Most of the time, for most transit riders, whether a vehicle is “on schedule” is not the most relevant question 鈥 instead, what’s important is how long that rider has to wait for a vehicle.聽
At a glance, those might seem like two ways of saying the same thing. But they’re not. If I head out to the bus stop on a cold January day, I’m generally not concerned with whether the bus arrives at 15 minutes after the hour, or 16, or 17. I’m concerned with how many minutes I have to stand out there in the cold waiting.
If buses are supposed to arrive every five minutes on my route, the precise arrival times are less important to me than that I never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a bus. This isn’t a matter of the schedule, per se, but of the “headways” between vehicles 鈥 how much space there is between one bus and the one behind it.聽
And what messes things up is often “bunching” 鈥 a phenomenon all too familiar to riders of the TTC in which you wait a long time for a bus or streetcar, and then two or three arrive at the same time.
According to a report issued last week by the advocacy group, with additional analysis by , in 海角社区官网right now that familiar sight of bunched-up vehicles is commonplace enough that it makes the TTC’s reported “on time performance” meaningless.
The TTC’s official performance indicators say their vehicles are “on-time” 83 per cent of the time, based on when vehicles leave or arrive at stations, averaged over all routes for an entire month.聽
The TTCriders report, which used vehicle wait times and headways based on actual GPS data for all stops, found that on 10 bus and streetcar routes wait times were 50 per cent longer than scheduled due to bunching, and on 41 routes wait times were 30 per cent longer than scheduled.聽
If I was out there in the -15 C weather last week waiting for the bus, and it took 50 per cent longer than the maximum expected wait time, that would be a lot more important to me than precisely what time it arrived at the station at the end of the run.
It’s worth noting that there are circumstances in which the schedule itself can be important: when a bus is scheduled infrequently, say every 15 minutes or less, then people are far more likely to be checking the schedule before heading to a stop. And that’s a situation where a bus being very late or even a tiny bit early can be disastrous. If I arrive at 12:15 and the 12:16 bus has already left, that’s a huge problem for me if the next one doesn’t come for an hour.
But when service is frequent, especially more frequent than every 12 minutes or so, people are not checking schedules, they’re just heading to the stop and waiting.
And, according to TTCriders data, waiting and waiting and waiting.
The good news is that the TTC acknowledged when the Star reported on this last week that they are aware of the problem, and in the 2025 budget funds are set aside for a pilot project on 11 routes to try to deal with bunching by having staff on routes to manage the headways between vehicles.聽
In fairness to the TTC, too, it’s worth noting that this can be difficult to manage in ways passengers appreciate when they encounter it. The age-old practice of short-turning streetcars (specifically to shorten the headways along the route) has long been a pet peeve riders are vocal about hating. And if you’ve ever been in a hurry to get to work when a supervisor makes a bus driver wait three minutes at a stop, you’ll know it can be very annoying.
So: the TTC is working on it, and the solutions may be annoying. But it does seem like, for a start, one step suggested by the TTCriders could be kind of essential: measuring headways along routes and publicly publishing the results, and making that a key measure of on-time performance, at least on frequent service routes.
Once upon a time it would have been very difficult to know each vehicle’s performance at each stop, but in the age of GPS, that data is available both in real time and in retrospect. That’s the data the TTCriders relied on to compile their own report. It’s available, and more helpful than the information the TTC is currently reporting.
Heck, the real-time GPS estimate of the next vehicle should be posted on screens at every stop.
Only 10 TTC bus and streetcar routes in the city are meeting the transit agency鈥檚 own goal for on-time service during rush hour.
Only 10 TTC bus and streetcar routes in the city are meeting the transit agency鈥檚 own goal for on-time service during rush hour.
Even though the reported 83 per cent on-time figure the TTC officially reports falls short of its target of 90 per cent, it still paints a rosier picture than the TTCriders analysis of actual at-the-stop performance. More importantly, it doesn’t highlight or easily suggest how to improve the trouble spots where riders are really feeling problems.聽
It’s a well-known management axiom that what gets measured is what gets improved. The TTC ought to be publicly measuring the aspects of transit service that most relate to the public’s experience of what they’re trying to improve.
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