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Improving the 506 Carlton Streetcar

At the July 22 meeting of the TTC Board, there was a fair amount of discussion about a motion by Commissioner Saxe asking for a study of improving the College streetcar, properly known as 506 Carlton.

The TTC Board:

1. Directed staff, in collaboration with the General Manager, Transportation Services, to report back to this Board in Q1 2027 with recommendations how to improve the speed and reliability of the College streetcar through measures that are within the control of the TTC.

There was a companion motion at the Infrastructure & Environment Committee on July 15 with the intent is that the TTC and City work together on this project.

A few deputants spoke to the issue including a challenger to Saxe’s Council seat in the coming election, and they advanced various possible solutions to streetcar speed problems. There was some debate about whether the motion should only address the portion of the 506 Carlton car within Saxe’s ward, the full line, or the streetcar network overall. A related issue is that the TTC already has a study of streetcar operations in general underway that will report back early in 2027. It is not clear what a 506-specific resolution adds.

This article reviews various proposals to speed up streetcar service in the context of the 506 Carlton route. Although this is usually cast as a “streetcar” issue, that is only because the major downtown routes operate with streetcars. Some of the problems, notably political resistance to giving transit better priority over cars, would apply even if these routes used buses.

Issues covered here include:

  • Stop geometry and spacing
  • Transit priority signals
  • Track switch and control system design
  • Operating practices
  • Red lanes and rights-of-way
  • Service reliability and frequency
  • Current and historical route speed
  • Why “Carlton” and not “College”?
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TTC Service Changes Effective July 26, 2026

The service changes for the second portion of the summer largely consist of restoring several routes to their pre-World Cup service.

  • 509 Harbourfront weekday service will return to its pre-World Cup level. Weekend service will remain higher to handle summer traffic.
  • 309 Harbourfront night car will be discontinued. Early Sunday morning service will be provided by the 509.
  • 510 Spadina will return to its normal schedule and route via Queens Quay to Union Station.
  • 511 Bathurst service will be reduced.
  • 311 Bathurst night car service will end, and the 307 Bathurst night bus will resume service to Exhibition Loop
  • 929 Dufferin Express weekend early evening service will end.

Track, overhead and sewer construction will resume on College between Bay and Church. Streetcars will divert both ways via Bay, Dundas and Parliament. Replacement buses will run from Spadina Station to Broadview & Gerrard. Westbound buses will divert around the work site via Jarvis, Wellesley and Bay.

512/312 St. Clair cars will make run in/out trips via Queen, Broadview, Dundas and Bathurst.

Changes are also planned for:

  • 1 Yonge-University-Spadina
    • Service Assistance Crews who assist with turnarounds at terminals will be removed due to “workforce considerations”.
  • 2 Bloor-Danforth
    • All weekday midday run-ins and deadheads from Pape Station will be changed to occur at Kennedy Station.
  • 22 Coxwell / 92 Woodbine South
    • Holiday interline discontinued. Service adjusted in some periods.
  • 21 Brimley
    • Service adjusted in all periods for reliability.
  • 94 Wellesley
    • Service adjusted for construction on Wellesley Street East between Jarvis and Parliament.
  • 162 Lawrence-Donway & 191 Underhill
    • Routes interlined weekdays daytime.
  • 927D Highway 27 Express
    • 927D Kipling Stn/Steeles via Royalcrest diverted via Baywood and Mars Road for construction.
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How Slow Is My Streetcar? (I)

In all the debates about streetcar operation and lack of speed, there is little by way of an overview of where the problem locations and times really are. There are discussions of track switching technology, signal priority (or the lack of it), whether stops are too close together, and operating practices such as standing slow orders at various locations. Much less so a line-by-line review to see where the worst problems lie, and where the greatest opportunities for improvement might be found.

Some advocates claim that an improvement of as much as 40% might be achieved in streetcar speeds, although this has too often been misinterpreted as an absolute number, not a best case target. It is worth noting that some routes, segments and times of day already achieve much higher average speeds. The question then is what prevents this from being standard operation across the system.

This post uses vehicle tracking data to plot average vehicle speed, by hour, over segments of each streetcar route for June 1-5, 2026. This interval was chosen because it was just before the onset of special services and conditions related to the World Cup, but during the moratorium of works and diversions that could have distorted the data.

In Part II, I will take a deeper dive into specific problem areas on some lines, and look at comparative data from pre-covid times.

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TTC Board Meeting July 22, 2026

The TTC Board will meet on July 22 at 9:30am in Committee Room 2 at City Hall. The agenda includes several confidential items, and it is not yet clear when they will be considered and what period will be an open public session. As usual, the public portion will be streamed for those not making the trek to City Hall.

Items covered by this article:

  • CEO’s Report
  • Transit Network Expansion Update – Provincial Projects in Delivery
  • New Entrance to Spadina Station
  • New Entrance to Eglinton Station
  • Large Contract Awards
  • A proposed study of speeding up the 506 Carlton streetcar

Items with confidential material include:

  • A update on the Fare Collection System
  • Fitness for Duty Grievance Update

There is also an Accessibility Plan Status Report. I will cover this in a separate article.

This will be the last meeting of the current TTC Board before the municipal election in October.

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TTC Chooses Hitachi for Line 2 Automatic Train Control

On July 15, the TTC announced that it would award the contract for implementation of Automatic Train Control (ATC) on subway Line 2 (Bloor-Danforth). This will include the Scarborough extension now under construction.

Updated July 17 at 8:30am: The value of the contract with Hitachi is $407.7-million according to the summary of contract awards (p. 2).

Between the New Subway Train (NST) contract already awarded to Alstom and the Hitachi signalling contract, both companies will be involved in supplying the TTC for a decade and more.

The NST contract includes trains for:

  • Replacement of the existing fleet of T-1 trains on Line 2 which are approaching end-of-life;
  • Supply of additional Line 2 trains both for the Scarborough extension and for future service improvements;
  • Supply of additional Line 1 trains both for the Richmond Hill extension and for future service improvements.

The ATC contract will cover replacement of the existing block signal system on Line 2. It is linked to the NST contract in the sense that the existing Line 2 fleet cannot be modified for ATC operation. New signalling requires new trains.

The choice of a different ATC technology has implications for the TTC’s fleets and operations:

  • The Line 1 and Line 2 fleets will not be able to operate in “foreign” territory where the signalling system does not match the on-train equipment. Line 1 uses Alstom’s Urbalis system, while Line 2 will use Hitachi’s Seltrac sytem. Any trains which would operate on both lines must have ATC gear for both technologies.
  • The TTC has no intention to interoperate Lines 1 and 2 (e.g. the short lived “integrated” service in 1966 or any variation of that), and regards “Crossline Train Operation” (CTO) as unneeded in the spec for reasons explained later in this article.
  • Any equipment which will operate regularly on both lines (e.g. work trains) will require interfaces to both systems for protection from other traffic.
  • Although “foreign” trains could be moved if needed (e.g. to take trains to another line’s carhouse), this would have to be done off hours under rules for unprotected, manual train operation. Trains could not be “borrowed” or rerouted off of their home lines.
  • Although the Line 2 trains will be fitted with Hitachi gear, the added trains for Line 1 will have to carry Alstom equipment. Moreover, the Line 1 trains will have to be managed as six-car sets because that is the configuration the Alstom system is designed to support. (See TTC report quote below.)
  • With a cutover date to ATC on Line 2, this also sets the earliest date for Platform Edge Doors (PEDs) assuming that the TTC regards ATC as a pre-requisite. Yonge Station on Line 2 might be rebuilt with provision for PEDs but it will be over a decade before the signal system is able to support them.

There is a somewhat surreal aspect to all of this given the timelines. Installation of Line 2 ATC will occur in phases up to 2037 based on the assumption that the existing Line 2 fleet will be retired soon before that. The line cannot be switched to automatic operation with a mix of old and new trains. By extension, any service improvements from ATC operation (closer train spacing, service more frequent than 2’20”) are a decade away, and even that depends on increasing the fleet beyond basic requirements to open the SSE.

Part of this extended timeline can be laid at the feet of former management who felt they could keep the existing trains and signals system running much longer than their planned retirement date. That attitude changed with the ongoing signalling problems on Line 1 before ATC conversion, but years were lost in procurement both of ATC equipment and new trains that could use it.

A September 2024 report on Line 2 modernization stated:

The RFP for Line 2 ATC does not include a Crossline Train Operation (CTO) feature for trains to move between Line 1 and Line 2. The requirement for CTO has been reviewed based on existing and future service plans, and operational needs assessment. It has been determined that CTO is not a requirement for day-to-day service for Line 1 and Line 2. There are also technical challenges that arise with CTO on the revenue fleet with one of the main constraints being that the trains on Line 1 are a permanent six car consist with a fixed ATC Train-Borne equipment configuration, whereas the expected new trains for Line 2 will consist of three married pair cars that will be dynamically configured. The dynamic configuration for the Line 2 ATC Train-Borne equipment is not supported by the ATC Line 1 system architecture. It should be noted that to support the CTO feature, additional funding would be required to redesign and upgrade the existing Line 1 ATC system to accommodate CTO. [pp16-17]

It is clear that the TTC would never return to integration of service between lines, but the need to move trains onto “foreign” territory has come up in the past as a way to deal with major disruptions. That option will be foreclosed. I have asked the TTC for clarification of their intent re emergency operations, carhouse moves and work cars, and will add their reply here when it comes in.

Replacing aging signals and trains is “good news”, but the benefits will not materialize soon for riders.

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Construction Effects at Gerrard and Leslieville Stations

Over coming years, Metrolinx will build new stations on the Ontario Line at Gerrard (Gerrard & Carlaw) and Leslieville (Queen & De Grassi). These structures will span local streets including two streetcar lines. Various partial and total closures of affected streets are needed for this work to proceed. Much of this involves sidewalk and curb lane closures, but there will be a five month period for each station where streetcar service is removed to allow Ontario Line work without energized streetcar overhead.

The full transit changes have not yet been published, but in each case streetcars will divert to the parallel street (Gerrard or Queen) between Coxwell and Broadview. Replacement bus service will bridge the gap diverting around station construction as necessary.

Details including parking restrictions, pedestrian and cycling effects, are in a City of Toronto report on the July 8 agenda of Toronto & East York Community Council:

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College-Carlton Construction Plans Summer-Fall 2026

Phase 2 of the planned reconstruction of sewers and track on College and Carlton requires 506/306 streetcars to divert via Dundas Street between Bay and Parliament Streets. A replacement bus service will operate on College and Carlton. This arrangement begins on July 26 and is expected to continue until the end of 2026.

506B/306B buses will run from Spadina Station to Broadview & Gerrard:

  • Eastbound via Spadina, College, Carlton, Parliament and Gerrard looping near Bridgepoint Hospital.
  • Westbound via Gerrard, Parliament, Carlton, Jarvis, Wellesley, Bay, College and Spadina

Note that there will be no westbound service on Carlton/College between Jarvis and Bay because the street will be closed in that direction in the work zone. One eastbound lane will remain open.

This phase of the work includes:

  • Reconstruction of the sewer and watermain on College between Bay and Yonge, and
  • Reconstruction of the streetcar track on Carlton between Yonge and Church.

In Phase 3 later this year, the work zones will switch with streetcar track replacement west of Yonge.

As with the King Street project described in a separate post, it should be noted that the work by Toronto Water is the lengthier of the two components. As the City upgrades water and sewer infrastructure that is over a century old, there have been many disruptions to streetcar routes, although track and overhead upgrades are scheduled concurrently to take advantage of the streetcar diversions.

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King West Construction Plans: 2026-27

Water main construction, coupled with track repairs, will force the diversion of 504 King streetcars from November 2026 to early Summer 2027.

The map below is taken from a report at Toronto & East York Community Council on July 8-9 (p 4).

Two areas will be affected starting November 2026: Close to Dufferin, and Portland to Spadina. At the end of February 2027 work will begin between Shaw and Bathurst Streets.

The following services will operate over the 504 King corridor:

  • 504 streetcar from Broadview Station to Dundas West Station diverting both ways via Queen between Roncesvalles and Spadina
  • 504 bus service from the Distillery District to Sunnyside Loop
  • 503 Kingston Road bus service from Bingham Loop to Dufferin Loop
  • Not shown in the map is the 508 Lake Shore car whose summer 2026 suspension appears to continue through the construction period.

Night service will be provided by:

  • 304 streetcar over the same route as 504 King car
  • 304C bus over the same route as 504C King bus

Projects planned for 2027 includes watermain work and intersection reconstruction at King and York. This was originally expected in Fall 2026, but has been pushed back into the next construction year. TTC advises that King/York is scheduled to start in late June 2027 with the intention of completion before the film festival in September. Other projects will affect King West in 2027, but details for this work have not been announced.

Traffic regulations will be changed at several locations to assist transit vehicle movement during the construction. Details follow the “more” break.

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Metrolinx Board Meeting – June 25, 2026

The Metrolinx Board met on June 25, and as usual for that secretive organization, most of the agenda was discussed in private session. What they do talk about in public is inevitably “good news”, and there is rarely any indication that the Board might have issues with management.

Items included in this article:

  • Write-Down of GO Transit Assets
  • GO Transit Project Status
  • Update on Line 5 and Line 6 LRT Operations
  • Fare Enforcement Bylaw Update
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Reviewing TTC Surface Delay Data 2025-2026

This article is a followup to a review of subway delay data published here in early June.

Four sets of data are summarized here:

  • Bus data January 2025 through April 2026
  • Streetcar data January 2025 through May 2026
  • Line 6 Finch data December 2025 through May 2026
  • Line 5 Eglinton data February through May 2026

There is no bus data for May 2026 because the TTC’s June 22, 2026 update on the City’s Open Data site did not include it.

The Open Data files include a key translating delay codes to text. However, many codes used in the logs do not appear in the key, and in those cases I have used “?” in the tables. I have asked TTC for an updated code list, but they have not replied.

Among the information shown in these delay logs:

  • “No Operator Available” is a serious problem related to TTC staffing levels.
  • Diversions account for a large number of delays, notably on the bus network, not just streetcars.
  • Collisions involving buses and streetcars are common.
  • Weather related delays including autos blocking tracks peak in winter months for buses and streetcars.
  • Streetcar delays related to switches are reported under various codes, but there is no code for derailment thereby masking the number of the most serious track-related events.
  • The number and length of delays on 6 Finch have fallen by over 50% since the opening months.
  • A common source of delay on 5 Eglinton relates to guideway intrusion.
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