Guest Post: Feeder buses in Toronto

This post is by Peter, and follows on from his previous post about feeder buses.

Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, and is an interesting case-study because – for such a large city – it has a relatively small ‘rapid transit network’. The Toronto Subway has about 70 kilometres of in-service track (with 69 stations), while the GO Transit commuter rail network doesn’t really offer the level of service and frequencies we would associate with ‘rapid transit’.  Like many Canadian cities, Toronto does a lot with its relatively limited system – especially when it comes to integrating its bus network and feeding into the rapid transit system. Weekday daily ridership in 2010 averaged 948,100 on the subway, with frequencies up to a train every 2 minutes and generally no worse than a train every 5-6 minutes. Here’s a map of the subway and rapid transit network:

The Toronto system is also incredibly smart in its use of feeder buses to the rapid transit network. This passage from Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia” highlights a comparison between Toronto and Melbourne, when it comes to the role of feeder buses:

The real difference between Toronto and Melbourne is not in the share of residents living within walking distance of rail stations: the share in Melbourne is actually higher, at 20 per cent to Toronto’s 15, because its rail network is much larger and has many more stations. The critical factor is the behaviour of the 80-85 per cent of residents who didn’t live near stations. In Melbourne, these residents rarely used public transport, especially outside peak hours: across the day 69 per cent of rail passengers walked to the station and 17 per cent travelled by car. In the part of Toronto served by the TTC, residents who lived beyond walking distance from stations used public transport nearly as often as those who lived nearby: only 20 per cent of rail users walked to the station and a tiny 3 per cent took cars. The big difference was in the use of feeder buses (and trams): 76 per cent of TTC rail passengers travelled to the station in this way, against only 10 per cent in Melbourne.

So we know the vast bulk of passengers on Toronto’s rail system get there on the bus – that’s a heck of a lot of transfers happening! TTC statistics back this up – highlighting that across all forms of the public transport system there are really high rates of transfers. In 2010 there were 1,512,000 average daily ‘linked’ trips (i.e. that number of fares collected), but once you include transfer trips there was an average of 2,508,000 daily trips. While some trips involve more than a single transfer, if we were to assume that each trip only had the one transfer, the numbers indicate that around 65% of trips involve a transfer/connection.

How does Toronto operate a system based so significantly around transfers, while at the same time obviously ensuring that it’s an attractive enough network for very high ridership rates? That’s a question obviously worth exploring in more detail. Let’s start with what Mees says about how Toronto’s system works – largely coming from his previous book A Very Public Solution:

The TTC’s bus network operated as an extension of the subway system, linking it to the whole of the city. This enabled the provision of a ‘Paris Metro’ style frequent rail service, running every five minutes or better until 1:45am seven days a week. Frequencies like this would require extremely high densities if patrons walked to the station, but the TTC’s rail-bus strategy circumvented the density problem… Because of the economical densities of patronage generated by the feeder bus network, the Toronto subway returned an operating surplus, which helped defray the loss incurred by the buses. Conventional economists might object to this apparent cross-subsidy, but in reality the performance of the two modes cannot be separated: the rail service would not carry enough passengers to make a profit without the loss-making buses that fed it. The net result was that Toronto’s much smaller rail system outperformed Melbourne’s large network, by using buses to extend its reach.

The system relies on making these feeder buses work well, of course. Some key points relating to Toronto’s system are outlined by Mees:

• Main bus routes operate at high frequencies (every 10 minutes or better) across the whole span of service.
• The network follows the grid street pattern, allowing straight and logical links with the subway stations (which are generally located at the intersection of key arterial roads).
• Free transfers between services – to the extent that at most subway stations the buses actually enter the ‘fare paid’ part of the station, avoiding inconvenient and slow ticket checks.
• Bus to bus transfers are facilitated by physical design: stops located immediately adjacent to intersections where routes cross, approach and departure side stops on wide roads eliminate the need to cross wide streets.

So what does a Toronto feeder bus service actually look like? Let’s take the 36 route for example, which is shown in blue in the picture below (the rapid transit system is shown in the various colours each line is generally depicted in): 
The 36 route has a few little variations – some buses branching off at various points as you head west, but generally follows what’s shown above: a straight and logical route that not only provides good east-west connections, not only feeds people into the Yonge-University-Spadina Line at Finch Station but also connects to a vast range of north-south bus services. In effect, with just one transfer, anyone living on this bus route has access to anywhere on the entire inner-western part of Toronto. Plus, for really common trips – such as those trying to get to the subway – the route offers the fastest and most logical option. No winding your way randomly through the suburbs here, just a direct route straight to the subway system.

As I said earlier, there’s a little bit of complexity with the route having a number of branches, but even those are handled in a way that’s pretty easy to understand:

Even though this route is really quite far out into the suburbs (remember the map earlier in the post to give a clue about its location in Toronto), it can support fantastic frequencies by doing so many different things and doing them so effectively.

So I think we can learn quite a lot from Toronto when it comes to feeder buses. Firstly, ideally the routes should be useful for something other than just being a feeder service (likely, especially if the interchange point becomes a retail/office/housing hub). Secondly, the process of the transfer is made as easy as possible – through high frequencies, station design, integrated ticketing and even at some stations bringing the bus effectively “into” the subway station. Thirdly, the route structure itself makes sense and is pretty attractive for travellers – being straight, direct, quick, easy to understand and logical.

Note: I’ve never actually been to Toronto, so all of this thinking just comes from reading books and looking at a lot of maps on the internet. If there are any locals, or people who have visited Toronto and wish to add to the points made or dispute them, I’d most welcome it!

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