Since 2014, the TTC subway system has recorded 34 bomb threats, lost 221 minutes because of reported robberies and had to suspend service on 395 occasions because a car was deemed “unsanitary.”

There were 60 incidents in which employees refused to work, over 281 hours of delays caused by sick passengers and 51 disruptions caused by reports of suspicious packages.

These precise numbers come from an unprecedented data dump by the TTC that has given the public a remarkably detailed look at the hows, whys and wheres of service disruptions on the subway and Scarborough RT network.

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said the agency receives so many requests from journalists for delay data that it finally decided to make the statistics available for anyone to download.

“It’s a lot of work to be perfectly frank. But it’s public information, and we’re happy to provide it,” he said. “It helps tell the story.”

The statistics, posted in raw form to the city’s open data website last week, cover January 2014 to April 2017. The more than 69,000 delay incidents on the subway and SRT over that period are sorted into 187 different categories that capture everything that can slow down a train, from door problems and injured employees to faulty radios and signal issues.

The numbers show that the TTC averages about 58 stoppages per day, each one lasting an average of 1.8 minutes. (The average delay on the rickety Scarborough RT is more than three times the system-wide number.)

While performance has significantly improved in the first five months of this year and the TTC says it’s cut delay times by more than a quarter from the same period in 2014, the agency hasn’t yet been able to reduce the number of delays recorded year over year.

In fact, between 2014 and 2016, the number of incidents per year increased slightly. But over that same period the time lost to delays fell by more than 7 per cent because the agency resolved problems more quickly.

“We’ve done much better on minutes than delays. So we get lots of very short delays,” said Mike Palmer, the TTC’s chief operations officer.

The trend is perhaps most glaring in the delays attributed to people activating the subway passenger assistance alarm without apparent cause. The number of such incidents fell slightly to 1,272 from 1,410 a year, but the time lost was nearly cut in half, to just 689 minutes from 1,190 minutes.

Palmer attributed the improvement to the TTC strategically positioning staff and supervisors at stations during busy periods. “We’re responding faster,” he said.

While transit officials often bear the brunt of riders’ frustrations for lengthy delays, three of the five leading causes of stalled service are customer-related.

Injured or ill passengers accounted for the most delay hours over the recorded period, at 281. The next leading causes were fire or smoke in the system, disorderly patrons, faulty car doors and what the TTC calls “priority ones” — when a person is hit by a train in a suicide attempt or other circumstance.

The number of priority ones fluctuated between 17 and 32 a year between 2014 and 2016, with seven so far this year. Such delays take a long time to clear, as TTC and emergency service staff undertake the grim task of clearing the scene. The average length of priority one delays is 64 minutes.

The station that experienced the most delay incidents of all kinds was Kennedy, followed by Kipling, Bloor-Yonge, St. George and Finch.

The high number at terminal stations such as Kipling, Kennedy and Finch is likely accounted for by the fact that some problems are discovered only once trains reach the end of the line, where crews have a chance to address mechanical or cleanliness issues.

“That could be urine, it could be feces, it could be vomit,” said Palmer. “New Year’s Eve … we had extra crews on just cleaning up vomit and nothing else. Pretty much every train that went to Finch had vomit in one or more cars.”

Keele station on Line 2 (Bloor-Danforth) also saw a high number of delays, with 2,026 incidents. Palmer said the likely cause was that Keele is near a long stretch of uncovered track.

“There you get leaves, you get (trespassers), you get things thrown on the track, you get dead raccoons,” he said.

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One stat that has the TTC worried is an unexplained rise in trespassing delays. Time lost to such incidents increased 43 per cent over three years to almost 25 hours in 2016. There were 162 reported occurrences of trespassing last year alone.

Palmer said people go onto the tracks for different reasons, including to urinate, to retrieve something they dropped, or on a dare.

“We’ve even in the past found a homeless person in a vent shaft in the middle of winter … They went down there as a safe place to sleep and stay warm,” he said.

The worst single day in the recorded period came on Feb. 17, 2015, when there were almost 21 hours of delays. Icy conditions knocked a Scarborough RT train out of service near Midland, and passengers had to be evacuated over the tracks. Service didn’t resume until the following day.

The most trouble-free 24 hours came on a serene Christmas Day in 2015, when a total of just 4 minutes of delays were recorded.

The data provided by the TTC is so detailed that it even shows which individual cars have experienced the most problems. If you see number 5661 coming, you may want to wait for the next train. It’s been delayed 237 separate times since 2014.