In late 2017, Toronto made a big little change. To speed up service on its busiest streetcar route, city council limited car traffic on a crowded, slow-moving stretch of King Street running through the heart of downtown. It produced big results: Even as car traffic on surrounding streets was largely unaffected, the streetcars moved faster and arrived more frequently. Already high ridership surged.
The King streetcars, in 2018, carried 84,000 people on an average weekday – or nearly as many passengers as the entire GO train network, and more than the Scarborough RT and Sheppard subway combined. Before the pandemic hit, the King streetcar was moving more people than the entire public-transit system in some major U.S. cities. The changes were made permanent last year.
It was such a big success that this space several years ago only half-jokingly suggested renaming it the “Cross-Town Rapid Transit Way.” Or the “Toronto Hyperloop.” Or the King Street Subway.
The King Street project is big – but it is also little. Speeding up the busiest surface transit line in Canada’s biggest city cost hardly any money at all. It involved the installation of some concrete barriers and the painting of some yellow lines during a weekend.
It was a swift, tiny-budget project, the opposite of the usual multidecade, multibillion-dollar megaproject. Small cost, big win. This page welcomed it and called for more.
Last week, Toronto offered more. Using the pretext of the need for physical distancing, it announced a big-little revolution to transit service on five of the city’s busiest suburban bus routes. The Toronto Transit Commission plans dedicated bus lanes on these five routes. As happened on King Street, this can be done quickly and cheaply.