This is a preliminary version based on GTFS data (the standard format for transit schedules used by online services) and some Service Advisories on the TTC site. I expect to receive the full list of September service changes early in the week of August 28 and will update this article accordingly including the usual detailed comparison of service levels.
Updated August 26 at 9:15 pm: 512 St. Clair updated to reflect complete bus replacement for work at various locations on the line.
Updated August 27 at 4:30 pm: At 10:30 am on August 28, the Mayor, TTC Chair and CEO will hold a press conference at STC Station to “outline how the TTC will increase service beginning September and into the fall.”
Updated August 29 at 5:30 pm: Due to changes in the Metrolinx schedule for work on the Lake Shore East Queen Street bridge, there has been a further revision of planned service. Please see this post for details.
The TTC continues its consultation on a five-year plan for service combined with a “customer experience action plan” with a series of pop-ups in mid-August, meetings with various stakeholder groups, and an online survey available until August 27.
With the election of a new Mayor and a shifted political balance of the TTC Board, the context for these plans has changed quite substantially. After years where “less is more” might have been a fitting logo, the TTC now faces key questions about its future. What should transit be? How deep are it shortfalls? How high should we aim for improvement?
Current plans are to take the Annual Service Plan for 2024 to the TTC Board in Fall 2023. There will be a final, fourth round on the Five-Year Plans in November 2023 and they will go to the Board in early 2024. It is not clear how the Five-Year Plan will interact with the 2024 budget process which will already be substantially complete. This timing is a remnant of the Tory era at City Hall when the budget was a “done deal” at the Mayor’s bidding and debate on future options simply was not tolerated.
An important part of the Five-Year Plan is the TTC’s claimed “vision” for its future:
Focus on improvements that enhance TTC’s core-competency: mass transit – moving large volumes of customers safely, reliably, and swiftly across Toronto
In all of the talk about transit and various improvement schemes, staying focused on moving people must be a top priority. The attractiveness of transit for that function – getting from “A” to “B” and back again – must not be lost in flirtations with marginal technologies, ancillary services or “improvements” that will not touch most riders’ daily experience.
Following Olivia Chow’s election as Mayor of Toronto, the process is now underway to repopulate committee and board appointments that will reflect the Mayor’s and Council’s priorities .
The Striking Committee – Councillors Malik (Chair), Bravo (Vice-Chair), Carroll, McKelvie and Perks – is very different from the crew who managed this process under Mayor Tory. Only Deputy Mayor McKelvie was carried over from previous era.
The City Clerk polled Councillors to determine each member’s interest in a wide variety of positions, and their requests will be considered by the Committee at its meeting on August 10, 2023. Their recommendations will be forwarded to Council for approval at a special meeting on the afternoon the same day.
Up for grabs are six positions on the TTC Board including the Chair and five other seats. The Councillor members’ terms will run to the end of 2024 when the process of juggling appointments will be repeated (standard practice at Council’s mid-term), although the sitting TTC Board members are likely to be reappointed for a further two years.
The remaining four members of the board, non-Council “public” members, will not be up for reappointment until early 2025 or 2027 unless Council rescinds them sooner. Any selections will be affected by the revised membership in the Civic Appointments Committee.
Today there are only five Councillors on the Board and there is one vacancy.
Councillors who have asked to be considered for the TTC Board are: Ainslie, Burnside, Holyday, Mantas, Matlow, Moise and Myers. Of these, all but Matlow and Myers are already on the Board, and Burnside is Chair. (The Vice-Chair is chosen from among the citizen members.)
The Striking Committee and Council should aim to create a TTC Board that actively pursues policies to improve transit. This includes public debates about just what we, as a city, expect of the system. Wringing their hands and saying “we can’t afford anything, so we won’t bother trying” should not be an option.
There are huge challenges financial (the City’s budget deficit), political (the Ford government at Queen’s Park) and organizational (the less-than-steller performance of and reputed poisonous environment under CEO Rick Leary). Any would-be Commissioner who views their job as simply showing up for meetings now and then to hear good news stories should seek work elsewhere.
The TTC has just embarked on consultation for its 5-Year Service Plan and a Customer Experience Action Plan. This might have been a business-as-usual plan under Mayor Tory entrenching a “Board approved” set of targets driven by a conservative agenda.
Toronto needs much more, an aspiration not just for “better” transit, but for a greater relevance of transit to riders across the city. Even if our goal is out of reach in the short term, we should aim high.
The TTC will make several changes to its services on July 30, although this round is more of a “fixer upper” to correct problems with some existing schedules rather than major changes.
Weekday evening subway service will be formally restored to every 6 minutes or better on Lines 1 & 2. Streetcar service in the east end will be reorganized to correct schedule problems and reflect progress on construction work (much of these changes are already in effect). Several bus route schedules will be updated to improve reliability including use of common headways on overlapped sections.
When I receive the detailed plans for coming schedule periods, I will post the usual omnibus articles.
Updated July 13, 2023: The eastern terminus of the 506C bus has been corrected to Victoria Park Station.
Updated July 14, 2023: The 506 Carlton street service will resume on Gerrard East to Coxwell on Monday, July 17.
Updated July 15, 2023: The map of the revised 506 Carlton routing has been posted by the TTC.
Week of July 17 (Updated)
With the completion of water main and track work at Coxwell & Lower Gerrard, the 506 Carlton cars will be extended east from Broadview via Coxwell to Woodbine Loop on July 17. Service to Victoria Park Station will continue to be provided by the 506C Carlton bus.
Through bus service on Coxwell from Danforth to Queen will be restored on July 30 when 22 Coxwell return.
July 30
Several changes will occur on Sunday, July 30 including adjustments in response to demand levels, scheduling improvements and construction work.
The 31 Greenwood bus route which has been operating temporarily via an expanded south end loop will be permanently extended to Queen & Eastern Avenue.
The 506 Carlton route will be shifted to Dundas West Station as its western terminus to permit water main construction on Howard Park Avenue.
September 3
Streetcar service will return to Long Branch with 501 Queen cars running to Humber Loop, and 507 Long Branch cars from Humber to Long Branch. The peak period 508 Lake Shore (via King) will also return.
Streetcar service will return to Upper Gerrard and Main Street Station with completion of construction work there.
Streetcars will be replaced on Queen East and on St. Clair for construction.
On 501 Queen, the Ontario Line work at Degrassi (east of Broadview) will require bus service in place of streetcars. As previously announced, the temporary 505 Dundas service to Woodbine Loop will be routed via Gerrard and Coxwell due to the Metrolinx work on Queen.
On St. Clair, reconstruction of St. Clair West Station Loop will require buses over the entire 512 route. This will also affect 33 Forest Hill and 126 Christie (which will interline rather than looping at St. Clair West), and 90 Vaughan which will be extended south to Bathurst Station.
Reconstruction of Dufferin Loop will alter the south end loop arrangements for the 29/929 Dufferin services, and the 504B King to Dufferin service will be extended to Roncesvalles.
The duration of these new construction projects has not been announced.
On May 7, 2023, the eastern terminus of 505 Dundas shifted from Broadview Station to Bingham Loop due to sewer work, track construction and road paving on Broadview north of Gerrard. This will continue into at least the late Fall 2023.
This operation was not a success by any measure with extremely erratic service on Kingston Road where the 505 replaced the 22 Coxwell bus and the 503 Kingston Road streetcar. Service on the main part of 505 Dundas from Broadview to Dundas West Station has also become less reliable.
July 4, 2023, service changes (505 Dundas was cut back to Woodbine Loop and 503 Kingston Road buses (running as unscheduled extras) provided service to Bingham until 8pm to correct this problem, but riders endured almost two months of bad service. This affected not just Kingston Road but the entire 505 Dundas route.
This article reviews service during the May-June 2023 period when 505 Dundas cars ran to Bingham with comparisons to the “before” conditions on routes 505, 503 and 22. It is a long article with many charts for those who are interested in the details of how this service has behaved over the past six months. In Part II I will turn to reviews of operations on a sample of days in May-June.
In brief, the May schedules unwound improvements made in February that adjusted travel times to better match conditions. Moreover, Februrary saw major service cuts to the 505 Dundas route which compounded with less reliable service to make for much wider gaps between cars. In many ways, this was an “own goal” by the TTC.
Oh the irony! The TTC’s Annual Service Plan consultations are all about how to handle a few (but not all) of the construction projects coming in 2024, but the elephant in the room remains bad communications and changes on the fly.
The new routes implemented in May and June 2023 were in cases impractical thanks to a combination of unduly optimistic running times in schedules, less than adequate transit priority and line management whose priority was not the provision of well-spaced, reliable service. Several changes will take effect on July 4 and 5 to correct some of these problems, but the information is scattered through the TTC’s website, if you can find it at all.
First, a summary of the changes:
The 501/504 shuttle bus (an ad hoc service implemented to cover for the absence of the 503 Kingston Road car to King Street downtown) will be rebranded as “503” and will serve Kingston Road to Bingham Loop until 8pm every day. This will become a scheduled bus service at the end of July, and will revert to 503 streetcars likely in October.
The 505 Dundas car will only operate east on Queen from Broadview to Woodbine Loop, except after 8pm when service to Bingham will be provided by streetcars.
The 506 Carlton car will only operate to Queen and Broadview and will return west to route via Queen and Parliament Streets without running east to Woodbine Loop.
The 512 St. Clair car will be restored, temporarily, west of Lansdowne to Gunns Loop. While it lasts, this will correct for the erratic service now provided there by the 47 Lansdowne extension.
The challenge is to find out that this is happening to your route. The TTC website is very poorly organized with information in many places that is inconsistently placed and linked (or not) to the main route pages affected. Some items are out of date, but remain in place to confuse riders. Some items describe major changes but are hard to find if you don’t know the site in detail.
These are the hallmarks of a site maintained by many groups each with its own (probably jealously guarded) responsibility for providing information. Nobody appears to care about overall site consistency and ease of navigation, or if they do, are in any position to change what is a clearly broken process. Some information is just plain wrong indicating that whoever created or updated the page was either sloppy, or does no know what is actually happening.
Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:10am: Changes to the TTC website since this article was posted are noted in various places below.
Updated July 5, 2023 at 4:30pm: Changes to the TTC website since the July 4 update are noted throughout the article.
The TTC will implement two route changes in July to address, in part, problems with service reliability on construction diversions.
Updated June 30, 2023: The location of Salsa on St. Clair has been corrected.
Updated July 1, 2023: The 506 Carlton cutback to Queen and Broadview has been added.
503 Kingston Road / 505 Dundas
Effective Tuesday, July 4, 2023 (July 3 is a holiday), service on Kingston Road to Bingham Loop (Victoria Park) will be revised on weekdays and Saturdays from 6am to 8pm, Sundays from 8am to 8pm:
505 Dundas cars will turn back at Woodbine Loop in stead of running through to Bingham.
503 Kingston Road buses will operate between Bingham Loop and York Street via King. Because these are “extras”, not scheduled buses, they will not appear on trip prediction apps.
After 8pm on all days, the 505 Dundas car will run through to Bingham Loop as it does now.
This change should relieve problems with tight running times that caused many short turns on 505 Dundas and wide gaps both on Kingston Road and on Dundas west of Lansdowne. (I will publish an analysis of 505 Dundas headways and reliability in early July.)
Effective Sunday, July 30, 2023, the 503 Kingston Road bus will operate between 6am and 1am (starting at 8am on Sundays) over its Bingham to York route.
Streetcars are expected to return in the fall, likely on Thanksgiving weekend. It is not yet clear whether the 503 streetcar will permanently replace the evening and weekend service formerly provided by the 22A Coxwell bus.
506 Carlton (Added July 1, 2023)
The 506 Carlton streetcar service will be cut back in the east end to Broadview rather than running east to Woodbine Loop. This will correct a problem with inadequate running time that caused many streetcars to short turn without getting to Woodbine Loop anyhow.
The map below shows the 506C bus diversion via Greenwood and Danforth around track construction at Coxwell and Lower Gerrard. This configuration will be in effect until mid-July when buses can again operate via Gerrard and Coxwell without diverting.
512 St. Clair
Effective Wednesday, July 5, 2023, the 512 St. Clair car will resume operation west to Gunns Loop. Construction at the GO Barrie corridor bridge west of Caledonia has been delayed allowing through service until August. The date when turnbacks at Lansdowne (Earlscourt Loop) will resume is not specified in the TTC announcement.
On the weekend of July 8-9, 2023, streetcar service will be suspended on at least part of the route (TBA) for the Salsa on St. Clair festival between Oakwood and St. Clair West Station.
Service on the temporarily extended 47 Lansdowne bus on St. Clair has been quite erratic. (Stay tuned for an analysis of this operation in coming days.)
The TTC is part way through production of its 2024 Service Plan as well as a 5-Year Service Plan and Customer Experience Action Plan. In Round Two, consultation will focus on plans for service changes triggered by major construction projects. Five pop-up sessions are planned at Flemingdon Park, Union Station, Liberty Village, Finch Terminal, and Pape Station between June 29 and July 12, 2023. Details are available here.
Also available on that page is a link to a survey seeking feedback on various proposals. Please note that my site is not an official TTC conduit for feedback, although it is no secret that many at the TTC do read articles and comments here. Any specific feedback for the TTC should be submitted through their own survey.
Round Three in August-September will present draft concepts for the 5-Year Plan and Customer Experience Action Plan, and these will be refined into final drafts for Round Four in October-November.
The remainder of this article presents an overview of the survey and proposals for construction-related service changes.
There are no proposals for new routes nor of overall service levels in this round. The election of Olivia Chow as Mayor will no doubt bring a review of existing services, but that is not in the scope of this round.
An important issue left over from the 2023 Budget process and the recent service cuts is the question of Service Standards. These are described as “Board Approved”, but in fact the 2023 changes were implemented by management as part of the budget with only retroactive consent from the Board. Moreover, the actual effect of the changes was withheld from the Board and Council until well after the budget was approved.
Transparency in budgets and service planning will be an important change looking ahead to 2024. With a new Mayor I hope to see a much improved process.
Steve Munro 