This article includes reviews of the 29/929 Dufferin local and express services to the end of 2025. The major item of interest is the introduction of “red lanes” south of Bloor Street and their effect on the bus service. Detailed charts are included here for:
November and December travel times in both directions between King and Bloor.
January 2024 to December 2025 historical stats on travel times.
The segment between Lawrence and Wilson that does not have transit priority, but which has much more congestion than at the south end of the route thanks to Yorkdale Mall.
General observations:
The benefit of the red lanes is more pronounced for northbound than for southbound trips, and only at certain times of the day.
There is much more severe disruption of service northbound near Yorkdale Mall, but no transit priority measures are proposed there.
Headways on Dufferin remain widely scattered near terminals (northbound at King, southbound at Transit Road just outside of Wilson Station).
Even on Christmas Day when weather was relatively benign and travel times were lower than normal, headways were not reliable.
Part of the improvement in travel time in December 2025 could be due to seasonal effects. When the data are in for early 2026, we will see how long-lived the saving actually is. I will publish an update to this article in a few months when the pattern is clear.
There are a lot of charts in this article, and I have put them all after the “more” break. Those who are interested in the details can open the full article.
I will turn to a review of 511 Bathurst streetcar and 7 Bathurst bus which both saw recent changes in future articles.
Update: For clarity, the red lanes currently extend only as far north as Dundas. After work up to Bloor is completed in the Spring, I will publish an update showing the effect.
The TTC has issued a press release confirming the times for start of service on December 7:
Line 6 Finch West – Toronto’s newest transit line – will officially open to customers on Sun. Dec. 7. The first westbound train will depart from Norfinch Oakdale Station at 7:33 a.m., while the first eastbound train will leave Jane & Finch Station at 7:47 a.m.
For detailed first train times at each of the 18 new Line 6 stations, customers are encouraged to visit the official TTC schedules page: https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules.
Before regular service begins, two ceremonial trains will depart from Finch West Station.
Opening day is expected to be busy, and the TTC has organized special activities to mark the occasion. Customers will have the opportunity to collect exclusive Line 6 souvenirs, including special-edition ride guides, vehicle cutouts, and limited-edition commemorative coins and buttons.
[…]
Opening day schedule
On Sun., Dec. 7, the TTC will host a celebratory opening at Finch West Station. The planned opening day schedule is below:
• 7:00 a.m. – Brief remarks from dignitaries. • 7:20 a.m. — A ceremonial first train will depart Finch West Station. This trip will be reserved for media and invited guests. • 7:27 a.m. — A second train will depart Finch West Station. Members of the public are welcome to board and join the celebration. This train will be travelling to Driftwood Station and returning to Finch West Station. It will not be picking up customers at other stops. • 7:33 a.m. — The first in-service train will depart Norfinch Oakdale Station, heading west.
Note that the schedule pages for Line 6 have not been loaded yet, but you can see the early Sunday morning service on the Finch Corridor below, and the full schedule for 6 Finch West in this pdf. The schedules should go live on the TTC’s site when they flip over to the December 7 versions on the weekend.
Original article:
This post contains a consolidated view of schedules for:
6 Finch West LRT
36 Finch West Bus
336 Finch West Night Bus
The period covered is 6 to 9am on Sundays, and these timetables show the transition from the night bus covering the entire route to the split bus/LRT operation east and west of Finch West Station during the daytime.
The information is taken from the GTFS version of the schedules for these routes published on the City’s Open Data site recently. My intent in producing this is that the new schedules will not go live on the TTC site until December 7, and many eager transit aficionados will want to know the times of service at various locations on the route in time to plan to ride early trips.
The TTC’s web page about Line 6 gives a generic start time of 7:30am for the route on Sundays, but actual times vary along the route.
In the timetables below, the LRT trips are in bold italics. Only major stops are shown to save space.
For those unfamiliar with the new line, the carhouse is located between Jane and Norfinch stations, and some trips originate there during the build-up of service.
With the constant changes in route diversions for various construction projects, water and sewer repairs and overhead reconstruction, the previous Fall 2025 edition was getting cluttered and unwieldy. This version consolidates the current and planned work for late fall and early winter 2025-26.
Updated February 11 at 11:25pm
Current diversions:
Until February 13:
501 Queen cars divert both ways via Coxwell, Gerrard, Broadview, Dundas and Parliament due to work by Toronto Water.
Until Spring 2026:
501 Queen cars divert both ways via Broadview, Dundas and Parliament.
503 Kingston Road buses divert both ways from River via Queen and Parliament.
504 King cars terminate at Distillery Loop.
504D King buses operate from Broadview Station to King & Parliament
Ongoing:
501 Queen cars divert both ways via Church, Richmond/Adelaide and York.
This article reviews the change in travel times and speed profiles on 510 Spadina, 511 Bathurst and 512 St. Clair between October 2019 and October 2025 (pre- and post-pandemic). In almost every case, streetcars are slower today than they were six years ago even though two of the three routes have reserved lanes.
511 Bathurst will soon have red lanes from Fleet to Bloor (except for a section north of Dundas), and I will publish updated charts for that route when the lane changes are in place.
By October 2019, streetcar service was almost completely operated with the new Flexity cars, and so the change over time is not explained with a comparison between the sprightlier CLRVs and the newer cars. (For 512 St. Clair, I have also included a comparison with the CLRV era to show the effect of the vehicle change separate from the pre/post pandemic change in traffic conditions.)
TTC is overly fond of laying blame for transit vehicle speeds on “traffic congestion”, but that is too simplistic an analysis especially for routes with reserved lanes. They also have a bad habit of presenting data without the granularity needed to identify patterns and problems by time of day and location. There are many charts in the main part of this article, but they are intended to show each route in detail.
One important point is that it is impossible to know how much change in speed comes from a more cautious operating philosophy as opposed to traffic conditions. There is, of course, the slow operation through junctions, but that does not explain slower travel on straight track with no special work. Traffic signal effects also show up, particularly in time spent holding nearside at intersections and then again at farside stops. Some areas are inherently slower than others such as Spadina from Queen south with many close-spaced intersections and signals that generally favour east-west traffic. The situation is particularly bad between Front and Queens Quay where the primary job of signals is to handle traffic to/from the Gardiner Expressway.
Any move to speed up operations on streetcar routes requires more than quick fixes like stop eliminations, and detailed block-by-block reviews are needed. In some cases there will be trade-offs between transit and other road users. Arguments for better priority will fare better if and when the TTC improves service so that there are actually transit vehicles to prioritize.
In a previous article, I examined the report on the Bunching & Gapping pilot now in progress at the TTC.
At the November 3 Board meeting, there was almost no discussion of that report, but in its place management provided a short presentation. Unfortunately, this portion of the meeting was not uploaded to YouTube, and so readers will not be able to view it for greater detail.
Information about hot spots on routes was presented in a different way from the original report. Both versions are shown below.
Original VersionPresentation Version
The original version has more granularity showing the issues specific to each route segment.
The presentation shown at the meeting included a hot spots map across the whole system, but this is not included in the published deck. I will ask TTC for a copy and add it here when available.
The important point about that map is that the hot spots are all over the city, while conventional wisdom presents this more as a downtown, streetcar-centric problem.
Results on the pilot routes have been mixed, and even this has required a high level of supervision that likely would not scale to the entire system and most hours of service. As an alternative, the TTC is considering an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool developed at York University. Initially this would be used in an advisory manner to route supervisors who would decide whether its recommendations were valid. Later, it would directly instruct operators to hold enroute to even out headways.
A decision to hold a vehicle would take into account the relative loads of the leading (gap) bus and the trailing (bunched) one. Ideally, a bunched bus will have the lighter load and holding it to space service will affect fewer riders. This is not always the case if pairs of buses leap-frog to share the work along a route, and the “trailing” bus might have the heavier load at some points.
A proof of concept dashboard gives an idea of what might be presented to a route supervisor. This shows recommended holds, as well as the distribution of historical and predicted bunching. Note that the scale on the chart is the number of bunched buses, not the gap size to be corrected.
The challenge here will be for the AI model to predict future behaviour. Many things affect bus spacing, and some of them are not predictable. For example, irregular terminal departures can begin a process where a small gap gradually widens. That effect can be predicted and service adjusted, but the actual late or early departure is only known when it happens. Developing gaps are easy to spot along a route because the future service at a location can be predicted by what is in the few kilometres approaching it.
Congestion caused by accidents cannot be predicted, but the act of smoothing out service can deal with its results at least in part based on past experience with similar events. There is no mention of short turns or tracking of issues with buses running late due to insufficient schedule time, or the timidity of a junior operator.
Notable in the presentation is the implication of headway management, not on-time performance. The TTC needs to decide which of these it will adopt and incorporate that into terminal dispatching.
There is also the question of whether the Service Standards are too generous in defining the allowable variation in “on-time” and “headway” values. Departures are supposed to be no more than 5 minutes late, and never early. Headways on a 10-minute service like 7 Bathurst can vary from 5 to 15 minutes. If the AI tool uses these as its goal, it will perpetuate the uneven service allowed by the standards, particularly in headway management. There is also a danger that route speed will be determined by spacing service to accommodate the slowest drivers.
No computer system inherently “knows” what it is supposed to achieve, and depends on the parameters set down by its developers. If the TTC does not fully understand what “good service” should look like, an AI tool will only work toward expectations built into its design. An important component should be the ability to tighten or relax the targets for “good” service management.
TTC plans to shift the focus of its more intense supervision from the 7 Bathurst and 24/924 Victoria Park routes to 29/929 Dufferin and 25/925 Don Mills. I have collected tracking data on these routes for some time, and will publish analyses of changes in route behaviour after a few months have accumulated.
The Board approved the following motion:
Request TTC staff report back to the TTC’s Strategic Planning Committee as a part of consideration for 2026 budget priorities on the resource requirements, staffing, and operational needs to sustain a full-year Bunching and Gapping Pilot in 2026 as well as the feasibility of expanding the pilot to additional key routes across the City to improve service and reliability.
The next meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee is on November 25, 2025.
At the TTC Board meeting on November 3, management presented statistics on streetcar delays broken down by type of incident. TTC is quite fond of portraying external incidents, especially those related to congestion, as the root of (almost) all evil. The following page is from the CEO’s Report.
Note that external delays (turquoise) occupy the majority of the chart. During discussion of the problem of autos fouling rails, a passing remark by the Interim Chief Operating Officer piqued my curiosity when he said that there were many delays due to the winter storm.
This sent me to the TTC’s delay statistics which are available on the City’s Open Data site. There are codes for many types of delay including “MTAFR”, short for “Auto Fouling Rails”.
According to the “In Focus” box above there has been a 400% year-over-year increase in these delays, although they are styled as “fowling” implying a flock of chickens might be responsible for service issues.
Sorting the data by code and summarizing by date produces interesting results.
Between January 1 and September 30, 2025, there were 843 MTAFR events logged.
Of these, 586 fall between February 14 and 26 hitting a daily high of 65 on February 17.
These blockages were not caused by the typical traffic congestion, but by the City’s utter failure to clear snow on key streets.
105 were on 501 Queen
42 were on 503 Kingston Rd.
84 were on 504 King
93 were on 505 Dundas
186 were on 506 Carlton
3 were on 507 Long Branch
1 was on 508 Lake Shore
2 were on 509 Harbourfront
None were on 510 Spadina or 511 Bathurst
6 were on 512 St. Clair
A few dozen were on various night cars
The pattern here is quite clear: routes on wide roads or rights-of-way were not seriously affected, but routes on regular 4-lane streets were hammered. (How 511 Bathurst was spared is a mystery. At the time it was running with streetcars from Bathurst Station to King & Spadina, and with buses on the south end of the route.)
To claim that the 400% increase from 2024 is some indication of worsening traffic problems is gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. Although this is the CEO’s report and he almost certainly did not assemble the information himself, he wears this issue for having reported misleading data to the Board and public.
Direct comparison with published 2024 data is difficult because until 2025 the TTC used a much coarser set of delay codes that lumped many types of events under generic headings. There was a category “Held by” in which there were 625 incidents from January to September in 2024. The 843 MTAFR codes in 2025 are quite clearly not a 400% increase over 2024.
Whenever there is a discussion of unreliable service, we hear endlessly about traffic congestion. This definitely is a problem, but not the only one, and certainly not in the way presented by the CEO.
A question arose during the debate about the problem that performance stats are consolidated across all routes. Route-by-route service quality is presented in detail in the second part of this article for all streetcar routes. This shows that problems are widespread in the system, even on routes with reserved lanes.
As for the delay stats cited by the CEO, it is clear that we are not comparing September 2025 to one year earlier as the text implies, but using events from the entire year to date including a major snowstorm that had no equivalent a year earlier. The so-called 400% jump in delays from blocked tracks is due to snow and poor road clearance by the City.
TTC management owes the Board and the public an apology for blatant misrepresentation of the delay statistics.
The TTC has a pilot program underway on several routes with increased supervision in an attempt to improve service quality by addressing service gaps and bunching. These are complementary effects in that a gap is often followed by a bunch, although gaps can also occur due to missing vehicles and short turns. See:
The pilot evolved over the year as some of the challenges and resource needs to manage service became apparent.
March 2025
Pilot launched on 7 Bathurst, 24 Victoria Park, 924 Victoria Park Express, 25 Don Mills, 925 Don Mills Express, 29 Dufferin, 929 Dufferin Express, 100 Flemington Park, 165 Weston Road North, 506 Carlton, 512 St Clair. Dedicated staff to manage each route were not used initially and results were poor.
June 2025
The pilot was scaled back to 7 Bathurst, 24 Victoria Park, 924 Victoria Park Express, 506 Carlton, and 512 St Clair. One route supervisor was assigned to each route.
September 2025
100 Flemingdon Park and 165 Weston Road North were added.
October 2025
Pilot “refined” to focus on the weekday peak periods.
The TTC recognizes that delays leading to gaps can be caused by several effects: “including including Operator behaviour, customer incidents, traffic congestion, city events, construction, and operational factors, such as door/ramp operations.” [p. 2]
Later in the report, there is mention of the effect of passenger loads and long traffic signal wait times.
If vehicles are crowded either because service is inadequate for demand, or because a gap creates an extra load, they will take longer at stops. Filling vehicles to the brim can be counter-productive and inefficient. Space limitations onboard can delay passenger movement especially for those with large objects (e.g. strollers, luggage) and mobility devices. Although ramp operations are mentioned, there are many other types of passengers with extra space and boarding time needs.
Transit signal priority is also mentioned, but there is no indication of where or what priority measures were added on the pilot routes.
The remainder of this article reviews the metrics used by the TTC to track the success of the pilot project, as well as problems and actions that might be taken to resolve them.
This post continues from Part I, and is broken off from it simply in the interest of keeping each article a reasonable size. For introductory comments please see Part I.
Routes included here are:
65 Parliament 70 O’Connor 72 Pape 75 Sherbourne 83 Jones 87 Cosburn 88 South Leaside
91 Woodbine 92 Woodbine South 111 East Mall 112 West Mall 114 Queens Quay East 154 Curran Hall 168 Symington
Problems seen on many routes in Part I show up here as well including:
Less reliable service on evenings and weekends
Missed trips due to missing buses without an attempt to rebalance headways to eliminate wide gaps
Most readers are only interested in some of the routes here, and that is why I have only published a few charts per route with links to details in PDF sets. Only the truly keen (some might say obsessed) and, of course, those whose job it is to know these details will look at just about everything.
Apologies if I’ve missed your route. I plan to look at others once the Line 5 and 6 changes fully cut in to see how new service designs work.
To those who ask why I publish so many of these route analyses, the answer is, sadly, that it takes a lot of data to make the point that erratic service is not found on only a few routes, nor only on major city-spanning bus and streetcar routes. “Traffic congestion” is too simplistic an explanation too often raised by the TTC, and it simply does not apply in some times and locations where these routes have poor service. TTC has no metric to report on this problem, and therefore no tracking mechanism to flag issues or the result of corrective strategies, if any.
The City of Toronto has announced that work at King & Dufferin is finished and the intersection will reopen to traffic on Wednesday, October 29 after 7pm.
Regular service will be restored on 29/929/329 Dufferin, and the 503 Kingston Road bus will be extended west from Joe Shuster Way (east of Dufferin) to Roncesvalles at 5am on Thursday, October 30.
TTC will test the new track and overhead during the week of November 3 and will restore 504 King and 508 Lake Shore services from their current Shaw/Queen diversion when the intersection is cleared for streetcar operation.
Meanwhile, the TTC CEO’s Report notes that six minute or better service will come to 505 Dundas and 511 Bathurst from 7am-7pm 7 days/week starting November 16.
Many of the service analyses on this site concern larger, major routes like the streetcar lines and bus routes crossing substantial distances in the suburbs. The picture of service quality is not a pretty one. Starting with this article, I will review service on several of the shorter routes, many with infrequent service, to see how the TTC fares. Short routes get frequent stops at terminals where headways can be reset, but irregular service can mean long waits for riders.
Many of these routes show very irregular service and one cannot help asking how this affects ridership. The TTC talks about improving service on major routes with interventions such as reserved lanes, but seems incapable of managing headways on relatively minor routes. There is a parallel here with declining maintenance quality where issues with the “little things that don’t matter” start to bleed into the major services and the system drives away as many riders as new services might attract.
Common problems seen on most of the routes reviewed here are:
Headways do not generally stay within a narrow band, but can be badly scattered especially for evening and weekend service.
In spite of this scatter, it is quite possible that the routes meet the TTC’s service standards which merge performance over an entire day, and provide a wide margin for data points outside of the target range (40%).
Review of the detailed tracking data (not included here in the interest of space) shows that some of the widest gaps occur because of missing buses. There is a metric in the service standards for missed trips with a goal to “minimize” them, albeit with no target. Trips can be missed because no operator or vehicle is available, or because of a short turn before a bus reaches the terminal, or because of such extreme lateness that it might as well not have operated. This statistic has never been reported in the monthly service quality metrics.
Bus bunching occurs even on routes with scheduled headways of 20-30 minutes, and this can persist for multiple trips showing little effort to space out service. Where the quality metric is “on time performance”, spacing service to compensate for bunched or missing vehicles can actually work against a “good” score even though what riders see would be more reliable.
31 Greenwood 49 Bloor West 50 Burnhamthorpe 62 Mortimer 64 Main 65 Parliament
An additional 13 routes will be included in Part II of this series.
65 Parliament 70 O’Connor 72 Pape 75 Sherbourne 83 Jones 88 South Leaside
91 Woodbine 92 Woodbine South 111 East Mall 112 West Mall 114 Queens Quay East 154 Curran Hall 168 Symington
After the “more” break, data for one route, 8 Broadview, are shown in detail as an introduction. Further routes are shown only in summary, but with links to PDFs containing all of the charts for readers interested in them.
Steve Munro 