Streetcars the neglected stars of this city

TIFF street closure sad symbol of their shoddy treatment

Everyone loves the Toronto International Film Festival; you’ve got all those movies, of course, and the bars are open until 4 a.m., and then there are so many Hollywood celebrities in town breathing our air and eating in our restaurants and saying nice things about our city. If you’re lucky, you can even get into one of your favourite bars and catch a glimpse of a celebrity who is hustling past you and your fellow Torontonians into a roped-off VIP area you’re not allowed into. Exciting!

We like TIFF so much, we’ve closed off part of the downtown core to celebrate all the reflected glory the entertainment tinsel-machine brings to town with it: the stretch of King St. between Peter St. and University Ave. is closed to vehicle traffic for the first four days of the festival, the better to celebrate with concerts and kids zones and red carpets and extended restaurant patios.

Now, closing downtown King St. to cars is kind of a non-event. (I mean, if a car sat waiting to move on King St. in the financial district for a week or two, how would the driver even notice it was different from normal traffic?) But closing it off to streetcars actually represents a fairly massive disruption in the lives of transit commuters; tens of thousands of people use that streetcar to get to work and back every day, and now they have no service between Bathurst and York Sts.

And as much as it’s possible to see this as indicative of how much we love TIFF (and, perhaps, street festivals in general), it’s also a sad symbol of just how shoddily this city treats the streetcar. The iconic electric vehicles are frequently trumpeted as a fleet of moving Toronto landmarks, a cherished part of our identity, even. And they move a lot of people (Toronto’s streetcar lines carry more passengers than the entire GO regional rail network).

Yet it’s no surprise the city eagerly shuts down streetcar service on a whim, even though doing so last year was a disaster, according to TTC CEO Andy Byford, and even though TTC staff strongly recommended against repeating the closure this year. Because we never really miss an opportunity to treat streetcars as an afterthought, or an inconvenience. We’ll spend years and hundreds of millions on a fiery debate about road space on the Gardiner, and we’ll tear each other’s eyes out in a subway-LRT grudge match. But while we do, you’ll still be standing on a streetcar with 100 other people waiting for some driver to make his left turn before you can move.

The transit expert and streetcar activist Steve Munro recently studied, on the highly detailed blog he keeps, the travel times of streetcars on the newly reopened Queens Quay Blvd. Turns out that after all the rebuilding and reconstructing the street as a primarily transit-and-cycling-and-pedestrian corridor, streetcars now take longer to travel the length of that line than they did before construction began. Like, 25 per cent longer. Why? Munro cites several problems, but key culprits are more traffic signals (red lights) and ineffective “signal priority” systems that leave the streetcars waiting at them.

The National Post’s Chris Selley already pointed this summer to the endless (and ongoing) delays of the construction of the Leslie St. streetcar barn as an example of how little attention is paid to ensuring street- car infrastructure is a priority.

Of course, the fleet of new streetcars we ordered way back in David Miller’s mayoralty has been treated as a wasteful scandal by many politicians at city hall, even as the manufacturer continues to string us along in actually delivering more than a handful of them. (“We’re stuck with them,” Rob Ford says he was told of the 204 low-floor streetcars — if only we could be stuck with them!)

In any given case, the specific (and sometimes reasonable) explanations differ for why streetcar riders wind up getting shortchanged and short-turned. Many of the big causes of delay are being addressed, slowly, imperfectly, over time. But taken together, the evidence points to the conclusion that streetcars are treated less like the backbone of our transit network they are and more like a barely tolerated eccentricity.

I, for one, think a star-studded Toronto street party would just seem all the better if it were taking place around a fast, functioning streetcar line — just imagine those pieces of Torontonalia driving past the revelry every few minutes. And I’m certain those riding on the lines would revel in being treated with even a fraction of the respect we give to visiting celebrities. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. Follow: @thekeenanwire, ekeenan@thestar.ca