Toronto: Let's Talk About the Streetcars.

Theres a subway-worth of capacity just sitting here. Can we finally fix them, please?

The streetcars are a silly thing. People have a vague affection for them that mostly goes out the window once they have to ride them. They are generally-speaking slow, unreliable, and treated like an inconvenience to the TTC more than a special superpower.

This, along with getting a new CEO for Toronto’s transit agency that doesn’t suggest that things are all good just because people indeed continue to crowd the system; we’d be wise to bring in someone from Zurich or Amsterdam, two cities where trams actually work — zipping around town on a frequent basis.

The Spadina streetcar, which the TTC zapped out of existence for almost a year (which they have thankfully yet to do to the subway) just came back, and I found this video rather amusing because half of the comments from riders were “the buses were faster”. This is pretty funny because for most of the route the buses weren’t even in their own lane, unlike the streetcars.

The unfortunate reality is the streetcars as they exist today would often be better replaced by buses. From all I’ve heard, the TTC and even some advocates say over the years they mostly think the streetcars are valuable because they each fit more people, allowing less frequency (worse for passenger but costs the agency less money) and less drivers (costs the agency less money). I don’t always think you need to read too much into names, but the fact that the name “streetcar” is still passionately used tells you a lot. The TTC basically tries to operate the system like it’s still the 1950s and these truly are street-cars, unfortunately, and this may surprise you Toronto is nothing like it was in the 1950s, and even the streetcars — now lumbering giants are nothing like the vehicles of old. Expecting success running the network like we would have decades ago would be like expecting you could drive to work in downtown Toronto from the suburbs in 25 minutes and park out front of your office.

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Unfortunately at a high level, seemingly nowhere in the TTC’s collective mind is “streetcar better than bus (for riders)” a serious consideration. This really ought to change, and I’ve honestly been really disappointed that mayors of different political stripes have come and gone with essentially zero action on actually fixing Toronto’s most famous transit mode. For example, I recently saw a video of Mayor Olivia Chow proudly announcing that the city was getting 60 more streetcars and that this would mean faster service; putting aside that this is a re-announcement of a re-announcement, this is just false — streetcars are not going to be faster (they should be), you just might have to wait a bit less. It’s the urban equivalent of VIA rail buying brand new trains for service between Montreal and Toronto that run slower and less reliably than the 50 year old trains they are replacing: it’s just embarrassing stuff.

The reason for this is that the problem with the streetcars mostly isn’t that we have too few of them (in fact, if we fixed the bigger problems, we wouldn’t need as many!), but the way we operate them, and the nonsensical network and corridor design. It’s like going to the doctor, saying you broke your leg, her handing you a prescription for Tylenol 3, slapping you on the back and saying “on your way now!”

Unreliable Service

The most obvious thing you’ll notice if you use the majority of the routes on the network that are long and not in a dedicated right-of-way — Queen, College, Dundas, etc. — is that service is very unreliable. Streetcars might go quickly in one place and slowly in others, they bunch up, and there are hug gaps in other places. I still remember being at Dundas Square and taking a streetcar to Dufferin a couple years ago — the type of thing that should be straightforward — and having the ride be like an hour (that takes 10 minutes on the subway and you can walk it in… about an hour).

I remember being in Berlin in 2023 and going to catch a tram: I looked at the arrival times in Google Maps, showed up at the stop, and to my complete shock the tram... came exactly when Google Maps said it would to the minute. This is a level of reliability that is possible (Berlin isn’t even the most remarkable tram system) when things are working as they should. Berlin also has even bigger trams than Toronto (up to 7 segments long).

A Tram in Berlin. It’s a very nice and fast tram. There isn’t a stop on every block.

A big part of the unreliable service is that the TTC doesn’t do a good job managing the vehicle locations and service as it’s operating. Its usual approach is to just run as many vehicles as possible — a lazy approach that sort of works with suburban buses, but mostly just sucks in the central parts of the city with lumbering streetcars and not a lot of space. The issue here is probably because culturally (at least at high levels) since the TTC just sees the streetcars as cheaper bigger buses, it doesn’t see a reason to pay special attention to their operations — even when they are the workhorse of the surface transit fleet, operate in particularly dense areas, and form a relatively small part of the network.

Low Speeds

Beyond unreliability, surely the other thing that people most associate with the streetcars is just how slow they are. Now, the issue isn’t the top speed the vehicles can operate at, but the average speed, which varies way more than it should from day to night (because when fewer people are riding there are less stops and the traffic is lighter), and is lower than almost any other large-scale tram network.

The reason for low average speed mostly comes down to two things: mandatory slowing down at intersections, and excessive stopping.

The first of these issues is downstream of the Toronto streetcar network using “single-blade” switches, which have one moving rail as opposed to two. This has historically been justified to me because “single blade is easier to move by hand”, which is a classic bad reason: A modern tram system should almost never rely on hand thrown switches! So often one problem lies downstream of another even crazier problem. I’ve also heard before that installing dual-blade switches would “require heavy construction!”, which sounds scary but makes sense — the components to run the switch is just larger, and wait… the TTC rips up intersections (where switches are) constantly. If they just had a sensible policy of replacing single blade switches when they did this, we’d be in a much better place — but, they do not! Now, I’ve had it suggested to me that single blade switches are fine, and perhaps this is true, but mechanically you can see how it would put more stress on both the infrastructure and the vehicles needlessly, and there’s also a reason that most systems do not use single-blade switches, so at the very least this is a case of us doing something unusual and nonstandard without a good reason to. What’s funny is that the TTC uses dual-blade switches at its newest yard so the agency does know of their existence, and so why they’ve been rebuilding things the old way for years is... anyones guess.

As it turns out, the slowing down at intersections (to 10 kph if memory serves correctly) is more closely tied to a policy of having to visually inspect the switch blade, since the electronic control system that is used is old and unreliable (and you don’t want to fly into an intersection just to realize the switch is set to turn and derail the streetcar). Clearly the system should be fixed (it would have been long ago in another city) so this absurd policy can be removed.

Both of these issues are downstream of the TTC just having more switches than it should. If you look at other cities with lots of trams — even Melbourne – you’ll see they have far fewer. I remember reading the TTC wiki page years ago and it bragging that the TTC has so many impressive junctions, but as I’ve learned from Paige Saunders, you should always question “records” like this. It’s often the case that the thing being celebrated is not actually good. The reason most systems have fewer switches is that they have infrastructure better matched to the service they operate. This creates less maintenance to do, and less points of failure (or, say, having to slow down to 10 kph!), and the fact that the TTC doesn’t have this approach shows that it’s operating in a dated and archaic mindset (think of all the places where there are streetcar switches that are likely very rarely used, but which require maintenance, slowing down, etc.).

As for the issue of having too many stops, I’ve discussed this issue to death. Toronto has a unusually slow streetcar system, and Toronto also has a streetcar system with an unusually high number of stops! An argument gets made that you need lots of stops because otherwise you unfairly burden people with long walks, but this doesn’t really make sense — how much walking is a reasonable amount? And why have so many other cities determined that they can comfortably have stops twice as far apart or more? I can recall a stop I would frequently use at U of T that was literally 100 meters from the one before it: this stop served a small number of students who would have to walk an extra minute without it, so they probably wouldn’t call for removing it, even if the net benefit would be huge (people often are quick to defend charitable cases of stops being close together, but rarely to acknowledge how many egregious cases like this there are). If all of this feels familiar, it’s a lot like drivers not wanting tolling, even though it would save them huge amounts of time — we need leadership!

Too often these questions don’t seem to be taken seriously, as if the elderly or people with mobility issues simply don’t exist in Paris, or Berlin, or Stockholm, and I’m personally quite skeptical that the sky would fall if we aligned our policy with most other places. The TTC has many people within it who understand this issue, but between politicians and managers pressuring to keep stops mostly because of a sort of NIMBYism (Chuck down on Lester Street says we just can’t take away his stop! He’d have to walk 3 more minutes!) The issue is, when you have this approach of providing lots of exemptions, it’s self-defeating because everyone wants one! The agency with strong political backing should just go and implement a wider stop policy and do so broadly. Berlin has wider stop spacings and the trams there fly. Of course, with fewer stops, we could also maybe think about making the busiest streetcar stops in the city, which move more people than some entire bus lines, nicer places to wait: Right now it’s often the case that even a very busy streetcar stop gets a pole and a bus shelter the same way some suburban bus that runs every half hour would.

The other issue with having so many stops is that it creates randomness (the same passengers who would mostly congregate at one stop now go to 3 or 4 different stops in unpredictable patterns), variability, and it makes it hard for signal priority to work well. When streetcars are constantly stopping (somethings for just one person) it means they can’t be going through a light being held green. All of this is further worsened by the new, much larger, Toronto streetcars, which legitimately take longer to start and stop, and have very slow closing doors. That people didn’t see this as a need to seriously rethink our policy on stops is unfortunately typical. Are there going to be cases where someone legitimately can’t walk to a further streetcar stop? Probably! But it only takes a few seconds of actually thinking to realize that if someone can’t walk 100 more meters, they also probably aren’t going to be able to use a transit system where they might need to walk well over 200 meters to get through a subway station (the platforms along are 150!). So based on extremely flimsy logic, we slow down the main form of transit across much of central Toronto.

Service Shutdowns

One of the things that is currently decimating the streetcar network and its ridership is the constant service shutdowns. I’m not sure there has been any substantial period of time in the decade I’ve lived in Toronto when some big chunk of the network was not shut down. I might be sympathetic to this — I mean the streetcar network is old — but I can’t be when these punishing shutdowns do not come with all of the infrastructure upgrades they should, and when the same sections are often shutdown multiple times over a few years. Given the streetcars are often slower than buses, the one thing they should have going with them is the '“permanence” people often laud in rail-based modes, and they just do not have that.

The TTC clearly has a shutdown problem in general. It is absolutely reasonable to shut down rail services here and there — London and Paris do it too — but when you do do it you need to take it seriously, and you need to get everything you can conceivably get done done. The TTC seems to have gotten lazy and careless, so instead of doing a few shutdowns where a ton of work is done, they do many shutdowns that have much less intense work getting done (but just as much disruption to riders). This is all exacerbated by the fact that shuttle buses running on dense urban streets don’t even get temporary bus lanes.

Basically, the TTC is overly reliant on shutdowns, and even the ones it does do are poorly coordinated and utilized, and don’t seem to have everyone rowing in the same direction — a better network needs to fix this.

Road Space and Design

The last big thing to touch on is street design. And I want to head this off right away — the answer is not “dedicated lanes on every street”. I think this idea is unfortunately part of a bad habit Torontonians have, where a certain imagined ideal that is not practical, not going to happen, and maybe not even a good idea — dedicated lanes on every street — is presented as this sort of universal panacea. Since it will never happen, you never have to worry about actually making hard design and planning decisions, and making real arguments, but you can claim you really care and that drivers are creating all these problems.

The thing is, need I remind you, the Spadina streetcar (which has dedicated lanes) was slower than buses that mostly did not have dedicated lanes. I think like many things people are drawn to dedicated lanes because they are visible, but this is a logical fallacy — their visibility might make them attractive or noteworthy, but they do not make them work. The “King Pilot”, which was a roaring success, managed to hugely speed up streetcar service along the central portion of King Street, and did not involve fully dedicated lanes!

Of course, in particular places dedicated lanes might be a nice solution, but we won’t always have room for them — and places from Amsterdam to Zurich and Melbourne all run trams that are mixed in with traffic at least some of the time. The things that really matter then are location-specific interventions, designing the road so that cars won’t queue up in a place that blocks streetcars, or providing a place for left-turning cars to get out of the way (done all over Berlin, but only in a handful of places in Toronto), or redesigning and optimizing intersections.

A tram in London. It’s also a good tram.

I think this explains why people like the dedicated lanes idea. The alternative is a much more block-by-block, intersection-by-intersection approach that is harder to visualize, understand, and say than “dedicated lanes everywhere! Ban all the cars!”. But, it’s also a solution that is actually politically palatable, and which will actually deliver real results.

The Stakes

Now, all of this matters because Toronto should be able to be proud of its streetcars, not just because it didn’t actively rip them out, but because they are good, and also because the network has huge potential.

At its peak, the King Streetcar (which still has lots of issues to be fixed!) was moving nearly 100,000 riders a day. If every streetcar line was doing these numbers — and I think that’s possible if we fix the network — we could be moving 500-700,000 people every day on the streetcars (Paris moves over a million every day on its trams, and Melbourne does about half a million) — our current record is a bit over 200,000. 500-700,000 are respectable numbers for a single subway line, so if we just got the streetcars working really well, it would be like adding a whole new subway’s worth of capacity: something we can do without digging expensive tunnels!

The thing is, the streetcars are primed for success: they cover most of the old city of Toronto, which is already dense and rapidly densifying. They also complement the existing and future subway network as well as GO transit really well, allowing for loads of convenient last-mile connections (assuming they were faster than walking or getting on a bike). They also provide a lot of east-west connectivity in places with limited good alternatives, like on College, Dundas, and the Waterfront, as well as the outer stretches of Queen. The huge development site at Park Lawn is going to get a new streetcar loop, but sadly I expect almost nobody to use the Queen streetcar, when they have the GO train right next door and the streetcars remain punishingly dysfunctional.

What’s Possible?

There is a version of Toronto, a version I want to live in in the future, where the “shoulders” of the old city, places like Parkdale, Little Italy, and the Beaches are all filled with mid-rise apartments, and loads of infill density, and this doesn’t create chaos (or ant-like streams of people walking to the nearest subway in frustration) because they are served well by fast and very frequent modern trams that speed people across the core, and to connections to the subway and regional trains that get them across the city and region. We know what we have to do to make this happen, and we can do it. The city and TTC just need to step up to the plate. There is a huge political win to be had here, and it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money — much of the changes could be happening when we are constantly doing otherwise unexciting construction.