‘Tough summer’ ahead on St. Clair Ave. as new streetcars force long closure

Six years after the streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave. W. opened, the TTC is being forced to shut it down for several months.

Starting Sunday, the 6.6-km dedicated transit lane will be closed for modifications to accommodate the agency’s new streetcar fleet.

One section of the tracks, between St. Clair and St. Clair West stations, won’t reopen until the end of the year, while the segment between St. Clair West and Gunns Loop should be back in service by Labour Day. TTC spokesman Brad Ross said some residents will “rightly ask” why the closure is necessary so soon after the right-of-way’s completion, but stressed that the work is essential for customer safety. Without modifications to streetcar platforms along St. Clair, the new vehicles won’t be able to properly deploy their accessibility ramps.

As part of the $2.8-million project, 26 of St. Clair’s 49 streetcar platforms will be retrofitted to match the height of the vehicles’ ramps. All platforms will also get new railings and tactile markings, and the streetcar facilities at St. Clair West and St. Clair stations will be upgraded.

During the closures, the TTC will replace streetcars on the 512 St. Clair route with buses, which will operate in mixed traffic because the poles that hold up the streetcar wires prevent them from being driven in the right-of-way. The 512 line carries 38,000 passengers on an average weekday, making it the TTC’s fifth busiest streetcar route.

Ross said the work is being done now because when the dedicated lane was being built between 2005 and 2010, the TTC didn’t know the design specifications of the new Bombardier streetcars, which city council ordered in 2009. As a result, some platforms were built too high, and others too low.

Asked why the TTC didn’t direct Bombardier to build streetcars with ramps that could fit with the commission’s existing infrastructure, Ross said: “The engineering of the ramp is incredibly complicated,” in part because it needs to function both on right-of-ways like St. Clair and on streets where the vehicles run in mixed traffic.

The St. Clair work is part of $58 million worth of modifications that the TTC first announced in 2013 to make all 700 of its streetcar stops ready for the Bombardier’s low-floor, accessible rides.

St. Clair’s right-of-way took five years and $106 million to build, and was hugely controversial. Residents complained that the work caused traffic chaos and drove local shops out of business.

Atefa Osmani owns a Pizza Pizza at St. Clair and Oakwood Ave. She said during the initial construction she lost a lot of customers because she couldn’t make deliveries on time. She’s worried she and her neighbours will suffer again as a result of this summer’s work.

“People are going to go out of busi- ness, it’s going to cause massive amounts of traffic. We can’t have parking in one lane and then have one lane running buses.”

Osmani said the TTC “should have put a lot more thought into this whole project from the beginning, and not try to figure it out along the way . . . They never planned this project properly at all.”

Councillor Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s), whose ward includes an affected stretch of St. Clair, conceded it could be a “tough summer.” But he argued that a few months of inconvenience is a small price to pay for access to the new streetcars, which he said will benefit transit riders with mobility devices and passengers who have strollers or who find it difficult to climb the older streetcars’ stairs.