Subway crowding crisis has reached house-on-fire status
There’s no excuse to delay thinking about building the relief line
A crisis has a way of focusing the mind. When you wake up and your house is ablaze, suddenly all those thoughts you’ve been putting off until a convenient time — about smoke detector batteries, fire extinguishers, insurance, escape routes, response plans — seem urgent.
Unfortunately, at that point, it’s too late for most of them.
Your immediate priority becomes trying to get yourself and your family out alive, and then get the fire put out. If those two work out, the other longerterm plans are front-of-mind considerations as you rebuild for the rest of your life.
It seems like we’re there with Toronto’s subway situation.
The downtown relief line — more recently called just the “relief line” so as not to alienate the suburban riders who would benefit from it as much as anyone else — has been discussed as a pressing need for the TTC since about the 1980s, and has remained 11th on a 10-item ToDo list all along.
So now, the level of crowding on the subway’s Line 1 — especially at YongeBloor station, and also often at St. George station — has reached house-onfire status.
Last week, problems on two mid-week days made clear the extent of the crisis, as people dangerously jammed on subway platforms saw waits of up to an hour, with few viable alternative routes available.
People are getting inconvenienced and even hurt. Journalist John Lorinc sug- gests in a Spacing article this week that it seems inevitable now that someone will literally die by being accidentally pushed off an overcrowded platform.
Finally this has everyone talking about the relief line, which would offer many thousands of passengers a different subway route into downtown: the Star’s editorial board, Mayor John Tory and TTC Chair Josh Colle, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat . . . “We need to speed this up” is a sentiment that is suddenly everywhere. And thank goodness for that.
But it’s also too late. It won’t be enough, and it won’t come soon enough. That’s no excuse to delay thinking about it or working on it any longer — as many suggest, we need to speed it up.
But let’s be honest about what kind of speed we can reasonably expect.
The Spadina subway extension that recently opened took eight years to build, once shovels were in the ground. The Eglinton-Crosstown LRT, much of which is tunnelled like a subway, is in the middle of a 10-year construction timeline.
Hell, just installing elevators at Dupont subway station will have been a threeyear construction project if it finishes on time later this year.
TTC construction work takes a lot of time. The city keeps saying 2031is when the relief line should be finished. Give or take a year or two, it’s hard to see how we can expect it much sooner.
In the meantime, the need for it is going to grow, not just because the city is growing, but because we have been actively working to feed more passengers into the choke points of our already packed system.
The recently opened Line 1 extension to Vaughan will only put more passengers onto the St. George corridor. The Eglinton Crosstown will feed thousands more passengers onto both branches of Line 1 when it opens in 2021. The Finch LRT, expected in 2022, will feed still more onto the Spadina branch. The controversial Scarborough subway extension to Line 2 planned for 2026, if it attracts more passengers, will be feeding directly into the clogged routes we already have. In the meantime, the clueless hustlers at Queen’s Park keep trying to force extending Line 1 further north along Yonge into Richmond Hill as a top priority.
So yes, for the love of whatever it is you love, build the Relief Line and build it as soon as possible. But while we’re doing that, we’re going to need to do much more, much sooner.
Not a single big solution, but many smaller partial ones.
The mayor keeps talking about his signature SmartTrack plan as one of those solutions. Current ridership projections show its contribution to reducing Yonge crowding may be marginal. But the provincial RER and GO Transit system it will be a part of could add more marginal help and add up to something together.
Today, there are already many GO stations in Toronto that charge an ungodly premium over TTC fares to get to Union Station. But they get to Union quickly! If the provincial government, which is as much or more to blame for this mess as anyone, immediately declared that GO trains would accept a TTC fare for travel within Toronto, those lines could pick up many commuters from Scarborough, Etobicoke, and other parts of Toronto who currently ride the overcrowded subway.
We’re not talking about tens of thousands of riders here. When the UP Express lowered its fares — not to TTC rates, but closer — it saw an immediate pick-up in local commuter rides (20 per cent of its ridership, they estimated, amounting to about 1,500 riders a day within a few months of the change.) If we saw similar pickup on each GO Line, each diverting even an extra 1,000 people a day from the rush-hour subway, that would add up to some capacity.
At the same time, the King St. pilot project could point to another area for a “quick win” to increase ridership into downtown by means other than the central subway. That streetcar priority project seems to suggest, though the numbers are very preliminary, that ridership can climb quickly on existing streetcar routes if service is more frequent, reliable and quick.
The longtime transit journalist Stephen Wickens has pointed out that in 1990, the 506 Carlton streetcar was the busiest surface route in the city, with more than 58,000 riders per day, but has since seen service drop by more than a fifth and in turn ridership drop almost a third. It seems likely some combination of increases in service and better service through measures like those on King could make streetcars on Carlton, Dundas and Queen pick up thousands of new riders, many of whom are otherwise taking the subway. And how about the bus? No one loves it, but it does have benefits for trying new routes quickly.
The TTC has a few popular premium express routes for getting downtown — like one that goes directly from Don Mills into the core (it takes the Don Valley Parkway to get there). How about similar routes from areas of the outer city that feed a lot of passengers into the core?
An express bus from Kennedy Station into downtown without stopping (via the DVP), for instance.
Main Station is among the busier east-end feeder points into the subway system — what if an express bus started at Main, stopped once or twice at locations in the Beaches/ Woodbine area, and then drove non-stop into the core via the east- ern Gardiner Expressway? Or one from the Scarborough Town Centre? Or from Rexdale via the 427 and Gardiner? Look around the city, you can find similar routes to try.
Of course, each bus can only carry so many people — about 1,800 customers per day rode the five existing downtown express routes, according to the most recent statistics I can find — but if they collectively take a few thousand people off the morning subway crush, and in the process provide better service than the subway to those few thousand people, then that helps.
The TTC does run into short-term problems with some of these kinds of ideas because it lacks extra buses and streetcars during rush hour to put into service — more evidence of the short-term, penny-pinching procrastination that has long ruled city hall. But it can certainly get more vehicles on the road faster than it can tunnel a new subway line under it.
These aren’t meant to be a finished plan. Maybe there are reasons some of these ideas won’t work. (I’m sure I’ll hear all about those reasons shortly). Maybe there are other better solutions out there. Discounted fares — or outright free rides — before 7 a.m.? Bus-only lanes on the city highways for express routes? Bring your ideas.
The point is that in the short term with limited resources, you need to eat the elephant one bite at a time — and there may be lots of different types of cutlery to do it with.
We need the subway line, but we can’t wait for it. We need to work on relief now, and for the future, as fast as we can, and in as many ways as we can. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire