King St. streetcar plan is a cautious first step with room to grow
It makes King St. a ‘streetcar priority’ corridor but other vehicles will still share the lane.

thestar.com
By EDWARD KEENAN
May 16, 2017

On the one hand, the King streetcar - TTC route 504 - is a massively successful powerhouse of a surface transit route. It carries 65,000 people a day into and across the downtown of the city, which is more passengers than the Sheppard subway carries, more than the Scarborough RT.

On the other hand, it’s a hot mess. Despite the TTC investing almost $1 billion in slowly arriving new, bigger streetcars, the King line is over-capacity, meaning the cars are packed to the doorsteps and many potential riders cannot get on. It is notoriously unreliable because it runs in mixed traffic, sharing the road with cars, waiting behind left-turning traffic, stopping at every red light. Many people who would ride it simply find it faster and easier to walk or drive or take a cab.

In the space where those two - its successes and the symptoms of its failures - lies the big opportunity. It’s already, obviously, a route in high demand, despite its faults. If it functioned better, it could carry even more people, and make life better and easier for all who use it. It already follows roughly one of the most-often-proposed routes for a relief subway line, which would cost billions and take decades to build.

The city’s King Street Pilot project, to be formally unveiled on Thursday, May 18 at a public meeting, seeks to take advantage of that opportunity, by making King St. downtown a “streetcar priority” corridor. The specific plan that will be revealed - as made clear by diagrams publicized by the city advertising the meeting and by chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat - aren’t quite as ambitious as they could have been. But they are a start. An overdue start. It’s time to get on with it. Then make it better as we go along. And then celebrate it.

Over the past few years I have reported here about some possibilities considered for this project - which originally included giving streetcars their own lanes and vastly expanding the pedestrian space, or allowing only one lane of one-way car traffic on each block to allow local access to driveways and so on.

After the usual political wrangling and public meetings, the pilot plan introduced this week falls short of that: cars and trucks in both directions will share the lane with streetcars and be forced to turn right at the end of every block. Left turns and through traffic will be banned. The curb lane will allow space for expanded streetcar boarding areas, sections for cars to make deliveries and drop-offs, and sections for right turns. Streetcars will stop at the far side of each intersection rather than the near side, which will allow the right turn lanes for cars to function efficiently.

As I said, this isn’t as ambitious as I’d like: I am skeptical about whether cars and trucks won’t continue to monkey with streetcar traffic flow, and about whether the far-side stops will make streetcars stop less or - as they appear to do on Spadina - stop more (once at a red light, then again at the stop). Jennifer Keesmaat, the city’s chief planner, told me months ago that stoplight priority for streetcars would be part of the plan, and if and how that is coordinated will make a big difference in how this functions. The small pilot area - reported by the Globe and Mail to be Bathurst to Jarvis - means streetcars will still be affected by regular conditions for most of their trip.

But as I also say, this is a start.

The TTC, which has rolled out its own big communications blitz on this, the planning department and the transportation (read: roads) department have worked together on this, and all have committed to making it work. The mayor’s office seems to be on board. So the pilot has that going for it - the determination of the parties involved to make the King streetcar work.

Also in the plan’s favour is that today, King St. is a mess for everyone. It’s a crowded pedestrian street for much of its length, a slow-moving streetcar route, and for cars and trucks it’s already a nightmare to drive on. As is, it doesn’t work for anyone, as politicians and city workers who favour the plan are fond of saying.

If this pilot is approached in the proper way - as a true test to see effects (on streetcar movement, on car traffic in the surrounding area, on business volumes, on pedestrian experience of the street) - then it will also allow for adjustment and adaptation as the process goes on. Paint on the roads is cheap, and repainting is easy if we need to try to iron out kinks.

If it’s successful, then it can be expanded to be even more successful.

My own advance hope - which is not to say expectation - is that if it is unsuccessful in its key goal of speeding up and improving streetcar function, then the next step will be a more dramatic intervention to achieve that same goal.

There are too many streetcar riders already on that line, too much potential for it to run better, too much opportunity to improve the whole transit network through using this car better to allow us to back off and accept that the ridiculous status quo is acceptable.

We have to do something to make the King streetcar work. This is something. And it’s a good start.