Toronto and Chicago, A Tale of Two Cities - Part 2B: Suburban Bus Transit
Suburban bus and local rail service further differentiate the Great Lakes megacities.
If you’re just starting this article, make sure you read the first part (linked below), which talks about the different provision of urban bus service between Toronto and Chicago. Today’s follow-up article will talk about buses in the suburbs (outside of the cities, so it might be more accurate to say “outer” suburbs) and the X-factor of streetcars and light rail for Toronto!
Suburban Service
In Chicago, suburban bus service is almost all run by PACE, and that includes a combination of typical local bus routes, express highway routes, and two “BRT” corridors that are probably more accurately described as “BRT-lite” as they aren’t exactly centre-running, fully-dedicated lane lines, known as PACE PULSE. On the whole, the PACE network is actually impressively extensive.
One thing that really makes PACE feel promising is that by taking on all of the truly suburban transit services in Chicago, you could in theory have a high level of integration — as PACE is a bigger agency relative to say the CTA. Unfortunately though, unlike in Toronto with GO, PACE does not include the regional and suburban rail, which is run by METRA. This creates a structural problem because it lets transit service get divided along the age-old line where wealthier riders use trains and bus service is left behind.
Indeed, when you consider that PACE has over 200 routes (more than the TTC) that it needs to operate with about 1/3 the buses, you can see how poor the service that is generally provided is. And the effect of that service being spread too thin is that PACE was moving less than 70,000 riders per day in mid-2023, comparable to just one suburban agency in the GTHA.
At the same time, integration is really not much better than Toronto (where it’s bad!). While you can fortunately use your VENTRA smart card for PACE services, those services mostly end at the edge of urban Chicago. You’d hope that since PACE controls all of the suburban bus service they could negotiate something better than that with CTA — like having each operator pick up selective routes into and out of the city to create a better mesh, but that’s not the case.
To be clear PACE is not all bad: its “BRT-lite” lines — the Milwaukee Line and the Dempster — actually provide a mostly-solid 15-minute service for most of the day (although you’d kind of hope for better with a service that has such a big fuss made about it), and two more similar lines are being developed. That being said, the answer for PACE mainly seems to be 1) a merger with METRA, and 2) dramatically better service everywhere.
Suburban service in Toronto is organized very differently from Chicago. While both cities have their local buses run by the TTC and CTA respectively and regional rail and bus run by GO, and PACE and METRA respectively, the anemic local service provided by PACE in Chicago is replaced with service provided by the cities surrounding Toronto in the GTHA, and that has a big impact!
The best way to look at this difference in structure is that while in Toronto the quality of service varies dramatically from suburb to suburb (though at its worst it’s still generally about as good as PACE); within some of those cities local transit is actually quite good for North America, such as in Mississauga, Hamilton, Durham, and especially and perhaps famously Brampton. Knitting all of the suburbs together are the same type of routes that generally forces riders to transfer to a route in the next city over to continue travelling, but there is also GO Transit that runs bus and train service that seamlessly travels across the region.
In terms of the impact on local transit, having transit controlled by the cities probably means that the “sub-networks” are optimized more for the trips that are popular within each suburb, as opposed to trying to form a coherent regional system, but that’s probably ok as GO explicitly handles regional transit. At the same time, adjacent suburban municipalities are usually not too horrible about some level of integration (although the City of Toronto and the suburbs generally are not very good), and they actually continue to have decent fare integration among themselves.
I think in large part because of the “local optimization” of transit routes, Toronto’s suburbs have benefitted from a virtuous cycle of transit use and provisioning that’s harder to get with a region-wide compliance-style network like PACE. And since the suburbs are all separate cities, they’ve seemingly been able to get a lot more investment in capital improvement projects.
For example, York Region has a bunch of BRT routes and nice bus terminals that blow the PACE stuff out of the water. Brampton has a similar service model to PACE PULSE known as ZÜM, which is far more extensive and also just provides better service. Mississauga even has an Ottawa-style “transitway”, which is a fully grade-separated bus roadway roughly between the city centre and Pearson Airport. Now, while some of the infrastructure — most notably the BRT in York — gets way under-utilized, the reality is that while PACE seems to guarantee pretty mediocre service, something better is at least possible in Toronto.
Better yet, the already more extensive local transit infrastructure in Toronto is growing a lot. There are plans for two very long BRT routes similar in quality to those seen in York Region through the suburbs to the east and west of Toronto that should get a lot more use as well. There is also a new BRT planned connecting York Region and Brampton, and a number of new bus terminals that provide a really high-quality transfer and waiting space. All in all, there should be a huge amount of high-quality bus infrastructure in the GTHA in the next decade, and better yet it should also get a ton of service using it.
The Weird Urban Suburban Gap
What’s fascinating about both Chicago and Toronto is that they both suffer from a gap between service levels and infrastructure in and out of the city’s are the centre of the regions.
In Toronto, while service tends to be very frequent on arterial routes, buses essentially appear to never follow a schedule and bunching is severe, which wastes resources. While suburban bus operators do benefit from more dedicated bus lanes and priority bus treatments, they do also seem better at maximizing their resources by minimizing bunching and actually running the service that schedules suggest. At the same time, the divide seen in a place like Brampton between all-day express ZÜM routes and local service is nowhere to be found in Toronto, where express routes are often peak-only and local routes are painfully slow. I actually think if the City of Toronto and TTC adopted the practices and network design seen in Brampton they could easily eke out 15-30% more bus ridership from their large existing fleet by speeding up service and reducing wasteful bunching.
In Chicago, the divide feels much the same, although PACE not having much high-frequency local service outside of its modest PULSE routes means that the CTA actually probably still remains a better operator. Nonetheless, in both Chicago and Toronto bus service is clearly quite inconsistent across the respective regions, and this impacts not only people’s ability to make longer region-wide trips, but also equity if you just happen to live somewhere with crappier service and infrastructure.
Streetcars and Light Rail
Of course, the most notable difference in local transit between Toronto and Chicago is probably the streetcars (at least that’s what you’d think!) that run through central parts of Toronto.
Unfortunately, the streetcar network often feels to me like more of a negative than a positive for Toronto. No doubt if the streetcars were optimized they’d be far better than buses, but today service often feels slow, unreliable, and just not very high-quality. New streetcars even have lower-fidelity wayfinding screens than new buses! Worse still, for what has always mostly seemed like a desire not to have buses “compete” with streetcar services, the local bus service in areas served by streetcars is often really bad! It’s crazy, but downtown Toronto absolutely has worse bus (and streetcar) service than the suburbs. I’m actually frequently told by locals that they long ago gave up on streetcars and now either cycle, walk and take the subway, or the most painful thing for me to hear… UBER.
Now, to be clear, the streetcars are obviously not all bad. For one, they are electric and that is very nice, and when going in a straight line they are quite quiet. The King street corridor manages to move a ton of people, and despite being slow Spadina is also fairly respectable — but it often feels like the TTC thought all that was required to modernize the network over the past two decades was new vehicles, not paring down infrastructure like switches, expanding priority measures, increasing speed, and upping reliability.
Toronto is also taking the popularity (at least theoretical popularity) of the streetcars and expanding outwards with new suburban light rail routes, which mostly seem to be about upgrading the quality of the passenger experience and reducing operating costs on some of the busier bus routes and more important corridors in the region such as Finch Avenue West and Hurontario Street. While these routes are sadly not operational yet, it will be interesting to see what a frequency decrease (at least on Finch buses run more frequently than light rail will) but passenger experience improvement will do.
What should Chicago do to close the gap?
Clearly the gap in local transit service between Toronto and Chicago is big, so what should Chicago do to close it?
The first and most obvious thing to do is double the frequency across the CTA system, modelling such an expansion on the TTC’s ten-minute network — but potentially outdoing it by running more reliable service on a schedule with less bunching, allowing TTC service levels with significantly less buses (the CTA should have more than enough buses already to do this).
I actually think PACE’s priority bus lines are a really good initiative and should be made both more frequent and more extensive. There’s no good reason PACE shouldn’t shift to mostly providing service on such lines, and a Chicago with 30 PACE PULSE lines would clearly be pretty good — running them 24/7 would be reasonable as well. However, the impact of these routes is limited if they always need to end at the edge of Chicago, perhaps a solution could be found in PACE building the infrastructure into Chicago itself, and then both CTA and PACE running the service — this would reduce the number of transfers passengers have to make and seriously improve the attractiveness of PULSE overall.
It might also make sense to hand regional bus service over to METRA, to create a parallel to Toronto’s GO, albeit with a stronger “all-day service” mandate, which METRA already seems to slowly be moving towards.
The last question is… where does light rail make sense in Chicago? I actually think some light rail in the city centre and along the lakeshore is a really promising idea, as it could augment the El’s coverage connecting dense neighbourhoods that lack rapid transit today. You could also really leapfrog the TTC streetcar network by building out a, say, 4-line city centre light rail system in Chicago with two east-west and two north-south lines with full dedicated lanes, level boarding, signal priority and fast consistent service. Since these would be new build, they would also not feature loops and could have 50-metre long, 7-segment LRVs. If you’d be interested in an article about this in the future — fleshing the idea out more fully, make sure to leave a comment!
I think the case for suburban light rail is perhaps less clear, since as I’ve talked about in many videos, light rail system tend to excel when there is a high demand for shorter trips. I think Chicago can benefit from the natural experiment that happens in Toronto here: if light rail leads to massive densification and a ridership explosion, then maybe Chicago should look at it. Something that complicates things is that in Chicago there is a real lack of an orbital rail service (a so called “outer” loop); creating such a service with one of Chicago’s many rail corridors and a tram train type of vehicle could be very attractive.
Thanks for joining me for the second part of the local transit section of this series, the next edition is one I am particularly interested in: Suburban Rail!
An extra reminder about this series, while articles are paywalled you can always gift a subscription or refer people who you want to read it, it helps!
I'd be EXTREMELY interested in an eventual post on city-center LRT routes in Chicago! "Loop link" (some very lite BRT) can be handy, but still doesn't feel like it's adequate for what it's supposed to be doing in terms of fast frequent transit options through the center.