In the previous post, I began my analysis of the 29 Dufferin route with a look at service on Christmas Day 2006.  Before turning to other specific days and their events, let’s look at the month overall as seen by the reliability of headways and link times at and between various points on the route.  This post presents the headway data, and in the next installment, you will see the link times.

The picture revealed by these data is not a happy one, although it will not surprise any regular user of the route.  Headways are a mess, especially in the evening.  The oft-cited “flexibility” of buses does not appear to yield service any more reliable than on the King car, and in some cases, the service is worse.  The fundamental problem is that very frequent services are left more or less to their own devices, and less frequent periods on such routes suffer from the effects of laissez-faire management.

Of particular note is the service on Sunday evenings, a period when classic TTC excuses about “traffic congestion” simply are not credible.  Headways are scattered over a range up to 20 minutes even though the schedule says 10. 

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Early in 2007 when I started looking at the TTC’s vehicle monitoring (CIS) data, I thought to be finished with it long ago, to have blazed through many routes and written wonderful commentaries on all of them.  Things didn’t quite work out as I had planned, and I got bogged down with competing issues and other calls on my time.  Also, the programs that digest, massage, and otherwise render presentable the TTC’s data needed some housecleaning both to make them more robust and to reduce a lot of the manual work that went into the early analyses on 504 King.

Things are much simpler now, although the challenges of interpreting the data remain with each route offering its own peculiarities.  Now I turn to the Dufferin Bus, a frequent route for which the TTC receives many complaints about service.  How will it compare to routes we have seen already?

The route is 13.56km from Dufferin Loop to Wilson Station, although half of the scheduled peak service runs only to Tycos Drive about 3/4 of the way to the north end of the line.  This is in the same range as the Carlton and King cars, although they spend much more time in “downtown” conditions.  It is shorter than the 16.65km Queen-Humber route, and of course much shorter than the 24.43km Queen-Long Branch route.

The scheduled service is generally more frequent than on the streetcar lines, although with smaller vehicles so that headways are better for any level of demand scaled to capacity.

As I have done on previous routes, I will look first at the data for Christmas Day 2006 as this shows the route in its simplest state without any effects from traffic congestion, weather or heavy passenger loads. Continue reading →