The (er) joys of riding Toronto streetcars

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I love a streetcar ride.

I’ve been riding Toronto streetcars as long as I can remember (I’m on my third generation of them now) and it’s always been my favourite kind of transit trip. I love the way they glide along the streets, rather than lurch and bump like the bus. I love watching the panorama of urban life outside. The views from the big picture windows of the latest generation are wonderful.

But even I have to admit that, lately, riding the streetcar has become an awful pain.

On paper, the streetcar network is a great asset for Toronto. Running on clean electric power and big enough to carry lots of passengers in relative comfort, they are a logical part of a big-city transit mix.

Toronto has had streetcars since the 1860s, when the first, horse-drawn vehicles started trundling through downtown. Electrified in the 1890s, the network spread all over the city and even far into the suburbs. One line went all the way to Lake Simcoe.

Like most North American cities, Toronto started abandoning streetcar lines after the Second World War. The car was king then and streetcars seemed only to get in the way. But, after a citizen’s revolt coinciding with the movement to stop the Spadina Expressway, the Toronto Transit Commission decided to keep most of its downtown system. Some days, I wonder whether we ought to have chucked the whole thing instead.

Those long, sleek vehicles that now patrol the downtown are really too big for Toronto’s slender main streets. Operating in mixed traffic on most routes, without a lane of their own, they move at a pace that could generously be described as stately. Commuters on bicycles routinely outrun them. On a bad day, even pedestrians go faster.

They stop too often, at too many places. They have to pause all the time when traffic slows or cars stop to turn in front of them. Out of caution, many will slow down to make way for a cyclist riding alongside, giving one person’s safety priority over the many impatient commuters on board.

If a streetcar breaks down, then all the streetcars behind it have to come to a stop, forming a red-and-white conga line that is a sadly familiar sight.

If someone in a wheelchair is getting on, the driver has to get out of the driver’s booth, step onto the street, open a panel on the side of the streetcar and activate controls to make the retractable ramp come out. Why can’t the driver do that from inside?

Bunching is a big problem. Waiting at a stop, you get no streetcars for the longest time, then a whole string of them at once.

Track repairs, road improvements and other hitches routinely require streetcars to stop running for months or take irritating detours. The St. Clair Avenue line is currently closed for a year-long series of fixes and upgrades. A huge subway-digging project at Queen and Yonge streets has turned the downtown system into a spaghetti plate of reroutings that leaves bewildered straphangers wondering where on earth they will end up. The muffled, mumbled announcements that come from the drivers in their closed booth are often no help at all.

Even when streetcars have their own protected right of way, as they do on Spadina Road, there are so many lights and turning signals that they rarely have the chance to get up to speed. Recent data on the King Street line, which has a partial right of way in the downtown core, showed that the streetcars were actually moving more slowly than they did before the city banned most cars from the route.

Despite TTC attempts to improve safety after a series of violent incidents on public transit, commuters still see a lot of misery and disorderly conduct. Spacious and warm, many streetcars have become rolling shelters for struggling people. As much as other riders might sympathize, they are getting fed up with what they have to witness on their ride to work.

Scrapping Toronto’s streetcar system is not really an option. Governments have spent hundreds of millions on the tracks and the cars: more than half a billion dollars for the latest batch of 60 alone.

Many European cities, including Dublin, Amsterdam and Strasbourg, operate popular, efficient urban streetcar systems. Toronto should be able to do the same. Whether it means more dedicated rights of way, more controls on automobile traffic along streetcar routes or smoother scheduling of construction projects, the city has to do a better job with its fleet.

Mayor Olivia Chow, who took office last summer, has made a good start by putting more uniformed security and information staff on the TTC and deploying special traffic monitors to keep things flowing at major intersections. But the city needs to do more, such as limiting left-hand turns for cars on streetcar routes and improving communication with riders about disruptions.

I still love riding Toronto’s streetcars. We just need to make sure they keep gliding along as they were meant to.