Frustrated resident finally traces non-stop honking to weird TTC bus feature

CTV News

2 days ago

A Toronto resident captured video of TTC buses blaring their horns outside his apartment, near Kipling Station for several minutes.
A west-end resident who found himself frequently disturbed by honking vehicles says he identified an unlikely culprit when he finally investigated the source of the noise.
Lucas Laporta has lived in an apartment near Kipling Station in Etobicoke for nearly four years.
A busy area with freight trains, subway trains and heavy machinery, he says he's learned to treat most of the noise in the area as background sound.
But that's been tougher to do for one type of sound – the blaring of a honking vehicle horn that can sometimes continue unabated for as long as five minutes.
'When you live across from a transit hub, you expect there to be some honking, just the same as you would if you lived on the corner a busy intersection. Sometimes you hear a car honk and that's fine, it's not a big deal, it's part of the package,' Laporta says. 'What you don't expect is for the buses across the street from you to honk for up to five minutes straight, completely uninterrupted and completely unprompted.'
At first, he thought it might be one inconsiderate motorist responsible for what sounded like a driver leaning hard on their horn without stopping.
'But one day, the honking happened as I was walking by the station on my way home from work,' Laporta recalls. 'Imagine my surprise when I see the culprit in question is parked, idling in its berth, with no driver in sight. The horn was going off completely on its own.'
Bus horn noise
A parked bus with a blaring car horn is pictured idling at Kipling Station. (Lucas Laporta /Submitted)
After several calls to TTC customer service, he was informed that the honking was in fact the result of a strange feature in the buses: If a stop is requested while the vehicle is idling, the horn will continue to honk until it is deactivated by the driver.
And if the horn goes off while the driver isn't near the vehicle, it could take several minutes for someone to notice and turn it off.
While it might sound like a simple nuisance, Laporta says the noise is loud enough that it can be heard over anything else that is happening in his seventh-floor apartment, especially if it happens in the early hours or late at night.
He's never sure when or how frequently the sound will go off.
'It varies, really, like it's hard to say,' he says. 'There are times like yesterday – it happened three times in one day. It's just a roll of the dice.'
Laporta, who mainly works form home, says he started tracking the honking buses in November 2023 and has recorded at least 67 occurrences since then.
One of the videos he shared with CP24 shows a parked bus at the station honking loudly for nearly three minutes straight.
TTC customer service has told him there's nothing they can do because it's a built-in feature of the buses, he said.
While he appreciates that it might not be their fault, he says the situation is nonetheless 'Kafkaesque' and the prolonged honking at all hours continues to be disruptive.
'It doesn't make any sense. You know, it's surprising because of how irrational it is. 'Oh, yeah, you pulled the thing while the bus is stopped and it sounds an alarm, it makes the horn honk.' Why? Why does it do that? You're supposed to honk the horn to alert other people on the road. It doesn't make any sense.'
Noisy bus horns
Laporta says bus horns can be heard blaring from the station at all hours.
In a statement, the TTC told CP24 it's aware of the issue and is trying to get drivers to disable the function whenever possible.
'We apologize to the neighbours for this inconvenience,' the TTC said. 'This is a feature of the buses that is intended for safety. We are aware that sometimes they go off and we've been reminding operators about disarming the feature whenever possible to do so.
'We will continue to remind them to disable the alarms out of respect to the community.'
Dozens of readers have written in to CP24 and CTV News Toronto recently to describe how noise in the city affects them, from loss of sleep to lack of concentration.
Many have complained that noise is not treated as a serious problem in the city, but rather something to be expected and ignored.
For its part, the City of Toronto has said it is trying to utilize technologies, such as sound level monitoring, to do a better job of identifying and mitigating problematic noise.