Dufferin Bus

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King West Construction Update

The City of Toronto has announced that the planned replacement of track at the intersection of King & Dufferin Streets will not occur in 2024 due to “supply chain issues”. Instead this work will be included in the 2025 construction schedule which already included reconstruction of King from Dufferin to Close.

The intersection replacement was originally planned for June-July with full closure of both streets. That will not happen and routes will stay on their current diversions pending reopening of King Street east of Dufferin. That was planned for year-end, but has now been moved forward to November 2024.

The project website contains current details of plans.

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King & Queen West Service Changes February 18, 2024

For those who have been wondering where my usual wrap-up of coming service changes is, it seems to be stuck in the managerial bowels of the TTC. A few weeks ago I was led to believe that its release was imminent, but as of the evening of February 11, crickets.

See also:

There is an online public event on the evening of Thursday, February 15 for which you can register via the City’s site. You can also subscribe to updates on the City’s page (the link is at the bottom).

Major changes to routes in the Parkdale and Liberty Village area are coming on February 18, and the details have been posted for a while elsewhere. Time for me to catch up. When the service memo comes out, I will flesh this out with service frequency details. Here is a map showing the wandering routes in the west end.

King Street will be closed between Shaw and Dufferin for water main and track work. This is a multi-stage project, although from a transit point of view it will have two configurations.

Effective February 18, 2024:

King Street will close between Shaw and Dufferin. Various routes will change to provide service, such as they can.

63 Ossington will no longer loop northbound via Atlantic and King to Shaw, but will be extended west via Liberty, Dufferin and King to Sunnyside Loop west of Roncesvalles.

29/929 Dufferin routes are not affected at this stage of the project.

501 Queen will vary by time of day. The eastern terminus remains at McCaul Loop, but the western terminus will change.

  • Until 10pm, all 501 Queen cars will run only as far west as Dufferin Street, and they will turn south to Dufferin Loop (CNE Western Gate).
  • After 10pm, all 501 Queen cars will run through to Long Branch as they do now replacing the 507 Long Branch car.

301 Queen night car bus service will continue to operate between Neville and Long Branch.

504 King cars will also vary by time of day:

  • Cars on both the 504A and 504B branches will divert via Shaw and Queen to Roncesvalles.
  • 504A Dundas West cars will run north to Dundas West Station at all times.
  • 504B cars that would normally run to Dufferin Loop will run west on Queen.
    • Before 10pm, 504B cars will run through to Humber Loop replacing the 501 Queen service which will divert to Dufferin Loop.
    • After 10pm, 504B cars will terminate at Roncesvalles.
  • Note that streetcar service to Broadview Station will be restored and so the 504B cars will no longer end at Distillery Loop, but will run to their normal east end destination.

304 King night service will operate between Broadview and Dundas West Stations diverting via Shaw and Queen. [Updated Feb. 12 at 11:40am] The TTC media release confirms that the night service will operate with streetcars.

507 Long Branch service is not affected.

508 Lake Shore cars will divert via Shaw and Queen, but will otherwise operate on their normal route.

Effective Late June 2024

Note: The work at King & Dufferin has been postponed to 2025.

The intersection of King & Dufferin will close for complete reconstruction of the track. This will require changes in the 501 Queen and 63 Ossington diversions, as well as a revised south end for the 29/929 Dufferin services, but details have not yet been announced.

Effective August 2024

With the completion of work at King & Dufferin, routes should revert to the February configuration, but nothing is definite about TTC plans as riders know well. Stay tuned.

The work is supposed to continue until “early December” according to the TTC site, but until “November” according to the City site. Normally, the schedule change would occur in late November, and so it is not clear just what date they are aiming at. The usual December change is for the two-week holiday schedules just before Christmas.

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Travel Times on RapidTO Corridors – December 2023 Update – Part I

This article updates tracking charts of travel times on three proposed RapidTO bus corridors with data to the end of 2023. The routes covered are:

  • 29/929 Dufferin from King to Wilson
  • 35/935 Jane from Eglinton to Pioneer Village Station
  • 39/939 Finch East from Victoria Park to McCowan
  • 54 Lawrence East from Victoria Park to PortUnion

I will turn to other RapidTO corridors including the existing Eglinton-Kingston red lanes in Part II of this series.

Without going into a lot of interpretive detail, the purpose of these charts is:

  • To show the travel times under “best case” conditions of low road traffic in Spring 2020 (the covid pandemic onset), and the changes since that time.
  • To show the variation in travel times day-by-day and at varying times of the day.

If RapidTO can flatten out variations in travel times and get the typical time to a consistently lower level, bus service should not only be faster but more reliable. That was the goal on King Street which, for a time, achieved it’s purpose of improving transit.

The focus of too much transit politics is on saving time getting from point “A” to “B” and not enough on ensuring that this time is consistent from day-to-day, hour-to-hour. This includes both on-vehicle travel time and reliability of the interval between buses, a frequent topic on this site.

Toronto’s Executive Committee will consider a report RapidTO: Surface Transit Network Plan at its meeting on January 30, 2024. I will report on the full document after their discussion and additional information, if any, from the meeting.

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Where Is My Diversion Notice (July 2/23 Edition) (Update 2)

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.

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TTC 2024 Service Plan Consultation Round Two

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.

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Evolution of Bus Route Travel Times, 2020-2023, Part I

This post reviews travel times on bus routes, primarily those that either have or are planned to get RapidTO red lanes for all-day transit priority. This continues from earlier examinations of the effects of changing traffic conditions on travel times over the course of the pandemic.

These articles will be the last in which I will present data for multiple routes to track post-pandemic recovery of traffic levels. I will continue to collect data, but will publish updates only if a specific route is actively under discussion for RapidTO treatment.

This article deals with routes west of Yonge Street: Dufferin, Keele, Jane, Steeles West and Lawrence West. In Part II I will turn to routes east of Yonge.

Note that an analysis of 35/935 Jane is in a separate, more extensive pair of articles in light of the current review of that corridor for RapidTO red lanes.

The format of charts used here is different from previous articles which summarized data on a weekly or monthly basis, subdivided by hour of the day. As the number of data points grew, these charts were no longer workable. Here I have adopted the style used in, among other things, my tracking of travel times on King Street which include day-by-day data, but only for a single hour of the day on each chart.

The values shown are the 50th and 85th percentiles. The 50th is the median value within a set of points where half of the trips took longer, and half of them a shorter time. The 85th is a value which captures the higher values but discards outliers that might only represent one trip within a group.

For the most part, these charts cover the period from March 2020 to May 2023, with some additional data from earlier months where I have it. My purpose in collecting the data was to monitor travel time changes with reduced traffic congestion and stop service times of the pandemic era.

Although there is no way to definitively prove this without actual implementation of red lanes, my premise is that conditions during the worst months of the pandemic show the most that is likely to be achieved by getting traffic out of the way. Additional changes such as traffic signal priority or selective elimination of stops is not specifically a red lane gain, but might be implemented concurrently. Those are beyond the scope of comparisons here.

As a general note, the onset of the pandemic travel restrictions in mid-March 2020 is quite clear in the data, as are other events such as changes in lockdown severity. Also quite clear is the effect of the mid-January 2022 and February 2023 snow storms, and on some routes, a lengthy return to then-normal travel times probably due to inadequate snow clearing.

Each set of charts is presented with data for the same period but opposite directions side by side. These charts can be quite different reflecting both geographic differences and loading patterns by direction. Charts are shown for the hours beginning at 8am (am peak), 1pm (midday), 5pm (pm peak), 8pm (early evening) and 10pm (late evening).

Where local and express routes operate together, the stats for the two services are shown separately, and a comparative set of charts shows the median values for each service.

In all cases, the Y-axis starts at 20 minutes, not zero, because data values are higher than 20 and this tactic gives charts more “elbow room”. In some cases the values drop to zero because there are no data for a specific date. This was particularly noticeable in November 2021 after the cyber attack on TTC systems.

Conclusions

  • Based on the drop in travel time in March 2020 and other subsequent covid-related changes in road traffic and transit demand, the potential for reduced travel times through transit priority varies considerably from route to route, by time and by direction. The amount of improvement through red lanes will not be uniform over each route.
  • Many trip times recovered to pre-pandemic levels or higher well before the city as a whole was “open”, and some times are now higher than they were three years ago. This accentuates the need for transit priority because longer trip times affect:
    • the cost of providing service (more buses to provide the same service),
    • frequency of service (the same buses running further apart), and
    • rider wait and travel times.
  • Express services, when they operate, offer a relatively small change in travel time versus the corresponding local services based on median travel times.
  • By analogy to the King Street pilot, the reduction in variability of travel times is at least as important in improving service reliability as any absolute reduction in the time required for trips.
  • Any proposal for transit priority should take these factors into account both for selective versus blanket implementation, and to ensure that the potential benefits are not oversold.

For those who want the details (and a lot of charts), read on.

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Charting Service Frequency (2)

In a previous article, I presented a proposed way to display service frequency on a route in a manner that, I hoped, would convey the pervasiveness of irregular service, be clear to casual readers, and in a consistent format. Several readers commented on this either on Twitter or via email, and I thank all for their contributions.

One immediate change, which I included in an addendum to the article, was to replace the vehicles/hour counts (which indicated how many buses or streetcars passed a point each hour) with an average wait time for a would-be rider. That time was calculated on a weighted basis to penalize long gaps in service.

The average wait time stat has other uses which I will explore later in this article.

My intent in developing this new type of chart is to add to the repertoire of charts I publish when reviewing a route’s performance and to show how, or if, changes the TTC makes to schedules affect service riders actually encounter.

For those interested in the details, read on. Again, comments are welcome. I would like to nail down the format before launching into a series of route reviews.

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Buses and Streetcars Return to Dufferin Loop on April 1, 2023

No. This is not supposed to be an early April Fool’s joke.

TTC Customer Service has announced that the 504 King streetcar service western terminus will change on April 1 to its regularly scheduled location at Dufferin Loop. At the same time, the 29/929 Dufferin buses will also return to that loop.

Looking at tracking data (thanks to TransSee), it appears that some but not all 329 Night buses have already resumed their normal route south on Dufferin into Exhibition Place.

Currently, King cars loop from Queen south via Shaw to King, west to Dufferin and north to Queen without serving Dufferin Loop. In the revised routing, cars will operate both ways via Shaw, King and Dufferin to Dufferin Loop as shown below.

Because these are the routes published in the electronic version of schedules (GTFS), tracking apps should correctly predict behaviour of streetcars and buses in this area.

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

In response to budgetary limitations, the TTC will be modifying service on several routes in two waves of changes. The first will occur on Sunday, March 26 and the second on Sunday, May 6. Details of the second wave are not yet available.

The first wave is detailed in a report to the TTC Board for its meeting of February 28, 2023.

This report shows the changes in headways and service levels on affected routes. It is not as detailed as the Service Memo that will come out just before these schedules are implemented, nor as the Scheduled Service Summary. When the fine details including changes in travel time and vehicle allocations are available, I will publish the usual breakdown.

Updated February 23, 2023 at 9:00am: A table consolidating old and new headways where changes occur has been added. The times in this table is shown in “mm:ss” format rather than in decimal minutes as in the original tables. The new version is at the end of the article.

Updated February 23, 2023 at 10:00pm: The tables in this article have been consolidated for simplicity. All times are now shown in mm’ss” format. The new version is at the end of the article replacing the version that was added earlier.

My apologies for the constant reformatting. With the widespread desire to see what the changes would be, I pushed the original tables out faster than I might otherwise, and my readers got to watch as I tweaked the format. The intent is to have a standard chart that will be used for all future comparisons of service.

Changes of Special Note

Within the list of changes, there are a few worth highlighting:

Subway Services

  • Service on 2 Bloor-Danforth will improve slightly in the AM peak, but will drop in other periods notably late evenings when trains will operate every 8 rather than every 5 minutes on weekdays.
  • Service on 4 Sheppard will be cut from 4 trains at all times to 3 with a corresponding widening of headways from 5’30” to 7’20”.

Express Services

Service will be suspended on the following routes and periods:

  • 935 Jane Express weekday evenings
  • 941 Keele Express weekday midday
  • 943 Kennedy Express peak periods
  • 984 Sheppard West Express weekends

In most cases, the local service will not be improved to compensate, and indeed there are local service cuts as well.

501 Queen Streetcar

Weekday service on 501 Queen will be reduced considerably except late evenings.

60/960 Steeles West

The 60C peak period service west of Pioneer Village Station to Kipling will be suspended.

Service Improvements

The 128 Stanley Greene bus was approved by the Board in the 2021 Service Plan, but was not yet implemented. It will begin operation during peak periods on a half-hourly headway.

The 335 Jane Night Bus will operate every 20 minutes rather than half hourly Monday-Friday (which effectively means Tuesday to Saturday).

The 336 Finch West Night Bus will operate every 10 minutes rather than half hourly after 5am Monday-Friday.

These changes are presented in the context of improvements to Neighbourhood Improvement Areas. The same cannot be said for the many service cuts affecting NIAs.

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Holes in the Road

Service on 501 Queen, 504 King, 29/929 Dufferin and 503 Kingston Road has been affected by two major water/sewer repairs both of which struck over the weekend of January 21-22, 2023.

Updated: The south end loop for the 29 Dufferin local service has been extended into Exhibition Place.

Updated: 501 Queen streetcars are now looping via Sunnyside Loop rather than around Roncesvalles Carhouse.

The intersection of King & University is closed due to a water main break which both undermined the road and flooded St. Andrew Station. The station was closed for a time, but reopened on the afternoon of January 22. The station is not currently accessible due to water damage of escalators and the elevator between the platform and concourse levels.

Dufferin is blocked north of Springhurst (the north side of Dufferin Gate Loop) due to a sewer failure. This affects the 29/929 Dufferin bus routes as well as the 501 Queen streetcar which has been using Dufferin Loop as a western terminus during the King-Queen-Queensway-Roncesvalles project.

501 Queen

The Queen car has been rerouted west to Sunnyside Loop Roncesvalles where it loops using the carhouse runaround track. Sunnyside Loop is not yet available as a terminus. (Updated Jan. 25/23)

29/929 Dufferin

The Dufferin bus services are making a long loop around Liberty Village instead of running south to Dufferin Loop.

Update: This loop has been revised for the 29 service to include Exhibition Place. Also, although the 929 express service is shown as operating east to Strachan, some buses make a shorter loop and turn south from King closer to Dufferin.

504 King

The King streetcars and buses are operating on a much-modified route due to the closure at University Avenue.

  • 504A cars would normally operate between Dufferin Loop and Distillery Loop. They are running between Broadview Station and Distillery Loop
  • 504B cars would normally operate between Exhibition Loop and Broadview Station Loop. They are running between Broadview Station and Church Street looping as shown below.
  • 504C buses are in theory providing service to River. However, many of these never get east of Bathurst Street (their normal terminus) due to congestion over the diversion route. Parallel service through the construction zone operates eastbound via Adelaide and westbound via Wellington as shown below, and these buses terminate at River Street.

Information in vehicle tracking/prediction apps is rather scrambled because many vehicles are not where they are supposed to be on the schedule, and extra buses operating on the 504C are not tracked at all.

503 Kingston Road

The 503 Kingston Road streetcars are currently operating as buses and their normal loop downtown would be via York, Richmond and University. This has been changed to run via York, Queen and Bay.

There are no firm dates for reopening the streets and resuming normal service at either location.

Apologies for the soft images here. This is what the TTC provides on its site.