Farewell to the city’s transit workhorse, the CLRV
Big number: 84,000. Approximate number of riders each weekday on the King streetcar, more than the Sheppard subway and any GO Train route
Soon after we moved to Toronto, my partner Erin and I went to see one of our favourite singers play a mid-December show at the Horseshoe on Queen West.
The show started late, and then just kept going. As Joel Plaskett piled on the encores, the snow outside was piling up too.
Before we knew it, it was 4 a.m. and we were freezing on the sidewalk on Queen Street. The subway was long past closing. Cabs were scarce in the winter storm. It was looking like the only way back to our east end apartment was a long, miserable walk.
And then we saw it: a beacon of hope in the form of a single headlight. It was a Toronto streetcar, pushing through the snow. It took us home.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that night lately. This Sunday, the last of Toronto’s remaining Canadian Light Rail Vehicles (CLRVs) — the kind of streetcar that got us home that night — will take their final ride. With the TTC finally receiving enough of the new Bombardier streetcars, the old fleet is being retired.
And call me a nostalgic sap, but I think it’s worth taking some time to appreciate these vehicles that brought so many people home for 40 years.
Toronto’s streetcars take a lot of flak. Talk to a frustrated Toronto driver and they’re likely to blame streetcars for all sorts of woes. But the fact is that Toronto’s streetcar network, and the CLRVs that began serving it in 1979, punches above its weight.
The city’s busiest streetcar route on King Street carries 84,000 riders each
weekday, more than double the approximately 32,000 riders that use GO Transit’s busiest route along Lakeshore West or the 50,000 riders that use the Sheppard subway.
And while there are plenty of people who claim they should have been replaced with buses years ago, it would take about three new buses to replace each streetcar with equivalent capacity.
Drivers like to imagine replacing streetcars with buses would lead to wide-open streets, but the reality would be streets packed with three times as many transit vehicles.
Toronto politicians spent much of the lifespan of the CLRV fleet talking and arguing about building other forms of transit, like subways and light rail lines. But they built little. Meanwhile, the CLRVs — and their already-retired articulated cousins — were workhorses, accommodating more and more riders.
They were the basis for costeffective, meaningful improvements. Transit lanes on Queens Quay, Spadina and St.
Clair all boosted ridership, and the successful transit priority pilot on King Street is now being eyed as a model for surface transit across the city.
And with all of the major transit projects in the new transit accord struck between Premier Doug Ford and Mayor John Tory not due until the end of the decade — optimistically — it’ll be the streetcar system that will be called upon to shoulder new transit demand downtown. Toronto council is already looking at ordering at least 60 more vehicles.
But an old era must end before a new one can begin.
It’s an odd thing saying goodbye to a transit vehicle. Of course old models get replaced as time goes on. There shouldn’t be any emotion to it. But then I think of just how many thousands of hours I spent on the CLRVs. How I have an absolute favourite seat — a single on the left side, fourth from the front — that I’ll never sit in again. How, when I close my eyes, my mental image of Toronto includes a CLRV — and probably always will, long after the streetcars take their last regular service ride Sunday.
And I think of that profound sense of relief I felt when I saw that streetcar’s headlight on that winter night, all those years ago. It felt like home, and then it got us there.