Tag: transit

They helped the city grow. And they could now help ease its con­ges­tion, experts say

This article was written by Andy Takagi and was published in the Toronto Star on March 16, 2025.

“The street­car could be shap­ing our future Queen Streets, Dun­das Streets and Col­lege Streets, where people want to live, work and be part of the city.”

LAURENCE LUI TTC HEAD

“Street­cars carry more people, more con­sist­ently, faster, more evenly. It feels bet­ter. Get­ting rid of the street­car is just talk­ing about mak­ing the city smal­ler (and) worse.”

SHOSHANNA SAXE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO CIVIL ENGINEERING

The ding­ding of a street­car means something dif­fer­ent to every Toronto­n­ian.

For Laurence Lui, it evokes memor­ies of night­time rides on the clas­sic street­cars, dur­ing which the TTC worker watched the spark­ling streets of the city go by. For Shoshanna Saxe, it’s a reminder of chug­ging along the smooth metal tracks that car­ried the civil engin­eer­ing pro­fessor to school as a child. For Steve Munro, it’s the soundtrack of a transit enthu­si­ast first learn­ing the city’s wind­ing streets.

For oth­ers, the famil­iar sound brings irrit­a­tion and out­right anger, the noise punc­tu­at­ing inter­rup­ted com­mutes and inter­min­able delays. To name only a few recent examples: a garbage truck derail­ing the com­mute of tens of thou­sands for most of a week after clip­ping street­car wires at King and Spad­ina. Or, over the span of 10 hours, 23 cars block­ing street­cars throughout the city as Toronto reeled from con­sec­ut­ive snowstorms last month.

It could also be, some experts con­tend, the sound of a solu­tion com­ing to whisk away Toronto’s para­lyz­ing con­ges­tion — that is, if we put faith, and money, back into a Toronto trans­port­a­tion sys­tem that has been on the decline for dec­ades.

“Fun­da­ment­ally, as a city, we grew up around the street­car,” said Lui, the TTC’s head of ser­vice plan­ning and schedul­ing.

“The street­car could be shap­ing our future Queen Streets, Dun­das Streets and Col­lege Streets, where people want to live, work and be part of the city.”

A past per­former

While the street­car has per­sisted, it hasn’t always thrived. Rider­ship for street­cars has yet to rebound to pre­pan­demic levels and lags behind buses and the sub­way lines. Although still some of the city’s busiest routes, the dozens of street­car lines that the city had at its peak in the 1920s have been whittled down to just 18. The net­work has taken a back seat to the needs of the sub­ways and the shiny new Ontario Line, all while becom­ing a tar­get of drivers who blame street­cars for gum­ming up the roads and cyc­lists whose tires can get caught in the tracks.

More than a hun­dred years ago, street­cars had the road to them­selves. Toronto­n­ians were fer­ried through the city by horse­drawn street­cars. Those hoof­trod­den paths were later embed­ded into paved roads with tracks made to Toronto’s unique rail gauge — routes sprawl­ing across the city from end to end to end. Through two world wars and just as many once­in­a­life­time pan­dem­ics, the street­car has cemen­ted itself into Toronto.

In 1861, Canada was still six years from Con­fed­er­a­tion. And Toronto had just got its first street­car. The first two routes were horse­drawn, clip­clop­ping north­south on Yonge Street and east­west on Queen Street. The city thrived along the routes — over time, the Yonge street­car con­nec­ted res­id­ents to Eaton’s and Maple Leaf Gar­dens. The Queen street­car route ser­viced a row of gro­cers, tail­ors, black­smiths and mil­liners — busi­nesses that in turn ser­viced grow­ing res­id­en­tial neigh­bour­hoods.

The sys­tem peaked in the 1920s as a web of inter­con­nec­ted tracks embed­ded in con­crete that sprawled into the out­skirts of the city, sup­port­ing street­cars run­ning all the way out to Port Credit in the west, Scar­bor­ough in the east and Sut­ton in the north.

Battle for the roads

But everything changed after the war. Toronto’s first sub­way, the Yonge line, was opened in 1954. Trol­ley buses became more wide­spread and Metro Toronto was cre­ated, massively expand­ing the area the TTC was meant to ser­vice.

After the first sub­ways began run­ning — and as more people could afford cars — the street­car went into decline. The Uni­versity sub­way was tun­nelled and street­car routes were aban­doned throughout the city over the sub­sequent dec­ades. Net­works on Har­bord, Dupont, Par­lia­ment and Cox­well were all aban­doned in favour of buses or the new Bloor sub­way line.

A sim­ilar scene was play­ing out throughout North Amer­ica, in cit­ies from Los Angeles to Boston, where buses and sub­ways gained favour over the street­car — and street­cars had to battle with cars for road space. By the 1970s, it seemed all but inev­it­able that the street­car would be going extinct here, too.

And it almost did. The TTC was plan­ning to aban­don the rest of the city’s street­car lines by the 1980s, until a transit advocacy group, Street­cars for Toronto, suc­cess­fully lob­bied to save the remain­ing routes in the city, arguing that street­cars offered a smoother ride, and were quieter and more costef­fi­cient than buses.

In 1972, even as the TTC was con­sid­er­ing phas­ing out street­cars on some routes, the agency’s gen­eral man­ager called them “pound for pound … the best transit vehicle ever pro­duced.”

But it was too late. The decline of the street­car was death by a thou­sand ser­vice cuts, said Steve Munro, a transit advoc­ate and mem­ber of Street­cars for Toronto,

“The level of ser­vice on the street­car lines in the city was con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than it is today. There were lines that had double the ser­vice they have today,” Munro said. A “little cut here and a little cut there” have driven riders away, he said.

As cars became more pop­u­lar, an “imbal­ance” was cre­ated on the roads, between the street­car that can carry 130 pas­sen­gers, and a car that might carry only one.

A Toronto icon

Des­pite the erosion of routes in the city, the street­car has remained at the heart of Toronto’s cul­tural iden­tity. The street­car has moved count­less Toronto­n­ians, been a place for “meet­cutes” and, on occa­sion, for overly pub­lic dis­plays of affec­tion. It’s a must­see sight for tour­ists and loved by transit enthu­si­asts — the expans­ive win­dows and smooth ride are known by most who have spent even a day down­town. Even non­human Toronto­n­ians take it: dogs, cats — and, of course, rac­coons.

Still, there are prob­lems. With a few excep­tions, most street­car routes share the road with cars, which can leave transit lines para­lyzed in traffic — a scene that played out most recently on King Street, but is reg­u­larly seen throughout the city where cars and street­cars battle for pri­or­ity. And while the King Street pilot was shown to move people more effi­ciently, with pri­or­ity sig­nalling and traffic enforce­ment agents, it all depends on drivers com­ply­ing with the rules of the road.

Get­ting rid of or redu­cing the num­ber of street­cars, as Toronto inten­ded to do in the 1970s, isn’t the solu­tion to eas­ing con­ges­tion, said Saxe, a Uni­versity of Toronto pro­fessor in civil engin­eer­ing and the Canada Research Chair in sus­tain­able infra­struc­ture. Instead, it’s giv­ing back more of the road to transit, like street­cars and buses, to move more Toronto­n­ians.

“Street­cars carry more people, more con­sist­ently, faster, more evenly. It feels bet­ter,” Saxe said. “Get­ting rid of the street­car is just talk­ing about mak­ing the city smal­ler (and) worse.”

Lui agreed, emphas­iz­ing the import­ant role the street­car con­tin­ues to play as part of the city’s transit net­work.

“If one street­car is car­ry­ing close to 200 people when it’s full, ima­gine if that was four or five buses and what that would mean in terms of con­ges­tion levels,” Lui said.

A future solu­tion?

In the short term, the city’s transit solu­tions lie in the realm of buses and bike lanes, Saxe said — “things that we can do this dec­ade to make (transit) bet­ter.”

That longer ­term future includes light rail transit (LRT), which, depend­ing on who you ask, is essen­tially the same as a street­car. (Oth­ers argue that LRTs have dis­tinct fea­tures, like right­ of­ ways and more dis­tance between stops.) On top of the long ­awaited, and long ­delayed, Eglin­ton Crosstown and Finch West LRTs, the city has plans for an Eglin­ton East and Water­front East LRT, both of which remain in the design stage without long­term fund­ing.

The prob­lem, as with most ser­vices in the city, is money, Lui said. With the TTC’s exist­ing street­car fleet, he explained, the city could run five­minute ser­vice throughout the city — if it had the money to pay drivers.

All the while, the street­car is one of the TTC’s most prof­it­able modes of transit. Nearly 236,000 Toronto­n­ians take a street­car every week­day, with each car nearly trip­ling the capa­city of a bus. That, and increas­ing rider­ship with bet­ter ser­vice, can help the TTC make a bet­ter argu­ment for pri­or­ity on the roads.

“We’ve had suc­cess cases of that in the past, where we invest in bet­ter ser­vice, bet­ter fre­quency, and people will come,” Lui said.

The King Street pri­or­ity cor­ridor, des­pite its much­maligned flaws, is just one example Lui put for­ward. The 2017 pilot, which was made per­man­ent in 2019, reduced travel times for com­muters along King Street (with the help of traffic agents), even as Ontario Line con­struc­tion poured more traffic into the already con­ges­ted stretch of down­town.

When the roads are backed up and street­cars are blocked, it’s not the street­car that’s at fault, Lui said.

“It’s about how do we pri­or­it­ize our road space and how other road users are using that same street,” he added. When Lui’s transit col­leagues from other North Amer­ican cit­ies come to Toronto, he said they’re “always amazed at how busy our street­cars are, and shocked how little pri­or­ity we get.”

“If we want to reach our goals for a liv­able city, for a city that is to con­tinue to wel­come more hous­ing, wel­come more people, street­cars are far more effect­ive in encour­aging that gentle dens­ity that cre­ates vibrant neigh­bour­hoods,” Lui said.