York Mills Bus

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Service Analysis of 95/995 York Mills, October-December 2021

This article begins a series reviewing the major east-west corridors in Scarborough and eastern North York. Although there are several proposals ranging from BRT-lite red lanes all the way up to a full scale subway for these streets, none of them is going to see much change for the coming decade. Rather than waiting forever for the promise of a new transit dawn in the east, Toronto really needs to focus on making transit service we have today work.

Minutes of community meetings are strewn with “improve the bus service” as a common, long-standing complaint. But nothing substantial happens.

For two years, everyone including the TTC has been preoccupied with the pandemic. For a time, the usual excuses about poor service, notably traffic congestion, really didn’t wash, but now we are on a rebound. Now is the time for TTC management to look at the service they are offering and ask whether it really is the best they can do, that it will attract riders back to the system.

The period covered by this article runs from October 1 to December 31, 2021. Most of this was during a period of ridership recovery, and the effect of Omicron-related drops in demand and in traffic came in the later half of December which is traditionally a slow period anyhow because of the holiday season. Data are missing in late October and early November because of the cyber-attack on the TTC, but there is more than enough to show the overall patterns of route behaviour.

Service on York Mills and Ellesmere

The 95 York Mills and its express counterpart, 995, run east from York Mills Station at Yonge Street.

The local service has three branches:

  • 95A runs east via York Mills, Ellesmere and northeast on Kingston Road to Port Union.
  • 95B splits off from Ellesmere at Military Trail and terminates at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC). This branch operates only during periods when there is no 995 express service.
  • 95C runs only as far east as Ellesmere Station on the SRT. This branch operates weekdays during peaks and midday.

Scheduled service for route 95 York Mills changed on October 10 when the 95A service was extended via Kingston Road to a loop at Port Union Road.

The service summaries for the two periods are below. During many periods, one bus was added to the service for the extension but headways remained the same making the round trip time longer. However, the scheduled speed also went up slightly.

Schedules for this route have not changed since October 2021.

The express service has only one branch:

  • 995 runs to UTSC via the same route as the 95B local service. These buses operate as locals between UTSC and Markham Road, and express from there west to York Mills Station.

Service to UTSC operates as the 995 express weekdays during the peaks and middays. Early evenings and on weekends, it operates as the 95B local.

The scheduled service for 995 York Mills Express has not changed since June 2021.

In brief:

  • Service on 95/995 York Mills operated on the same schedules from mid October 2021 through to year end.
  • Bunching is common. Generally, but not always, it is caused by “blended services” that actually run as pairs of buses.
  • There is little or no evidence of supervisory intervention to break up bunches of vehicles. Some bunches form at terminals where service spacing should be comparatively easy.
  • Cancelled runs were not a problem on York Mills because average headways generally lie at the scheduled values, although individual headway values were widely scattered during all operating periods.
  • The difference in average travel time is only about 5 minutes between the local and express services during most periods when both are offered.
  • Terminal layover times are generous especially at Port Union on the 95A service. Recovery from minor delays enroute should not be a problem.
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TTC Service Changes January 3, 2021: Part II Buses

Updated January 7, 2021: Comparative service level charts have been added for routes 53/953 and 60/960 showing changes between the November 2020 and January 2021 schedules.

Updated January 5, 2021: Information about express routes 953 Steeles East, 960 Steeles West and 984 Sheppard has been updated in the route summary. Comparative service charts will be added for weekday service on 953 and 960 in a separate update.

Updated December 26-28, 2020: This article has been extensively updated with charts to illustrate the change in service levels on corridors that have or had 9xx Express services. I will turn to other routes in a separate article.

Some of you have probably been wondering where my list of bus service changes for January 2021 has wandered off to.

The problem is that some of the information in the TTC’s service change memo is inconsistent, and a new version to be issued after Christmas. Some information about planned schedule changes is available through the City of Toronto’s Open Data Portal which has the electronic versions of all schedules for use by various trip planning apps.

Because the difference between some new and old schedules is not as straightforward as usual, I have added charts comparing service levels by time of day rather than the breakdown into peak, midday and off peak periods.

Information here should be considered “preliminary” in case the TTC makes further revisions before the new schedules take effect.

Scheduled Erratic Service

The schedules for many routes suffer from build-in irregular headways. If the route runs on time, the buses are not evenly spaced, and “on time” performance is the metric the TTC uses, for better or worse, to evaluate service. This irregularity arises from several factors that can also interact on the same schedule:

  • The route has branching services that are not on a compatible headway. For example, it is easy to blend two services running every 20′ to give a 10′ combined service on the common mileage. However, if it is a 25′ and a 10′ headway, this is impossible.
  • For pandemic-era schedules, some trips were cancelled without adjusting surrounding buses to even out the headways. This might have occurred unofficially, but it would take a lot of work to ensure that spacing stayed ideal even if the buses were not strictly “on time”.
  • For pandemic-era replacement of express services, “trippers” operated usually on schedules that did not blend with the basic service. These buses were typically in service from 5 am to noon, and from 3 to 10 pm.
  • Some “Run as Directed” (RAD) buses (aka Route 600 series) operated where needed to supplement scheduled service. These do not appear on any schedule nor in a route’s vehicle tracking logs.

My purpose in looking in detail at the January 2021 changes is to show how all of these factors interact.

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The TTC 2021 Service Plan

The TTC Service Plan for 2021 is still in draft, but the TTC wants public feedback on their proposals. The deadline for comments is October 9, 2020.

See:

In earlier stages of public participation, the focus was on implementation of the RapidTO bus lanes, notably the one on Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside that has just been installed.

Now the TTC has added material about other proposals and there is a 24-minute video overview on the presentation page linked above.

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TTC Bus Service Frequency and Reliability in 2020 (Part IV)

The four east-west corridors detailed in this article share a common characteristic in their schedule changes between the pre-covid winter schedules and the spring-summer versions. The only change has been to remove the 9xx express service without any update to the underlying local services.

In some cases, this represents a substantial cut in the total service provided on portions of the route where roughly half of the “winter” service operated as express trips. Some of these cuts are substantially greater than the TTC’s oft-cited 80-85% level of pre-covid service, and this illustrates an ongoing problem with reporting stats on an average basis that hides the fine detail.

These are long routes where service might not even be well-spaced leaving the terminals, and headways become much worse along the way. The problems cannot be attributed to “congestion” in times of relatively light traffic, and there is clearly no attempt at headway management. In turn, the uneven headways cause crowding well beyond what all-day averages might suggest.

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The Reliable Unreliability of TTC Service

In a recent article, I reviewed the TTC’s Service Standards Update. These standards included targets for headway reliability which are extremely generous and allow the TTC to claim that services operate “to standard” when actual rider experience is less than ideal.

Reliability of service is a top concern for TTC riders, and it has also been identified by TTC staff. Where the problem lies is that the targets offer little incentive to improve or measurement of just how bad the situation really is.

When the TTC talks about reliability, they inevitably trot out excuses about traffic congestion and the difficulty of operating service in mixed traffic. This has been a standard response to issues with streetcar routes for as long as I can remember. However, the typical TTC rider is a bus passenger, and this group has flagged service reliability, frequency and crowding as issues just as important as for streetcar riders.

Regular readers will know that over the years I have published many analyses of route performance looking mainly at the streetcar system, but also at selected bus routes. Recently, I decided to expand this to a number of routes in Scarborough where the quality of bus service often comes up in debates about the Scarborough subway extension, and to revisit some of the routes affected by construction on the Spadina extension which has now pretty much wrapped up. Apologies to readers in Etobicoke because this gives a central/eastern slant to the routes reviewed here, but I have no doubt that route behaviour in our western suburb is similar to that on the rest of the network.

This post may give some readers that dreaded sense of “TL;DR” because of the amount of material it contains. It is intended partly as a reference (readers can look at their favourite routes, if present), and partly to establish beyond any doubt the pervasiveness of the problem with headway reliability facing the TTC. This problem exists across the network, and setting performance targets that simply normalize what is already happening is no way to (a) understand the severity of the problem or (b) provide any measurement of improvements, should they be attempted.

The data here are taken from January 2017. The analysis would have been published sooner but for a delay in receiving the data from the TTC, a problem that has now been rectified. As always, thanks to the TTC for providing the raw material for this work.

Although January is a winter month, the level of precipitation, and particularly of snow, was unusually low for Toronto, and so weather delays do not lead to anomalies in the data.

Toronto Precipitation and Temperatures for January 2017

The TTC’s current attitude to service reliability is to focus on conditions at terminals with the premise that if service leaves and arrives on time, then there is a good chance it will also be in good shape along the route. This is a misguided approach on two counts.

First and most important, there is little indication that service from terminals is actually managed to be reliable, and the “targets” in the standards provide a wide margin by which unreliability is considered acceptable. In particular, it is possible for services to leave termini running as bunches of two or more vehicles and still be considered “on target”.

Second, any variability in headway from a terminal will be magnified as buses travel along a route. Buses carrying larger headways (gaps) will have heavier loads and run late while buses closely following will catch up. The result can be pairs of buses operating at twice the advertised headway, and with uneven loads. Without active management of service at points along a route, the problems become worse and worse the further one progresses away from a trip’s origin. Again, the generous standards allow much of this service to be considered acceptable, and so there is no need, on paper, to actually manage what is happening.

TTC operators are a great bunch of people, overall, but the laissez faire attitude to headways allows those who prefer a leisurely trip across their route to run “hot” with impunity. The worst of them are, fortunately for riders, only a small group. The larger problem is the degree to which irregular headways are a normal situation across the system.

The balance of this article looks at several routes primarily for their behaviour near terminals as this matches the point where the TTC sets its targets, such as they are. To recap the Service Standards:

The TTC standards vary for very frequent (less than 5′), frequent (5′ to 10′) and infrequent (above 10′) services.

  • Very frequent services target a band of ±75% of the scheduled headway.
  • Frequent services target a band of ±50% of the scheduled headway.
  • Infrequent service aims for a range of 1 minute early to 5 minutes late.

The charts which follow look at actual headways, not scheduled values, and it is clear throughout that the typical range of values exceeds these standards.

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