[URBAN NOTE] "Analysis of 29 Dufferin for March 2012"

[rfmcdonald]

The first part of Steve Munro's analysis of the 29 Dufferin bus route, a route famously known for the tendency of its buses to clump up--three buses arriving at one stop all at once, then nothing at all for dozens of minutes--is up. The data proves this.

What riders see is “headways”, the time between vehicles, as well as the degree of variation in that time. If the TTC says a bus will appear every 5 minutes, and the service manages to achieve this, more or less, most of the time, then a rider will consider this “reliable”. Even on a wider advertised headway, if buses appear at roughly the expected interval, riders know what to expect.

However, if the headways vary widely from the scheduled value, this makes a service unreliable and riders must, at a minimum, build in additional travel time to account for the possibility of a long wait. Moreover, at the end of the wait, they may be faced with a jammed bus they cannot board. There might be another one (or two) right behind, but that makes no difference to the length of the wait, and those buses might not be going to the rider’s destination. Providing frequent service “on average” is not what riders want to see.

In this article, I will review the actual headways provided by the Dufferin bus at various locations during the month of March 2012. Although this is technically “winter” (most of it), 2012 was a balmy year and the route operated without the kind of severe weather delays we have seen in 2013.

Munro goes over it all in detail.