So. Many. TikTok videos.
The unending barrage of grating, trendy music blares beside me. Surely this isn’t how I — or anyone — would choose to start their day.
It’s just after 7 a.m., and my bus seatmate is scrolling through TikTok on his phone. He’s swiping so quickly the music blurs into an incoherent spew. The sound fills the bus — no headphones, just raw speakers echoing through the entire ride.
Welcome to my first trip.
As part of the Star’s new series, we are setting out to find the city’s worst commutes. It’s part of our effort to discover what makes getting around our city so miserable — and what we can do about it. It’s in that vein that I took Alisha’s daily trek.
The loud passengers, bumpy bus rides and poor TTC service in Scarborough is the weekly reality for Alisha, a social worker who claims to have one of the city’s worst commutes.
“It takes me the same amount of time to take the transit as for my co-workers to drive from Ajax or Brampton into work,” she says.
Alisha (the Star is providing pseudonyms to the commuters for safety reasons) takes her bus, train and streetcar combination three times a week from Scarborough, and her journey downtown has gotten worse as transit options in the area have dwindled over the past few years, leaving her with a gruelling one-and-a-half hour trip from Scarborough to Riverside.
To start this journey we’re about to take together, I do need to make a confession: My own commute to work is usually a breeze. I live downtown and have a maximum 30-minute commute, with the option of cycling or taking the streetcar. Others aren’t so lucky.
It turns out the worst part of a commute sometimes isn’t the journey, it’s the unfortunate friends you make along the way.
A noisy commute begins in silence
Getting on the 133 Neilson Southbound bus is, by most TTC standards, a piece of cake. There are six other riders waiting when I arrive at a bus stop near Finch Avenue East and Neilson Road at 7:10 a.m. Everyone is minding their own business. Only two people are making small talk; the rest of us stand in sleepy silence by the shelter.
When the bus arrives minutes later, it’s empty enough that everyone gets a seat. The first few stops are eerily quiet bliss, though the driver is a bit heavy-footed on the brake.
A note: I get carsick relatively easily, which makes taking an hour-long bus ride an unpleasant experience from the get-go. But with this particularly aggressive bus driver, I feel thankful for not eating a heavy breakfast. That is, until the bus starts to fill up a few stops in.
I try not to complain about people on public transportation — for the most part minding your own business and popping an earphone in can help tune out most noise. But I’m without any earphones or a book, and the man in his mid-30s sitting next to me, wearing a neatly pressed polo shirt with a large backpack on his lap, is harder to ignore.
He scrolls so fast through TikTok that everything coming out of his speaker is incoherent noise — his finger flicks up and, after looking at the next video just long enough to hear the beginnings of a grating, trendy song, he flicks again. And again. And again.
Soon enough, the bus gets busier. A man begins to talk on the phone in the back, a woman is speaking softly into her earphones — there are pockets of conversation all around as we settle in.
A squeak cuts through the chatter
We veer onto the busier Ellesmere Road, and the driver’s sudden stopping-and-starting leads to a man nearly spilling his coffee. Compared to the downtown replacement buses that often run during subway closures, the buses out in Scarborough feel supersonic — they run at 40 to 50 km/h, according to an app on my phone. (The average TTC bus chugged along at 17.2 km/h last year; and buses downtown are especially hindered by gridlock and construction in the city’s core.)
But like most TTC vehicles, this age of this bus is starting to show (15 years old, refurbished in 2017). About halfway through the 45-minute ride, a noticeable squeaking starts and stops from the back of the bus. Every time we speed up, the squeaks get louder, making noises that sound like there’s an oversized dying mouse hacking up a lung in one of the seats behind me.
Once we pull into Scarborough Town Centre, most of the bus empties and a new crowd files on. As the bus restarts its journey, I watch the abandoned Scarborough RT tracks roll by on our left.
It’s a haunting — or taunting — visage.
Scarborough has long had connectivity issues with the rest of the city, made worse in 2023 when the Scarborough RT derailed, sending five people to the hospital. Though bus lanes have been installed to try and speed up some transit, area residents will be without a full bus right-of-way until 2027, and without a subway until the Scarborough Subway Extension is completed (at least 2030).
“This trip could have been a much easier train ride,” I think to myself.
After an especially long wait to turn left onto Midland Avenue because of a long light and traffic, we finally pull into the bus terminal just outside Kennedy Station.
Then, there was the ‘slow zone’
After taking in a deep breath of fresh air, I enter Kennedy, where I’m greeted by the thudthudthudthud of incessant jackhammering. If I wasn’t fully awake before, I am now.
I just miss a train, so I join other stragglers on the next train waiting at the platform. I hesitate for a second before sitting down — is my seat wet or is it just a dark spot? I sit down, thinking I’m in the clear, but I can’t help thinking my butt feels cold for the next few minutes. This feels like a common problem for the TTC’s cloth seats, where dark spots may either be the tint of the fabric or an unknown fluid left behind by another passenger.
The old Line 2 cars (which are in desperate need of replacement — something that won’t happen until at least 2030) creak and groan as we leave the station. At first, I think we’re going at a healthy pace, until we reach Warden Station, when a “slow zone” kicks in and the train is reduced to a crawl.
Reduced speed zones, also known as “slow zones,” have become a frequent quirk of the system, plaguing the TTC’s ability to run quick and efficient service. The subway system currently has 16 zones where speed is reduced to 10 to 25 km/h for track maintenance. The transit agency has said the system will never be fully rid of slow zones.
I finally pull into Broadview Station at 8:22 a.m.
Catching a ‘slothlike’ streetcar
I’m able to catch the 505 Dundas westbound streetcar, which awaits outside the station.
The floor is sticky and someone has left an empty Tim Hortons cup on the floor. It rattles between my feet as we leave Broadview Station.
I try to enjoy the view to my left, but the streetcar is wrapped with an ad, so all I see are tiny dots that blur the houses and streets as we chug along Broadview Avenue.
Even as a regular streetcar-enjoyer, I can’t defend its dreary pace. The streetcar crawls forward, even though there’s relatively light traffic ahead. If you’re out for a leisurely ride, it can feel quaint. But if you’re rushing to get to work, the slothlike speed is an irritant (only made worse by the knowledge that these streetcars have a top speed of 70 km/h). Streetcars don’t go as fast as other transit, like buses, mainly because they have to slow at intersections (related to a very technical explanation about switches) and have lots of stops.
As I step off at the intersection of Broadview and Dundas, I make sure to look right, out of instinct, to make sure I’m not about to be hit by a speeding car. After exactly one hour and 22 minutes, my commute is over.
Driven to distraction
The worst part about Alisha’s commute is just how long it is. Without a book, music or any distractions, it’s easy to get annoyed with the habits of fellow TTC riders. All the while, over the course of one-and-a-half hours, seeing the missed opportunities of other transit systems pass you by: the Scarborough RT and the under-construction subway extension would have shortened this trip, or at least made it more tolerable. And Alisha’s commute time is nearly triple the Toronto average of 34.9 minutes spent getting to and from work, according to Statistics Canada.
Sometimes, what makes the TTC frustrating isn’t just the single slow zone or one late bus, it’s the accumulation of irritations — like how one mosquito bite is manageable, but several can send you into an itchy rage.
Crowning a commute in Toronto as “the worst” requires some categories for what drives commuters crazy. First is the system itself, operational issues such as slow zones or sluggish streetcars — these are things that are within the TTC’s control. Second are the extenuating circumstances — things like weather, poor passenger behaviour and congestion — that the TTC can’t necessarily control, but issues that could have some solutions at city hall. Finally, there’s general irritability (think combo modifier on a video game). Commutes are unpredictable, and sometimes a slow zone here or a loud passenger there might be tolerable for a day, but may have you considering buying a car if it goes on for months or years.
On this route, it was my fellow riders, a squeaky wheel, a sticky streetcar floor — some issues were TTC-related, others, like my loud neighbour, weren’t. But each was small annoyance that, over weeks, months or years, would build up, and lead any commuter to think that this is the worst commute in the city.
