The TTC is retraining some subway and streetcar operators to drive buses as part of a wider effort to shift resources from downtown routes that have seen their ridership plummet during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ridership across the transit system remains at only 31 per cent of pre-pandemic levels but the reduction has not been equally felt. On bus routes ridership has now climbed back to 45 per cent of pre-pandemic levels but on streetcars it is only 28 per cent and on subways it is only 26 per cent.
That disparity has meant that some bus routes in the city’s inner suburbs, where there is a higher prevalence of essential workers, have remained crowded amid the pandemic despite the TTCs best efforts. Meanwhile routes that mostly serve downtown office workers, many of whom are now working from home, are often empty or close to it.
At a briefing at city hall on Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said that the city is now working with the TTC to make sure that there are “extra buses to ensure physical distancing on busy routes” in hotspot neighboruhoods where higher rates of infection have been observed.
He said that as part of that an unprecedented effort is now underway to retrain subway and streetcar operators over the next two months so that they can be reassigned to other parts of the city.
The TTC is also restoring express bus service along several busy corridors, such as Jane Street and Lawrence Avenue East.
“We are adding extra buses to ensure greater physical distancing on busy routes. We know this won’t always be possible at the busiest times of the day and that is why we brought in the mandatory mask rule on the TTC but we are working to get as many buses as possible on the busiest bus routes,” Tory said.
The TTC temporarily furloughed hundreds of operators in April as ridership declined by 86 per cent amid the various lockdown orders that accompanied the first wave of the pandemic
The workers were, however, all brought back by November once ridership started to slowly increase.
Service is now back to 96 per cent of pre-pandemic levels on the TTC’s bus network and some routes actually have more frequent service than they did before, including 36 Finch West, 35 Jane, 102 Markham, 54 Lawrence East, 29 Dufferin and 41 Keele.
But the TTC has only restored about 86 per cent of the service across its subway and streetcar network due to a demand-geared approach that it has utilized throughout the pandemic.
The TTC’s 2021 service plan, which was released on Wednesday and will be considered by the board next week, says that ridership will “steadily increase” as the year goes on but will only rise above 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels “once mass vaccinations begin.”
In the interim, the TTC says that its goal will be to ensure that there are not more than 25 passengers on a bus at any given time. It says more than 95 per cent of trips through the week ending Nov. 27 were below that threshold.
“Demand will continue to vary by mode with bus service being the greatest until activity in the downtown core significantly increases,” the plan notes.
Higher transit usage in hotspot neighbourhoods
The TTC’s service plan reveals that some of the parts of the city with the highest levels of COVID-19 infections also had the highest level of transit usage, likely pointing to a prevalence of frontline workers that haven’t been able to work from home.
For example, Presto taps on surface routes in all of the neighbourhoods in the hard-hit northwest corner of Toronto were at a minimum of 46 per cent of pre-pandemic levels in October and in one particular neighbourhood they were at more than 56 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.
But in the downtown core they were at less than 25 per cent
“The message has been received and it is all hands on deck,” Tory said on Wednesday. “So much so that the TTC is actually retraining subway and streetcar drivers who have not previously been trained on how to drive a bus.”
