The Streetcars in Toronto Could be So Much Better

June 15, 2024 - Toronto's streetcar network, while being the longest and most heavily used in North America, has come under a lot of scrutiny recently for being slow and unreliable. At the end of 2023, the average weekday boardings across the streetcar network was only at sixty-seven percent of pre-COVID levels, the lowest of all three modes. This is happening alongside questions of fare enforcement and the effectiveness of the Transit Priority intervention on King Street. The TTC recently released a report outlining the rates of fare evasion across the three modes, and per capita the streetcars came out on top - nearly thirty percent of riders on the streetcars do not pay their fare. Until Mayor Olivia Chow deployed traffic enforcement officers along the King Street Transit Priority corridor, streetcars were essentially stuck in gridlock on what was supposed to be a semi-dedicated corridor.

It is no secret that the TTC has a PR issue. Safety while riding has been at the forefront for many critics since the panic caused by several high-profile incidents over the past couple years. While some would say these are outliers and point to the fact that because millions ride the system everyday, the chances of an incident happening to you are slim, the effects for many has been a complete loss of trust in the system. Speaking to family members who have an elementary-aged child who uses the subway to commute to and from school, many parents are confused as to why they would let their child use public transit. This is not a convenience issue for them, it is a safety issue. For the TTC unfortunately the safety perception issue is not something easily solvable by infographics and security in stations and will take years before the public regains full trust. The more definable and acute PR problem the TTC is facing is just plain usability, and no where is this more pronounced than on the streetcar network. 

It is, in my opinion, consistently difficult and downright annoying at times to use the streetcar network. It is slow, unreliable, unpredictable, and unfriendly to users. It is not the fault of the mode - streetcars or trams get a lot of negative press for being perceived as more expensive and less flexible buses - but a confluence of issues that are pretty specific to Toronto that hurt the streetcars usability. There is a lot of potential in the network - as shown by the high ridership numbers, that had been rising until COVID. As downtown and its environs densify even more than they already are, the higher capacity provided will be essential for trips around the old city. If these issues are not addressed, I predict a massive increase in traffic downtown as more people move in and choose to use Uber or taxis when deciding how to move around the center of Toronto. 

The TTC also faces massive competition for use in the downtown core from cyclists. While high numbers of cyclists and users of Toronto's Bike Share network is generally a sign of a healthy urban landscape, and adequate and expanding bike infrastructure is necessary and underway, the fact that the streetcar is uncompetitive on speed on short, and longer trips through downtown is worrying. What happens when the weather gets cold? Will those cycling hop on the streetcar or switch to a car or Uber?

Here are the three issues that I believe are the most pressing for the streetcar network:

• Speed - The streetcars are slow. Take current traffic conditions, and then add on delays at most intersections for boarding, crossing other tracks, waiting for lights, etc.

• Service Reliability - Short Turns are not the problem. If a service is advertised as Ten Minutes or Better, it needs to be such.

• Passenger Experience - If streetcars are different from buses, there needs to be better infrastructure for waiting and for service information. There also needs to be better information on detours at stops, the current system of 'good-enough' pieces of paper strung up at each stop and a page on ttc.ca that many will not check is not enough.

Speed

Most streetcars run crosstown, east to west. They are rarely the fastest trip. For the Dundas and College cars, the usual quickest route across town is to travel up to the Bloor-Danforth subway, and then back down to your destination. There are numerous issues that affect this, first and foremost the lack of any sort of dedicated space on many routes. No, there does not have to be a comprehensive program to remove cars from every single street that a streetcar travels on, but there needs to be some sort of plan for high-traffic corridors on every route. This means that while yes, King Street is a transit-priority corridor, Queen, Dundas, and College need to be as well, in varying degrees of hard infrastructure, situation depending.

Berlins tram network provides evidence that not every street needs to have dedicated lanes to have an effective network. While travelling there on a recent trip, I found myself in Prenzlauer Berg, visiting vintage clothing and record stores and pretentious coffee shops as any good member of Generation Z would. The main drag of the neighbourhood is Kastanienallee, a street with one travel lane in each direction, two tram routes and on street parking. The result? Not a constant line of traffic backing up through each block, as I have seen on Queen or Dundas. The trams have dedicated signals (with white bars, not the 'transit signal' mess we have here) and level boarding and great stop infrastructure (more on that later). But elsewhere in the city, trams are strategically given completely dedicated lanes for stopping, turning, or entire right-of-ways are reserved. The answer for Toronto is a comprehensive plan of strategic infrastructure projects to separate streetcars from regular traffic. The streetcar as it exists right now is just not compatible with street traffic if the TTC wants to provide good service. In the TTC's RapidTO initial report, it identified twenty roadways that should be considered for transit priority measures. All four of the east-west streetcar routes through downtown were identified, but as of now none are moving forward into the planning stage. Is the TTC not touching them due to lack of expertise, lack of money, or lack of political capital?

There is a lot of talk within Toronto's urbanism circles about stop spacing, and how that relates to speed. The argument goes that the more times a streetcar stops, the more deceleration and subsequent acceleration, the more dwell time waiting for people to board, and because of that an increase in journey time. This does make sense, but its not a one and done issue. If you removed half of the stops from the network today, would that stop streetcars from getting stuck behind left-turning vehicles tomorrow? Once again the true answer to speeding up streetcars is strategic interventions. For example, the Dundas streetcar stops at Ossington Ave., Shaw St., Grace St., and Manning Ave.. Within around 800 metres, the streetcar has stopped four times. At Shaw Street, autos can only turn right or go straight, so remove the curbside stop at Shaw Street and Grace Street, put in place a dedicated lane for streetcars westbound between Ossington and Shaw, have streetcars go through the intersection of Dundas and Shaw with a separate signal, and put a new stop between Crawford and Montrose, with all the bump out platforms and associated goodies. From four stops to three, and a bit of additional transit priority measures to help speed things up even more. If trips through downtown on the streetcar are not sped up, the service is simply not competitive with other modes.

Service Reliability

This is a short but important point. The value of a streetcar is partly derived from its certainty. With a bus on an infrequent route, who knows when or if it will show up if there is not any additional information given. But with hard infrastructure like a streetcar, people who turn up to the stop see the tracks, maybe see streetcars going in the other direction carrying hundreds of people and rightly think that this is a rail service with a high volume of riders and it will show up at least within five to ten minutes of me arriving at the stop. This should be the case for Toronto's streetcar network. In fact, it is advertised as such. Every single route is part of the TTC's ten-minute-or-better network. Now usually this is true, but because the routes are subject to the whim of traffic, sometimes this does not happen and riders are left waiting up to twenty minutes for a streetcar to show up. When this happens, it is not just an inconvenience, it is an attack on the mode itself. Common arguments against streetcars is that they are inflexible. They cannot move around a parked car, a traffic jam, or a crash. So when delays happen, regular users might start to question why the service is a streetcar at all. Short turns are not the issue. The TTC needs to step up its line management game and ensure the service is flowing especially at peak times.

Passenger Experience

Returning from a trip around Europe to Toronto definitely left me with a bit of reverse culture shock. Sometimes it feels like urbanism-wise, nothing is going right here and if it is its too slow or not perfect. While I know Toronto is doing its catching up and yes Canada has 'urbanist heaven' Montreal, when it comes to streetcars or trams, the TTC could be so much better. There needs to be LCD screens inside the streetcars, capable of showing service disruption information. Detours need to be more clearly marked on apps, on stop poles using actual line maps instead of the lazy orange drawing we have now, and screens at stops (whether dot-matrix or LCD) should be capable of giving detour and disruption information to passengers. There could be way more level boarding and bump out platforms here. Not once in Europe did I have to step into moving traffic to board or get off a tram. It is super dangerous.

Every stop I used in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Budapest had a dot-matrix screen showing when the next tram was going to arrive. And if there were multiple routes, it would be a larger board to show all of them at once. Most had a detailed map of the specific routes stopping at them and the upcoming stops. More benches, better platforms. Inside the trams there were screens with moving maps. And that is just the start of the experience. Tram priority is everywhere in Europe, in varying degrees of separation. Tracks are not glued to the center of streets, they change lanes and sides of the road when needed to ensure they have the most optimal route. We have done this in Toronto before. The Harbourfront route is a great example of flexible dedicated streetcar infrastructure. Roncesvalles Avenue is a street where all the stops have platforms that extend onto the street. We just need to be doing it more.

The streetcars remain by far my favourite mode of transit in Toronto. Watching the city roll by out the window is truly a great experience. Going to Europe really solidified for me just how awesome they could be. But there needs to be serious work done to improve the network. Why are we still using single point switches like it is the 19th century? Why did we just order a new batch of streetcars with no LCD screens? Why are we not just building the Waterfront East LRT now, when we know the development is coming? We are rebuilding a bunch of different parts of the streetcar network, why are we not combining this with new transit priority measures? These questions are one that I simply cannot answer and will leave to the politicians. But, like I said, I remain hopeful that if these issues are addressed, the TTC streetcar network can truly become great.