: 95%
Within walking distance: 1250 metres
Within walking time: 15 minutes
Minimum service frequency: 30 minutes
Headway performance: Service is considered to be on time if it is no more than 1 minute early and no more than 5 minutes late. TTC’s goal is to have 60% of all trips meet the on-time performance standard.
The one minute early standard was informally dropped in early 2025 and on time performance is now measured by TTC against a -0/+5 scale. That applies to on-time departure at terminals, but not to headways. The standard allows a swing of headways between 25-35 minutes for a half-hourly service as shown below. The service is “on time”, but unreliable, especially when the compounding effect of the swings is considered at transfer points.
Moreover, the “standard” need only be achieved 60% of the time, and then only at terminals. Almost half of the service is held to no standard at all.
Trip
Scheduled Time / Headway
Actual Time / Headway
1
2:00
2:00
2
2:30 / 30m
2:35 / 35m
3
3:00 / 30m
3:00 / 25m
4
3:30 / 30m
3:35 / 35m
5
4:00 / 30m
4:00 / 25m
The TTC does not have any planned meets in its night network, and these would require scheduled, protected departure times enroute, not the current catch-as-catch-can arrangement. On a half-hourly base and with long routes, the gaps between buses can vary a lot, and riders cannot count on their arrival. This is a common annoyance on the daytime network, but on the night routes where a missed bus can make a large difference in trip time, this should be unacceptable.
Most night services operate every 30 minutes, although there are exceptions on both the bus and streetcar networks. That service level is provided generally from 2am onward to about 4am, later on some routes depending on when demand begins to build up for the morning. There is also some overlap of daytime and night time route number usage, although the TTC has been sorting out its schedules for consistency in past months.
Some routes do achieve a narrow band of headways around 30 minutes for terminal departures, although this band widens along the route just as it does with daytime service. However, some routes have erratic headways even near their terminals, but the standards are lax enough that these still can count as mostly “on time” in reports of service quality.
For all that the night services are supposed to be for shift workers and the night economy, reliability leaves much to be desired because, like so much TTC service, the time a vehicle will arrive is unpredictable. The situation varies from route to route as the sample in this article will show. Some routes are not too bad, but still leave riders vulnerable to missed trips and connections. Others are a real mess with 307 Bathurst taking the prize here. (There are likely competitors for that title, but I have not worked through every route yet. Be patient, gentle reader.)
May is an ideal month usually free of major storms, hot or cold, and conditions are about as good as one can expect. Service in February will not be as good as the examples shown here.
The TTC’s common bugbear/excuse for erratic service, traffic congestion, does not apply to these night services. Uneven headways are caused by lack of line management, the absence of a policy to maintain on time performance along routes, and in a minority of cases by schedules that are too tight to allow for terminal recovery time.
Through this series, I will review the quality of night service provided on the TTC system. This will take a while, and the articles will appear as time permits in between other topics.
Note: This is a long article with a lot of charts. I don’t expect most people to read every word or review every route. For some, this might validate their own experience. For others, it will show the variations across the network. Happy reading.
The TTC continues to issue notices of Restricted Speed Zones (RSZ) for the subway system. Some appear and disappear in short order, while others are extremely long-lived. I have been tracking the status of these since early 2024, and the charts below show where and when the zones were in place.
Some areas have had RSZs in place continuously for over a year. The TTC has not given any indication of when these will be repaired, although the list has thinned out over the past year.
The departing interim CEO has claimed that 12 RSZs will be a normal situation. This might be credible if problem areas appeared and disappeared quickly, but this is only the case for some of the zones listed here.
A related problem is that some of these areas have been in bad shape for an extended period thanks to deferred maintenance and the complexity of repairs. TTC management has mused about extended shutdowns to attack these problems, but without any specifics, and especially regarding replacement services.
Where the symbols “>” or “<” are used, the RSZ is only in one direction. Where “<>” is used, the zone applies both ways. The charts are broken by year with 2024 on the top, 2025 below. The dates correspond to my visits to the website.
The Design Review Panel at Waterfront Toronto recently considered the proposed design for the surface portion of the Waterfront East LRT and Queens Quay reconfiguration now that it has reached the 60% level.
Updated June 6 at 4:10pm:
The presentation decks from the meeting will not be posted on Waterfront’s site, but I have set up a page on this site where those interested can access them. There is far more information about the designs in the presentation decks than I have included here.
This article focuses on aspects of the design affecting the Waterfront East LRT project (WELRT), one of several major City of Toronto priorities that is not yet funded. Toronto hopes to see money for this in the Federal government’s collection of key infrastructure projects, but nothing is certain.
How much of this design will survive the inevitable “value engineering” and reduce acres of green to boring concrete remains to be seen.
Responsibility for this project is split:
The segment from Union south to Queens Quay is a TTC project, but work on that has stopped at 30% design pending certainty about funding.
The segments on Queens Quay East, Cherry and Commissioners are split between the Port Lands Flood Protection project (funded) and the WELRT (not funded). Waterfront Toronto is responsible for design of these segments.
Two early works, shown in light blue in the map above, are the reconfiguration of the Yonge Street Slip and the extension of Queens Quay east from Small Street (where it now veers north) to Cherry Street. Readers may recall the overblown Sidewalk Labs proposal for the land around Parliament Slip and south onto Ookwemin Minising (formerly Villiers Island). This design round is far more in keeping with the style and scale of Queens Quay West’s renewal.
In its initial implementation, the WELRT will go as far as the Commissioners Street crossing of the new Don River. Tracks on Cherry will be extended south from Distillery Loop through a new portal under the rail corridor to connect with the line on Queens Quay east from Bay Street. Future expansion in various ways is possible, but how soon this might occur is anyone’s guess given the state of transit funding and the uncertainty of land development schemes. Options include:
Southern extension via Cherry to Polson Street
Eastern extension to a planned Broadview extension and thus to:
Leslie Barns via Commissioners
East Harbour Station on the Ontario Line and beyond to existing trackage on Broadview at Queen Street
This was a design presentation, and issues of constructability and eventual implementation of the WELRT are beyond its scope.
On June 5, the TTC Board unanimously endorsed the recommendation of its selection committee to name Mandeep S. Lali as their new CEO. Mr. Lali comes to the TTC from New York’s MTA where he is currently Executive Vice-President & Chief Operating Officer, Subways. His transit career began at Transport for London in power management and signals (2002-2015), shifted to Otis Elevator (2015-2022), and then the MTA.
The committee included Mayor Olivia Chow, TTC Chair Jamaal Myers, former Vice-Chair Joanne De Laurentiis, Commissioner Paul Ainslie and City Manager, Paul Johnson.
Mayor Chow had very high hopes for a new CEO as set out in a letter to the TTC Board when the process began.
This process is more than just a search for new management. It’s an opportunity for renewal. It’s an opportunity to restore people’s faith in transit and to envision a bold future for transit in our city.
We must be a city where people choose transit first because it’s the fastest, safest and most convenient choice to get to work, school or run errands – everywhere.
The Mayor’s vision for what transit could be is much more ambitious than the TTC’s recent history and approach to transit improvement. Organizational issues including, critically, the need to rebuild employee confidence and morale, are substantially management’s responsibility. But there are limits imposed by political decisions on planning and funding at both the provincial and municipal levels. Toronto has bold hopes for transit’s future role in a greener city, but there is no sign of support for system expansion beyond routine year-over-year growth.
One significant gap in Lali’s experience is that he comes from a subway culture, and yet much of the vision for transit’s future requires substantial improvement and increase in the surface network service. That network has a very different operating environment, although basic skills such as building a trustworthy, competent management team do carry over. The challenge lies in knowing what questions to ask, and to know or at least sense if answers are boilerplate BS.
Mayor Chow wrote:
Imagine a system with far-reaching, frequent bus service. Where riders aren’t bundled up for 20-30 minutes outdoors, waiting for bunched buses to arrive. Where transfers are easy and reliable. Where there is always room to get on board. Where people can trust their bus to get them to work and home to their families on time.
[…]
People have to be able to count on their train, streetcar or bus to arrive on time, and to get them where they are going quickly – without surprise route changes, delays or bunching.
Riders might wonder just what the TTC, and by extension Council and the Mayor, has been doing in the past few years to address capacity and reliability.
TTC routinely touts a return to pre-covid service levels, but this is measured by vehicle hours, a metric that hides the slower operation of the system that delivers less actual service per hour than six years ago. Statistics on reliability and “on time performance” mask the actual experience of riders by averaging data across routes and weeks, where riders see service on their routes vehicle-by-vehicle and hour-by-hour. Problems with system maintenance came to light bit-by-bit thanks to major accidents and outages including the SRT derailment and the long-standing slow orders on the subway and streetcar networks.
A history of self-congratulatory announcements shows a culture that values “good news” over substantive information, and the need for management to report on that basis is an ingrained part of the TTC. An early test for the new CEO will be the transparency he brings to understanding what the transit system and our City must do to reconcile the TTC with the Mayor’s vision.
There are advantages to hiring an outsider who can bring a fresh outlook to Toronto, but there will also be a gap in institutional memory for both the TTC and the city it serves.
Back in 2018, after Andy Byford’s departure from the CEO’s office, I wrote:
What challenges does the new CEO face? Broadly, these fall into three categories:
The political situation at Queen’s Park is in flux with a new Conservative administration headed by a Premier for whom subways answer every question, and who has talked of shifting responsibility for Toronto’s rapid transit network to Ontario from the City of Toronto.
Toronto’s Council and Mayor send mixed signals on transit’s importance for the city’s economic prosperity and the good of its citizens, while keeping the TTC hostage to a tax-fighting dogma that demands ongoing restraint in budget and subsidy growth.
The long-term effect of policies by all governments has been a wide gap between the funding needs – both capital and operating – and the money the TTC is actually allowed to spend. Many “big ticket” items are special projects like subway extensions, funded in part for their political benefit, but the hole left in day-to-day project funding continues to deepen.
Underlying all of these is a basic question: what is the TTC supposed to be?
Not much has changed on those fronts, although the budgetary situation has improved somewhat, but there is still a disproportionate focus on funding capital projects, not day-to-day operations. Going into an election year in 2026, the tug-of-war between demands for improved City services and holding the line on property taxes could leave the TTC little better off than in 2025.
The TTC’s Strategic Planning Committee, approved by the Board in January, has yet to even schedule a meeting. The Board is not exactly seized of the need for action, and yet a new CEO needs clear goals beyond just keeping the lights on and the trains rolling.
In December 2024, the search firm, Phelps, in preparing for the CEO’s recruiting, conducted interviews with many stakeholders to determine what characteristics were valued. [See Searching For a New TTC CEO]. Among many key attributes were:
Demonstrated focus on rider experience, accessibility, and affordability.
Passionate about improving transit systems as essential public services.
One major addition to the CEO’s mission is the repair of the years of a poisoned environment and a neglect of basics under former CEO Rick Leary. These problems stood out clearly in the Phelps report, and they will complicate setting a new direction for the TTC.
We can only hope that a focus on riders and on an improved TTC will bring a level of advocacy not seen for many years in the CEO’s office, and that Mandeep Lali will bring trust, integrity and inspiration back to that position.
Effective Monday, June 2, 2025, the 504C/D and 304D shuttle buses will divert around the construction at King & Church via Yonge, Front/Wellington and Jarvis as shown in the map below. This affects only the shuttle buses, and the streetcar diversions via Richmond/Adelaide are not affected.
How this will work with already congested conditions south of King on Yonge and on Jarvis remains to be seen.
Source: TTC
The map below combines all of the diversions into one view of where King and related routes are diverting in and near downtown.
Not shown are:
501 Queen continues to divert via Church, Richmond/Adelaide and York.
509 Harbourfront which is temporarily replaced by a bus between Spadina and Exhibition Loop.
510 Spadina continues to operate from Spadina Station to Union Station.
511 Bathurst continues its split operation with streetcars running east on King to loop at Spadina and a shuttle bus replacement to the Exhibition due to construction at Bathurst & Lake Shore.
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.
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.
On May 11, 2025, the diversion arrangements downtown became more complex as the 504 King, 503 Kingston Road and 508 Lake Shore (peak only) streetcar services shifted onto the same Richmond/Adelaide diversion route as 501 Queen. This arrangement will be in place until early September for water main and track repairs at King and Church, as well as for streetcar overhead upgrades on King Street.
As initially implemented, the three routes operated eastbound from King and Spadina, north to Queen, east to York, south to Adelaide, east to Church and north back to Queen. The westbound diversion was similar using Richmond from Church to York.
Immediately after this change, it was obvious that streetcars were snarled in traffic, particularly eastbound on Adelaide. Generally across the diversion, there was a problem with the number of streetcar turns exceeding the intersection capacity in peak periods. There is also construction interference at a few locations along the way.
I wrote about capacity issues and other related matters:
On May 16, the TTC changed the 504 King diversion so that it used Shaw Street between Queen and King to reduce the number of turns at Spadina. Only the 503 Kingston Road cars, and a few peak period 508 Lake Shore cars remained, as well as the 511 Bathurst cars looping via Spadina, Adelaide and Charlotte. (The 511 diversion will end on June 22 when streetcar service returns to Exhibition Loop.)
However, this change only addressed the west end of the diversion at Spadina, but further east the full volume of routes 501, 503, 504 and 508 continued to use the diversion between York and Church contributing a high number of streetcars/hour where the service turned. The frequency of service on 501, 503 and 504 is roughly the same through the day. It is the volume of road traffic that changes, not the number of streetcars.
Period
501 Queen
503 Kingston Rd
504 King
508 Lake Shore
Combined
AM Peak
10′ (6)
8′ (7.5)
8′ (7.5)
20′ (3)
2’30″(24)
Midday
9’30” (6.3)
10′ (6)
10′ (6)
3’17” (18.3)
PM Peak
9′ (6.7)
8′ (7.5)
8′ (7.5)
20′ (3)
2’26” (24.7)
Early Evening
10′ (6)
10′ (6)
10′ (6)
3’20″(18)
Late Evening
10′ (6)
10′ (6)
10′ (6)
3’20” (18)
Values in parentheses are vehicles per hour.
Charts in the following section show travel times between University and Jarvis both ways, and how these rose when the volume of 503-504-508 service was added along the diversion.
This article reviews archival data back to January 2024 to discover how the route’s behaviour has changed in the past 16 months. At the end, there are charts showing travel times over the full route from April 2018 to April 2025 for a long view of their evolution.
The first part of the article looks at headways (the time between vehicles) on both the 29 local and 929 express services at various points along the route. The patterns visible in the earlier articles with ragged headways leaving terminals appear throughout data back to January 2024. A major problem with these routes is that buses do not leave terminals evenly spaced, and this problem grows as they move along the line.
The second part reviews travel times over segments of the route to show areas where these change by time of day, and where they do not. These show that on some segments, travel times are mostly consistent across time periods, whereas others show rises and falls. The segment with particularly wide variations is northbound from Lawrence to Wilson showing the effect of traffic queuing for Yorkdale Mall and for Highway 401.
The original RapidTO proposal for red lanes included the full route, but the current version is only from Eglinton southbound. This will not address congestion issues north of Eglinton, nor will it deal with the operational problem of erratic terminal departures.
This article is Part II of my review of service quality on the 29/929 Dufferin routes in April 2025. Part I covered headways (the interval between buses) while this part looks at travel times. Part III will review historic data going back to January 2024.
Average travel times are fairly consistent, but for any time of day can vary by 10 minutes or more over a one-way trip, much less for shorter segments of a few kilometres.
The major rise in travel times occurs northbound in the afternoon and PM peak. The effect is much smaller in the AM peak and for southbound trips.
There is a slight difference between travel times for local and express buses. The time saving either way between King and Wilson lies between three and seven minutes on average. The percentage change is lower in the peak period when travel times rise, but the spread between local and express services does not.
The dispersal in travel times is similar for local and express buses. This is reflected both in the standard deviation values and in the quartile breakdowns.
Conditions changed in the latter part of the month increasing travel times on the southern part of the route.
A considerable part of the PM peak travel time increase lies outside of the proposed RapidTO area notably between Eglinton and Lawrence, and especially between Lawrence and Wilson.
The time spent by buses at or near terminals varies quite substantially, and reveals periods when schedules could be too tight or, conversely, too generous.
Transit lanes on Dufferin should be able to shave some peaks off of travel times, but this will only apply to periods where buses are routinely fouled in traffic. Some locations where congestion snarls the route are not proposed for transit priority.
As shown in Part I there is a wide variation in departure times from terminals compared to scheduled headways even though most trips appear to have time for recovery to their schedule. Reducing travel time, and more importantly making travel times consistent will help to make headways more reliable, but the problem of regulating departures and vehicle spacing will still remain.
The remainder of this article is a large set of charts for those interested in a fine-grained view of the route.
Steve Munro 