I don't like riding my local bus, but it doesn't have to be this way
The bus is oft maligned, but not always unfairly
Walking over to the bus stop is a weird experience these days. You’d imagine moving to downtown Toronto would mean way better local transit service, but frequencies kind of suck - that’s a big problem because without high frequency downtown you are often better off just walking. This feels like the “diet” version of the problems buses face in the rest of North America.
Sadly in North America, buses are usually not very popular. Even people in the transit space often seem to think buses are a lower form of public transportation. I talk about rail a lot, but obviously so many forms of transit primarily will be delivered with buses - local service, night service, rapidly deployed service, replacement service, last mile! I think even I was a bit more questioning of the usefulness or value of buses before I moved to suburban Toronto (City of Toronto, not in the old city). I think the broad disdain for buses comes down to some key issues, many of which my local service in bus-heaven Toronto suffers from.
The first obvious issue is that riding the buses here is rough. Toronto’s streets are perennially in pretty bad shape and it’s very rare to see a road without lots of holes, cracks and an uneven surface, and this along with the poor suspension in many low floor buses leads to a bumpy, loud, rattly ride that I personally find can give me headaches. At the same time, the lurching and weaving of buses into and out of curb lanes due to the lack of transit priority signals or of dedicated space for buses means that even if you manage to get a seat you’re often tossed about. Of course, 99% of buses are diesel powered in Toronto so you also have the loud engine and vibrations from that. Creating dedicated busways in areas that aren’t likely to receive rapid transit in the future should really be more of a priority, not just to ensure that buses (and emergency vehicles) can get around traffic and spend less time weaving, but also so the quality of the ride on vehicles can be improved. Electric buses of some sort, be it trolley, battery, are seriously a game changer: Not only do they massively reduce emissions, they should also be cheaper to operate and maintain in the long run, allowing transit agencies to effectively convert capital funds to operating funding. I was also reminded just how incredibly pleasant being on a bus can be without the noise and vibrations of an engine when I travelled to Ottawa last week, it’s awesome!
The buses are too cramped and the wayfinding is lackluster. Buses are naturally the workhorse of the transit fleet, but given their relative frequency it amazes me how bad we’ve allowed seating layouts to become. I am not a particularly tall person, but I’ve often hit my knees sitting in many of the seats, some of which are also oriented in awkward ways just to cram a few extra on. That seats are also hard and covered in a thin layer of fabric, which is just the discomfort of a plastic seat without the sanitary benefits. At the same time, so often bus wayfinding is brutal. Often announcements are quiet and hard to hear over the sound of the bus itself, and in my experience it’s rare to find a bus with a good colour information display, even though buses would probably benefit more from them than trains due to their increased route variability. Toronto’s TTC has them in some buses, but the implementation is absolutely horrible - some information cycles despite there being loads of room, much of the screen is taken up by a logo, and the important information is hard to see. It also just *isn’t* aesthetically pleasing, which is important if we want people to want to take transit.
It’s often the case that you’re unable to see your stop until you’re some distance past the last one since announcements are GPS triggered, and this is a real problem where stops are so tightly spaced. These issues are definitely fixable as with many things. While York Region Transit completely fails to run adequate transit service, their VIVA BRT service nicely outlines how to make buses comfortable - though the move to less expensive (read: less nice) domestically produced buses is something that gives me mixed feelings. Seats are well spaced and feature more padding than those in Toronto proper. They also feature shockingly good - if poorly placed - colour next stop screens that even give you an estimated travel time. This doesn’t even dig into other types of buses, which can be appropriate in different environments (something I’ve discussed a fair bit in the past): Articulated buses can enable higher frequencies and shorter dwells, while double decker buses can provide more comfort and have basically always been popular with riders when used in North America.
Traffic slows buses, and route design is questionable. Buses getting stuck in traffic is the oldest tale out there, but it is really amazing that with all we know about dedicated bus lanes, transit signal priority, and congestion charges, so few cities are providing even basic priority to core bus routes. At the same time, route design often doesn’t feel very thoughtful. My local bus route has a crazy number of stops - which, thanks to streetside parking (bus lane please!), requires constant lane changes. This makes it slow, and also means that even between traffic signals the bus ends up stopping quite frequently. Worse still, it seems there is little synergy between the road designs and the route planning. I’ve often found urban buses in Toronto make incredibly awkward turns at tight intersections that could probably be avoided with a little more detailed planning. The TTC also seems to be overapplying its legitimately smart operations on suburban buses to urban routes. Having a bus pull into a large suburban bus terminal to provide a shorter walk to the subway and eliminate passing through the fare barriers makes sense, especially since suburban bus terminals usually have good street connections. On the other hand, having an urban bus go through a narrow back alley to access a cramped bus terminal while bringing me basically no closer to the stairs to the subway instead of stopping on the street is just weird, not to mention wasting a ton of time.
Bus stops could be nicer. I try to be thankful that unlike in suburban Vancouver where I grew up, bus shelters are abundant in Toronto, but they still aren’t great. The enclosed nature of the shelters is definitely appreciated when the weather is good but I can’t help but feel they often aren’t large enough. Having larger, more open shelters, especially at busy stops, would be nice, and I do appreciate that stops often have digital next vehicle screens. At the same time, shelters fail to provide critical protection from the sun. The glass ceiling design on shelters around the GTA might look sleek (if you’re flying above in a helicopter?), but it also means no real shade in summer, turning the shelter into an often-useless oven. At the same time, I think more variation could really be good at busier stops on key routes. There’s no reason a bus stop should not have tough tactile paving and even a raised curb to aid in accessibility.
I also cannot emphasize enough how much Toronto needs to totally reimagine the approach to local stop wayfinding. Not only are Toronto’s stop flags small and hard to see in many cases, but they provide *so* little information. This stop just tells me that route 63 and 363 stop here, but I don’t know where the route goes, which corridor it follows, what connections it makes (there’s a subway station a short distance from here), or how frequently it operates. The fact that major stops don’t provide any more information than this is crazy. Having something bright and bold that makes identifying a stop from far away would be a huge improvement.
Service is not what it should be. I am amazed I am going to say this but, perhaps central Toronto needs less bus routes. I hate to say it, but bus network redesigns are usually less about expanding service and more about reallocating it, and the central Toronto bus network is at a point where a redesign would probably be better than leaving things the way they are today, especially when combined with improved active travel options. Given the often-infrequent service of central Toronto bus routes and their poor schedule adherence, it’s quite often faster to walk and very frequently faster to cycle than to take the bus. Now, of course, we can’t just remove all bus service (and nobody wants that!), but reallocating service to busy routes and removing some east-west and some north-south routes to beef up service would be good. At the same time, less bus routes means that infrastructure improvements and interventions can be focused on those same routes, while cycling improvements could be focused on the lower traffic bus routes (which also generally have lower car traffic). Of course, some people depend on the local routes that provide service to inner areas of neighborhoods, but given the low frequency and reliability of these routes they aren’t popular with those who have compelling alternatives, and they’re also quite possibly good candidates for on demand transportation options.
Now, if Toronto (and other North American cities) addresses these issues, the bus could really take a big step forward as a more attractive mode of transportation. I think, in a macro sense, the reason buses aren’t more popular in North America is that while many systems get some things right, few get enough right to attract a really large amount of ridership. You can really see this in Toronto, whose suburban buses are not fancy but also aren’t in bad shape, and are usually quite clean and virtually always frequent and well patronized. Other North American bus transit success stories include Seattle and Vancouver, both of which have also invested in frequency - though not to the extent Toronto has - but they have also invested in nice hybrid and electric articulated buses, with transit priority and enhanced stops with express service, and this has been quite successful. It’s still all too common to see cities invest in nice buses or infrastructure without hitting those key service and user experience points of fast operation (or at least efficient operation) and high frequency.
At the same time, I actually think my opinion on a key transit issue has changed - what qualifies as turn up and go frequency. For me, I used to always hold onto what I think is the commonly accepted belief that to have a transit route be turn up and go it must have a minimum 15 minute frequency; Now, I actually think that the City of Toronto’s 10 minute frequency standard (sadly mostly applied to the bus suburban bus routes) is probably more logical. The reason for this, as with many things, has to do with the difference between theory and practice. In theory, a route scheduled to operate every 15 minutes does so, but in practice (especially without heavy prioritization) the operations are likely to be off, meaning in reality you may get a longer than 15 minute wait, and I think that is too long. By comparison, the 10 minute service standard on the TTC (which is often not met) means that in the worst case you still usually wait less than 15 minutes.
Ultimately, I think it’s critical for people who care about transit to take the issue of bus quality seriously. Despite what some may think, I am convinced that buses play a critical role in our transportation system, and that with the right execution they can be a comfortable and dignified form of transit. We just need to be much more thoughtful about them.
I agree that a half-way reliable 10-minute-interval service is the least for what I would consider to be a "walk-up" service -- one I don't plan on catching a particular vehicle from.
Actually, if a 10-minute service is pretty reliable, such as the Berlin S-Bahn, I would still plan on catching a particular train rather than blindly taking off from home.
A like this very informative article, except that you do not address the issue of stop dwell times. This is a huge problem here in the UK, where single-doorway are the norm. On frequency of urban bus routes, European (including British) experience is that every 15 minutes is not good enough. Every 10 is fine; every 6-8 minutes is the optimum. If you attempt a frequency of 'better' than every six minutes, BUNCHING (in Britain we call them 'convoys') is inevitable.