In a recent “Stakeholder Update” email, the TTC reiterates misleading claims about the service changes implemented on May 12.

Significant Service Increases as of May 12

As of May 12, TTC has TTC increased scheduled service on major routes, delivering more frequent and reliable trips, shorter wait times, and more room for customers on board. The latest round of service increases will bring service to 96% of pre-pandemic levels, the highest since 2019. 24 bus routes now have improved service, mostly in off-peak periods, providing more room on board and improving more than 140,000 daily customer trips.

I reviewed the changes in a previous article showing that in many cases service is actually less frequent than it was before. See:

• Service Improvements That Aren’t

TTC quotes service as being at 96% of pre-pandemic levels. This is measured in vehicle or train hours, not by the actual frequency of service. Some of the changes use additional vehicle hours to address traffic congestion stretching existing service further apart to give longer scheduled trip times. With less frequent buses, these changes do not provide “more room on board”.

The TTC claims that by improving schedule reliability, they simply reflect actual operating conditions and that the former service did not match schedules. This might be true, but still does not reflect the provision of more service measured as buses/hour past your stop.

The tiresome point about this is that one expects spin from what is a “communications” piece telling the official story and putting the TTC in the best possible light. For years the TTC Board under former Mayors has been content to lap up this and other management tales, but an organization hoping to win back riders cannot start by overselling its wares.

The TTC has severe budget problems, but these are not helped by overly rosy claims about improvements that, if anything, undercut calls for better funding. It’s easy and popular to slag the Feds when they don’t belly up to the bar on capital funding, but this applies equally to the City and Province on the operating side.

Riders may see the ads touting better service, but like shoppers lured into a store with a glitzy window display, they soon find what is really on offer.

Today, May 12, the TTC implemented many changes to its services as detailed in my previous article.

• TTC Service Changes Effective May 12, 2024

Earlier in the week, on May 7, the Mayor Chow and TTC Chair Myers, among others, held a press conference to announce widespread service improvements, and the illustration below has appear in the Mayor’s social media feeds.

There is only one problem: several of the routes on this map will see service cuts, not increases. In some cases, there is a service increase, but on only part of a route or at a limited time through the week. The chart below illustrates where and when the changes actually happen.

In parliamentary language, one might say that “the Mayor was badly advised”. However, it is her name and face on an announcement that simply is not true.

TTC management has a long history of spinning service changes to emphasize the gains, such as they might be, while downplaying the cuts. The May 2024 changes were particularly challenging to anyone who wanted the details because the memo containing this information was not released until the afternoon of May 10. Normally it is available one to two weeks in advance. It may have suited the stage management of the press conference to keep it under wraps.

995 York Mills Express was singled out in the press announcement because of the doubling of weekday midday service from 20′ to 10′, but that is a rare example of a significant improvement. It is not typical of the actual changes to the bus network as a whole.

I have already written about the so-called service recovery based on vehicle hours, not on actual service frequency. The TTC itself has noted a decline in traffic and transit speeds in recent years. That, combined with more generous provisions for delay recovery time has pushed up the number of hours even while some routes see less frequent service.

This chart and the following text have been corrected to show changes to 939 Finch East Express which were missed in the first version.

A detailed route-by-route review follows the “more” break.

The TTC’s Planning Page includes reports with statistics for each of the years 2019 through 2023 giving weekday passenger counts, vehicle hours, vehicle mileage and peak vehicles for the fall in each year. Collectively, this information shows the status of ridership and service on the surface network just before the pandemic and through the years following.

Updated April 25, 2024 at 4:10pm: 505 Dundas operated with buses in 2019, and so comparisons to later years’ stats when it was a streetcar show a “recovery” that has more to do with vehicle size and service quality than with an apples-to-apples comparison. This article has been updated in a few places to reflect this. Thanks to a reader for spotting this.

Several points emerge when these data are collected together and compared year-over-year at a route level and for the bus and streetcar networks as a whole.

• The TTC talks of service recovery to 95% of prepandemic levels. This is based on the number of vehicle hours operated. This can be misleading for various reasons, notably:
  • The scheduled speed of many routes is now slower than it was in 2019 due to adjustments both to deal with traffic conditions and to provide more recovery time for operators. Reducing the speed lowers the amount of service provided and so even if vehicle hours are unchanged, there is less service.
• Streetcar vehicle hours are higher in 2023 than 2019, but this is due to bus substitution on various routes or route segments. The use of smaller buses pushes up the vehicle hours required to serve the streetcar network.
• There has been an ongoing drop in the speed of streetcar routes from 2019 to 2023. This is in part due to replacement of the older CLRVs with the new Flexitys, in part due to schedule changes for congestion and various construction projects, and in part due to more restrictive operating practices that slow streetcar movements at junctions.
• Speed of local and express bus operations also fell from 2019 to 2023, although not as much as for streetcars.
• The replacement of the SRT by bus routes has added to bus hours and mileage, but to a lesser extent to bus ridership because continuous trips through STC to Kennedy Station count as only one boarding.

The recovery rates for subsets of the network vary, as they do for different metrics.

A further complication is that with ridership shifts, total riding on a route might go up, but the distribution of riding through the day and week may have changed. This is not reflected in TTC data which simply gives a daily total figure for each route.

This article consolidates five years’ worth of data for all surface routes in one place for easy reference, and shows that “recovery” is a complex subject where details are hidden by looking at only one metric and at overall averages.

At the end of the article there are linked PDFs containing all of the tables.

On March 31, the TTC will make service changes on several routes. Many of these include small service increases and/or adjusted travel times to reflect conditions on the routes.

Major changes include:

• Reconfiguration of routes for construction at:
  • Lawrence West and Lawrence Stations
  • Sheppard-Yonge Station
  • Pape Station
• Return of streetcars on 301 Queen Night
• Service on 905 Eglinton East Express will change from using articulated to standard buses
• Adjustments to travel times on bus routes in the STC corridor