From September 3, 2023 until summer 2024 (the exact date is not specified), the TTC will operate buses on route 512 St. Clair during several overlapping construction projects.
Updated August 28 at 5:00 pm: A response from the TTC about the scope of work for this project has been added.
A major part of this work is the reconstruction of St. Clair West Station Loop.
All transfers between surface routes and the subway will occur on street, and the following route changes will occur:
- 512 St. Clair buses will operate between St. Clair Station and Gunn’s Loop.
- 47A Lansdowne buses will return to their normal terminal at Earlscourt Loop.
- 90 Vaughan will be extended south to Bathurst Station.
- 33 Forest Hill and 126 Christie will interline as a single route rather than looping at St. Clair West.
The chart below shows the many projects affecting St. Clair in the coming year.
The overall timelines are shown in the chart below.
Within St. Clair West Station, the loop will be rebuilt in two stages as shown below.
Concrete and track repairs will occur at various locations along the route including at Bathurst, Vaughan and in Oakwood Loop. Track lubricators will be added at Oakwood and Earlscourt Loops to reduce wheel squeal.
The overhead power system along the entire route will be upgraded fully to pantograph-only operation including the four intersections. Some of this has already been done on St. Clair, and I have a query in to the TTC about the additional work in this round. The presentation deck notes that this will include “Installation and reinforcing of traction power cable to allow additional flexibility”, and “Repairs to [cable] chamber walls and covers”.
Updated August 28: The TTC Replies
We have upgraded the entire tangent network across St. Clair with full stagger and installed auto-tensioning units where we were able to do so. Under this closure we will be replacing all the hybrid loops and intersections installed in 2009 with the fully optimized pantograph design. We will also be installing auto-tensioning units in the remainder of the tangent areas that were prohibitive due to the hybrid hardware at the intersections. The presentation could have been more clear with respect to this item, but ultimately, with the installation of the final pieces of fully pantograph OCS we will need to adjust and retension the entire line as a complete system from end to end.
Email from TTC Media Relations, Aug. 28/23
Toronto Water will replace two failed valves at St. Clair and Greenlaw. The excavation required for this work will require temporary removal of part of the track structure. This and other work along St. Clair work is scheduled for September-October 2023. Toronto Hydro plans work between Bathurst and Caledonia from November 2023 through Q1 2024.
Work will continue on the GO bridge west of Caledonia Road as part of the GO Expansion project. Beyond mid-2024 (date TBA), there will be major work at the GO corridor east of Keele Street for service expansion including the planned “SmartTrack” station. Other roads in the area will be affected as part of a City of Toronto plan for improved access through the area.
At St. Clair Station, utility relocation work will occur in Fall-Winter 2023-24, and the offloading platform will be replaced in Fall 2024.
Fire ventilation upgrades will occur at St. Clair West Station in 2026 near the Heath Street entrance, but this will not affect operations in the underground loop.
Links to source material:
Steve Munro 
How does the TTC justify taking 12 months to replace a few dozen metres of streetcar track at St. Clair West station?
Steve: It’s not just the track, but also the full concrete slab for the station and the entrance area. But, yes, this seems like a rather leisurely schedule.
Will the buses operate in the RoW (partially), or fully on the road where they can be held up by parked cars?
Steve: That is not yet decided. The TTC created a problem for themselves by using centre poles for overhead suspension and this limits the flexibility of driving buses on the tracks.
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Thanks, Steve. Much clearer than the official TTC handout.
Do you or does the TTC or anyone else have an opinion on what this will do to travel times along St. Clair? Or will have to rely on Google Maps?
Thanks.
Steve: If the past shutdown of this type is any indication, travel times will be longer, particularly west of St. Clair West.
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We should have a betting pool on when they’ll actually reopen streetcar operations. I say fall of 2025.
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This should leave the TTC with the world’s largest reserve fleet of streetcars.
You never know when you might need them for some currently unfunded project.
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Chow is finally reversing TTC cuts (and increasing service as well)!!!!
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How many minutes will it be when the TTC says ‘Buses will arrive every few minutes, serving curbside stops’. Will there be a mechanism to ensure spacing and avoiding bunching, which somehow works better with real streetcars ? PS: As Steve would know, the 47A/512 loop extension experiment was a disaster where there were 3 buses in 3 minutes and then none for 27 minutes on most days even though advertised frequency was 10 minutes.
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Hi Steve, Thanks for this information. Will the buses run along the streetcar’s right of way? I see in the presentation deck that bus service will be every 3 mins during peak periods. I don’t know how all those buses are going to fit in the car lanes on St. Clair. It’s pretty grid-locked as is.
Steve: Use of the streetcar right-of-way by buses has not been decided yet. The TTC did themselves no favours when, years ago, they designed the street with centre poles rather than with span wires from curb to curb as it had been for decades. The centre poles makes it difficult for any vehicles like buses or fire trucks to use the streetcar lanes. In the day, several of the advocates for St. Clair fought for side poles, but the City and TTC knew better.
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In other words, see you folks in 2026. If they’re going to shut the line down for this long they should install the switches and track junctions for track to extend west of Gunns but we all know nobody plans for this sort of thing because everything is done piecemeal at the TTC.
Steve: I think that the extension west from Gunn’s is on nobody’s list of priority projects. It fell off of the map when Transit City was cancelled, and with it the Jane LRT to which the extension would have connected.
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I assume it is too late to get rid of the centre poles and make the track suitable for bus and emergency vehicle use? They are doing ‘overhead work”.
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When they finish this job, they’ll then be able to close down St. Clair Avenue Avenue between Old Weston Road and Keele Street. This is for the widening of St. Clair Avenue West at the railway underpass, which wasn’t done when they put the streetcar tracks into a right-of-way.
Can’t do it at the same time when the right-of-way was being built, can’t co it at the same time as St. Clair West Station. Why? No funds to do it at the same time.
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Thanks for your reporting! had no idea this was gonna happen!
Are they gonna give Signal Priority to street cars at intersections as part of the upgrades? I saw an “OCS Upgrades” in the site plan image, but not sure what it is. 512 DESPERATELY needs signal priority!!! Trains wait waaay too long for cars to clear the intersections!
Thanks!
Steve: “OCS” = “Overhead Contact System”. See the TTC’s reply to my query which is now in the article.
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PLEASE confirm that the buses will run along the dedicated streetcar tracks wherever possible, and won’t simply add to traffic congestion along the car lane.
Steve: The use of the streetcar right-of-way by buses has not yet been confirmed. As I said in previous replies to this question, the TTC’s original decision to use centre poles for overhead suspension rather than span wires across the street (as on the old overhead) presents a challenge for large vehicles on the right-of-way.
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It seems 512 St.Clair downtime for service upgrades, or accident damage like the overhead wire cutting at Vaughan several years ago, is a too regular occurrence.
The ROW has an aura of vulnerability, of weakness, with frequent service disruptions. This phenomena isn’t discussed at pre-build in public. As a user from day 1 it gets frustrating unto fait accompli when the buses come out and stops get moved to opposite intersection corners. The Spadina ROW doesn’t share this structural weakness, why?
Has the opposite ever happened – bus route suspended for infrastructure upgrades, service replaced by a streetcar!
To add to the buses and service vehicles on the ROW: I remember during construction the many concerned citizen groups attempted interdictions including at least one claiming police and fire could not use the ROW. Local fire chief responded that the TTC consulted them and Toronto Fire has no issues with St.Clair ROW.
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Re: Extension of St.Clair Car westward which was previously cancelled for no good reason.
This would be a good opportunity to extend St.Clair route with buses to improve service west of Gunn’s Loop. This should replace the 189 Stockyards route along St.Clair and on-street looping as per present routing.
If not practical to extend all buses beyond Gunn’s, then try every other one.
There is no need for 189 route to operate on Keele to High Park as there is already excellent choices of local and express buses on both 89/989 Weston Rd and 41/941 Keele routes.
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The mechanism is called service management and it does not exist at the TTC. I’ve highlighted in recent times the behaviour of the 503 replacement bus where operators take long layovers at the terminals despite (sometimes large) gaps opening up in the scheduled headway and it is followed by buses leaving in packs. I don’t imagine the 512 replacement bus will be any different.
My comment wasn’t a call to action for getting shovels in the ground for 100% project completion ASAP. It’s the same criticism of the organization for not being proactive and getting these minor pieces into play to prevent more pain and more shutdowns in the future, see Queen-Broadview loop or perhaps similar to the idea of tail tracks at Gunns we could ask why they haven’t done anything like that at Park Lawn while the track west of Roncesvalles has been shutdown for the past century.
Doubtless we’ll see more screw ups in planning and staging if and when money becomes available for QQE sometime within the next 25 years.
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Watched TV news this PM with Mayor and Rick Leary announcing big improvements to TTC service to begin shortly.
I would like to suggest a “pilot” whereby St.Clair route is extended as per my earlier suggestion. Searched TTC website and no e-mail addy for Leary or anyone else of authority. No problem getting e-mail for the Mayor.
Any suggestion?
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Rick Leary doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of our collective imaginations.
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Say Steve, this is will be my take since you forgot to mention this that you should add:
The 90 VAUGHAN is once again being extended to Bathurst Station to Oakwood which followed the routing from 1966 to 1978. The 90-Bathurst branch was extended north from Oakwood to Eglinton in 1995 only for the route to cut back to St. Clair West Station in 1996 when the cuts happened.
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I was skeptical about the 189 when it was introduced, but after the recent 512 interruptions, I would it was much better for traveling between St Clair West (west of Gunns) to downtown than the 512 ever was. Faster and less crowded. The schedule is random, but I attribute that to the High Park-Keele segment. I figure that was needed due to the high use of the bus bays at Keele.
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Going to be a circus… what a disaster
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I wonder if all the folks bitching about building the St. Clair RoW will be happy now that they have nothing but buses for a year? The RoW isn’t perfect (someone should tell the TTC about signal priority), but it really improved travel times on the streetcar.
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Are there any plans to put in separate tracks for eastbound and westbound cars at St. Clair West aside from what is already there? Similarly any thoughts to a storage track or run around switch at St. Clair.
Steve: The track plans are in the article. Same layout as at present. I don’t think that a runaround track is physically possible.
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This change hasn’t been terribly well communicated in the local area.
That said, I hope that the city gets rid of street parking on St Clair if they decide to run the buses on the road itself (rather than the streetcar ROW). St Clair is functionally one lane in each direction for much of the day.
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Could this conceivably happen to the Crosstown in the future? Shutting down a transit line seems like a last resort and it seems like the TTC is not making much of an effort to keep it open.
Steve: This is highly unlikely. The longest single piece of work is the reconstruction of St. Clair West Station which strikes me as rather longer than comparable work at surface loops. The other major work, the overhead, should not require a nearly year-long shutdown considering that conversion of other parts of the network have been done more quickly.
My gut feeling is that the TTC is dragging its feet on reactivating all of the streetcar network either due to staff shortages (concentrating new hires on buses), or because management would simply prefer to run buses. We are going to have a huge fleet in a few years, and if this practice keeps up, a lot of the cars will sit in the carhouses.
Has Chow said anything about this?
Steve: No. I doubt she knew about this before my article appeared.
Will TTC maps be updated?
Steve: I would not hold my breath. After all, the basic 512 route is not changing, and the only real route change is the 90 Vaughan running down to Bloor.
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With buses replacing the streetcars along 512 ST. CLAIR, and buses are still running along 189 STOCKYARDS, seems to be a good year to “test” out running the buses from ST. CLAIR STATION out to Jane Street, Dundas Street West, Scarlett Road, and St. Clair Avenue West. Combine the 512 & 189 for a year-long test of service along the entire stretch. A good test for extending streetcar service west of Gunns Road.
After a year, we’ll have to return back to “regular” service, with the 512 ST. CLAIR and 189 STOCKYARDS. They will have to because of the Scarlett Road / CP Rail Bridge replacement, which is taking forever to even start.
If the test is “successful”, then we can install the streetcar tracks west of Gunns Road at the same time they do the bridge replacement at Scarlett Road. This could be done at the same while we have the St. Clair Avenue West widening at the railway bridge between Keele Street & Old Weston Road. There would be no streetcars west of Lansdowne.
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“TTC is dragging its feet on reactivating all of the streetcar network either due to staff shortages (concentrating new hires on buses)”
I understood all newly hired drivers are assigned to buses and after a while they can apply to transfer to a streetcar division and, of course, it requires more staff to run buses than streetcar.
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The biggest question for me (512 rider, Hillcrest neighbourhood person) is whether we will collectively benefit from this project. The “full” OCS is good, but also may not be too noticeable. I really think they should incorporate meaningful improvements into these kind of projects, i.e. green tracking where they’re tearing up concrete.
Steve: There are only short sections in the open air where concrete will be torn up at Earlscourt westbound and Bathurst eastbound. Most of the concrete work is in St. Clair West Station and the bottom parts of the ramps leading to it, and the area is shared with buses.
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TTC is and has always been an absolute joke. Tie this in with the fact that the 512 street car crosses paths with the WORST transit line in all of Toronto (the 29 Dufferin Bus aka 29 Sufferin’) and the commuters in this area are basically screwed in terms of options.
If this were in China, the entire construction would be completed within a few weeks, if not days.
It comes down to these corporations being paid way too much money to do these kinds of projects and as a result, the longer it takes, the more they get paid.
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Dear Steve:
Anybody living along St. Clair Avenue between Yonge Street and just west of Keele Street, get accustomed to taking the “512 St. Clair” shuttle buses. They’re sticking around until next summer. The reason for this is track construction on this route between St. Clair Station in the east and the Gunn’s loop in the west.
Steve: Tell us something we don’t know already!
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