A group that calls itself the voice of Toronto transit riders says the way the TTC measures and reports its on-time service hides how poorly some bus and streetcar routes actually perform.
The group said its findings show the transit agency much change how it measures service reliability if it expects to see improvements.
"Taking public transit should not be a gamble: it should be a given that your bus or streetcar will show up when you expect it to," TTCriders say in its report titled Lucky or late: A report on TTC metrics vs. rider experience.
The report delves into the issue of "bunching," which is a frustration for any transit user.
"Bunching occurs when a bus falls behind schedule enough that the bus behind it catches up," the report said. This also applies to streetcars.
"Conversely, bunching can also occur if a bus is running well ahead of schedule and catches up with a bus in front of it. Instead of arriving at evenly-spaced intervals (e.g. one bus arrives every five minutes), buses arrive in clusters with long waits in between (e.g. two buses arrive together every 10 minutes)."
The other key term is "gapping," which describes the long wait times between bunched clusters of buses.
Instead of arriving at evenly-spaced intervals, buses arrive in clusters with long waits in between.
The report argues the TTC’s current “on-time performance” metrics hide more than they reveal about the state of service and reliability that transit riders experience.
The group's report uses TTC stats obtained via Freedom of Information as well as bunching calculations gathered by TransSee from real-time vehicle location data.
The goal was to "demonstrate the actual condition of TTC reliability" and how it could report on service in more accurate and transparent ways.
"The TTC can't fix what it does not measure," the group said.
The report's findings suggest that last year, between Sept. 1 and Nov. 16, riders waited 50 per cent longer than scheduled on 10 TTC routes due to bunching, and 30 per cent longer than scheduled on 41 routes.
Only 10 routes during the evening rush hour met the TTC’s goal of being on time 90 per cent of the time.
TTCriders said the way TTC reports on-time performance — as an average — flattens a month’s worth of data in all time periods and across all routes, hiding how poorly some routes perform.
"The TTC’s 2025 budget makes welcome investments in TTC service and introduces pilot programs to reduce bunching and gapping on the most unreliable routes," the group noted.
TTriders called on the TTC to make the most of the pilot project by establishing new, transparent ways to report on service.
That includes reporting "on the accuracy of real-time predictions shared with apps," which many transit users rely on to time their journeys.
Other suggestions include changing how service and on-time performance metrics are measured, creating a public dashboard to report metrics, reporting regularly so the public can evaluate the success of the bunching pilot and hiring additional operations supervisors.
