The TTC Board met on April 16 with many items on its agenda including a report on Extreme Precipitation Planning.

Anyone living in Toronto will remember the heavy rains of July 2024 and the snows of February 2025. July 15-16 brought 115mm of rain within 24 hours, higher than the 100-year design for storms. From February 8-17, Toronto saw over 60cm of snow accumulation with no melts between storms. This was the highest snow pack in 25 years.

Both of these events revealed shortfalls in both TTC’s and City’s response to extreme weather. They also undermined the credibility of management claims of the transit system’s physical state, and the City’s false claims about snow clearing. The split jurisdiction between TTC and City forces did not help the situation either.

Among the issues raised in the report are:

• The (in)adequacy of drainage on City streets to prevent ponding and flooding of underground structures.
• The (in)adequacy of TTC drains for streetcar tracks, subway tunnels and stations.
• The condition of drainage and pumping systems from inadequate maintenance and deferred replacement of aged equipment.
• The integrity of TTC buildings, tunnels and other infrastructure to prevent or limit water penetration.
• The actual condition of roads that were supposedly plowed versus reported conditions.
• The absence of snow clearing at transit stops.
• The creation of windrows both along curbs and between streetcar and adjacent lanes where the curb lane is not used by autos.
• The failure to remove accumulated snow on transit routes causing repeated cases of parked cars blocking streetcars, and in some cases, buses.
• The TTC’s ability to keep subway open cut areas operational when there is a large accumulation of snow on the tracks and power rails.
• The adequacy and timeliness of public information provided to riders about transit operations during emergency conditions.

Many of these are interrelated. For example, if snow were actually cleared to the curb on four-lane roads with streetcars or buses, then autos would park normally rather than obstructing the only other lane available for transit vehicles. If maintenance of drainage and pumping systems (both day-to-day and life-cycle) kept them in working order, then less water would accumulate and potentially block service or render stations unsafe. If passengers could board and alight from transit vehicles with their usual ease, buses and streetcars would not be delayed attempting to serve snowed-in stops.

Among the TTC’s observations is the challenge of operating streetcars and articulated buses in bad weather, particularly snow. How much of this an inherent shortcoming of the vehicles, and how much is the effect of inadequate infrastructure maintenance and snow clearing?

Both from the delay logs and from personal experience, transit vehicles continued to be blocked by parked cars, and stops were blocked by snow, well after the snowfall ended. Some of the snowbanks did not dissipate until they melted. One particularly ironic location was at the southbound stop on Bay at Albert Street, the City Hall stop.

These are not just issues for the once-in-a-blue-moon weather events, but for the general condition and robustness of transit and related city infrastructure.

The report actually contemplates the purchase of spare buses, and possibly a new garage to hold them, to deal with periods when streetcars and articulated buses have operating difficulties. This would present a substantial premium in fleet size, garaging and staffing for these vehicles. One cannot help asking if the same money invested in better service generally would be more productive, combined with more aggressive storm responses when needed.The TTC is silent on the subway (for which bus replacements are completely inadequate even in good weather), and on the extra staff who would have to be available on the off chance of a bad storm.

This ludicrous approach avoids responsibility for making the streets and the transit system as robust as possible in their own right. Elsewhere I have written about the TTC’s bad habit of maintaining a spare ratio for their fleets well above industry targets, and “just buying more buses” would make the problem even worse. It is the kind of response I would expect from a system whose CEO considers crowded buses a mark of success, and months-long slow orders on deteriorated subway track as perfectly normal.

The TTC routinely trots out its list of unfunded capital projects. Critical maintenance such as replacement of pumps for subway tunnels is on that list. This is not a “nice to have”, but essential for safety. However, the problem is not just in capital funding, but under-resourcing of routine maintenance, an operating budget issue. We know the effects this brought to subway and SRT track. What other aspects of the system are waiting to fail?

The capital budget lines related to extreme weather effects total $1.4 billion of which only $360 million is funded in 2025-2034, mainly in the early years. (See TTC Major Projects Update and Funding Shortfalls for details.)

The TTC will make several service changes on March 30, 2025. Most of the changes will increase the frequency of service, but in some cases there are reductions. There are also a few cases where the new schedules adjust travel times, but the frequency is unchanged.

Updated March 27, 2025 at 10:15am: The detailed spreadsheet showing changes in headways, travel times and vehicle assignments is now available.

• 20250330_ServiceChanges

Updated March 28, 2025 at 11:15pm: Erroneous entries in the first/last trip table that were copied from the TTC’s service change memo have been updated with information from the electronic version of the schedules (GTFS) on the City’s Open Data site.

There are relatively few service changes for the mid-February schedules, and most are on the bus network. There is no change in subway service.

The major change for construction is the start of work at the Bathurst, Fleet, Lake Shore intersection for water main replacement and track renewal. This will be ongoing in stages until June 2025. 511 Bathurst and 509 Harbourfront cars will be replaced by buses at the south and west ends of each line respectively.

With the completion of construction at Jane Station, the temporary route shifts to Old Mill and Runnymede Stations are reversed and service returns to Jane Station. This change is actually already in place 26 Dupont, 35/935/335 Jane, and 55 Warren Park. The schedules are now catching up. The 71/77 Runnymede/Swansea interline will be broken and the individual routes will loop in Runnymede Station.

Bus bay allocations at Warden and Victoria Park Stations will change to better suit the routes operating there.

Destination signs on many routes will be modified to standardize references to stations such as Scarborough Town Centre, Coxwell, Greenwood and Wilson Stations.

Service on the 300 Bloor-Danforth and 320 Yonge night buses will be improved to deal with scheduling and crowding problems. I have an article in preparation on this situation using December 2024 and January 2025 tracking data as a “before” view of service quality which is extremely poor.

The TTC produces a monthly summary of On Time Performance for its bus and streetcar networks. To call it superficial would be generous, but there are pretty charts.

First and most obvious among the problems is that the TTC never hits their target which is 90% across the system. Streetcars fare worse than buses because proportionately more of that network is affected by construction and diversions.

“On time” is defined as leaving a terminal within a six minute window from 1 minute early to 5 minutes late. In practice, for routes with frequent service, this means that vehicles can run in pairs but be counted as “on time”. A related problem affects branching routes where there is no management nor measurement of the regularity of services merging together on an even spacing.

There is no standard nor measurement of schedule adherence anywhere else on the route. Most riders do not board at terminals, and so service quality is not measured where most riders see it.

The second problem is that the reported numbers aggregate an entire month’s data for every route. There is no indication of problem routes or time periods, or of how this relates to periods when many riders are trying to use the service.

In an attempt to learn the details beyond the summary numbers, TTCRiders recently made a Freedom of Information Request for route and time period “on time” data from September 1 to November 16, 2024.

The charts in this article review the TTC data at increasing levels of detail to show how different that view is from the simplistic summary values published as “key performance indicators” in the CEO’s Report.

First, here is a breakdown by mode. The roughly echoes the values reported by the TTC with bus service achieving just over 80% “on time” trips and streetcars about 70%. Broken out here are the Express Bus routes (900 series) and the Blue Night routes (300 series). Note that night services which should have no problems with traffic congestion do not fare well.

When the status for each mode is subdivided by time of day, things are not quite as rosy. In the charts below, there are four sets of columns corresponding to weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and Holidays. Within these are six time periods.

• Weekdays: AM Peak, Midday, PM Peak, Early Evening, Late Evening, Overnight
• Others: Early Morning, Late Morning, Afternoon, Early Evening, Late Evening, Overnight

Note that “on time” performance for streetcars (green) falls in the evenings and especially on weekends. Nowhere in the official KPIs does the TTC admit to only hitting 50% “on time” on part of its network.

The upper right chart shows the proportion of late trips (more than 5 minutes after a scheduled departure). The percentages are high in the PM peak and evenings, with Saturday being particularly bad.

The lower left chart shows the proportion of early trips (more than 59 seconds before a scheduled departure). Streetcars run early at terminals much more than buses. This might be related to the idea of getting a “head start” on a trip where delays are anticipated on busy downtown routes.

The lower right chart shows missed trips. These are defined as trips that are over 20 minutes late or just do not show up at the terminal. This can occur due to short turns, operator or vehicle shortages, or severe schedule disruption. Note that on Saturday evenings about 1/6 of the streetcar service never reaches its terminus.

The yellow bars (night service) only appear on the rightmost of the six columns because that is when 300-series routes are in service. About 20% of the service is late or early, and on Saturdays [actually Sunday morning] about 10% of service is missing at terminals. Reliability is quite poor on a service riders depend on for safe travel to and from shift work.

In the following section, charts provide a route-by-route view of performance. They illustrate the wide variation by route and time period that is completely lost in overall averages. Many routes achieve 90% “on time” status much of the time and these pull up the system averages. However, some routes perform quite poorly. This problem did not just develop in the past few months. Consolidated reporting masks the problem routes and times, and hence the need for management to address service reliability.