[URBAN NOTE] On bus-clumping on Dufferin Street (and other Toronto routes)

[rfmcdonald]

On the same day that a TTC worker was charged with assaulting a passenger, transit maven Steve Munro blogs about my own Dufferin Street's 29 Dufferin bus route, famously prone to clumping together one, two, three, more buses at a time. (This morning could have been so much less stressful ...)

The TTC talks a good line about service management, but a casual look at any of the routes where real-time monitoring is possible (through the open data interface to GPS vehicle data) routinely shows bunching even at 7am when there cannot possibly be “traffic congestion” effects. Two basic questions about bunching emerge from all of the service reviews I have done:

Why are vehicles allowed to leave termini very close together rather than regularly spaced?

Why are vehicles entering service from yards or from short-turns not spaced between through runs so that even headways are provided?

This does not require millions in high technology to implement, only the will to manage the service, something the TTC once did regularly with no more than route Inspectors on the street. With the tools now available for vehicle tracking, it should be much easier as all vehicle locations are available online.

The post was inspired by one disgrunted commenter.

I wrote to TTC customer service but of course I didn’t hear back from them. I would be interested to know what measures are in place to space out the buses. It seems to me that buses are just rushing to get to the end of the line; they basically do not care if they have 2-3 buses traveling together or if the last buses have no passengers.

I took this video as an example, there are 7 buses passing Bloor stop in under 3 minutes … such a waste from TTC. Just imagine being the “lucky” one that just missed all 7 buses. How long they will need to wait for another bus?

The video referred to is below.

"Junior Boys - Over It (Official Video)" (Watch on YouTube)