Beginning this weekend, more than 100,000 streetcar riders will have their commutes derailed with a summer of delays and diversions, as the TTC will funnel three streetcars onto an already busy Queen Street to make way for construction.
When Kelly Ronan hears about the diversions that will crowd her commute from The Beaches with more than triple the number of streetcars on the same stretch of track at peak times, she sighs, exasperated.
“Sometimes you sit there and you wonder: is this the best plan?” said Ronan. “It’s pretty easy — in your frustration — to doubt their decision-making.”
The 503 Kingston Road, 504 King and the 508 Lake Shore streetcars will all snake onto Queen Street, between Spadina Avenue and Broadview Avenue, due to water main and streetcar track maintenance, and will be further diverted again, onto Richmond and Adelaide Streets, between York and Church Streets. There will be some relief in June, when the 508, as it usually does, stops running between June and September. To add to the complications, the 504B replacement bus will also divert onto Jarvis Street, Front and Wellington Streets and Yonge Street.
The diversions will begin May 11, and are expected to run through to August, or until construction at the intersection of King and Church Streets is complete.
That will mean an increase from seven streetcars in peak hours to 25 — or a streetcar passing by, on average, every 144 seconds on that section of Queen. How that frequency plays out during peak hours will depend on how the city and TTC are able to keep “bunching” (where several buses or streetcars arrive all at once after a delay) to a minimum. As part of its plan for the diversions, the city said it will deploy parking and traffic enforcement to help keep traffic corridors clear, where they might otherwise cause a pileup of streetcars.
These detours will also mean changes for drivers along that stretch — the eastbound lane on Queen Street, from Hamilton Street to Broadview avenue, will be for public transit only. Left turns off Queen Street, on a number of roads from Spadina Avenue to Jarvis Street, will be restricted throughout the day. And there will be on-street parking restrictions and new no stopping zones: on Queen Street, from Spadina to River Street, and on Richmond and Adelaide Streets, on the stretch between York to Church Streets.
Ronan rides the 501 Queen five days a week from her home deep in The Beaches all the way to her book publishing job on Bay Street. The diversions are likely to stretch out her commute, which at its worst can already take an hour and a half.
Maintenance and construction are a “necessary evil,” said Ronan, one that she knows has to happen to keep the city in working order. But, that isn’t much consolation when streetcar traffic on her commute to and from work slows to a crawl.Â
TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said the traffic management measures approved by the city were designed to keep the impact on riders “to a minimum.”Â
“Our focus is on keeping transit moving through the impacted areas as best we can,” said Green. “The city has to consider a number of competing interests (including emergency vehicles, cars, bikes and neighbourhood concerns) and balance them accordingly. We appreciate their help with the measures that have been approved.”
Three streetcars routes are being funnelled along the same stretch of Queen Street due to maintenance and construction starting May 11.
The TTC and the city, however, might not be taking the full “opportunity” presented by these major disruptions, said David Cooper, a transit planning consultant at Leading Mobility who previously worked as a transportation planner for the city.Â
Cooper said º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøhasn’t “maximized” the city’s streetcar infrastructure — as opposed to cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and Cologne, where similar streetcars run on the streets but have more priority at intersections and dedicated right-of-ways.
It’s an existential question about the city’s streetcar network that Ronan has asked as well: “If the city is committed to having these as a mode of transportation, then do it properly and give dedicated space to them, otherwise get back to buses.”
Cooper points to the King Street transit priority corridor, which he helped develop for the city, where — after some initial growing pains and with the help of traffic agents — travel times for streetcars decreased. An east-west transit corridor on King with even more priority for transit could help relieve other large disruptions in the future, Cooper said, but only if the city makes that a priority.
More than 100,000 daily riders use the streetcar routes that will be funnelled on to Queen Street this summer.
Andrew Francis Wallace º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøStarThe city has taken steps in the right direction, Cooper added, like a new congestion czar that is supposed to help co-ordinate diversions and construction between the TTC and the city’s transportation departments, but º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøneeds to have clearer priorities in its approach to transit.
“We can do all the same things (that European cities do for their streetcars), especially when we have disruptions and detours that are pretty significant to impact thousands of customers,” Cooper said. “But we must decide that we want to actually do that.”
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