A public transit advocate says it doesn't come as a surprise that only about three-quarters of Halifax Transit's fleet was on time during the summer months of 2017.

According to a new Halifax Transit report, system wide on-time performance, which refers to being no more than one minute early and three minutes late, was 73 per cent for the period running from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2017.

Ben Wedge, executive director of the transit advocacy group It's More Than Buses, said unless Halifax invests more in dedicated bus lanes, on-time performance will continue to be poor.

"It's not right that a bus with 60 people on it is stuck in the same traffic as a bunch of individual drivers with no passengers in their vehicles," he said.

"And until we get those buses out of traffic, they're going to be delayed, they're going to be fighting through the same congestion and no one's going to want to take the bus."

Wedge said Halifax Transit also needs to spend more on route scheduling to have better on-time performance.

Ben Wedge, of It's More Than Buses, said increasing ridership numbers for Halifax Transit was one of the bright spots in the report. (CBC)

The report says industry standards for on-time performance generally range from 85 to 90 per cent. Halifax Transit doesn't have a target in place, but says it does intend to establish one.

Wedge said Halifax Transit lags at tracking key performance indicators, such as scheduling, maintenance and reliability of the fleet, and fuel consumption.

"They just don't have key performance indicators. I think that's really a fault of council and a lack of proper oversight for decades, that they're not keeping up with the industry on those metrics," he said.

Road construction to blame

Halifax Transit said on-time performance during the second quarter was "significantly impacted" by road construction projects and singled out work to the St. Margarets Bay Road in particular, which required detours on several routes.

This project also increased traffic on Bayers Road that fed in from Highway 102.

The rush-hour route most likely to be late

The #1 Spring Garden, Halifax Transit's busiest route with 8,741 boardings per day, was on time 60 per cent of the day, but only 47 per cent during peak hours. Its peak-time performance was the worst among Halifax Transit's routes.

The regular-service route with the best all-day performance was the #83 Springfield, which was on schedule 96 per cent of the time. The route runs from Middle to Lower Sackville. It also tied the #56 Dartmouth Crossing as the bus being most on time during peak hours at 96 per cent.

Ridership is up

Overall ridership for bus, ferry and Access-A-Bus service was up 1.7 per cent over the previous quarter. Revenue was down by 0.04 per cent.

The average weekday passenger count was 90,785 riders.

Bus failures

Wedge said the fact the average distance between bus failures had increased by 15.3 per cent over the second quarter of 2016 is good news for passengers.

"What that means for the end user is the bus should be there when they say it's going to be there. The more reliable those buses are from a mechanical standpoint, the more likely you are going to have the trip you were promised," he said.