Does the streetcar fit into Toronto’s transit future?

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.

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 city 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.”

While the streetcar has persisted, it hasn’t always thrived. Ridership for streetcars has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic 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 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 horse-drawn streetcars. Those hoof-trodden paths were later cemented and 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 once-in-a-lifetime pandemics, the streetcar has cemented itself into Toronto.

In 1861, Canada was still six years from Confederation. And Toronto had just gotten its first streetcar. The first two routes were horse-drawn, clip-clopping north-south on Yonge Street and east-west 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.

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 Streets 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 than buses and more cost efficient.

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 a death by a thousand service cuts, transit advocate and member of Streetcars For Toronto, Steve Munro said.

“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” has driven riders away, he said.

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

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 “meet cutes” and, on occasion, been a place for some overly public displays of affection. It’s a must-see sight for tourists and loved by transit enthusiasts — the expansive windows and smooth rolling ride are known by most who have spent even a day downtown. Even non-human Torontonians take it: dogs, cats — and, of course, raccoons.

Getting rid of or reducing the number of streetcars, as Toronto had thought to do in the ‘70s, isn’t the solution to easing congestion and moving Torontonians, said Saxe, a U of T 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.

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 LRTs, 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 Eglinton East and Waterfront East LRT, both of which remain in the design stage without long-term 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 five-minute service throughout Toronto — 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 more 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 much-maligned 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 networks 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.