Many changes will occur on the TTC’s network on March 26 primarily with adjustments to schedules in response to lower ridership. This issue was covered previously in:

• TTC Service Changes for March 26, 2023 (Preliminary Version, Updated)

This article presents more detail about new schedules as well as information on several service reorganizations and diversions.

Updated March 23, 2023 at 10:30 am: The TTC’s map showing the 504 route diversions has been added to this article. Note that it does not match the route description provided in their service change notice.

How Schedules Can Change

When a new schedule is implemented on a route, one or more changes might be happening, and the same changes might not occur in each affected time period. This can produce confusing results as well as communications from the TTC that do not quite represent what is actually happening.

In the simplest case, a route needs more or less service because ridership exceeds capacity or because it has fallen below the level where a reduction is warranted. In this case, the change simply adds or removes vehicles while leaving the travel time unchanged. For example, on a route with a one hour round trip, a 6 minute headway (the interval between buses) would be provided by 10 buses. If two buses were added, the headway would be every 5 minutes, and the route’s capacity would rise by 20 percent.

A variation on this which exists in the current budget tightening era is that the standard for what is a “full” bus has changed. Peak periods have gone back to 100% of pre-covid levels, and off-peak have gone even further, close to peak levels. That undoes the “seated load” standard of the Ridership Growth Strategy that goes back two decades. If the standards allow more crowding, then fewer vehicles are needed to provide the new target capacity.

Other changes can occur independently or at the same time. Most common are adjustments to travel and recovery times in response to changes in congestion and/or construction projects. If a route operates more slowly under new conditions, more buses are needed to maintain the same level of service, or fewer if things speed up. The change in travel time can occur at the same time as changes in crowding standards so that the existing, or even fewer, buses provide less frequent service.

Almost all routes have some recovery time built into the schedule, but this is not a fixed amount. Partly the recovery time deals with expected variations in day-to-day or trip-to-trip travel time, and partly it could simply be included to make schedules work out properly. This is particularly true of branching routes where the time taken by each branch must be such that they blend together, at least on paper. Branching routes with wide headways can have very long recovery times to make schedules “come out right”. Conversely, when such a route has a change, it is possible to accommodate some or all of the change by converting recovery time to driving time.

The TTC has a bad habit of referring to travel time changes as “service reliability improvements” on the assumption that buses are more likely to maintain regular spacing if they have more time for their journey. This is not always borne out by actual operations, and the main effect on riders is that buses show up less often than before the change.

In the lead up to the March 26 changes, changes in headways were listed for several branching routes. The change cited applied to the common part of the route. Beyond the branch point, the change would be double what was originally listed.

Finally, some changes involve route reorganizations that interact such as interlining where two infrequent routes share a pool of buses between them. Combining the two routes reduces the number of vehicles needed for the linked services, while the headways might go up or down as the individual routes are changed to a new common headway.

There is one case in this round where a night bus “service improvement” is really the shift of trips formerly provided by daytime service to the night bus route number, but on the daytime frequency. Looking at the corridor as one route, this might not be as big an improvement as it seems. The same issue can arise when the balance between express and local service on a route is changed. One of the two services might improve, but not necessarily the route as a whole.

I include these caveats in the hope that readers will look closely at their before and after schedules to see exactly what is happening.

For details of changes in specific route headways, travel times and vehicle allocations, please refer to the spreadsheet linked here.

Beginning March 26, 2023, the 905 Eglinton East Express bus will run less frequently due to a combination of the new TTC Service Standards and the route’s conversion from standard sized to articulated buses.

The vehicle change was not included in the information in the TTC’s overview report discussed at the February 28 Board Meeting, and service comparisons published by me and others were based on a reasonable assumption of equal vehicle capacity.

New Service Standards

The new standards were included in the 2023 Operating Budget [p. 26]:

Route adjustments will be based on ridership demand in the busiest portion of the route, in the busiest direction and hour within each time period of service.

The realigned service proposes to:

1) Resume pre-COVID vehicle crowding standards in peak periods, which were temporarily suspended during the pandemic to provide more physical distancing. (50 customers per bus, 130 customers per streetcar, 1000/1100 customers per train on average during the busiest hour)

2) Increase the pre-COVID vehicle crowding standard at off-peak periods with capacity for each route and time period planned based on the busiest hour for 45 customers per bus, 90 customers per streetcar, and 600-650 customers per train on average.

There is no reference to articulated bus capacities. In the previous service standards, the peak crowding value was 50% higher for artics, but the offpeak value was only 28% higher. The offpeak ratio was lower because the old standard was based on a seated load, and the artics have proportionately more standee space.

In the table below, the “new” values are based on the budget quotation above with the articulated bus values set at 50% higher than those for standard buses.

The TTC cites 50/bus peak and 45/bus offpeak in the quote above. Therefore the new artic standards would be 75/bus peak and 68/bus offpeak using a 50% capacity increase over standard buses.

The old and new hourly route capacities below are based on vehicle types and planned headways. Note that offpeak capacities generally go up because of the substantial increase in standees. Reductions in peak capacity are very small and could be due to assumptions I have made about the TTC’s vehicle capacity standards.

Service Reliability

However, the problem with 905 Eglinton East is not confined to the capacity, but to the reliability of the service. We hear a lot about the wonders of Red Lanes for service, but it does not take long to find examples of erratic spacing between buses.

The following sections review January and February 2023 headways in detail looking at service departing eastbound from Kennedy Station and southbound from Ellesmere. The vital point here is that headway reliability is already not good on this route (as on many others in the network), and past experience shows that when scheduled service is reduced problems like this only get worse. Laissez-faire approaches to service management might work tolerably (at least in management’s eyes) for frequent service, but they fail when service is less frequent.

Service standards accept a six minute window (from -1 to +5 minutes) of “on time” performance relative to the schedule. Combined with the new headways proposed above, this will allow gaps of 20 minutes and more to be counted as “on time”. This is a severe penalty for riders, and can undo much of the benefit of “express” operation.

In many of the charts showing individual headways (left column in the collections below), note how often the data points are spread over a range from 0 to at least 15 minutes or more. The TTC routinely fails to attain the quality of service it claims as a target.

As the TTC adjusts schedules to its new budget limitations, the biggest problem for riders will remain the quality of service as shown in reliable headways (or not). Service quality could deteriorate and further inflame riders who already complain about unpredictable waits for and crowding on buses, or the TTC could actually make good on its claims of better service management.

I will return to this in May after the new schedules have been in operation for six weeks.

The remainder of this article contains detailed charts showing service quality on 905 Eglinton East for those who love all of the details.

A major question facing transit advocates today is the degree to which TTC service is less frequent than in the pre-pandemic era, and more recently how it will be changing on a month-to-month basis.

As I write this on February 15, 2023, service changes were introduced a few days ago, and many more are planned for March 26, 2023. The TTC plans to release details of the March changes in its agenda for their Board meeting on February 28 for which the agenda should be available about a week in advance.

For each schedule change, I have published a detailed table showing old and new headways (the interval between vehicles), the changes in scheduled trip times, and the number of vehicles assigned to each route. This information is important for seeing that detail, but for a general audience, a simpler representation of the changes is needed.

In mid 2022, I published a comparison of May 2022 service levels with January 2020 to illustrate the degree to which service had changed between the pre-pandemic period and what, at the time, was thought to be the start of a strong recovery through 2022. This article includes tables in the same format comparing:

• January 2020 to January 2023 as an update to the previous article, and
• January 2023 to February 2023 showing the changes, where they occurred, on February 12, 2023.

In future articles about service changes I will include both the usual detailed spreadsheet as well as a chart showing the changes in the consolidated view used here. This will allow readers to quickly see where major changes occur, or not.

Updated February 16, 2023 at 12:45am: The pdf chart sets and some pages within the article have been replaced to correct an error in 76 Royal York South.

Updated February 10 at 3:45pm: The TTC has advised that the 504C bus will not return to Roncesvalles south of Howard Park until mid-March.

The TTC has announced several service changes effective February 12. These are, generally speaking, not the changes pending due to revised Service Standards and the 2023 Budget which will not come to City Council until February 15. Those changes will begin to appear in late March schedules, although there is a good chance that that the details will be published soon.

Notwithstanding that, some routes will see service cuts in February “to match demand”, although the TTC sometimes masks this as a schedule adjustment for reliability. A headway (the time between buses) might be lengthened to provide more round trip with the same number of vehicles, but this also affects the level of service.

Details of the changes are available in the spreadsheet linked below.

Service Changes for February 12, 2023