Billion-dollar addiction to outdated tech
If you want to know the trouble with Toronto Transit’s streetcars, here it is in a nutshell from the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association’s History of the Streetcar: “In the beginning there was the horsecar.”
The first light rail transit system (LRT) was a small boxy car pulled by horses over rails embedded into the street. Not much has changed in the streetcar world since then — about 1830, almost 200 years ago. On the streets of Toronto they still pull boxy carriages over rails embedded in the street, the difference being that instead of a horse it takes a billion dollar’s worth of infrastructure—tracks, concrete, roadways, electrical overhead, power transmission facilities, dedicated rights-of-way — to haul the cars over tracks that are an anachronism.
The streetcar is essentially 19th-century technology kept alive in the 21st century by political and ideological forces. Streetcars predate the automobile and the internal combustion engine, they predate the invention of rubber tires, asphalt, concrete and all the other miracles of modern urban transportation.
What killed the streetcar, or should have killed it, was the modern world of the automobile and the internal combustion engine. Freedom! From the tyranny of tracks, which limited movement of the streetcar and created obstacles to the movement of far superior automobiles and buses powered by the internal combustion engine.
Most cities in North America removed their streetcar systems through the 20th century. Montreal scrapped them decades ago, leaving only memories of cold cars rattling out from the Craig Street ter- minus to the No. 17 line out to the northern suburbs of Ville St. Laurent and Cartierville. The tracks and overpasses are long gone.
Toronto took a different route. A TTC report in 2005 describes what happened. In 1972, the TTC studied the streetcar and came up with a sound and viable plan, which called for “the elimination of streetcars and their replacement by new subways, buses or electrical trolley buses.” Those plans, however, were “decisively reversed, largely as a result of citizen support for continued streetcar service. “
That “citizen support” was largely produced by a core of leftist public transit activists through a group called Streetcars for Toronto. Its backers including public transit advocate Steve Munro and William Kilbourn, a Rosedale historian.
And so Toronto held on to its streetcar dreams over the next four decades, captive of a range of interests and pathologies, from nostalgia to autophobia to a belief that streetcars were superior to buses and subways.
The TTC’s famous 2007 Transit City Light Rail Plan— described by the TTC itself as “an updated and improved version of the streetcar” — proposed running the modern equivalent of horse-drawn carriages along Eglinton, up and down Jane Street and Don Mills Road, out to Mississauga along Lake Shore, out Sheppard to Scarborough and west to deepest Etobicoke.
The option of installing trolley buses — with vehicles described by the TTC as quieter, emissions-free, smootherriding and longer-lasting than fuel-based buses — was dismissed as requiring too much costly infrastructure. But the study did not compare trolley buses with streetcars, whose capital costs are much higher than trolley buses. The fixation on tracks running down the middle of main traffic arteries is nothing but perverse.
Today the battle is over various half-baked successors to LRT-fixated Transit City. With transit a major issue in the coming municipal election, mayoral candidates adopt plans like children picking toy transit systems at a hobby shop. Get used to it, Toronto. Almost two centuries after the invention of horse-drawn vehicles pulled on tracks, your city is now locked into billiondollar streetcar expansions. The economics of such expansion are prohibitive and will require endless subsidies from taxpayers, not to mention the continuing cost of inconvenience and congestion brought on by the rigid streetcar system.
Now there is talk of clearing all automobile movement on King Street and other streetcar-strangled streets, all to facilitate the trundling vestige of the horsecar along tracks that lock Toronto into the 19th century.