Toronto and Chicago, A Tale of Two Cities - Part 2A: Urban Bus Transit
Local transit is dramatically different in our northern lakefront city, and it's not just streetcars!
In today’s subscriber-exclusive continuation of “A Tale of Two Cities”, I’ll talk about the dramatically different local transit in the Toronto region (the GTHA, or Greater Toronto & Hamilton area is the closest we have to a Chicagoland equivalent) and Chicagoland. If you missed my last article on rapid transit I’ll link it here:
While the differences between Toronto and Chicago for rapid transit are actually diminishing over time as Chicago’s system grows only a little while Toronto massively expands the subway network, the opposite is true for local transit. Toronto already has dramatically more local transit options across the region (particularly in the suburb,s which I think always goes under-appreciated), and that gap will only grow into the future based on the projects happening right now.
How many buses?
A good way to set the tone for the comparison is looking at the transit providers and their capacity in the two cities today by comparing the number of buses, which tends to be a good proxy for local transit service. Right now, Chicago provides local transit throughout the city via the CTA (which provides urban service), and in the greater region with PACE and its suburban bus and regional highway bus services. CTA has 1879 buses while PACE has 792 — a total of 2671 buses serving all of Chicagoland seems pretty impressive, though to compare the MTA in New York does eclipse this number with 5725 buses (which are just the MTA! Not the other, albeit smaller, agencies in the New York Region) New York is a significantly large city.
So what do the numbers look like in Toronto? Well, the TTC alone has 2100 buses, while Peel Region has roughly another 1000, York Region has another 500 or so, Durham has about 170, and Burlington, Oakville, and Hamilton add nearly 500 more between them. But beyond those “urban” bus operators there is also GO transit, which by itself has roughly 700 more buses that serve regional routes between the various cities! That means there are around 4987 buses that serve the Toronto region, roughly twice as many as serve Chicagoland! On top of the significantly larger fleet size, I’d suggest that the large amount of BRT, Transitway, and Highway bus routes in the Toronto region probably also make Toronto’s buses much more productive so overall bus service provision is easily more than twice as much in Toronto as in Chicago.
Level of Service
When you look at the actual level of bus service provided in the two cities, it’s pretty dramatic. To be sure, Chicago has some decently frequent bus corridors — Ashland for example (which would be a good candidate to handle an equivalent of the Bloor Line in Toronto for crosstown trips;' in fact Ashland and Bloor are both similar distances from the lakes) has roughly 10-minute service for much of the day. The street even has a BRT plan, which appears to be in development hell as I can find lots of references to it from the early 2010s, and it’s not like Chicago has seen lots of new transit projects competing to be built in the last decade.
However, when you start looking at more suburban areas, Toronto’s bus service really shines. While bus routes running every 10 minutes or better all day are a dime a dozen in Toronto, in Chicago similar routes typically run every 20 or 30 minutes — that’s before you note that Toronto has a lot of questionable mid-block local routes that also run similar headways to Chicago’s main routes.
Night service is a really interesting place to compare, where the differences are even more stark from daytime service. Chicago simply has quite a bit less twenty-four hour transit service than Toronto does, and the City of Toronto running night bus service creates positive pressure on other cities nearby to also do so. I should also point out that while Toronto does not run the subway 24 hours a day as Chicago does with the Blue and Red lines, it does run a frequent bus replacement service. Toronto also does a good job consolidating multiple daytime routes into single night routes to reduce the pain of having to potentially transfer to an infrequent connecting route in the middle of the night — for example, travelling along Bloor and then to Pearson Airport.
Of course, in both cities rail and bus are integrated to an extent, and in both there are also bus terminals where you can connect between rail and local bus routes. 95th/Dan Ryan in Chicago comes to mind, but the integration between rail and bus is just much more significant in Toronto.
For example, giant suburban bus terminals in Toronto can be found at Finch, Warden, Kennedy, Kipling, Wilson, Pioneer Village, and more; this tighter integration with rail provides a huge boost to Toronto. The ridership on the subway as detailed in the last article of this series is much more concentrated and a lot of it comes from transfers at the big bus terminals — which provide a much nicer indoor transfer experience in the suburbs, especially in a harsh Great Lakes winter than a basic stop under an elevated viaduct.
Those bus terminals end up not only being used by bus→ rail passengers, but also bus→ bus, because along with the much better bus frequencies, having an enclosed space with Wifi to wait in is pretty nice!
And all of this extra service provision has a big impact. TTC bus ridership is recovering well from the pandemic and is well over a million a day, while the CTA has bus ridership sitting at just around half a million. Of course, these figures can’t be considered completely independently of a more “transit-friendly” culture in Canada and less urban freeways in Toronto, but then again much of Toronto’s suburban transit success has come on bus routes running parallel to major freeways — the reality is that great frequency helps transit a lot. Of course, ridership also does not scale linearly with service, but exponentially. It’s pretty obvious to anyone that understands public transport than an hourly bus is clearly not going to attract one quarter the riders of a service that runs every 15 minutes.
This article will be followed up with a “B-Side later this week talking about suburban buses and rail services! Stay tuned.