Bus routes provide critical lifelines to disadvantaged travelers in major cities. Bus route performance is also more variable than the performance of other, grade-separated transit modes. Yet the social equity of bus operational performance is largely unexamined outside of limited statutory applications. Equity assessment methods for transit operations are similarly underdeveloped relative to equity analysis methods deployed in transit planning. This study examines the equity of bus on-time performance (OTP) in Toronto, Ontario, the largest city in Canada. Both census proximity and ridership profile approaches to defining equity routes are deployed, modifying United States Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) Title VI methods to fit a Canadian context. Bus OTP in Toronto is found to be horizontally equitable. It is also found that the U.S. DOT approach of averaging performance between equity and non-equity routes masks the existence of underperforming routes with very significant ridership of color. These routes are overwhelmingly night routes, most of which are only classified as equity routes using a ridership definition. These results suggest that the underperformance of Toronto’s “Blue Night” network of overnight buses is a social equity issue. This OTP data is also applied to a household travel survey to identify disparities in the OTP of bus transit as experienced by different demographic groups throughout the city. It is found that recent immigrants and carless households, both heavily transit dependent populations in the Canadian context, experience lower on-time bus performance than other groups.

公共汽车路线为主要城市的处境不利的旅行者提供了重要的生命线。公交线路的性能也比其他按等级划分的公交方式的性能多。然而，除了有限的法定申请外，公交运营绩效的社会公平性基本上未被审查。与过境规划中部署的权益分析方法相比，过境操作的权益评估方法同样欠发达。这项研究考察了加拿大最大城市安大略省多伦多市公交车准时性能（OTP）的公平性。人口普查邻近法和乘车人次分布图方法均用于定义公平路线，并修改了美国运输部（US DOT）标题VI方法以适合加拿大的情况。多伦多的公交OTP被认为是水平平等的。还发现美国 DOT方法对股权和非股权路线之间的性能进行平均，掩盖了表现不佳的路线的存在，这些路线具有非常显着的色彩。这些路线绝大多数都是夜间路线，根据乘车定义，大多数路线仅归类为公平路线。这些结果表明，多伦多“蓝色之夜”的夜间公交车网络表现不佳是社会公平问题。此OTP数据还应用于家庭旅行调查，以识别整个城市不同人口群体所经历的公交过境OTP差异。结果发现，在加拿大背景下，新移民和无车家庭在很大程度上依赖于过境人口，他们的准时公交车性能要低于其他群体。