Riders of the 512 St. Clair, 506 Carlton and 505 Dundas streetcars will see the biggest service improvements thanks to new multimillion-dollar funding set aside in the TTC’s 2025 budget.
Mayor Olivia Chow and TTC board chair Coun. Jamaal Myers promised more reliable transit when they unveiled the TTC’s new spending plan on Jan. 7, but some of the marquee measures lacked details until this week.
TorontoToday on Thursday confirmed which TTC routes will benefit most from the transit authority's new cash flow as details about several big-ticket items from the initial announcement were revealed.
One such highly anticipated improvement has to do with the efficiency and effectiveness of timely transit arrivals.
The 2025 budget outlines a pilot project to address “bunching and gapping” of aboveground TTC services, meaning when several transit vehicles arrive immediately one after another following a long wait.
The bunching and gapping measure will affect 11 routes, according to the agency’s budget presentation; not 10 routes, as was initially outlined in early January.
The new measure will be rolled out in the spring for several buses including the 7 Bathurst, 24 and 924 Victoria Park, 25 and 925 Don Mills North, 29 and 929 Dufferin, 100 Flemingdon Park North and 165 Weston North routes. The 506 Carlton and 512 St. Clair West streetcar routes will also see an effort to remove bunching and gapping.
Mayor Chow hopes the effort will make riding the TTC less frustrating for Torontonians.
“How infuriating it is when the buses are bunched together and you wait, and wait, and wait and nothing comes — and then, boom, three of them show up at the same time,” Chow said in early January. “Oh, my God. We need to fix that.”
The measure includes repurposing seven existing supervisory TTC staff. If the project is successful, it’ll be rolled out across the city, Chow said.
The 2025 TTC budget also promised extra service for some of the city’s popular routes.
On Thursday, transit officials outlined 825 additional service hours per week for routes seeing the biggest ridership growth. This will target the 16 McCowan South, 57 Midland South, 89 Weston North, 96 Wilson West, 116 Morningside North, 944 South Kipling, 505 Dundas and 506 Carlton lines.
The extra service will be concentrated during off-peak hours and is an attempt to help the TTC return to crowding standards that first changed in the 2023 budget.
The transit agency’s crowding standards detail how many riders should be on a vehicle at a particular time. In 2023, the TTC permitted more people per vehicle, leading to less frequent service.
Those aforementioned routes will also benefit from an overall promise to increase service hours — the amount of time a driver spends on a route — by nearly six per cent, or 9.6 million new hours this year, across the whole system.
The TTC budget includes additional service improvements that will mean more transit along some of the routes already benefitting from other recently unveiled changes.
Riders of the 505 Dundas, 512 St. Clair and 7 Bathurst routes won’t have to wait more than six minutes for a streetcar between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on any day thanks to an extra $3.3-million in operational funding.
Many of the routes that will see better service — such as in the downtown core and the east and north regions towards Scarborough — roughly line up with areas of the city Chow won in the 2023 mayoral byelection.
