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.

Routes included in this article are:

An additional 13 routes will be included in Part II of this series.

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.