cityscape Sufferin’ on the Dufferin

What makes the 29 Dufferin one of Toronto’s most notorious bus routes, and what the TTC is doing to fix it.

The bus lurches to a stop, and I stumble against the mass of silent, stone-faced commuters. No one says anything, but the waves of Monday-morning annoyance are palpable.

Looking around at the crowd, it’s clear I’m the only one who isn’t a regular. People listen to their music and tap away at their smart phones as they trundle along on their way to work. It’s crowded and unpleasant, but no more so than any city bus at peak hours. Yet I had braced for heaving masses, complete dysfunction and, well, borderline chaos. And that’s because this isn’t just any bus route—it’s the Sufferin’ Dufferin.

The 29 Dufferin is arguably Toronto’s most hated bus route. Certainly, public sentiment is well documented; angry riders have taken to Yelp, Twitter, and Reddit to voice their frustrations with the route, giving it the apt and enduring nickname “Sufferin’ Dufferin.” There are even pins available for purchase, and some rather creative fan art.

So why, as one Yelp writer puts it, is the 29 Dufferin “beyond reproach and beyond compare”? As David Topping pointed out in The Grid (RIP), it’s not the city’s busiest bus route, or its longest, but it causes major headaches. Rider complaints include long wait times, bunching, and an excess of short turns. It’s these factors in combination with a road in need of some new tarmac (which my haphazard footing can attest to), that make for such a particularly unpleasant transit experience.

While public ire for the 29 Dufferin continues, the TTC is aware of the situation and has taken some major steps to rectify it. It’s worth examining both the problems themselves and their suggested solutions to see if the route may need a new nickname in the not so distant future.

The Facts

The Complaints

Steve Munro, a Toronto transit advocate and Torontoist contributor, has used TTC vehicle tracking data to review the 29 Dufferin’s operation between 2011 and 2015. In his report on the route he identifies a few key failures in performance: headways (or time in between vehicles), bunching, and short turns.

Headways give riders an idea of when they can expect the next bus to arrive. Regular service, according to the TTC, means a vehicle every five to 10 minutes. According to Munro, “Headways may look good on paper, but if the service arrives unreliably, or if some of it never reaches the destination thanks to short turns, then the advertised service is a polite fiction.”

Short turns are used by drivers to ensure that they are keeping to their scheduled running times. If they can’t complete the full route in the scheduled time, they’ll short turn and return to the station early, frustrating riders who are unceremoniously dumped off before arriving at their chosen destination. Munro notes that the 29 Dufferin will often short turn at College, meaning those who are looking to use the service southbound find themselves stranded.

“The route is constantly changed without warning, one moment you are on a bus headed south to Dufferin gates and the next you are being kicked off at minus 20 to stand on the corner of College Street to wait and try and make it onto the people-filled bus trailing behind,” wrote one disgruntled Yelp reviewer.

Munro links the route’s scheduled headways to its abundance of short turns.

“What shows up quite consistently is that standard deviations [in headways] rarely fall below two minutes and are commonly at higher values, and that these values seem to have little relation to the headway actually operating,” he writes. The problem with this, he says, is that the wider headways tend to spread out as vehicles move along the route, leaving the narrow headways to collapse into bunched service. This creates the oft bemoaned “packs” of Dufferin buses, which leave riders waiting for a bus, only to have four arrive at once.

The solutions

Munro notes that “in November 2014 the route officially switched to articulated bus operation weekdays and Saturdays” and that “in April 2014 there was a major restructuring of the schedules: considerably more running time was provided to reflect actual conditions, and the split operation at the south end of the route was discontinued on weekends.”

These changes can be attributed, at least in part, to the hiring of Rick Leary as the TTC’s Chief of Service Delivery in April 2014. Leary, who previously headed up York Region Transit, was well aware of 29 Dufferin’s reputation from the very beginning.

“In October of 2014 a review of Dufferin route was initiated,” he explains. “We looked at the route, we saw there were these short turns, we knew you couldn’t get from A to Z in the time that was allocated in many cases.” In response to these issues, Leary ensured that the schedule was modified to fit the reality of the situation, and made sure their were additional runner directed buses on the road that would be able to help stranded commuters when a short turn did occur.

“We knew that 50 to 60 per cent of our buses were leaving on time. We added some time to the schedule and we started to see 80 to 90 per cent increases on departure time,” he says. The result? “Our short turns are drastically reduced,” he says proudly.

The numbers seem to indicate as much. From 2013 to 2014 the route experienced 39 customer service complaints about short turns. In 2014 to 2015 that number dropped to 13. Discourtesy complaints went from 233 to 80, and complaints about surface delays from 262 to 134. “The more and more we focus on reliability, the more you see numbers starting to plummet in certain areas,” Leary explains.

The focus of Leary’s strategy is reliability; instead of having drivers make short turns to make their running times, they spread their headways instead. “We have supervisors working from the ends of the line, at our dispatch centre, telling people, spread your headways. The more vehicles we have that go from A to Z, the more we’re able to forecast what travel times are, and the better we’re going to be able to revise these schedules,” he explains.

Leary plans to take the success he’s achieved with the 29 and apply it more broadly across the city. “Right now we’re looking at all the bus routes, trying to find the top ten bus routes with the highest riderships, the highest complaints, and the highest amounts of short turns, because we want to go over the biggest ones first,” he says.

Both the numbers and the online outrage seem to suggest that Leary’s doing something right. The majority of complaints about the route are from between 2010 to 2013, before the improvements had been made. It might just be time for long-time Dufferin-haters to turn in their novelty buttons and start hating the 501 like everyone else.