The TTC has announced several service changes to accommodate crowds expected at the Taylor Swift Eras Tour concerts at the Rogers Centre on November 14-16 and 21-23. For full details, see their site.
On concert nights, subway service will be improved between 5-8pm and 11pm-1:30am with Line 1 trains operating about every 3 minutes, and Line 2 trains every 4 minutes.
509 Harbourfront service will be restored between Union Station and Exhibition Loop from November 1-24 with at least 11 cars, up from the usual 7 on the line, on concert days .
511 Bathurst cars will operate from Bathurst Station to Union on November 14-16, and starting on November 17 on a scheduled basis.
19 Bay, a normally infrequent service, will have 10 extra buses. Post-show they will operate express northbound stopping only at King, Queen, Dundas and College enroute to Bay Station.
510D Spadina bus will similarly provide an express service stopping at the same intermediate destinations as 19 Bay enroute to Spadina Station.
The express services will be styled as “Swiftbus”. Extra service on 504 King will be styled as “Swiftcar”.
Access at Union Station will be monitored and controlled to prevent the overcrowding that occurred on past occasions with large events.
Earlier this year, the TTC conducted the first round of consultations on its 2025 Annual Service Plan. My comments on it include several maps and tables including an update on previously proposed changes that had not yet been implemented.
The following changes are in the second round of consultations:
The proposed removal of 87 Cosburn service to East York Acres has been withdrawn for further review.
The review of Community Bus routes now includes proposed extensions and restructuring, although the scope is limited by a lack of budget headroom. There is no discussion of where more routes might be added to the system but for a lack of resources to run them.
Proposals have been added for alternate service during some, but not all, major construction projects planned for 2025.
A proposal to review and consolidate mid-block bus stops has been added.
Except for the 87 Cosburn, all proposals from round one appear unchanged in round two.
The TTC’s survey is available here and will be open for feedback until November 11, 2024. If you have suggestions, please be sure to respond to the survey. Some TTC planning staff do read this site regularly, but feedback on the plan should go to them directly to be part of the record.
I participated in a recent stakeholder session on the plan, and was disappointed by its lack of ambition. There is no sense of a “Ridership Growth Strategy”, an aspirational statement of “here is what we could do”, as opposed to living within the existing budget. It’s almost as if John Tory and Rick Leary never left.
On an informational basis, the plan does not recap pending changes for the eventual opening of Lines 5 Eglinton-Crosstown and 6 Finch West, nor does it discuss past proposals that have not yet been implemented (see my article on round one for a list of these). This leaves riders to search through available background materials to get an overall sense of what will happen in 2025. There is no concrete discussion of general service improvements to attract ridership.
The remainder of this article details the proposals added in the round two consultation.
Updated Oct. 29 at 2:35pm:The service chart showing crowding levels has been revised with adjusted colouring, and to give emphasis to lines so that they stand out better. See the end of the article for a sample.
Updated Oct. 27 at 8:45pm: Sample charts have been added at the end incorporating some suggested changes.
This article continues my search for clear ways to display vehicle crowding data that I now receive as part of my data feed from TTC. In previous articles, I have shown vehicle tracking charts colour coded for the crowding index.
These charts show the regularity (or not) of service, locations of delays, bunches and gaps, and the resulting crowding pattern. This is useful for fine-grained analysis, but one must look at many charts to see the overall patterns.
In an attempt to “zoom out”, I developed a new chart format that shows the proportion of service at each crowding level seen at screenlines along a route by time of day. This article presents the results for the routes already published, but I wanted to nail down the format before publishing more. (I have many more in the wings including 25/925 Don Mills, 29/929 Dufferin, 36 Finch West, 39/939 Finch East, 41/941 Keele, 52/952 Lawrence, 53/953 Steeles East, 60/960 Steeles West, 85/985 Sheppard East, 86/986 Scarborough, 89/989 Weston, 116 Morningside, 129 McCowan North, 903 STC Express, and 905 Eglinton East Express).
Regular readers will know that I abhor the TTC’s practice of reporting service stats on monthly averages with every trip combined to give an overall picture. This hides a lot of things, notably the variations by hour and location, not to mention variations between routes. The chart format proposed here attempts to strike a balance between a hyper-detailed view and one where readers can see how routes behave at a level they can relate to their own journeys.
Does the new format shown here work for readers? Please let me know in the comments. I can do a lot of preparatory work on the other routes, and then drop their stats into whatever the final chart template looks like.
Many thanks to those who have sent suggestions regarding other charts I have published.
This is the third in a series of reviews of various transit lines in Toronto. Although the streetcar fleet is not yet reporting passenger loads (automatic counter installation is in progress), it is still worth looking at the quality of service provided on some of these lines.
For 505 Dundas, I will look at seven days’ operation from Monday, September 16 to Sunday, September 22. The intent is to show that conditions on the route are not “one of” instances, but a continuing pattern. The article includes:
operating charts (sometimes called Marey diagrams after their supposed inventor well over a century ago),
vehicle spacing charts showing bunching and gapping of streetcars, and
headway summary charts for the month showing the range of headways at various times and places along the route.
An added topic at the end is a review of travel times on Dundas between University Avenue and Bathurst Street and the effect of parking restrictions that were implemented there earlier in 2024.
Items of particular note:
During some periods, streetcars leave terminals fairly evenly spaced, but do not stay in this condition across the route. The bunching and gaps seen by most riders are not as good as terminal-based stats might indicate.
Some periods when there is no specific event impeding service see pairs, and occasionally trios, of streetcars travel together for extended periods.
Terminal dwell times are adequate for a rest break in most periods, but there are times when this does not occur. Short turns, notably westbound at Lansdowne, become more frequent.
Two major delays/diversion occurred during the period covered by this article from demonstrations downtown. The after-effects on service lasted hours beyond the events.
Only one event, an early-morning “operational problem”, triggered the use of shuttle buses, at least to the extent that these were tracked and appear in the data feed.
There are a lot of charts in this article. For some readers, this will be a case of “TL,DR” but others really like all of the detail.
This post reviews operation of TTC service on the 54 Lawrence East bus and its express equivalent, 954, for September 2024. It continues on the work of building new charts including crowding data that began in the previous article on 35/935 Jane.
In response to suggestions, there are a few changes in the charts here.
The shade of red used for crowded buses has been darkened.
A reader suggested using a colour palette with a common base such as a light, medium and dark taupe. I experimented with it, but found the contrast for fine lines against a white background did not work well, especially on small displays.
New charts showing the distribution of headways along the route and over time have been added.
The scheme used is intended to give comparable information to a histogram, but on a more compact basis that makes changes along routes easy to see.
Summary of the 54/954 Lawrence East bus review:
Service on 54 Lawrence is unreliable with much bunching and gapping during many periods, especially toward the eastern end of the line.
Bunching caused by unregulated “blending” of the two branches (54A to Starspray and 54B to Morningside) is chronic. (This is a common problem on branching routes.)
Crowding during off-peak periods generally occurs on buses that are running in a gap.
Groups of buses commonly stay together for extended periods, including terminal departures, rather than being spaced apart to minimize gaps.
Late evening service on the eastern end of the route is quite erratic, and there was a repeated wide gap on most days in the period reviewed here.
The 954 express service has relative little crowding and much more reliable headways than the local service.
This route is a textbook example of abdication of route management. The tracking data shows little sign of congestion compared to some other routes, and bunching is a common operating practice.
First off, an apology to regular readers for the lack of posts in the past week or so. I have been working on new ways to present service reliability data together with information on bus crowding. This is now possible because the TTC includes crowding info in the data I receive from them.
Updated October 21, 2024 at 7:45am:
The scheduled service levels for 35/935 Jane have been added.
Charts showing the distribution of weekday headways by hour and location have been added.
TTC service metrics suffer from a lack of detail, and an inability to see what is happening to “my bus” or “my streetcar” as opposed to average service conditions over many hours, weeks and vehicles. Statistics purport to show that average loads and service lie within so-called Service Standards (about which more later) while riders wait glumly for buses that arrive in packs and have little room on board.
In past articles, I have presented charts showing the behaviour of many routes, but there are limitations of how many charts I can publish. With the advantage that I can review all of the data, patterns are more evident than might be the case with only excerpts.
One important pattern is the spacing of vehicles along a route. TTC standards assume that if service is “on time” (itself a rather loose concept) at terminals, the rest of the line will look after itself. Flatly, this is not true, but it is an assumption that lets managers collect gold stars they do not deserve.
Even on days when there is no adverse weather, traffic or special events, tracking data show that a reasonably spaced service might leave a terminal, but can degenerate into pairs (or worse) along the line. Instead of a steady “tick .. tick .. tick” of service promised by the schedule, riders experience “tick …… tick tick ….. tick .. tick ………. tick tick tick” like a drunken clock. All of the promised buses might eventually arrive, but unevenly. Of course, riders in the real world know that even at terminals, departures can be uneven, and this worsens across a route.
This contributes to crowding because the buses in wide gaps tend to have more riders, and the problem compounds as stop service times for these buses rise.
Although the TTC has released vehicle tracking data since 2007, crowding data are much more recent. Initially they showed up in the real-time data feed used by various apps, and now in the archival data I receive each month. This allows analysis of the relationship between vehicle spacing and crowding, as well as a better view of when and where routes are heavily used.
Buses have automatic passenger counters with infrared beams at doorways to keep track of entries and exits. Work to install them on the streetcar fleet is still in progress, and crowding data for streetcars is not yet available.
This article looks at bus tracking data showing crowding levels. This is a preliminary view of 35 Jane to show and explain the new chart formats. In future articles, I will dive into this and other routes in more detail.
If you have suggestions to improve these charts, please leave a comment.
Updated October 21, 2024 at 11:30am: The end date for the 501 Queen diversion via Church, King and Spadina has been changed to “mid-November”.
Updated October 18, 2024 at 11:00am: Information on diversions that have finished has been moved to the end of the article to avoid confusion. A planned diversion on Queen west late evening and overnight service from October 21-24 has been added.
Effective October 13: (Don Bridge reopens two days earlier than the planned Oct. 15)
501 Queen:
West end: Regular service.
Downtown: Streetcar Diversion via Church, King and Spadina both ways.
East end: Regular service restored at the Don Bridge.
Shuttle bus from Broadview & Gerrard to Queen & Bathurst:
Westbound via Church, Richmond and Bay
Eastbound via Bay, King and Church until 10pm daily
Eastbound via University, King and Church from 10pm to 5am daily
503 Kingston Road: Regular service from Bingham Loop to King & York looping downtown via Church and Wellington Streets.
504 King: Regular 504B routing restored between Broadview Station and Dufferin Loop. 504A has already been on its regular routing and does not change.
508 Lake Shore: Regular route to Broadview Station via Queen and Broadview restored.
Effective October 21-24 Only
501/301 Queen
October 21-24 only from 11pm to 4am: Streetcars divert between Shaw and Roncesvalles via King for trackwork at Queen & Brock. Shuttle buses to Neville Loop
The TTC will make several changes to their services on October 6.
One major construction diversion in Parkdale ends with restoration of normal routes on King and Queen Street West, and the downtown 501B bus shuttle will end with resumption of through streetcar service on 501 Queen.
Updated September 27 at 3:20: The TTC advises that although the schedules have been drawn up for a unified 501 Queen car service, the changeover will not take place on October 6, but at a later date. Service details from October 6 until eventual cutover have not yet been announced.
Service on the Bloor-Danforth subway, Line 2, will be improved to address crowding.
Several late night and early morning schedules will be adjusted to better integrate routes during the transition from regular daytime routes to the 300-series Blue Night Network.
Other changes adjust service for reliability and/or to reallocate service hours between routes.
Updated September 29 at 3:30: The spreadsheet showing the details of all service changes is now available.
Updated October 2 at 2:20 pm: Although the service change notice for October 6 showed a 30 minute headway would continue for the 303 Kingston Road night car, the electronic schedule published for this route shows a 20 minute headway from 1:40am onward. TTC has confirmed that the 20 minute headway will operate.
The TTC expects to end the year with a lower than budgeted gap between revenue and expenses. Revenues are running ahead of projections because of strong ridership and a higher than expected average fare. For the six months to June, revenues are $15.6-million above budget. In turn, this translates to a better position going into the 2025 budget cycle.
Expenses are running below budget through a combination of unfilled vacancies and savings due to timing changes in some work. The projected year-end position is that the TTC will come in $52.2-million below its net budget (the portion requiring subsidy).
Ridership reached 81% of pre-covid levels in fiscal period 6 (most of the month of June) and is expected to hit 81.5% by the fourth quarter.
Note that ridership and revenue recovery are not the same thing because, allowing for inflation, the value of a fare has dropped while operating costs continued to rise.
Looking ahead to the next two years, there continue to be pressures on the TTC’s operating budget. As things currently stand, service increases will be small with the major changes coming when Lines 5 and 6 open, a date that is still not announced by Metrolinx.
The City’s target is for a 0% change in TTC funding. This is not as straightforward as it seems. Budgets are struck on a budget-to-budget basis, not actual-to-budget, and so the starting point is the budgeted subsidy in 2024. This arrangement has been in place for many years, and it gives an incentive for the TTC to end the year in a “surplus” position. Other aspects are changes, if any, in external subsidies and which aspects of TTC costs these offset. For example, the extra cost of Lines 5 and 6 are substantially covered by a new, albeit temporary, provincial subsidy and the City does not face this cost at least for 2025 and 2026.
The “Reserve Draw Reversal” is an accounting adjustment. Originally, the 2024 budget included a $15-million withdrawal from a reserve, but this was not required and will not be carried forward into 2025. Therefore, on a budget-to-budget basis this item shows up as reduced revenue. Like the “surplus”, this tactic is also fairly common in TTC budget planning.
Challenges the TTC recognizes going into 2025 include:
The need for attracting riders through “customer experience and satisfaction”
Changing demographics of Toronto
The ability to meet the 0% target without affecting service
Limited funding for state of good repair (this is the Operating Budget component that covers day-to-day work as opposed to major overhauls and asset replacement)
The Mayor’s Vision
The meeting agenda includes a letter from Mayor Chow regarding the hiring of a new permanent CEO.
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.
Imagine a city where a commuter taps their card to enter, paying an affordable fare, and then takes a working escalator or elevator down to the subway platform. The station is clean and well-maintained, the message board is working and tells them their train is on time. People aren’t crowded shoulder to shoulder waiting to get on the train, only to be shoulder to shoulder during their ride. If while they wait they feel unsafe, there’s someone there to help them. And they can rely on high quality public WiFi or cell service to chat with a friend or send that important text to a family member.
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.
In short, to make the TTC the better way again it needs to be reliable, safe and remain affordable.
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. Vehicles, tracks, stations and stops should be proactively maintained and in a state of good repair. Riders and transit workers should feel safe and respected on the system.
That’s a fine vision for what transit should be, but it does not align with the budget process now underway, nor with the projected level of service additions in the next few years.
At its meeting of September 24, 2024, the TTC Board received a presentation from Fort Monaco, Chief Operations and Infrastructure Officer, on subway restricted speed zones (aka “RSZs”).
From the sheer number and duration of these, it has been clear to riders that the TTC fell behind both in the quality of its track maintenance, and in its ability to work through the backlog. It is one thing to say that RSZs are implemented for safety, but when they are so numerous, “safety” had become a matter of necessity beyond routine levels.
The current RSZ map, together with expected dates when these zones will be repaired, is from the appendix of the presentation deck. Monaco noted that with each RSZ adding about two minutes of travel time, the trip from Wilson to Union Station is extended by about 15 minutes.
The locations where these occur are overwhelmingly in “open cut” locations where rail is laid on ties and ballast. In tunnels, rail is either mounted directly on the concrete tunnel floor, or on structures which themself are fixed to the tunnel. Such track cannot shift around as much from forces of passing trains. Other track issues include several types of wear that can induce noise and rough train operation, but also fractures from metal fatigue.
Since January 2023 the accumulated count of RSZs is almost 300. Of these, only 30 were planned, typically for track renewal projects where a slow order is required over an extended period while work is in progress.
Steve Munro 