“Toronto’s King and Queen Streets — where packed streetcars stop and wait behind one left-turning driver or someone taking forever to parallel-park — is one of North America’s greatest monuments to the natural superiority of motorists over everyone else.
“These streetcars are all Toronto has in the way of east-west transit through the very core of downtown, yet their operations are routinely strangled by quite small numbers of cars, running as slow as 6 km/hr (4 mi/hr) (!) during the peak in the most critical section. This for a service that carries the overwhelming majority of the people moving down the street.
“We’re talking about the middle of downtown Toronto, the city’s densest and fastest densifying area. For such a place to function, transit just as to succeed.
“We’re clear on how dense downtown Toronto is, right? The King streetcar connects this area to very dense residential areas to the east and west.
Since this is Canada, you can be sure these are legacy streetcar lines. Almost nobody outside the US intentionally builds streetcars in mixed traffic, but many cities have inherited them. Long ago, they were reliable because there wasn’t much traffic. But things got worse in the usual boiling-frog manner, and now here we are…”