Effective Monday, June 23 at 7am until Thursday, June 26 at 7am, all streetcar service on Queen Street East will divert both ways via Coxwell, Gerrard and Broadview for emergency water main repairs at Vancouver St. just west of Russell Carhouse.
Notice of this change has not yet been posted on the TTC’s site.
Also effective June 23 at 11pm until Tuesday, July 8 at 4am, buses will replace streetcars on the Queen and Long Branch routes west of Humber Loop for track work.
Updated June 24, 2025: The TTC has now standardized the 504 King and 503 Kingston Road diversions so that both routes (and associated night services) operate via Queen and Shaw Streets
The diversions for track reconstruction on King Street will change again on Sunday, June 22. The TTC has posted conflicting information both on its website and in its weekly update memo regarding construction and special events. I have asked TTC for clarification and will update this page if and when they reply.
In an email on June 19, the TTC announced:
From 6 a.m. on Sun., June 22, until 4 a.m. on Sat., Jul. 12, the 503/303 Kingston Road streetcars will divert to accommodate streetcar track work on King St. between Shaw St. and Spadina Ave. 503/303 Kingston Road streetcars will run along Queen St. between Shaw St. and Dufferin St. 504D King replacement buses will be extended to run from King St. and Bathurst St. to Dufferin Gate Loop.
Affected routes:
Here are the original TTC maps.
It appears that whoever designed this change notice is unaware that the 503 does not now operate via Queen and Shaw, but in fact runs on King from Spadina westward.
Updated Monday, June 23 at 10:45pm: The erroneous map of the 504D diversion has been replaced on the TTC’s site. Here is the corrected map.
Updated Tuesday, June 24 at 5:00pm: The diversion of 503/303 and 504/304 services has now been standardized via Queen and Shaw Streets, and the notice/map also include the 504D bus extension west from King and Bathurst to Dufferin Loop.
Changes happening at the same time are:
There is no reference to the existing 504 streetcar route which operates via Queen and Shaw to King, nor is there any explanation of why the 503 and 504D services cannot use the same route. (Corrected effective June 24.)
Here is the construction plan included in the June 22, 2025 service change memo clearly showing where the 503 car runs today, but this will not, in fact, be how the routes operate starting June 22.
Taking the TTC notices at face value, this means that service on parts of King will be affected in different ways:
This is a repetition of the classic TTC communications cock-ups of past years where diversions are poorly or inaccurately explained. They are supposed to be “doing diversions differently” this year, but this is not a sterling example.
Updated 4:50 pm June 20: There are separate pages on the TTC website describing the 503/504 diversions which make no mention at all of the change effective June 22. They refer to the summer suspension of the 508 Lake Shore, but assure riders there are no other changes:
Starting Monday, June 23, 508 Lake Shore streetcar service will be suspended until early September for seasonal service adjustments. There will be no changes to 503/303 Kingston Rd, 504/304 King streetcars or to 504/304 King replacement bus routing. [Source: TTC Streetcar service changes.]
As of Tuesday, June 24, the separate streetcar diversion pages for the King and Kingston Road services still make no mention of the changes west of Bathurst Street.
In a recent article, I detailed the headway reliability of night buses on several routes. In a comment, a reader asked if I could relate that data to “on time” performance.
There are a few problems with that concept, not least that the TTC’s own standard is so lax. The charts presented here are an attempt to show the degree to which departure times on two routes are scattered (307 Bathurst) or more closely bunched in a more-or-less reliable group (335 Jane).
Depending on reader feedback, I will include these charts, or possibly a modified version of them, in future articles about night services.
Updated June 20, 2025: The charts for 307 Bathurst Night Bus have been modified to show the advertised times of buses to show the degree to which service is “on time” or not.
A separate set of charts has been added to show the evolution of departure times northbound over the route from Front to Steeles.
Continue readingThis article begins a series to review the TTC’s overnight services, aka the Blue Night network. Most of these are bus routes, but a few of the older lines still operate with streetcars.
Included in this article are:
Other routes will follow in future installments.
It’s worth reviewing the TTC Service Standards regarding their Blue Night network.
Purpose of night service:
The overnight network is designed so 95% of the population and employment is within a 1,250 metre walk (15 minutes) of transit service. Consequently, overnight services may be provided on different routes than the base network in order to meet these requirements. Where possible, however, overnight routes will follow daytime routing and be identified in a manner consistent with the daytime route. The overnight network is an important part of the TTC’s commitment to maximizing the mobility of people in the City of Toronto and meeting all of their diverse travel needs.
- Hours of service: 1:30am to 6:00am (8:00am Sunday)
- % of population and employment served: 95%
- Within walking distance: 1250 metres
- Within walking time: 15 minutes
- Minimum service frequency: 30 minutes
- Headway performance: Service is considered to be on time if it is no more than 1 minute early and no more than 5 minutes late. TTC’s goal is to have 60% of all trips meet the on-time performance standard.
The one minute early standard was informally dropped in early 2025 and on time performance is now measured by TTC against a -0/+5 scale. That applies to on-time departure at terminals, but not to headways. The standard allows a swing of headways between 25-35 minutes for a half-hourly service as shown below. The service is “on time”, but unreliable, especially when the compounding effect of the swings is considered at transfer points.
Moreover, the “standard” need only be achieved 60% of the time, and then only at terminals. Almost half of the service is held to no standard at all.
| Trip | Scheduled Time / Headway | Actual Time / Headway |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2:00 | 2:00 |
| 2 | 2:30 / 30m | 2:35 / 35m |
| 3 | 3:00 / 30m | 3:00 / 25m |
| 4 | 3:30 / 30m | 3:35 / 35m |
| 5 | 4:00 / 30m | 4:00 / 25m |
The TTC does not have any planned meets in its night network, and these would require scheduled, protected departure times enroute, not the current catch-as-catch-can arrangement. On a half-hourly base and with long routes, the gaps between buses can vary a lot, and riders cannot count on their arrival. This is a common annoyance on the daytime network, but on the night routes where a missed bus can make a large difference in trip time, this should be unacceptable.
Most night services operate every 30 minutes, although there are exceptions on both the bus and streetcar networks. That service level is provided generally from 2am onward to about 4am, later on some routes depending on when demand begins to build up for the morning. There is also some overlap of daytime and night time route number usage, although the TTC has been sorting out its schedules for consistency in past months.
Some routes do achieve a narrow band of headways around 30 minutes for terminal departures, although this band widens along the route just as it does with daytime service. However, some routes have erratic headways even near their terminals, but the standards are lax enough that these still can count as mostly “on time” in reports of service quality.
For all that the night services are supposed to be for shift workers and the night economy, reliability leaves much to be desired because, like so much TTC service, the time a vehicle will arrive is unpredictable. The situation varies from route to route as the sample in this article will show. Some routes are not too bad, but still leave riders vulnerable to missed trips and connections. Others are a real mess with 307 Bathurst taking the prize here. (There are likely competitors for that title, but I have not worked through every route yet. Be patient, gentle reader.)
May is an ideal month usually free of major storms, hot or cold, and conditions are about as good as one can expect. Service in February will not be as good as the examples shown here.
The TTC’s common bugbear/excuse for erratic service, traffic congestion, does not apply to these night services. Uneven headways are caused by lack of line management, the absence of a policy to maintain on time performance along routes, and in a minority of cases by schedules that are too tight to allow for terminal recovery time.
Through this series, I will review the quality of night service provided on the TTC system. This will take a while, and the articles will appear as time permits in between other topics.
Note: This is a long article with a lot of charts. I don’t expect most people to read every word or review every route. For some, this might validate their own experience. For others, it will show the variations across the network. Happy reading.
Continue readingEffective Monday, June 2, 2025, the 504C/D and 304D shuttle buses will divert around the construction at King & Church via Yonge, Front/Wellington and Jarvis as shown in the map below. This affects only the shuttle buses, and the streetcar diversions via Richmond/Adelaide are not affected.
How this will work with already congested conditions south of King on Yonge and on Jarvis remains to be seen.
The map below combines all of the diversions into one view of where King and related routes are diverting in and near downtown.
Not shown are:
Thanks to a recent article about the proposed RapidTO lanes on Bathurst and Dufferin, A Contrarian’s View of Bathurst/Dufferin RapidTO, I was dumped on by several people notably on BlueSky in the type of exchange we are more used to seeing on X. The problem was compounded when several of my comments were incorporated in the now-discredited anti-bus-lane campaigns featuring AI-generated “spokespeople” for affected neighbourhoods.
The existence of those campaigns, however, does not invalidate my basic arguments questioning the purported benefits of the project.
While I was working on a series of articles reviewing the actual operating characteristics of 7 Bathurst and 29/929 Dufferin, the debate about red lanes started to heat up. I already knew from the analysis in progress that the issues on these corridors went well beyond parking, and in some cases were completely separate.
See:
Both routes suffer from appallingly irregular “dispatching”, if we can call it that, of vehicles from their northern and southern terminals. Before service even reaches the proposed transit priority areas, the headways are erratic with gaps and bunching. This worsens as buses travel along routes. This happens all of the time, every day of the week. This is not a case of chronically late buses leaving at random times, and tracking data show that much of the service enjoys a reasonable terminal layover time.
A related problem for riders is that the scheduled service on 7 Bathurst is not frequent, compared to other routes in the city with reserved lanes. This compounds with irregular headways to produce unreliable service.
Although Bathurst was part of the “top 20” identified as possible RapidTO candidates, it was not part of the original RapidTO studies reviewing Dufferin, Jane, Steeles West, Lawrence East and Finch East. Lawrence East is only on that short list thanks to efforts of the recently departed Councillor McKelvie who has gone on to a new career as an MP. Bathurst rose to prominence thanks to the anticipated need for transit priority during the six FIFA World Cup games in 2026.
Even the overnight 329 Dufferin Night Bus, operating half-hourly when there is no traffic congestion, does not maintain regular headways. Buses leave terminals at Exhibition Place and Steeles within a narrow band of headways, as one would hope when they are running “on time” relative to schedules. However, just as with daytime service, bus speeds vary, and as they move along the route, the headways spread out. Midway along the route between 3am and 4am, half of the service lies in a 15-minute wide band, well beyond TTC Service Standards, and the other half lies even further from the target.
This is not a problem of congestion but of the lack of headway and “on time” discipline for night services. In turn this makes wait times unpredictable, and transfers between routes can fail because a bus is badly off schedule. Night service is erratic across the city despite political talk of its important role serving shift workers.
TTC Service Standards give considerable leeway to what is reported as “on time performance” and allow management to report better results than a typical rider would find credible. I have covered this topic in other posts and will not belabour the problems here. The “Standards” badly need revision, and along with them, the quality of service management.
This is not to say that transit priority is unnecessary, but that it will not achieve its stated goals without addressing underlying problems affecting far more routes than the Bathurst and Dufferin buses.
As for the Bathurst Streetcar proposal, this originates in the FIFA games. The TTC hopes to run very frequent service between Bathurst Station and Exhibition Loop with transit priority from Bloor south to Lake Shore where the route joins the existing right-of-way on Fleet Street. The question here is whether the installation should be permanent, or only for the period of the games.
The 511 Bathurst car now operates every 8-10 minutes, although the TTC has plans to improve this to every 6 minutes later this year. The route suffers from many delays at crossings of other streetcar routes thanks to the TTC’s blanket slow order on junctions where streetcars crawl through the special trackwork. Those of us with long memories (or anyone who has visited street railways elsewhere) know that this is a Toronto-specific restriction that grew out of problems with electric switch controller reliability dating back to the 1990s.
If service on 511 Bathurst is to be very frequent for the games, the TTC will have to design a mechanism for crew relief that does not include parking vehicles for extended periods. Operators need breaks, but this should not cause transit traffic congestion at terminals.
On a four-lane road, no parking will be possible with a 7×24 reserved streetcar lane. As with the proposed bus lanes, the issue is whether all-day reservation is needed, and what locations would work with shorter hours. The problem of enforcement is trickier because motorists think of middle lanes as “theirs” while the curb lane might come and go. There will also be an issue with any mix of local and express services, and which of these is provided by the streetcars.
The TTC has not published any service design proposals to indicate what the transit demands on the road will be. Many operational issues need to be sorted out for an intensive FIFA service, and much more than red paint is needed.
Toronto talks a good line on transit support, but this is not reflected in system-wide issues including irregular and crowded bus service, and a sense that growth, if any, will be doled out by a parsimonious Council. This directly contradicts claims for the future importance of transit in moving people around the city and supporting increased density on major routes.
Continue readingOn May 11, 2025, the diversion arrangements downtown became more complex as the 504 King, 503 Kingston Road and 508 Lake Shore (peak only) streetcar services shifted onto the same Richmond/Adelaide diversion route as 501 Queen. This arrangement will be in place until early September for water main and track repairs at King and Church, as well as for streetcar overhead upgrades on King Street.
As initially implemented, the three routes operated eastbound from King and Spadina, north to Queen, east to York, south to Adelaide, east to Church and north back to Queen. The westbound diversion was similar using Richmond from Church to York.
Immediately after this change, it was obvious that streetcars were snarled in traffic, particularly eastbound on Adelaide. Generally across the diversion, there was a problem with the number of streetcar turns exceeding the intersection capacity in peak periods. There is also construction interference at a few locations along the way.
I wrote about capacity issues and other related matters:
On May 16, the TTC changed the 504 King diversion so that it used Shaw Street between Queen and King to reduce the number of turns at Spadina. Only the 503 Kingston Road cars, and a few peak period 508 Lake Shore cars remained, as well as the 511 Bathurst cars looping via Spadina, Adelaide and Charlotte. (The 511 diversion will end on June 22 when streetcar service returns to Exhibition Loop.)
However, this change only addressed the west end of the diversion at Spadina, but further east the full volume of routes 501, 503, 504 and 508 continued to use the diversion between York and Church contributing a high number of streetcars/hour where the service turned. The frequency of service on 501, 503 and 504 is roughly the same through the day. It is the volume of road traffic that changes, not the number of streetcars.
| Period | 501 Queen | 503 Kingston Rd | 504 King | 508 Lake Shore | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AM Peak | 10′ (6) | 8′ (7.5) | 8′ (7.5) | 20′ (3) | 2’30″(24) |
| Midday | 9’30” (6.3) | 10′ (6) | 10′ (6) | 3’17” (18.3) | |
| PM Peak | 9′ (6.7) | 8′ (7.5) | 8′ (7.5) | 20′ (3) | 2’26” (24.7) |
| Early Evening | 10′ (6) | 10′ (6) | 10′ (6) | 3’20″(18) | |
| Late Evening | 10′ (6) | 10′ (6) | 10′ (6) | 3’20” (18) |
Charts in the following section show travel times between University and Jarvis both ways, and how these rose when the volume of 503-504-508 service was added along the diversion.
Continue readingIn the first two parts of this series, I reviewed headway and travel time data for the 29/929 Dufferin bus during April 2025.
This article reviews archival data back to January 2024 to discover how the route’s behaviour has changed in the past 16 months. At the end, there are charts showing travel times over the full route from April 2018 to April 2025 for a long view of their evolution.
The first part of the article looks at headways (the time between vehicles) on both the 29 local and 929 express services at various points along the route. The patterns visible in the earlier articles with ragged headways leaving terminals appear throughout data back to January 2024. A major problem with these routes is that buses do not leave terminals evenly spaced, and this problem grows as they move along the line.
The second part reviews travel times over segments of the route to show areas where these change by time of day, and where they do not. These show that on some segments, travel times are mostly consistent across time periods, whereas others show rises and falls. The segment with particularly wide variations is northbound from Lawrence to Wilson showing the effect of traffic queuing for Yorkdale Mall and for Highway 401.
The original RapidTO proposal for red lanes included the full route, but the current version is only from Eglinton southbound. This will not address congestion issues north of Eglinton, nor will it deal with the operational problem of erratic terminal departures.
Continue readingThis article is Part II of my review of service quality on the 29/929 Dufferin routes in April 2025. Part I covered headways (the interval between buses) while this part looks at travel times. Part III will review historic data going back to January 2024.
Transit lanes on Dufferin should be able to shave some peaks off of travel times, but this will only apply to periods where buses are routinely fouled in traffic. Some locations where congestion snarls the route are not proposed for transit priority.
As shown in Part I there is a wide variation in departure times from terminals compared to scheduled headways even though most trips appear to have time for recovery to their schedule. Reducing travel time, and more importantly making travel times consistent will help to make headways more reliable, but the problem of regulating departures and vehicle spacing will still remain.
The remainder of this article is a large set of charts for those interested in a fine-grained view of the route.
Continue readingThis is the first of three articles about TTC services on Dufferin Street, the 29 Dufferin local bus and its 929 Dufferin Express counterpart.
Major points worth noting:
Steve Munro 