Back on August 20, when I was part of a Twitter thread about lousy service on 7 Bathurst, the day of the TTC’s birthday party at Hillcrest, one person said “I have the same problem on Highland Creek”. When I looked at the tracking data, the result was stunning, and not in a way anyone would like to see.
This article reviews 38 Highland Creek for the month of August 2022. The short version is that on weekdays, the route is somewhat unreliable and suffers at time from missing buses, but on weekends, the problems are worse than anything I have seen in my travels through operating stats.
The route originates at Rouge Hill GO Station, and travels west to Scarbourough Town Centre. There is a bit of a meander via Lawrence, Port Union and Lawson to get across the 401 to Kingston Road, thence via Military Trail and Ellesmere to STC.
There is a 38B/938 split operation to the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, but that is not currently running. Only the 38A to Rouge Hill GO is part of the scheduled service in August 2022.
The Short Read
Service on 38 Highland Creek can operate on fairly reliable headways, but is often disrupted, especially on weekends. The primary issues are:
- Missing buses create service gaps that are not filled by re-spacing other vehicles.
- Travel times on Saturday afternoons appear to be inadequate leaving no margin for recovery at terminals.
- Bunching on weekends, and particularly on Saturdays, is chronic to the point that four or more buses operate in packs for extended periods with little apparent effort by line management to space out the service.
Steve Munro 